 Back in 2000, when I moved from Brazil to America to US, I was 42 years old and my weight was around 220 pounds. But during the period of 14 years, I gained a lot of weight mainly to the fact that here we eat much more food. The fact that I didn't do any physical activity to offset this, I started adding weight and like I said in 14 years I moved from 220 pounds all the way up to 310 pounds. That's when I decided that this thing should stop and I should change the way it was going to. With the weight gain came a variety of health issues. The most critical one was type 2 diabetes. I also, doing my weight, I had back pain, knee pain and I snore. I had sleep apnea and this whole thing was adding up to a point that I could not manage anymore. I chose to have the surgery at the Michigan Medical Center in Midland because my colleague at work had the same surgery with the same team. He was very successful in his surgery and I was impressed with the results. I went to attend a seminar and one of the coordinators explained us how this thing works and several different options of surgery. I chose for the leave gastrectomy because I found during my research and conversation with the doctors that would be a more definitive solution compared to the other options. Even though all of them have their benefits, I chose to be more radical and say, okay, if I have this leave gastrectomy, it's kind of a no way back. So I would reduce my stomach size, I would be forced to eat less and more frequent and I would have to be educated in terms of what kind of food to eat and eat more health and etc. So that was what I decided to do. A couple of months later, around July that same year, I found this Taekwondo school in the Midland Mall and I decided to join and to have an activity that I could commit with time. It requires certain abilities in terms of agility, flexibility, elasticity, dedication, all of these together with physical feet preparation and during my tenure of being prepared and moving from belt to belt to belt, I saw other people that was part of the group that I go in the school going to competition and we have this group going right now. We have nine students and four or five of them came from the bariatric surgery so it's very, very, very rewarding. The surgery changed the way I eat primarily by limited the size, the amount of food that I can eat. For me, having the bariatric surgery was the best thing that happened in my recent life. I was going, like I said, in the wrong direction and bariatric surgery put me back on track to be healthier, to remove all of those health issues that I had. And today I'm a healthier person. I'm happy. I like the results. If I have to do it again, I definitely would do it again.