Read an Excerpt From '703' by Nancy Makin

April 20, 2010— -- In May 2000, Nancy Makin weighed an astounding 703 pounds. But Malkin found hope online and started to lose weight. without following any particular diet or exercise program.

But what she found, in addition to a healthier lifestyle, was that losing the weight freed her from a feeling of helplessness.

Read an excerpt of her book "703: How I Lost More Than a Quarter Ton and Gained a Life" below, and then head to the "GMA" Library to find more good reads.

No one could be more surprised than I to find myself here tapping on this keyboard, pounding out these characters, building words, telling a tale that could never be; it is too fantastic. But I am tapping, and it did happen. I am alive, and that revelation still stuns me. This was not the plan, the blueprint that I saw lying there before me. Life is for the living; I was not alive, only went through the motions, and even those were streamlined to the very barest function necessary to keep my heart pumping and lungs fi lling in a heavily encumbered chest. My vacant eyes were still activated, watching all that bustled about me, all I had no part in. I marked time, waiting for the end.

My death would come; either slowly, incrementally, a wasting sort of degeneration, or in a swift manner, suddenly, taking me away in one fell swoop and releasing my misused body, my brain's unspent currency and saddened spirit.

My incarceration crept up on me over years, built not in a day, but in millions of moments, one upon the next, as if each were a single brick in some ominous structure of my own design. In every moment, I pressed firmly down each sturdy rectangle, applying a liberal layer of the mortar of worthlessness, then another and another heaped upon the last, till the walls of my prison were erected solidly around me.

I was a fine mason. There were no gaps between bricks, no air pockets in which to find a fissure, some defect that could later be exploited, tearing down my encasement and letting daylight shine upon my prisoner's face. There would be no escaping this mind-numbing cell. Yet this is the story of one woman's unlikely prison break. There alone in my confinement, I felt helpless to find a way outside. My liberation would come from the most unexpected source, and in my wildest imaginings, I never contemplated its arrival. I had resigned myself to this life sentence, although that was surely a misnomer. For truly, it was a death sentence I faced. And I ought to know, it was I who was prosecutor, judge and jury. I had imposed a sentence, the harshest possible. And those outside the dank walls would be my improbable liberators. I did not even know them, nor were they aware of me, not yet. Let me take you back to when it all began.