530 Pound Weight Loss: 'Food Is Not the Enemy'

April 20, 2010— -- When Nancy Makin weighed 703 pounds, she could barely move, and for 12 years rarely left her apartment.

"Because of my appearance, many people rejected me," Makin said today on "Good Morning America." "Most did."

Makin lost 530 pounds without a radical diet or exercise plan or surgery, and seven years later, she's kept the weight off. The secret to her success? Makin said the relationships she developed online finally allowed her to be happy and to stop obsessing over food.

"Food is not the enemy," she said. "If I didn't allow myself onion rings once a month, I wouldn't want to live."

Makin writes about her journey in a new memoir, "703: How I lost More Than a Quarter Ton and Gained a Life." She said the community and support she found through her computer helped her heal.

"I could be judged on my inner beauty or my wit or my sensibilities about certain issues," she said. "I did not know that I was losing weight. I was happier."

As for how she got to 703 pounds, Makin attributed her weight gain to upheaval in her childhood and unhappiness as an adult. She said that the more food she ate, the more shame she felt, and nothing could stop the cycle. At her heaviest, she wore a skirt with a 108-inch waistband and missed her son's wedding and father's funeral.

"Some of that stuff was impossible to do," she said. "Others, it was just too humiliating. … It was very terrible, too traumatic, to go."

After she received a computer as a gift from her sister, Makin said she became inspired by the friends she made online.

"The anonymity of the computer gave me access to a world that would have just as well have left me alone, alone to die but I did not," Makin wrote in a letter describing her saga.

After staying healthy for years, Makin said she's "healed something within."

"Sports Illustrated has not called yet," she joked. "I'm not holding my breath."

When Makin first appeared on "Good Morning America" in December 2007, she weighed 170 pounds and hoped others would be inspired by her story.

After going through a divorce, Makin told "GMA" that she began overeating to avoid her feelings, and soon, she just couldn't stop.

"My son would bring me 10 double cheeseburgers," she told "GMA" in 2007. "So I'd eat four, put the rest in the fridge. And then they'd call to me during the night or whatever, and you'd eat 'em cold. I could go in and overeat cold squash out of the fridge. It doesn't matter."

"You're stuffing your feelings. That's what people need to know. It's not just being a glutton."

Too humiliated to go out in public, Makin allowed only her family to see her, often sending her son to get her groceries.

"I only regret that my son — that I hurt him, that I marred his childhood somehow, that it could have been more full."

Escape Online

It was the gift of getting online that ultimately let Makin escape her misery. Before she knew it, the political junkie was surfing through chat rooms and making friends, beginning to find value in herself again.

"I was being loved and nurtured by faceless strangers," she said in 2007. "Friends accepted who I was based on my mind and soul. "I was so busy and happy to get up every morning that I like to say I lost weight in my fingers first."

Makin said the psychological transformation was so complete that she lost all that weight without diet pills, exercise or even a diet. She just stopped gorging.

"I achieved this on my own, in a natural way, with no surgical procedures having been performed. No particular 'diet' plan was followed; no pills, potions or ab-crunching exercises played a part in my recovery," she wrote in a congratulatory letter to herself.

After losing 530 pounds, she wanted people to know that crucial first step is realizing that the weight is not the problem.

"I've heard so many times, I said it myself, if I could only lose 40 or 50 pounds, I'd be so much happier," she said in 2007. "I've found on this journey that the opposite is true."

Unless you focus on what's going on inside and start to feel better about yourself, you won't be able to stop the cycle.

"The key is to find contentment and value in yourself by reaching out and doing something not for you, and the weight will come off as a side effect."