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Brooke Stanley is on the cusp of a decision. Surgery or not? She’s happy with herself now, but is concerned her weight could ruin her health.
| Wednesday, Jan 9 2008 3:55 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Jan 25 2008 4:07 PM
PART ONE ... PART TWO ... PART THREE
BROOKE STANLEY
Age: 15
Grade: sophomore at Liberty High School
Height: 5 feet 6 inches
Weight: 268 pounds
Ideal weight for her height and age: 103-151 pounds
Body mass index: 43.3
Healthy body mass index for her height and age: between 16.5 and 24
The Xcelerator ride at Knott’s Berry Farm promises 62 seconds of stomach-dropping excitement.
Afterward, 15-year-old Brooke Stanley and her friends would be off to the next attraction. Supreme Scream perhaps. Or Boomerang.
Instead, everything stops.
“Please stop. Just stop,” Brooke shouts at the ride operator as he tries to fasten the belt for her. “I’m going to get off the ride. I’m not going to get on, OK?”
“Yeah, you need to get off,” he says. “You’re too big for this ride.”
Brooke’s heart thumps in her chest in last summer’s heat. Her sunburn tingles. The seat belt strap digs into her lap.
In her mind, everything stops as one of her most embarrassing moments sinks in.
Park employees usually need to help get the seat belts and safety harnesses fastened over her 268-pound body.
But too big for a ride — that’s never happened before. She finds some shadows nearby and cries.
Why was that guy so mean? Why is it so hard to change? Why should I change?
Brooke, a vivacious girl with a smile that spans her whole face, isn’t normally ashamed of her weight. She will quickly tell you that she is beautiful, especially her glowing blue eyes.
But at odds with her self-esteem is the fact that she is obese. At 5 feet 6 inches tall, Brooke is almost twice her ideal weight.
She is off the chart for her body mass index.
A girl her age and height should have a BMI of 16.5 to 24, meaning she should be 103 to 151 pounds. Brooke’s BMI is 43.3, and the chart only goes to 37.
Her back hurts. Her ankles hurt. And it often takes her 20 minutes to catch her breath in gym class.
She believes she would feel better if she dropped weight. Maybe she’d be more popular at school.
But if Brooke’s already happy with herself, is it even worth it?
At 9 pounds 9 ounces, Brooke was born “a very cute, chubby baby,” as she puts it.
Her mother was also on the heavier side when she had Brooke.
“When I was pregnant with her was the first time I broke the 200-pound threshold, and I cried,” said 37-year-old Robin Stanley.
Her mother can only guess at the cause of Brooke’s weight.
Could it be that she formula-fed Brooke? Breast-fed babies have been shown to grow up leaner and handle hunger better.
“Brooke cried all the time,” she said. “And I would put a bottle in her mouth every time she cried.”
Or maybe it’s genetic?
Her two younger siblings, 9-year-old twins Chelsea and Chase, are twigs. Chase, with freckles and short white-blond hair, is always in a different place one moment to the next. Same goes for Chelsea, who has her big sister’s strawberry blond hair and wide smile.
Her 18-year-old half-brother, Jakob Holtschulte, is brawny but by no means overweight.
“Why am I like this when they’re all like this?” Brooke says, holding up her pinkie finger. “I’m eating about as much as anyone else in my family does, and my whole family is these skinny little minis.”
Her father, Christopher, is the stockiest of all at 6-foot-4 and 290 pounds. Technically, this is considered obese, but he’s also very muscular, which can skew the results.
Robin, who is 5-foot-5 and 125 pounds, went as “Baywatch” star Pamela Anderson to a Halloween party this year. She is rail-thin.
But she wasn’t always this way.
Six years ago, Robin underwent gastric bypass surgery. Surgeons cut off 80-90 percent of her stomach and rerouted her small intestine to the pouch that was left. She was 267 pounds at her heaviest.
“So Brooke has surpassed what I was,” Robin says.
Brooke wonders if surgery is in her future too.
“I understand that you have to be healthy, but I’m happy. I’m so happy,” she says. “Whose fault is it? Is it the person’s fault? Is it the company’s fault?
“It’s both of their faults. It’s everyone’s fault.”
Brooke and some friends sit on her bed with plates of roast beef, macaroni and rolls during Jakob’s graduation party in early June.
Guests include two great-aunts and one great-uncle, who have undergone bariatric weight-loss surgery. If Brooke went under the knife, she would extend the legacy to three generations.
“When women are pregnant they are not supposed to have a lot of caffeine,” says family friend Kayli Hoffman, 16. “Caffeine is a drug.”
“I’m sure you can do without a soda for nine months,” Brooke says, sipping a Diet Dr. Pepper.
KT Tunstall plays on the iPod hooked up to the stereo.
You can see she’s a beautiful girl. She’s a beautiful girl.
Brooke fits in with this group. They love her, accept her. A couple girls go to church with her.
Brooke’s smiles constantly, showing the extent of her braces; her blue eyes are highlighted with green and gold eye shadow.
Beneath the easy laughter, though, is something else.
I need to make sure I’m not going overboard. Other people are looking at what I eat.
All around are remnants of a diminishing childhood and developing adulthood: Barbies and a growing supply of make-up. A long, purple dress, size 22, from Brooke’s eighth-grade winter gala hangs over the closet door.
Brooke takes a couple bites of the roast beef on her plate.
Sunlight from an oppressively hot July day streams through the windows of Brooke’s kitchen.
In the sanctuary of the air conditioning, she picks at some leftover spaghetti as an earlier conversation with her mother comes to mind.
“She said she was going to monitor my food,” Brooke says.
Robin wants Brooke to keep a journal of her meals, a task Brooke has tried before without much luck.
“Whenever I’m told what I can and can’t eat, I’m just embarrassed, and I get mad. And then I’m like, ‘OK, Brooke, calm down.’”
During summer, she doesn’t normally eat much for breakfast after waking between 8 and 9 a.m.
Lunch is leftovers and then snacking on sandwich or fruit snacks with most time in between in front of the 32-inch television or reading. Then Mom will make dinner, usually Italian or Mexican.
Robin comes in, busily trying to get everyone ready for a weeklong trip to see family in Ridgecrest.
“She looked like she had been gaining weight,” says Robin, who just returned from a mission to Zimbabwe with their church, Brimhall Road Assembly of God.
Summertime is when Brooke puts on weight, sometimes 10-15 pounds. The high temps keep her from exercising outside.
The family can’t afford a gym membership. (Brooke once got a monthlong membership to 24 Hour Fitness and loved it.)
Her street, near Rosedale Highway, doesn’t have sidewalks, and she doesn’t think the area is very safe. She sometimes walks with the twins to nearby Greenacres Park but not when walking feels like wading through dust and sweat.
Also on her mind are her parents. They aren’t acting like they usually do; her father, especially, is more distant.
Robin resumes packing. Brooke finishes her lunch, her face redder with each bite.
“It’s hard for me to be too hard on her because I know how it feels,” Robin says.
Later that week, Brooke and a family friend sit in front of the television in Ridgecrest.
This is the third day of Brooke’s vacation. Time so far has been spent playing pool, swimming and drinking Pepsi Freezes, a slushy treat from the Drive Thru Dairy.
The two girls watch a rerun of the NBC show “The Biggest Loser.”
Brooke sees herself in 16-year-old contestant Emily Senti.
“When I get made fun of I usually walk away and take it as a joke, but it usually kills me,” Emily Senti says on the show.
Brooke likewise uses humor. Emily Senti has the same brightness as Brooke. Emily Senti peaked at 250 pounds, roughly 20 pounds shy of Brooke’s weight.
“She found out that she started having diabetes,” Brooke says. “When I heard that it just really scared me because I’m only 15. What if I get it?”
Brooke doesn’t have diabetes or any serious complications — yet.
But it was as if the episode was showing Brooke her future.
If Brooke stays this weight as an adult, she has seven times the risk of having diabetes, six times the risk of hypertension, and three times the risk of asthma compared to healthy weight adults, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Brooke still wants so much.
She wants to go with her mother on a mission trip. She dreams of graduating from Vanguard University with degrees in education and theology. She wants to get married at Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle and have at least two kids.
“It was really hard because her mom started crying, and her mom blamed herself,” Brooke says between tears. “And that just kind of broke my heart ‘cause my mom might think that too, and I don’t want my mom to ever think that because it wasn’t my mom’s fault.
“It’s my fault, and I shouldn’t be eating the way I do. And I just want to stop all the time.”
The weight that so far has just plagued her thoughts now feels like a noose around her neck.
Brooke decides something must be done.
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