- Lost 244 pounds in 2012, bringing her weight from 575 pounds to 331.
- After years of loneliness, reclusive behavior and chronic depression, she began to return to the world despite her obesity with help of an anti-depressant medication and her story became public news.
- Author and screenwriter Peter Hedges saw a tape of her on the segment of Sally Jessy Raphael (1983) entitled, "Too Heavy to Leave Their House." On the show she spoke of her self-imposed imprisonment. Hedges, writer of What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) offered her the role of the morbidly obese mother in the film, which she accepted.
- Has since done children's school seminars on weight and self-esteem.
- Had her stomach stapled (gastroplasty) in 1981 when she weighed 410 pounds and lost 100 pounds, but eventually gained all that weight back and more, going up to 550 pounds. She has had two very close friends die of complications from weight-loss surgery.
- In her early years she took solace in food. Her overeating, compounded by a thyroid condition and slow metabolism, led to substantial weight gains, and in 1986 pelvic infections kept her bedridden for two years, during which she gained 150 pounds.
- In 1992 she received her high school diploma via correspondence courses and emerged from her house after a five-year period of reclusion.
- Grew up in the panhandle town of Dumas, TX, the daughter of a homemaker and a gas-station attendant who divorced when she was 12. Two years later she met her future husband and lied to him about her age. After a year's courtship they married; he was 25, she 15.
- The wife of a postal worker, she has three children--Sheri, Mark and Chris. She had her first child at age 18 and is a grandmother of four.
- Has one daughter, Sheri Ann (b. January 1966), and two sons: Mark (b. October 1967) and Chris (b. 1971)
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