"It's a disease" - Dublin woman Susie Birney's reality of living with obesity

Susie Birney is living with obesity and wants people to know it’s a chronic disease and not a body shape.

The 45-year-old Dublin native is living with the condition as well as Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder which has impacted on her health and wellbeing over the years.

For World Obesity Day, Susie wants to send out a strong message that people’s perceptions of obesity need to change - it is not someone simply being lazy and eating too much, but rather a complex chronic disease which people need to be better educated on.

Sharing her story with RSVP Live, Susie told us: “I loved sport as a child, I was always very active. I did competitive swimming, swam the Liffey four times in my teens. But then I had a serious knee injury, and I couldn’t do much at all, except for swimming. I had to give up everything else.

“I also have a food disorder since I was two years old, called Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. What that means is that there is only a limited list of food I can eat. I can’t eat vegetables or fruit, I have an aversion to foods depending on taste, smell and texture.

“That was a long battle with anxiety as a child, not being able to eat like other kids, and that started I suppose the feelings of not feeling normal, like everybody else.

“My weight started to increase in my late teens. Anxiety led to depression, and I would think [obesity] was a mixture of all of these things.

“I used to blame it on the food disorder but now I know there was a hell of a lot more than that going on.”

When Susie started gaining weight she tried all of the slimming groups, diets and tablets. Her weight fluctuated over the years and when she was 35 she weighed roughly 25 stone ; this is when she started attending the Weight Management Service in Dublin.

“Through the support there, I started to learn a bit more about how to focus on weight and support,” she said.

Susie, who also discovered she had Type 2 Diabetes, ended up getting a gastric bypass and she says she saw “a huge quality of life improvement afterwards,” such as reversing the diabetes.

She added: “I separated from a longterm relationship of 17 years which wasn’t really beneficial for me. I was a new person, you could say moving on, but my weight gain started to come on.”

Following this, Susie became a patient advocate for the Association of Obesity Studies Ireland, and then the European Association which then became the European Coalition for People Living with Obesity.

“Through that I learned that sharing your experiences and discussing how you feel about your weight with others actually helped, you weren’t on your own. I think that's the stigma, you feel like you’ve blamed yourself,” she said.

Recalling the moment which changed her perspective on living with obesity, Susie said: “I went to a concert when I was at my heaviest weight. I hadn’t gone anywhere in years, with friends, to parties, for meals, I’d really secluded myself because I was ashamed of my weight.

“I went to this concert with my best friend and I had to climb 35 steps up to my seat and I couldn’t breathe, I was in agony, I was out of breath but sat down and listened to the band - and I realised they wouldn’t have sounded better if I was 15 stone lighter.

“I had stopped living, I had put off all of these things that I should have been doing. I suddenly realised I’ve got to live.

“I’m just the same as anybody else, I’m just in a bigger body.”

Susie now works on the Irish Coalition for People Living with Obesity, an organisation which she says has been going from strength to strength.

The Dubliner is calling for there to be more awareness of obesity as a chronic disease and for people to not make assumptions about those who have it.

“I think there’s a huge lack of education about weight regulation in Ireland. There are so many things that people don’t know,” she said.

“I never realised that obesity is between 40-70% hereditary. It’s as likely for you to inherit how your weight will be in your life as it is how tall you will be. Obesity is a visual disease, people see it and they just judge. They think it’s basically to do with eating, and not moving, when it can be so much more than that.

“Across Europe, you’ve got Portugal and Germany now recognising obesity as a chronic disease and Ireland is quickly following suit. We're seeing changes now with the acceptance that it is a disease, and people are starting to realise that obesity is not so simple, but there’s a still long way to go.

“For World Obesity Day I would love there to be more awareness about stigma. Don’t assume. There are 60% of people in Ireland either are overweight or have obesity. So 60% means it's somebody in your family, it’s your friend, or a work colleague.

“When you judge and you think that you can say to somebody, ‘why don't you stop doing x y z?’, it’s not that straightforward.

“There needs to be more awareness that obesity is more than just a body shape. It’s about health and about needing help.”

World Obesity Day takes place on Thursday March 4th. You can find out more information here.