Khaliah Ali before her "Moment of Truth"

Moment Of Truth
Muhammad Ali's daughter battles obesity, gets down to fighting weight... and changes her life.
By Alyson Black

By the time someone goes to a doctor and says, ‘Cut me open,’ it’s a conscious act of surrender,” explains 33-year-old Khaliah Ali. “It’s a big step.”

For Ali, her decision to undergo gastric-banding surgery with Lap-Band was more like a leap. She had spent most of her life dieting: being told by a friend at age five that she would be less “blubbery” if she ate less steak; appearing on national television at age nine as part of a program to slim down overweight kids. In her twenties, at 335 pounds, the five-foot-nine daughter of Muhammad Ali was nearly 100 pounds heavier than her boxing-legend father had been at his peak.

“Whatever weight I lost always came back,” Ali wrote last year in her book, Fighting Weight, in which she chronicles her battle with obesity and her success with gastric banding. “Whatever effort I put into it always backfired. Even the most extraordinary effort was no match for the tenacity of my obese body. The hunger my body engendered...was constant; it was maddening; it always got the better of me.”

Fearing that obesity would rob her of the opportunity to see her son grow up (“It’s a disease that kills,” she says), Ali knew she needed help—but she feared, too, the risks of a major surgery like gastric bypass. “I had this organic feeling from within that I would die if I had it,” she says of the procedure, which requires making the stomach smaller and bypassing part of the small intestine. “I’ve lost a lot of friends to obesity, and a lot of friends to bypass surgery.”

She herself had suffered too many of the indignities associated with being obese: the judgmental looks, the comments, the feeling like she didn’t belong. “I sat in a chair and it broke,” she admits. “I got on an airplane and they gave me a seatbelt extender.” These were her moments of truth, she says—enough to make her realize she had to do something. When a friend told her about the Lap-Band System from Allergan, Inc.—in which a silicone ring is placed laparoscopically around the upper part of the stomach and filled with saline to create a smaller stomach pouch—she was eager to learn more.

“I wanted to feel like everyone else,” she says. “And I understood that Lap-Band was an option that was minimally invasive and ends hunger. I saw it as an opportunity to achieve optimal health.” Ali says she remembers thinking, “I can do this! It was a real deep-down-inside feeling of relief.”

She had the surgery on a Friday, live on the Today show. The following Monday, she made another appearance on the program to demonstrate how quickly she’d recovered. Of course, that’s when the real work began—eating right and exercising and achieving a healthy balance. “The surgery is not a magic bullet,” Ali says. “I definitely have had to work with it and make lifestyle changes. But it’s easier now that I’m not ravenous all the time. I can make clear decisions.”

Chief among those decisions was her determination to create an environment that could support the entire family nutritionally. “People consume a lot of calories by mindlessly reaching,” she says. “When you mindlessly reach into my refrigerator, you find cut up cucumber and pepper, honeydew and can-
taloupe, pineapple. Everyone loves to come to my house—it’s like a restaurant!”

Ali’s personal accomplishment over obesity was so great, she spends much of her time these days helping others climb toward success as spokesperson for Lap-Band’s “Moment of Truth” campaign, part of a grassroots effort to educate people about all of their weight-loss options, Lap-Band included. She challenges audiences to find their own moments of truth and achieve their true potential by taking back their lives.

“I tell people, ‘You’re not a cookie cutter; you’re an individual. Be clear about what you think. Do your homework. Reach out to people you know.’ ” Says Ali, “With obese people, and especially the morbidly obese, you forget that they have dreams, sexuality, desires. But when you’re obese you feel like you can’t go to the beach, can’t be seen nude. Before you realize it, you’ve backed yourself into a corner that is your world.” For Ali, the world seems larger than ever before. “Life tastes different,” she says. “Life is bitter when you’re 335 pounds. But I’m fitting into the life I was intended to live. Health occurs on the inside and has a manifestation on the outside. I’m being big in my life and not being a pushover. The world is wide open.