{"id":63015,"date":"2022-03-18T07:47:45","date_gmt":"2022-03-18T13:47:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/?p=63015"},"modified":"2025-12-31T09:15:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T16:15:12","slug":"at-325-pounds-he-decided-it-was-time-for-bariatric-surgery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uchealth.org\/today\/at-325-pounds-he-decided-it-was-time-for-bariatric-surgery\/","title":{"rendered":"He weighed 325 pounds and decided it was time for bariatric surgery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Steve Deplato, in red, is a bariatric surgery success story and you can see it on his face as he sings and drums with his Longmont community band. Photo by Joel Blocker, for UCHealth.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Steve Deplato knew his body was under stress, and he wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold out.<\/p>\n

“I had gotten to 325 pounds and was close to 60 years old. My blood pressure and cholesterol were very high, and my eating was out of control,” Deplato said. “I wasn’t going to survive very long.”<\/p>\n

Deplato has had minimal success with diet programs, lifestyle changes and or exercise over the past three decades. He decided it was time to seriously consider bariatric surgery, an option he’d dismissed years before.<\/p>\n

“It was time to pull the trigger,” he said. “Nothing else was working, and I was too old to be this big.”<\/p>\n

Deplato underwent gastric bypass surgery on June 3, 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s been almost two years, and he’s still maintaining a healthy weight. Though lifestyle change was grueling at times, Deplato said his only regret is that he didn’t have the surgery years ago.<\/p>\n

“It’s been life-changing in only positive ways,” he said.<\/p>\n