Sitting on Top of the World After Dropping 103 lbs! :

For most of us, weight loss is a matter of better-fitting clothing and more energy. For featured slimmer Dean W., losing weight was a frightening matter of life or death.

Morbid obesity had dragged poor Dean down to the lowest point of her life. She admits that before finding help and hope from eDiets and a low-carb lifestyle, she considered ending it all.

It wasn't just the weight that she was dragging around that made Dean's outlook so bleak. Declining health also played a huge role in her suicidal thinking.

Dean suffered from severe depression and the first stages of type 2 diabetes. She also endured fibromyalgia, a nightmarish disease characterized by chronic pain in the muscles and soft tissues surrounding joints, fatigue and uncomfortable tenderness in various areas.She took 12 different medications daily. She was only 34, yet she felt like her life was over.

At her top weight, she tipped the scales at 215 pounds. Dean spent much of the past seven years trying every diet she could find -- everything from Weight Watchers to the cabbage soup diet. Nothing seemed to work.

Dean estimates that since her marriage nine years ago, she’s spent at least 25 months in bed suffering from various ailments. Just last year she underwent five surgeries and nearly died when her liver failed. But Dean has proven to be like a cat with nine lives.

"I was severely depressed and suicidal," she tells eDiets. "Physically I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t play with my kids. I couldn’t function. I was absolutely miserable. I felt worthless. When I felt bad physically, I stopped caring about stuff. I didn’t do my hair or makeup. I didn’t care that I lived in a t-shirt and sweats. I was a full-time mom and figured, 'No one sees me.'"

Dean pulled off her remarkable transformation from obese to "Oh, my!". Dean has gone from 190 to 112 pounds for a grand total of 103 pounds trimmed from her petite 5-foot-2 figure.

The best part: A year later, the size-20 clothing remains packed away and she's sporting form-fitting size 4s and 6s.

Dean is living proof that where there’s a will there’s a way. Even when she spent months in the hospital last year, she never wavered on her goal. She refused to deviate from her healthy eating regimen and she stayed active -- even when that meant slow walks down the hospital hallway, IV and all.

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