Meggie Hale

Program Titles

• The pain of being abused, taken advantage of, mocked
• I shoved so many pills in my mouth that some spilled out.
• The Skinny Spirit: A Quest
• Body Sculpting System: Slimmer Silhouette

Meggie Hale: There was a fresh face represented at the recent, Oscar Gifting Suites – that of Ms. Meggie Hale.

Her journey from an abused, overweight teen to a successful businesswoman and creator of Slimmer Silhouette® is both inspiring and fascinating.

Tighten your skin and replenish nutrients into your body. The skin is largest organ in the human body. It doesn’t simply serve to protect us, but in many ways is quite interactive not only with the environment in which we live and the substances with which it comes into contact.

“This is not a weight-loss program,” says creator Meggie Hale. Combined with a healthy lifestyle, Slimmer Silhouette® can help lose inches-not weight and not water.

Ms. Hale, along with a biochemist created the wraps for her hospice business to help speed the healing process of bedsores and fissures. Inspired by the results of the wraps, Meggie decided to use the wraps on herself and found they gave her the incentive that she needed to begin a successful weight loss journey on her own.

Meggie Hale lost over 15 sizes by using the wraps to reduce excess skin and help increase her weight loss results, but also tighten the excess skin and rejuvenate her body. As word of mouth started spreading, Meggie found she had to start turning people away for private wrap sessions.

It was night; the stove light was the only light on in the kitchen. I tiptoed to the freezer. Please don’t make any noise, I thought, as I got ready to open it. I pulled the handle: thunk—that magnetic sucking sound went through the kitchen like a gunshot. I stood still. No sound in the house, so no one must have heard. I opened the freezer the rest of the way, and the ice smoke billowed out like clouds into my face

And there it sat, so calm, so patient: my protector, my lover, my consolation, my friend: a gallon of ice cream.

I grabbed the cold gallon and shut the freezer door. I scurried to the silverware drawer and opened it without making a sound. I pulled out a spoon, careful not to jingle the ones below it, and after I shut the drawer I went back up the stairs twice as fast as I’d come down. Almost there, I thought. I got to my bedroom and shut the door and could barely breathe. I couldn’t wait.

I hid under my covers as if I had a dirty book. I took off the lid, plunged in the spoon. A huge bite and it was pure pleasure on my tongue. I rolled it around my mouth, letting it melt deliciously. Then I took another bite and another. I stopped tasting it but kept eating it. I hated this but I loved it. I hated myself so much that I ate ice cream because it made me feel better. You’re my deepest love, I thought, staring down at the ice cream. And you’re my greatest destroyer.

Mom and Dad were divorced after my father broke almost every bone in my mother’s body. She had custody of me and my brothers.

When I was five, my father kidnapped my brothers and me, out of spite for my mother. Even at such a young age I was riddled with anxiety, because I never knew what to expect from him—a hundred dollar bill, for no reason, or a severe beating, also for no reason.

Food was something I could always rely on to calm me and make me feel good, even if it was just for a few moments.

As I became fatter and fatter, I became more self-conscious. Once, in fifth grade, I was taking a math test and acing it. The questions were so easy I felt like I’d written them myself. The teacher’s going to be so proud of me, I thought. Then my pencil lead broke. I sat there as horrified as if I’d peed my pants. The pencil sharpener was all the way across the room. I couldn’t figure out how to get there without people looking at me. So I didn’t go sharpen my pencil. And I didn’t finish the test. And I failed.

But I’d come to expect failure. “You’re such a failure,” Dad told me constantly. He nicknamed me Stupid. “You will fail at everything you try,” he told me every day. You’re right, I always thought.

I didn’t have many friends, either, and the ones I did have I couldn’t bring home: Dad was interested in young girls.

My mother became pregnant at fifteen; Dad was twenty-five. He showed that same demented, disgusting interest in me once. It was at a time when I was dieting, so my weight was down. I made sure to gain weight so that he would never be tempted to touch or hurt me that way again.

Food not only made me feel good; now it was my greatest protector.

The pain of being abused, taken advantage of, mocked, and not knowing how I could possibly protect myself from more of the same left me wanting to die. I’d sit in the backyard and cut myself—miniature trial runs at suicide, practicing for the real thing. Most girls my age hung posters in their bedrooms; I hung a noose in mine. When I was thirteen, I went to my bedroom and swallowed a bunch of store-bought sleeping pills. My brother came into the room and found me half conscious, seemingly fading into death. Hysterical, he called my father, who said in a monotone voice, “Don’t worry about it.”

By fifteen, I realized that I did not want to die; I just wanted to feel love. I was tired of my father calling stupid, and I was tired of believing he was right. I was exhausted from living in fear and burying my emotions in food. So I decided to leave and lock his abuse away in a small, secure closet within my mind and visit it as seldom as possible.

I’d been working a few jobs to try and find a way to earn my own independence and find my own strength, so I had some money saved up. As I approached my father with my news, my knees shook uncontrollably, my heart felt as if it was going to leap out of my chest and my mouth seemed as dry as the Sahara. I had learned early in life the cost of speaking your mind could be much higher than my brothers and I were prepared to pay. But now my life depended on it.

He’ll scream, he’ll holler, throw stuff and beat me maybe, I thought. But I gotta give myself a chance, even if it costs me my life because I’m already dying a slow death living here like this. So on one warm spring evening, I took a deep breath and went into the living room, where he was watching TV. “Dad,” I said, “I want to move out.” I held my breath, even winced, waiting to get beaten, waiting to be harangued.

The blow came harder than even I had expected. It hit me like a Mack truck right in my belly.

“Okay,” was all he said. In my mind I screamed, “What did you just say?

OKAY!?!

You are not going to yell, throw stuff, hit me, show me that you even care the least bit. I’m fifteen, you jerk!

I’m asking you to leave your pseudo protection and go off into the big bad world, and all you say is OKAY!”

That hurt more than a slap across the face or a fist in my stomach. He really doesn’t care about me.

I found an apartment for $150, complete with utilities, two windows and roaches, and moved in. I was both excited and scared. Once I left home, my aunt helped me secure emancipation through the school court system so that I could continue with my schooling, and I eventually graduated from high school. It was tough being on my own, but I had escaped my father’s abuse. Now all I had to do was figure out how to stop tormenting myself.

I found the supportive and loving community I had longed for, but my father had taught me well, and I had trouble receiving the love my newfound friends offered. “You’re not stupid,” my friends told me. “You’re nice, you’re smart, you’re pretty, and you just graduated high school.” I smiled patiently. “You just don’t know the real me,” I always said in reply, but only to myself.

Now nearly one hundred and twenty pounds overweight, I battled with food, my old love and constant companion. I went on diets, lost weight, and gained it right back. When I got my weight down, the boys came out from everywhere like Children of the Corn, so I knew I had attractive features.

When I gained weight, it was like The Second Coming, they disappeared into hiding so fast. But even when I was at my thinnest, and even when I had a boyfriend, I still felt fat and alone.

After high school, I moved to California with forty dollars to my name, and that was its own experiment in disaster. My loneliness became excruciating after I found myself violated again by a man who offered me a ride.

Somehow I had committed to being a lifelong victim. Heavy again and tired of all of the stares and judgmental looks, sure I would always be the stupid, ugly, fat little girl just waiting to be abused, I decided to enough was enough. Since I didn’t have the skills or resources to rise above my pain, since I had lost every shred of hope and promise in my quest to break free from my need for food, I chose death instead.

Believing and accepting that I could no longer live, my last thoughts were, I’m sorry I failed you, Meggie. I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to beat the depression and the emptiness. You have already been dead for so long—I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you back to life. I swallowed the last pill and said goodbye.

Two days later I woke up in the ICU, tubes and wires everywhere, working to keep me alive.

Damn!

Why did they find me?

Now I have to continue to live in this body. Now I’ll never be free. When I asked how I got there, “Your landlord found you.” At first I wanted to curse out my landlord, but then I imagined her finding me, trying to revive me, calling the ambulance and in that moment I knew I was worth saving.

“You can’t do that again,” I said to myself, coming out of the hospital. “Even a fat life is better than no life.” I resolved to never again try suicide. You got too close to the edge, and you fell off. You let all the sadness and misery pull you in, like quicksand. Don’t get near the quicksand, Meggie.

Don’t get near the quicksand. And I didn’t. In fact, I started running in the other direction toward a life that I could enjoy and be proud of. With every step, I began believing in myself more. Yes, I can take the risk and let a man love me. Yes, I can have children and raise them in a loving home. Slowly but surely, I started to live again. And each time I felt myself slipping, I remembered that day in the hospital, and all the days I wanted to die, and pulled myself back to the land of the living.

The complete paradigm shift came at a time when I least expected it. I was taking a psychology class at a local college and decided to ask the professor for another chance at the exam, since I had been sick and unable to study.

She looked at me, confused. “Meggie,” she said, “you got the highest grade in the class.” In that moment, I was freed. It was as if she opened a dam and the truth came rushing out. I’m not stupid, I thought.

My father was wrong. Why did I believe him?

Maybe he was wrong about other things—maybe everything.

Maybe, I am nice and smart and pretty.

And maybe, just maybe, I can believe in me.

That day, I found my “skinny” spirit, which I came to realize, wasn’t about being thin; my “skinny” spirit was about becoming the healthy person I was born to be. And I didn’t find it in a diet; I found it in the truth. Today, the inches are peeling off to reveal the healthy body that was there all along.

The once-tiny shred of belief in myself has transformed and grown into a life mission: to help others, especially teens, discover their “skinny” spirits and sculpt their bodies into healthier works of art, ones that mirror the spirits within. If I found it within me, anyone can.

My true self was there all along—even under the blankets eating a gallon of ice cream. It just took me thirty years to see it, feel it and be it.

Meggie Hale grew up eating all the wrong kinds of food—and eating a lot of them. For years, she struggled with weight and low self-esteem. After a near-fatal experience with liposuction, she spent fifteen years developing a natural mineral and body sculpting wrap system that is cost-effective, produces results and has limited risks. Over the years, she has helped thousands clients achieve safe and substantial weight loss.

Meggie offers life and food coaching, personal training and skin, beauty, and fashion consulting to teens as desperate as Meggie once was.

Teens get help with setting and reaching their goals, improving their self-image and building their self-esteem. Helping Teens Blossom from the Inside Out

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Family – Health