Friends Mourn Angel of the Morbidly Obese

Joychan Roberson won her battle with morbid obesity by losing 600 pounds, but she couldn’t win her fight with uterine cancer.

The 50-year-old Lancaster woman with the bright smile, who died Dec. 11, was remembered at her funeral Monday by family, friends and her trainer as an inspiration to others struggling to lose large amounts of weight and battle personal demons.

After slimming down through diet and exercise, Roberson held workshops and seminars to encourage those fighting obesity to lose weight and improve their lives. She started an organization devoted to the cause called Life’s Forgotten Angels. Her story caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, who had Roberson on her talk show twice.

“There couldn’t have been a more perfect name for her,” said Tina Pullum, the wife of Roberson’s personal trainer, Cecil Pullum. “She was always full of joy.”

Roberson once weighed 900 pounds and had to be hospitalized when her lungs could no longer supply oxygen to her body. She was taken to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in a U-Haul truck and placed in a special “big boy” bed.

There, she overheard doctors say there was nothing more they could do and that she should be made comfortable until she died. Roberson told friends and family that’s when she knew she had to do something extraordinary to save her life.

“I’d eat because I was depressed and was depressed because I was fat,” she told a newspaper. “I earned every pound I carried. Most people have a time separation between meals, but I ate all day long.”

She started exercising by pulling herself up by a bar that hung over her hospital bed. She would scoot down to the bottom of the bed and pull herself up.

When she returned home, she paced her mother’s porch with a walker until she could manage without it. She advanced to walking in a local park and at a mall. In 1 1/2 years, she dropped to 720 pounds.

She joined a gym where she met Cecil Pullum, a professional trainer. Seeing her sitting backward on a piece of gym equipment, he offered to help her when no one else would. She lost 200 pounds that year, following his regimen of walking, swimming, rowing and working out on equipment five days a week.

“She called me Dr. Death and Dr. Pain,” Pullum said before the funeral, in Lancaster. “But as much as she complained and whined, she was there every day, ready to sweat.”

Roberson had begun gaining weight after high school, and over the years grew larger and larger.

By the time she was hospitalized, she had been confined to her apartment for years. She had lost her job because she couldn’t stay awake. Later, she learned she suffered from sleep apnea, a disorder that prevented her from getting a good night’s rest, contributing to her weight gain.

After her success at weight loss, Roberson and Pullum began holding workshops and seminars to encourage isolated, morbidly obese people to save themselves.

“If I can do it, so can others,” she said. “I can give them hope and encouragement, but the bottom line is that it’s their choice whether to fight and live.”

Denise Toone, a longtime friend, called Roberson a mentor and said she was thinking of her while preparing for bariatric surgery to make her stomach smaller.

“She pulled a lot of us who suffered with obesity out of the darkness,” Toone said during the funeral service. “The greatest tribute I can give to my beloved friend is to have my own personal success with this disease.”