Being Kendra_ Cribs, Cocktails, and Getting My Sexy Back - Kendra Wilkinson [35]
Then I considered surgery and lipo but figured that was a last resort. I was young; I shouldn’t have needed liposuction at this point. Sometimes you just stare at yourself in the mirror and think “Surgery could make this all go away.” But I was looking to try other options before getting to that. Something had to work! So I took diet pills and started to wear Spanx, but neither was working. The Spanx actually made me look (and feel) bigger, because in my head it was just an extra layer of material making me look even thicker. People would come up to me and say, “It’s okay, it’s only been three months.” That bugged me, but it bugged me even worse when they said, “It’s okay, it’s only been five months.” Meanwhile I would see pictures of Kourtney Kardashian in the magazines, and her body was already back to normal after a few months. I kept thinking, “What is wrong with me? Why can she do it and I can’t?” I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong. We had kids three days apart and she was back to her pre-baby body while I hadn’t lost a pound.
It got to the point where I knew I was becoming a poster child for struggling to lose the weight when businesses wanted to hire me for their weight-loss campaigns. That meant I was still “fat,” because they wanted to portray me as the “before,” hoping I’d get to the “after.” They all submitted me proposals and gave me time limits by which I had to lose the weight! When I started to shed a few pounds there was a diet pill manufacturer that wanted me to work with them, and they wanted “before and after” pictures. So I took my “before” picture and sent it in, but they said I wasn’t fat enough in the photos! They wanted me even heavier. So this company actually told me to eat a ton of bread and whole bags of chips and drink a lot of soda and then take a picture so they could get their good “before” picture. I tried to look fat and I gave them a good “before” picture, but ultimately my team and their team thankfully figured out I wasn’t a good fit.
Diet pills, bulimia, plastic surgery—nothing seemed to be right for me. So when we were in Philadelphia I went to the gynecologist just to check things out, because at this point I just wanted to make sure I was healthy. I suspected and maybe even hoped that something else was going on so I would have an explanation for why I couldn’t lose weight despite my best efforts. So I went and got my blood drawn as part of the usual checkup.
I left the doctor and went to an interview for MTV’s When I Was 17. And during the interview, Eddie comes running over with the cell phone screaming, “It’s Hank! He says it’s an emergency. He’s been calling everyone looking for you.” So Eddie gives me the phone, and I shout to Hank, “What’s wrong?!” Hank says, “Kendra, do you know what’s wrong with you right now? Your doctor just called me and told me what you have. Your blood test shows your thyroid levels have plummeted. It’s the lowest level they have ever seen.”
The doctor said my thyroid levels were ten times less than what they should have been. They were worried about it getting worse and sent me to take another blood test to double-check it. New test, same result. It was obviously a real and growing problem, so that same day she sent me to an endocrinologist.
The endocrinologist started talking to me about my problem and asked me if it had been in my family, which it hadn’t. He asked me if Hank Jr. had any problems; I said no. Doctors don’t get me nervous because