Our Story

The HCG Diet has changed our lives forever!

I weighed almost 300 pounds and was invisible. My name is Patty Christopher and that is how I felt a few years ago. I am originally from Cleveland, Ohio and moved to Las Vegas five years ago. My motto in life is to work hard and play hard. If there is something exciting going on count me in! I love to dance, love to travel, and love my family and friends. I was a middle school teacher and worked very hard to take care of everyone else except me. My Vegas friends and I would go dancing several nights a week. I am a pretty good dancer and so are my friends. My two dancing buddies are very beautiful women and as soon as we went inside they hit the dance floor. The guys loved spinning them around. Me? I held up the wall. No one asks a 300 pound woman to dance. I felt invisible. They would actually look around me to find someone to dance with.

Do you know the concept that you have three seconds to make a first impression? I always felt I have three seconds to change that first impression. I am not fat and lazy nor stupid! I felt that within three seconds of meeting someone I had to do or say something intelligent or funny to change their first impression. It’s exhausting!

I am Geno Gambino and have been obese my whole life. My whole family is overweight. We owned restaurants and our lives revolved around food. I was living in Slidell, Louisiana when I lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. I was a casino dealer for Harrah’s and within eight days of the hurricane I was living in Las Vegas, Nevada. As a local in Vegas there are all kinds of freebies: free food, free alcohol, and lots of fun. I missed my daughter and home so I had a little too much fun in Vegas to distract me from reality. I quickly grew to a size 50 pant.

I took my daughter, then 12, to Disney World. We stood in line for over an hour to ride a roller coaster. When we got to the ride I couldn’t ride it with her, I was too fat! They made me walk all the way back up the line of people waiting to ride; the walk of shame. That was devastating and my daughter was embarrassed.

Geno actually asked me to dance one night in Vegas! We have been inseparable ever since. But our weight started interfering with our social life. We could no longer dance all night without being out of breath. None of our clothes fit and Patty’s family was planning a family vacation to Disney. We were too fat to ride the roller coasters with our kids. That was the last straw for us. We were not going to sit with all the old people and babies and watch life pass us by.

That is when we found the HCG diet. We started our first round in Vegas. Geno lost 30 pounds and Patty lost 35 (he cheated a couple times)! We went on that vacation and rode those coasters with our kids and stood in the middle of Disney World and cried because we actually did it!!!

Waist Away Weight Loss Center

Only two weeks into the HCG diet we knew that we had found the answer to obesity and knew that somehow we would open our own weight loss center so we could help people change their lives like we had changed our own. That was two years ago and we just couldn’t get everything to fall into place so we went back to our regular jobs and put our dream on the back burner. Just over a year ago, when we started another round of HCG, the opportunity to open Waist Away actually fell into place. We honestly believe that God has sent us to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to change people’s lives. Within six weeks of making the decision to open Waist Away we had quit our jobs, sold all of our belongings, packed our cars and the last day of school in June we drove cross country to open Waist Away Weight Loss Center on June 10, 2010. Over the past year we have helped HUNDREDS of people lose weight and be successful when they felt like there was no hope.

We get to spend our days watching people change their lives forever. I know that I am in the right place at the right time doing the right thing for the first time in my life! I watched a 50 year old woman put on size 16 jeans for the first time in 20 years! I have given hope to a grandmother who even her five year old grandson called fat. She now has lost over 50 pounds! I listen to clients talk about eating what used to be their favorite fried food and it makes them sick now because they have changed.
We are VERY EXCITED to be here in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In the past year Waist Away Weight Loss Center has grown from one small office to a new location with several offices, a retail store, and meeting space. We are the HCG diet experts in the Metro Baton Rouge area serving clients from Metairie to Lafayette, Houma to Jackson, Mississippi. There are 72 million obese people in America. We want to help all of them change their lives forever!

The Happy Ending… or Beginning?

On December 22nd we were married in a Chapel in Las Vegas near where we had that first dance almost six year earlier. Geno looked handsome as ever in (Patty’s favorite) jeans, cowboy boots, and suit jacket. Patty bought herself a NEW dress (not someone’s hand-me-down) from the “Normal” women’s department and looked mighty sexy for 51. Watch our video here: