She also experienced anxiety, even while doing routine tasks such as grocery shopping.
“I used to sit in the carpark… I’d stay outside my car for a good 30 minutes. Sometimes I’d decide to go in if I’d mustered up enough gusto in my body and my mind,” she told Cowan.
She opted for bariatric surgery because she had tried to lose weight many times, but it usually came back. She also did not want to use GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic.
“I’ve had a lot of people say, ‘Why don’t you just do it naturally?’ Girl, I have tried up and down, round and round, side to side, back to front, paid lots of money for all the things.”
She also feared what she would be putting in her body if she went down the injection route.
Kalolo-Suraj went to Turkey for the procedure because of the lower cost. She said it cost thousands of dollars less than in New Zealand.
After the procedure, she noticed a big difference.
“I hollered at my surgeon, and I said, ‘Hi, I’m just wondering, where’s my back pain gone?’ It feels like there’s so much more movement and freedom.”
Another big part of her life has been marriage.
She married personal trainer Suraj Kumar in 2021 after dating for four months.
They met on the dating app Bumble and hit it off nearly instantly.
What sealed the deal was a tray of eggs. Kumar was coming off a bodybuilding competition and Kalolo-Suraj thought she would provide a protein source that wasn’t chicken at their first meeting.
She said it “did the trick”.
Since then, the pair have been on a journey trying to meld their respective cultures and faith traditions together.
Kalolo-Suraj grew up in a Christian home, with a mix of Samoan, Tongan, Māori, Chinese, German and Scottish ancestry. Meanwhile, Kumar is Indian, with a Hindu background.
She said there were challenges crossing those cultural lines, especially for Kumar’s parents.
“Previous to the marriage, they absolutely had things to say. Never to me, always to their son. I wasn’t Indian and so I kinda didn’t really make the grade.”
“That was never going to shift for them because that’s all they knew, and they wanted someone of their own caste and religion.”
After someone close to her gave them a word of caution, Kalolo-Suraj and Kumar were forced to confront some of those realities.
“That kind of made me go, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing?’ Suraj and I had a conversation, and we were like, ‘No, let’s do this. I wanna be with you. You wanna be with me. We love each other. Let’s do this.’”
They went ahead with the wedding and told his parents five months later.
Now, they have found ways to embrace both sides at the same time.
“I’ve welcomed the way he prays. So I do puja [prayer] with him, and he does prayers with me, and so we encompass my God and all his gods. Because I can’t just be here and be like, ‘There’s just the one true God’. You know?”
“For me to have a better understanding, I had to let go of my own thoughts and processes because otherwise I would just be a sergeant major… and I don’t wanna be that,” she said.
Over the years, her relationship with her in-laws has shifted.
“They came over last year for four months, and I’m not gonna lie, that was a long time. We just had to learn how to live with each other because that was the first time I was meeting them in the flesh.
“I had to learn a lot, and it was really great to be able to kind of not see eye-to-eye, to then see eye-to-eye.”
Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.