By working out and kicking his drinking habit, 31-year-old Mike Waudby, a former morbidly obese man from Kingston upon Hull, England, lost a staggering 18st – about 115kg, in just 18 months Excited about his accomplishment and determined to maintain his new physique Mike weighed 33st (209kg) has become a professional fitness trainer.
Mike’s weight problems started in his young adulthood and by the time he was 21, he weighted about 140kg. He worked various jobs including as a car valet and security guard for a supermarket but as he kept putting on weight, he soon found himself unable to fulfill his job duties. With no employment prospects in sight, he barely left his room, eating whatever his mom cooked for him and drinking alcohol he ordered online. He says it was the booze that made him fat, as he used to drink a whole bottle of whisky and 6 cans of beer every night. Feeling lonely, he decided to go out one night out but was disappointed to discover how judgmental some people could be of his appearance. “I used to go out but, one night, a girl came up to me and asked me to leave the bar I was in. I asked why and she told me I was making her and her friends feel sick,” he relates. This incident left him even more bitter than before and drove him to an attempted suicide. “One night, while listening to Guns N’ Roses, I thought to myself, “What kind of a life is this?” he explains. Tired of being laughed at, he was prepared to end it all. “I had terrible pains but I was too scared to go to the gym and do anything about my weight, as people pointed and laughed at me in the street,” he told reporters. After describing how he ingested two bottles of whisky, eight cans of Stella and as many tablets as he could find, Mike remembers waking up with no headache, no pains, just a sickening feeling that he was still there and not dead.
Photo: Facebook
This experience was the much-awaited wake-up call he needed in order to take control of his life again. Mike stopped drinking altogether and began working out on a cross-trainer that he had ordered online. “Every session on the cross-trainer ended up with me taking my XXXXL dripping wet T-shirt off and just looking down at my belly crying. But, each time, I picked myself up and carried on,” Mike says. After working hard for 18 months, training and staying away from alcohol, he was in the best shape of his life. However, he still felt unsatisfied with his looks because of the excessive skin leftover from losing so much weight. Mike told the Daily Mail that “I felt just as disgusting as I did when I weighed 33 stone. I needed to do something, and I ended up paying for skin on my stomach and upper arms to be removed.” Now, he’s still insecure about his thighs but he’s much happier and healthier.
His confidence regained, Mike – now called “Mr. Muscles” by his friends, regularly posts pictures of his progress on his Facebook profile and even has a girlfriend who “hates people who judge others based on their appearance”, which apparently was the first thing that attracted him to her. He also eats healthier and drinks only “a couple of beers at the weekends.” Wanting to help others, Mike has become a personal trainer and hopes to assist others struggling with the same problems he had to deal with not so long ago.
