Obese Man Gets Inspired By Engagement To Childhood Sweetheart, Drops 317 LBS

We may face many times in life that we are excited about the potential of what life is holding out for us. One of those times is when we get engaged. For many of us, it is a moment in time that is special but there may also be some apprehension that goes along with it as well. From the moment we decide to get engaged we do our best to push ahead, realizing that our entire life is going to be changed.

The change is not only associated with the engagement but it is also the marriage that changes our life as well. In order to prepare for the marriage, which is truly the big day, many of us decide to lose some extra weight. We sometimes feel that it happens naturally when we fall in love but for John Allaire, it wasn’t something that came easy. In fact, he had to work very hard on it because he got engaged to his childhood sweetheart and needed to lose over 300 pounds.

“Even though Caila loved me as I was, and she was ready to commit to marrying me at 540 pounds, I was like, “There is no way that I can, in good conscience, drag this woman through the difficulties that I am going to go through the rest of my life if I don’t lose weight.”

John realizes that he had a problem with overeating throughout his life and he used it to deal with stress. He was only a child when his parents were divorced and he turned to food to comfort him. He was already morbidly obese by the time he turned 18.

His father died when he was 18 and things went downhill from there. He had been living in Florida for a couple of years and in order to weigh himself, he had to use a commercial scale at a local fish house. It was so humiliating that he decided to stop weighing himself but that doesn’t mean that he stopped gaining weight.

He asked Calia to marry him and she said yes. She didn’t ask him to lose weight but he realized he had to do something about it because now the weight would be her problem as well as his.

The first few weeks he was juicing and walking and he ended up dropping 20 pounds. His wife is in the Navy so they moved to San Francisco after they got married. He joined the Camp Transformation Center which is a weight loss boot camp.

He knew that he was going to live a healthier lifestyle and he dropped 300 pounds in 15 months.

“It has been a long and grinding process. For the last year and a half, I have put in work every single day towards losing the weight. Even when I chose to take rest days, nothing was done without clear intention to succeed. The results of this laser focus? Losing 297.4 pounds since August 2016. Overall, 317 pounds since my heaviest.”

This must’ve taken that incredible about the willpower.

He was so heavy when he started that his skin sagged after he lost the weight. He had 13 pounds of excess skin that needed to be removed surgically. He started a GoalFundMe account to have the surgery done before they moved to Japan.

He discussed how much skin there was and what his expectations were before the surgery. They talked to him about the emotional and psychological impact it would have on him.

“I think his loose skin affects him in a lot of different ways. Definitely self image. The surgery is just going to improve his overall quality of life. He’s finally going to feel completely free, like there’s not going to be any baggage from his obesity.

“It is a blessing to be able to move freely,” John said after the surgery. “There are just so many constant little things throughout the day that I think most people take for granted.”