Matt Post donated his 70-inch waist jeans to Goodwill and got rid of most of his old pictures.
The 30-year-old doesn’t want to relive the past but instead look to the future.
“I just did not want to see myself at that again,” Post said. “I did not want that to be an acceptable return for me.”
Post, who has an autoimmune disorder and a chronic skin condition called Hidradenitis, weighed 411 pounds when he moved to The Dalles from Oklahoma in 2011.
Standing at 6-2, Post weighed 220 when he graduated from high school but fell into a depression when he lost his job and the grandmother that raised him died in 2006.
Drinking a 12-pack of soda a day—his favorite was A&W Root Beer—and eating either ramen noodles or fast food for nearly every meal, Post ballooned to more than 400 pounds over the next five years.
When Post relocated to Oregon, a Portland doctor said he wouldn’t make it to age 35 if he didn’t lose weight and stop smoking. While it took a little while for the news to really sink in, that was just the push Post needed as he has lost more than 100 pounds over the past year and a half.
Post quit eating fast food and started eating salad. He has one cheat day where he usually meets his friends on Monday at Pho Sai Gon. He replaced soda with water.
As of April 2013, he’s also quit smoking.
“I was a very moody person,” Post said. “It was very difficult. Even watching TV shows when somebody smokes, I’ll get the craving to go smoke. It’s something that will never go away.”
Exercising was even more difficult than eating right.
“I’m opposed to physical exercise,” Post said. “I was a fat person. No fat person wants to exercise. People who actively go to the gym scare me.”
Due to his autoimmune disorder, Post can’t run without losing his breath but he’s become an avid walker. A couple hours a night he walks up and down Second and Third streets. He’s made friends walking from the Commodore II to Oregon Trial Games and also uses a treadmill in the apartment complex’s gym, where he can watch the nightly news as he walks for hours.
“I feel a lot better,” Post said. “While I was at my fattest, I was always down and sluggish. I was depressed from being fat and now I’m active, I go places.”
Post, who weighed 297 at his last doctor’s visit, has lost so much weight that he’ll soon have surgery to remove some of the excess skin around his stomach. But he doesn’t want to credit that towards his total weight loss.
Post’s doctors say he still has work to do. He would like to get down to between 230-240 pounds, be able to run a mile and fit into the 36-inch waist pants he once wore.
Unlike the 70-inch, he still owns a pair of those.
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