Obese Man’s Engagement Inspires Him To Lose 317 Pounds.

Love is one of the most common reasons why people finally decide to buckle down and shed some of that extra weight.

John Allaire wasn’t married when he decided to lose weight, but he was engaged, and to a childhood sweetheart who loved him just the way he was. All 540 lbs. of him.

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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.”

In retrospect, he realizes he’d used food as a coping mechanism for most of his life, starting with his parents’ divorce when he was a child. Later, he took refuge in food when his dad’s health started to fail, and was considered morbidly obese by the age of 18, when his father passed away.

Two years later, when he was living in Florida, he had to use the commercial scale in the back room of a local fish house to pin down how much he weighed. It was such a humiliating experience that he refused to weigh himself after that, and the pounds kept piling on.

But when he and Caila got engaged, he realized that the weight problems he’d been carrying for so many years would become her problem, as well. And he wasn’t okay with that.

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On his own initiative, he dropped 20 lbs. over several weeks just by juicing and doing some walking – just in time for the couple to exchange vows. Caila’s in the Navy, and when the couple moved to San Diego, John decided to up the ante and joined the weight-loss boot camp, Camp Transformation Center.

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Committed to a new and healthy lifestyle, he dropped a whopping 300 lbs. in just 15 months!

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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.

Can you even begin to imagine the sheer willpower it took for this guy to accomplish what he did?! How many of us could do that?

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Of course, his skin didn’t just spring back into place, so his next step was getting all that excess skin, all 13 lbs. of it, surgically removed. Late last year, ahead of his and Caila’s planned move to Japan, he launched a GoFundMe, and those funds helped cover the cost of surgery to remove the excess skin from his upper body.

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Just a few days before the scheduled surgery, he and Caila talked about how much more skin there was than they’d expected, and how carrying it around affected him psychologically and emotionally:

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.”

We bet you’re just dying right about now to know what he looks like now. So click on the video below to see the transformation, and share to spread congratulations on reaching his goal. Way to go, John!

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