MAN LOSES 150 POUNDS WITHOUT WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS: 'YOU CAN DO ANYTHING'

Jose Matos still remembers the moment a doctor told him he wouldn’t live to see his two sons graduate from high school if he didn’t lose weight and get healthier.

Weighing more than 500 pounds after years of overeating, Matos had Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

He’d already been hospitalized for a life-threatening diabetes complication, so the prospect of dying loomed large.

“It felt like the floor around me was crumbling. It was terrifying. It was scary. I love my kids and my wife more than anything else,” Matos, 32, who lives in Provo, Utah, tells TODAY.com.

“That was the scariest thing — seeing myself not being there for them.”

But it wasn’t until another health scare that Matos changed his diet and started to exercise, losing more than 150 pounds. He continues to work toward his goal weight, and says he no longer needs blood pressure medication or a daily insulin shot to manage his blood sugar.

The transformation earned him one of the top winning spots in the 2024 “Submit Your Fit” contest for the most inspirational fitness journeys among members of EoS Fitness, a chain of gyms.

Weight gain

Matos says he was “husky” as a child — not thin, but not overweight either. Reaching his full height of 6 feet, 2 inches, he was broad-shouldered and liked to play football and rugby.

“During high school, you eat whatever you want,” he recalls. “Then once I started going to college, I kept eating the same way, but I wasn’t nearly as active as I once was.”

His weight kept creeping up, and he describes his diet habits at the time as “atrocious.” He ate often and a lot, starting at 7 a.m. and snacking until 11 o’clock at night.

Matos loved fast food and would eat it two or three times a day. A typical meal might consist of three burgers, large fries and a giant soda, he says. Quick, salty processed and frozen foods were also a bad habit. Matos calls pizza rolls his “biggest downfall,” noting he could eat a bag in one sitting.

He’d wash it all down with sugary drinks or juices, estimating he consumed about 6,000 calories a day.

In 2021, Matos was hospitalized with diabetic ketoacidosis, a potentially life-threatening diabetes complication.

The next year, Matos reached his maximum weight of 525 pounds. But he suspects it was closer to 540 because his bathroom scale began to display an error message indicating it was maxed out.

Besides Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, Matos also had lower back pain, achy knees and other chronic pain. He tried keto, Atkins and other diets to lose weight, but always regained it.

Then suddenly, another health scare: Bell’s palsy, which left the right side of his face paralyzed. The exact cause of the condition is unknown, but risk factors include obesity, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

The full paralysis lasted three months and took a year to resolve completely. It was a turning point.

“The Bell’s palsy actually helped give me the mental fortitude to be like, enough is enough,” he says.

Weight-loss transformation

Matos, who works in marketing, says a co-worker connected him with her husband, who is a trainer.

Following his advice, Matos stopped eating processed, frozen and fast food, and focused on whole foods with plenty of protein, such as chicken, steak and fish. High-protein foods help people feel strong and satisfied, dietitians say.

He limited carbs and began tracking everything he ate to make sure he was in a calorie deficit every day.

“I love quesadillas, but I could not eat that. I couldn’t have cheese in the house, I couldn’t have tortillas in the house, because I would eat them. I avoided having the pizza rolls, sodas,” Matos says.

“I mostly drank water. I would avoid going out to eat.”

He cooked at home and meal-prepped his lunches with his wife every Sunday to make sure they had nutritious meals ready to go.

His first-ever exercise was walking for 30 minutes. He then added at-home functional moves, such as squats, to his routine.

“Little by little, I started creating good habits of exercising,” Matos recalls.

Once he lost some weight, he started going to the gym and focusing on push-pull workouts for the upper and lower body to work different muscle groups. He finished with 30 minutes of cardio on a treadmill or elliptical machine to reach his fat-burning heart rate.

Matos now works out six days a week. When he occasionally doesn’t feel like it, he reminds himself what’s at stake.

“I will look at pictures of myself back when I was my heaviest and think, ‘This guy couldn’t do it. This guy couldn’t walk into a gym. This guy wouldn’t feel accepted at the gym like I do now,’” he says.

“So I do it for him. I do it for the guy who felt like the world was crumbling around his feet because I don’t ever want to go back there again. That’s when I’m like, ‘Alright, let’s go.’”

In July, Matos took part in a 5K Spartan Race obstacle course, fulfilling a goal he’s had for more than a decade. The best part was proving to his sons, now 6 and 9, that "you can do anything."

He now weighs 375 pounds and says he no longer takes Type 2 diabetes or blood pressure medication. His goal weight is 240 pounds.

His simple tips to others:

Matos shares this advice:

Weight-loss drugs aren’t always the solution: He tried a weight-loss drug for a couple of months but stopped because it didn’t help him lose weight and had side effects. “I’d just rather do the hard work, put in the time, put in the effort,” Matos says. “When I tried the (drug), I felt like I was doing something that wasn’t who I was.”

Create a support system: He credits his co-worker and her trainer husband for helping him build the skills he needs to stay healthy. “They were instrumental in teaching me that this isn’t just a sprint, it’s not an overnight cure. It’s a lifetime. It’s creating lifelong habits,” Matos says. “My support system has been huge for me.”

Get a craving out of the way with a bite of the food: If he craves a pizza roll, he limits himself to just one.

Try to see working out as a privilege: His exercise philosophy is: “I know that I have to do it and that I want to do it and I get to do it.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com

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