We are going to have a lot of exciting times in our lives but perhaps the time that is most noteworthy is associated with our engagement. The way that we face that day is going to differ from one person to another. Some people may look forward to it for years but when it actually arrives, they are almost too nervous to do anything about it. On the other hand, there are going to be those who do more than simply get down on one knee and ask for someone’s hand in marriage, they do something inspiring. That is what the man in this story did.
John Allaire was facing the possibility of asking the love of his life for her hand in marriage. They were high school sweethearts, but John is not your typical individual. Most of us are carrying around a little bit of extra weight and we would likely want to lose weight when we were facing a big day, such as our engagement. For John, however, the struggle was a little more than usual because he weighed 540 pounds. Just because he was carrying around the extra weight, however, did not mean that he was simply ready to throw in the towel and do nothing about it. He knew that his childhood sweetheart loved him, and he wanted to give her something special.
“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 was only a young child when his parents were divorced and he realized that he turned to overeating as a way to cope with the stress. He was already morbidly obese by the time he was 18 and that is when his father died.
Fast forward two years and John was living in Florida. In order to see how much he weighed, he had to use the commercial scale at a local fish house. He eventually stopped weighing himself altogether because it was so humiliating.
When his high school sweetheart, Caila agreed to marry him, he knew that he needed to do something about his weight. She wasn’t asking him to do it but he wanted to for his sake and for hers.
In the first few weeks, he dropped about 20 pounds by juicing and walking. They got married and moved to San Diego because his wife is in the Navy. He took things to the next level when he joined a weight loss boot camp, Camp Transformation Center.
He was ready to live healthier 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 took an incredible amount of willpower!
When someone as heavy as John loses weight, the skin doesn’t always bounce back as it should. He had 13 pounds of excess skin that needed to be removed, so a Gofundme account was started to pay for the surgery. He and his wife were getting ready to move to Japan, so they did it ahead of time.
They discussed the amount of skin he had before he went into surgery. They also talked about the effect it was having on him in so many different ways.
“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.”
