A teen who was warned he was in danger of suffering a heart attack once he reached the age of 25 shed an amazing 58 kg (9 stone) after changing his diet and reducing his intake to one healthy meal a day.
Charity shop worker Michael Murray, Jr. used to tip the scales at 136 kg (21 stone) but managed to get to a trim 77 kg (12 stone) by limiting his meal to just dinner and by walking three miles a day.
Watch his amazing diet story below.
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Video credit: Rumble
Michael, from Middletown, Ohio, said: “The doctor told me I was 21(stone) and that because I was extremely obese I was likely to have cardiac trouble and a heart attack by the time I was 25.
“That wasn’t the news I wanted to hear but it gave me the motivation I needed to change. I didn’t want to live obese and I didn’t want to have health problems.”
Michael got the grim warning back in 2014 when he was just 14 years old. He always had difficulty managing his weight and his eating patterns soon devolved into a vicious cycle of emotional eating.
Michael said: “I was introverted growing up and hated being overweight and so I ate.
“I was extremely antisocial in school so I was picked on for being a ‘nerd’ a few times, but I was not messed with too often.
“I would eat a lot of sweets and six pieces of pizza each day.”
Apart from the six slices of pizza a day, he practically wolfed down sweets and drank a lot of sugary drinks.
Michael added: “I would eat a lot of sweets and six pieces of pizza each day. I would always eat to the point where I felt gorged.”
Michael’s problems with food stemmed in large part from unhappy home life. His mother, Dawn Burke, 41, was schizophrenic and had bipolar disorder. Tragically, she took her own life in 2015.
This tragedy only gave Michael more impetus to get healthy and lose weight.
He said: “My mother’s suicide was a breaking point for me. Overeating led to a broken home and depression. I was tired of being overweight. I realized I needed to change my life.”
Being a devout Christian, he prayed for the strength to lose weight and claims that he noticed his appetite decreasing afterward.
Instead of his usual fare of junk food, he began drinking lots of water and ate protein-rich meat and salad. And from four meals a day, he cut down to two meals a day until he eventually felt sated by just eating dinner.
“I was only getting hungry once a day. Physically the human body can get through a day on one meal.”
In 2017, Michael finally achieved his target weight of 77 kg (12 stone).
From size 42 pants and size 3X shirts, he now wears a size 34 and medium-sized shirts. And since achieving his target weight, he went back up to two meals a day, breakfast and dinner.
Michael said: “I will usually have a breakfast burrito and I do drink a lot of water. It gave me a sense of achievement. My mom would be proud of me.
“She definitely would have been happy that I made a choice to better myself.”
Michael graduated from bible college at the Refuge School of Ministry in Alabama and has since been helping kids who live in broken homes.
For this young man, the future is definitely a bright and healthy one.
Replaced!