By Kelsey Murray
Last week there was a popular thread on Reddit.com that answered the question, “What’s it like to be fat?”. Many users responded to the article and shared their stories of life as an overweight or obese person in the U.S. One user, Jusselin Rabalais, decided to share his story in a personal interview-style thread.
Rabalais is 6’1″ tall and currently weighs 620 pounds, which is 130 pounds lower than he weighed at his highest point. He had lost 252 pounds three years ago in order to be healthier for his wedding, but since then he has “slowly ballooned back up to 620.” He is still trying to shed the pounds, but at one point he lost faith in himself and lost his motivation to keep losing weight, which is why he regained more than 100 pounds.
The first thing that popped into many people’s minds when they see someone who is as large as Rabalais is: how much food does he eat? On the average day, Rabalais says he eats between 3,000-4,000 calories worth of food. This is twice as much as the average person is recommended to consume daily, but it is nothing compared to how much he used to eat. He said that he used to eat around 20,000 calories every day.
How can a person consume 20,000 calories in one day? By eating “tons of the wrong stuff: sweets, a whole cake, 3-4 footlong Subways, a gallon of milk a day, a whole pizza,” he said. “It went on and on; I would get to the point where I would vomit to make more room for food.”
He also said that it is not necessarily what he eats, but how much of it he eats.
“I love healthy food. My weight gain was not so much [due to] the unhealthy [foods] I ate, but the portions I ate.” It’s true that you can have too much of a good thing.
Rabalais has tried a lot of things to lose the weight, including auditioning for several weight-loss reality shows like The Biggest Loser and Heavy. He says that he was one of the final contestants to make it through The Biggest Loser auditions, but didn’t quite make it. He was cast for the second season of Heavy, but the show was cancelled before filming could begin.