Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
‘Half-ton-killer’ has cut her 454kg weight by staggering half
LONDON: The world’s heaviest woman has lost a staggering 272kg in the five years since she shot to fame as the “Half-Ton Killer”.
Mayra Rosales, 32, of Texas, made headlines in 2008 after being tried but found not guilty of murdering her nephew with her own 454kg body, and now she has embarked on a gruelling journey to save her own life by losing weight.
In an upcoming television special Half-Ton Killer: Transformed, Rosales’s astonishing story is being brought to light as she reveals how she has changed. It is not clear when the episode will air in South Africa.
In the episode, which airs in the UK on December 4, Rosales – who weighed a shocking 544kg at her heaviest – is wheeled out of her home after workmen break a hole in the wall. They haul her body on to a stretcher and into a lorry, since she is too big to fit into an ambulance. “At this point, if things don’t change, I’m going to die,” she says.
Reports show she has indeed managed to shed “an astounding amount of weight”, thanks to surgery, physical therapy, rehabilitation and huge changes in diet.
She has been following a highprotein, low-carb diet, with plenty of steamed vegetables, sugar-free desserts and soups.
But with her new 272kg body, she must learn to carry out normal activities she has never been exposed to, like grocery shopping and job hunting.
Last year, US television channel TLC aired a TV special about Rosales’s murder trial, in which she was accused of smothering her nephew Eliseo, 2, to death by falling on him.
Even though she confessed in 2008, Rosales was acquitted of her nephew’s murder in La Joya, Texas, in 2011 after evidence concluded the boy had injuries to his skull that did not indicate he was smothered.
“I thought I was dying anyway so I decided to admit I’d done it to protect my sister because I love her.”
Rosales then testified that she witnessed her sister Jaime had hit her son Eliseo repeatedly on his arms, legs and head with a brush.
“We were all trying to cover for my sister,” she testified.
“There was abuse from her towards her son. She yelled at him. She kicked him. On that night Junior didn’t want to eat and she got frustrated and she hit him on the head with a hairbrush.”
Jaime was found guilty, and is currently serving a 15-year sentence.
Today, Rosales has been given a second chance at life, and one of her goals is to become physically fit enough to be able to adopt and take care of her nieces and nephew.
Rosales looks visibly slimmer in recent photos posted on her Facebook page. In one, she strikes a confident and trimmed-down pose with her cousin in a low-cut dress.
So far, thanks to daily two-hour sessions at a physical rehabilitation centre, she has been able to take 36 steps on her own with no support, but she is determined to go even further. – Daily Mail