‘I feel amazing after losing 273kg’
It took 10 years and two surgeries to lose a whopping 273kg – now Paul Tuthill is finally comfortable in his skin
HE WAS so sure he was going to crush his wife they slept in separate bedrooms for years. His weight was affecting everything – his self-esteem, his relationship with his family and his sex life. At his heaviest, Paul Tuthill from Inverness in Scotland, tipped the scale at 368kg. The morbidly obese 44-year-old admits he was slowly eating himself to death.
Paul, a former fitness enthusiast, started gaining weight after a back injury left him wheelchair bound. He got so big he couldn’t fit on the toilet. Unable to bathe or even go to the loo by himself, he slept in the living room with a commode.
Having to rely on his wife Pauline to take care of him left him feeling like a burden to his family and he tried to take his life several times.
When his sister offered to pay for his gastric surgery, he decided to turn his life around – but never in his wildest dreams did he imagine what an uphill struggle it would be.
Paul started eating smaller portions, cut out sugar and had weight-loss surgery. Though the surgery was a success, progress was slow, and he still battled to walk.
Through gruelling physiotherapy and sheer determination, he went from using a wheelchair to a walking frame to crutches to a walking stick within three months.
More determined than ever, he stuck to his diet and started smashing small goals for himself.
When he reached 158kg, he started cycling again. But his extreme weight loss left him with swathes of skin hanging all over his body.
In December 2020 he went under the knife where surgeons removed 5kg of excess skin. In the past two years, he’s lost a further 70kg – and his remarkable transformation has given him a new lease of life.
Having gone from abs to flab and back to abs, Paul is now making the most of being able to engage in physical activities with his family.
“Before we simply couldn’t function as a family,” he says. “I couldn’t go on holiday or days out with my family and my sex life with my wife was non-existent.
“We were unable to even sleep in the same bed for years and now we can – our sex life is back on track.”
PAUL’S life ground to a halt in 2010 when he slipped on a flight of stairs and injured his back. The father of three was forced to quit his job when the injury and his mobility grew steadily worse, leaving him in a wheelchair.
Before throwing his back out, he enjoyed cycling and weighed 105kg. But that all changed when his accident left him in excruciating pain.
“The strong pain meds I was on were making it almost impossible for me to
‘IT GOT TO THE POINT WHERE EVERY NIGHT I WISHED I WAS DEAD’
control my appetite,” he recalls.
“It wasn’t that I was eating that badly, I just had zero portion control.”
For breakfast, he’d have four slices of toast with peanut butter and jam, leftovers from the night before for lunch, followed by pizza, kebabs and fried chips for supper. He’d also polish off several packets of chips and chocolate slabs a day while guzzling fizzy drinks.
Unable to leave his house or move around much, Paul’s confidence crumbled, and his weight ballooned to 266kg. At one point his legs swelled to a metre in circumference. He even had a specialist wheelchair which had to be shipped in from Denmark.
His obesity wasn’t just affecting his physical health – he’d started a downward spiral into depression. Stuck at home and unable to provide for his family, Paul felt terrible when Pauline, a business solutions advisor, came home from work in the evening to take care of him and their children.
“It got to the point where every night I wished I was dead,” he says. “I felt I was holding my family back, I wanted it all to be over.”
Things got so bad he made multiple attempts to take his own life. “I even chucked myself on the floor of my room so they wouldn’t be able to get me up when they found me.”
In chronic pain and with his mental health in tatters, Paul couldn’t see any other way out until his concerned sister, Maureen Warren, offered to cover the £15 000 (now about R300 000) he needed for gastric bypass surgery.
But because he was so overweight, he needed to lose weight before doctors would even consider the surgery. Paul drastically changed his lifestyle, cutting out junk food and replacing it with healthier, low kilojoule options.
In just a few months he lost about 100kg “but I was told that still wasn’t light enough to have the surgery,” he says.
“Doctors said I definitely wouldn’t survive the operation.”
HE WAS crushed when doctors delivered the news, but he desperately wanted his life back. Fed up with being fat, Paul doubled down on his strict diet. By April 2018 he weighed 215kg – enough to safely have the surgery.
In May he had a successful five-hour surgery. Surgeons had made his stomach smaller and he ate much less but he still couldn’t walk very well.
Still, he rediscovered his lust for living, and went back to college. There, he did some research online and found physiotherapists who helped him work out a fitness plan to restore his flexibility.
At times, he felt like a baby learning to walk but Paul loved being able to get around independently again. “People would clap for me as I toddled about the college campus, some of them would even walk with me,” he says.
Having dropped the weight, he started getting more active so he could keep it off. Paul went from having an enormous stomach to washboard abs but still had difficulty using the toilet. “There was so much skin it would hang down over my privates and get in the way,” he says.
In December 2020 he had another procedure. This time surgeons spent nine hours painstakingly removing 5kg of excess skin. Though he still has more skin to remove on his legs and arms, he has no regrets. Paul has to pinch himself when he thinks of how far he’s come.
He’s lost so much weight he’s more than half the man he used to be. Not having to carry around all that heaviness has left him with a new zest for life. “I feel amazing,” says Paul, who now works as a tour guide in the Scottish Highlands.
It’s not just his health that’s changed for the better – after a decade Pauline finally got back the man she married.
“It’s life changing having my husband back and for him to be able to walk with me and go up hills,” she says.
“Our relationship is definitely on track and back to where it was. There’s far less stress and strain now.”
There are no quick fixes for weight loss, Paul says, which is why he did it the old-fashioned way – no diet pills, no crash diet, just plain hard work and “lots of water”.
Now he’s lighter than he was before his back injury. Paul weighs 95kg and never wants to put on weight again. “I’m really proud of how far I’ve come,” he says.
“Small goals and stepping stones have helped change everything.”