Last week, 700-pound Manuel Uribe left his Monterrey, Mexico home for the second time in five years. The first time in March 2007, his friends and family rolled his bed out into the street where a crane lifted him onto a truck and took him on a tour of the city. But this time he went first-class – via forklift on a platform truck.
This time he was also 500 pounds lighter, thanks to a diet he’s been adhering to for the past couple of years.
The forklift hoisted him, bed and all, onto the truck. The truck then toted its hefty cargo to a local lake. And what did the excessively obese Senor Uibe do at the lake? Swim, you ask? No, he ATE! Vegetables and fish, the reports say. No mention if they were deep fried.
Even though the massive man has dropped 700 pounds from his top weight of 1,235 pounds (an estimate; there’s no scale big enough to actually weigh him), he’s still not able to walk. His doctors would like to see him eventually tip the scales at about 330 pounds.
A couple of years ago, Italian surgeons were going to perform gastric bypass surgery on Uribe, but he decided against it when he lost weight on the Zone diet. He uses a harness system to lift weights. "I am losing weight every day and I don’t feel that I’m so desperate that I need an operation,” he said at the time.
The personable fat man has charmed people who have listened to him as he has made impassioned pleas about his plight via television and his own website. “He’s so likable you can’t help but root for him,” one viewer said, although he couldn’t help but wonder how he got so big. “The thing most interesting to me is that it was never mentioned (in interviews) that there was no way he could have gotten anywhere close to this size without his mom feeding him all day, everyday. No one asked her the simple question of why?”
He weighed a relatively normal 290 pounds until he was 22, then ballooned up to half a ton by the time he reached his early 40s. His wife, appalled by what was happening, left him 10 years ago.