A man who lost 30 stone (190.5kg) as part of a lifestyle overhaul will compete in his first bodybuilding competition later this month.
At 25 years old, Jack Ako weighed 47 stone (298kg) when he decided to undergo gastric bypass surgery and embark on a health and fitness journey.
Now a qualified personal trainer, the 29-year-old from Wakefield said his “mindset is totally different” and he has found “a fire and passion to help people”, especially the younger generation.
“I was the big kid, then the big teenager and the extremely big adult. Maybe knowledge could have changed that for me,” he said.
Ako said his weight gain started due to “growing up with bad nutrition” and being labelled “big” due to his height and frame – both his parents are more than 6ft (1.8m) tall.
“I was always told it was bad genetics, ‘you’re the big lad’, you get used to it,” he said.
“The big lad is who I am, so I’ll live by it.”
As a former rugby player, it was “quite normalised to eat and put weight on”, but even after he stopped playing, his mindset didn’t change.
His first career was working for the railways, but weight gain meant he couldn’t keep up with the physical demands of the job, and he switched to become a bookmaker.
However, the new role meant he was “stationary for long periods of time”, and could conceal habits like secret eating.
He described attaching a positive feeling to certain foods, which provided a “dopamine release”.
“Different people have their different vices – for me, it was food.”
Food noise took over his everyday life, he said, adding that it affected social outings such as going to the cinema, which became “more about the sweets than it was the film”.
“Before you know it, you can consume 10,000 calories a day without realising.”
