Freddy was raised to not waste food. In a family where food stamps and scarce days were often the way, his mother taught him something through her example: to eat was to celebrate.
As a boy growing up in L.A., good grades were rewarded with all-you-can-eat buffet celebrations. Food offered both satiation and joy and also comforted—a substitute for happiness on dreary days.
“I grew up with the gas being turned off, food stamps, and my mother not eating at times to allow us to eat,” Freddy told The Epoch Times. “Her reward system was with food. Anytime we do good in any aspect we would go out to eat.”
Now a health-conscious 23, Freddy sells real-estate in Austin, Texas, and looks back with greater confidence. He pinpointed the root of his weight problem and tackled a journey to shed over half his 615 pounds of body weight.
Each day still presents battles though—comfort foods like the buckets of fried chicken he once gorged still haunt him on those gloomy days.
He had always been a big boy. With his 6-foot, 6-inch frame, weighing 315 pounds in 2018, Freddy was a “healthy fat” high schooler, hitting the weights with gusto and playing football.
Like any hearty, growing Texas boy, he loved eating. That wasn’t a major issue until breaking an ankle rendered him hospitalized in 2019. While his food intake hadn’t slowed up, now he was burning almost no calories.
He would order in and polish off a family-sized bucket from Popeye’s, consuming 10,000 calories. Other times, the hero of the day was Panda Express. Big on takeout and bedridden, with nothing but time on his hands, he spent upwards of $30 every day on fast food.
In the span of a year, his weight skyrocketed by over 100 pounds. And the vicious cycle repeated twice more, adding another 100 pounds in 2020, until finally tipping the scales at a frightful 615 pounds the year after. “Frightful” also aptly describes the words he heard from his doctor in 2021.
“If you don’t do anything about your weight, you are going to die before your mom,” he said.
“After my doctor told me I was going to die before my mother, it was an instant eye-opener,” Freddy told us. “That day I started eating less, the next day I started working out. He truly saved my life.”
Most meaningful journeys in life are complicated, though, filled with false starts and failures:
Freddy’s first day on the treadmill floored him, leaving him feeling ready to have a heart attack.
Days later, he relapsed, binging on $50 at Taco Bell and vomiting. So now we’re back to dying before my mom? he thought. Again he spurred himself forward.
“I just started reducing the portions of what I would eat, from 14 pieces to 5 pieces,” he said. “Starting off I still was not eating health foods, I was still eating a lot of fried food.”
But persistence paid off. His mix of weight lifting several days a week, cardio, and dieting helped him cut 100 pounds in the first year of his journey.
The junk food had to go. It was replaced with eggs and egg whites for breakfast, and for dinner a whole roasted chicken supplemented with spinach and carrots, in a diet where intermittent fasting was a control.
In 2022, around 150 pounds slipped off.
One of the greatest days of Freddy’s journey came when he ran his first marathon—at least, he calls it that. It was only 5 miles but was lightyears beyond that time on the treadmill that almost killed him.
In the car ride home, he found himself shedding tears of joy thinking about all he had accomplished.
Marking another milestone, Freddy finally shattered his plateau last December when his weight hit his longtime goal of 280 pounds. Only to rebound to 286 pounds just days later.
Today, he hits the gym 4 times a week. One day is allocated to each: pushing (chest) exercises, pulling (back) exercises, leg workouts, and cardio. Leaving his former self in the dust, he now jogs 5 miles several days a week, clocking in at 30 to 40 minutes.
But there are no fairytale endings. Freddy knows it better than anyone: his battle isn’t over.
“I thought that once I lost the weight all my problems would go away,” he said. “Thankfully, a lot of them did. But now I have new problems that are not related to weight.”
“Starting off my journey, I would look for motivation and inspiration and I could not find people going through the journey,” he said. “So, I wanted to do that. I wanted to document the journey.”
In the end, Freddy didn’t fail. And through persistence, at time of writing, his Instagram has attracted 41,700 followers.
Now, he encourages others with wise words from his mentor: “You did it once, you can do it again!”
In a clip, he relates what a friend recently declared—something counterintuitive to the young man raised poor, who cherished food.
“It’s better to let food rot in the trash than in your body,” Freddy said, adding that he often stuffed his face so it wouldn’t go to waste.
“There are a lot of things I would tell my mother growing up,” he told the newspaper. “But the biggest thing I would tell her is how big of a game changer protein is.
“I’ve learned that protein keeps you fuller for longer and as a kid I think that would have benefited us greatly.”
For his next big milestone, Freddy is aiming to get weight loss surgery. He wants a body worth taking off his shirt for at the beach.
