THE world’s former fattest man has revealed he is still bedridden and may never walk again.
Paul Mason weighed 70 stone – 444.5kg – at his peak and was the heaviest recorded person from the UK.
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The former postie’s battle with his weight hit breaking point after the coronavirus lockdown when he took an overdose during a bout of depression.
But he has defied predictions he wouldn’t live past the age of 40 and is set to turn 64 this year.
Paul, from Ipswich, Suffolk, currently weighs 36 stone and is bedridden, but insisted he would never become the world’s heaviest person again.
“A doctor once told me I would be lucky to make 40 and now here I am, nearly a pensioner,” he told The Mirror.
“I may not walk again now but I am at one with that. I just want to use my time to help others and make sure they don’t make the same mistakes I did.”
Paul also said he was scarred by the death of Jason Holton – Britain’s heaviest man who weighed an estimated 50 stone.
He continued: “He was only 33, he had seen nothing of life. The [food] addiction beat him.
“I feel so bad for his mum and his poor family, wish I could have helped him overcome it, but I did my best.”
There was a point where things were looking up for Paul.
After a successful gastric bypass in 2015, he managed to shrink down to 19 stone.
Falling in love with Rebecca Mountain – an American 13 years his junior – he moved to the US where he underwent a series of operations to have his excess skin cut off.
After a 2015 operation which removed several stones of loose skin, he described waking up feeling “light as a feather”.
His mobility improved and his love life with eight stone Rebecca was blooming.
Rebecca described their love life as “fabulous”.
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She said back in 2013: “The physical side of our relationship is fabulous.
“We have a physical chemistry as strong as our emotional chemistry.”
Rebecca eventually proposed to Paul live on American TV in 2014.
But while everything seemed to be going in the right direction for Paul, he was struggling mentally.
“At my lightest just after my surgeries I was 19 stone but my mind was not right, I weren’t that 19 stone person,” he said.
While he admitted he looked “thin” in the mirror, deep down he was “still that person carrying that excess skin”.
He said: “Your body, it takes time to adjust and your mind definitely – I was carrying that for so long, and struggled with all the issues around it all.”
As his mental health worsened, Paul’s eating began to increase.
“For me it was the crisps every night,” he admitted.
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“Go to sleep for a couple of hours and wake up. It started when I was living with Rebecca, she could hear at night me rustling the old crisp packets you know.”
Paul falling back into his old ways put strain on their relationship – and they eventually split over a loaf of bread.
In 2019 he moved back to the UK to “get his life back on track”.
Back in Blighty he has been seeing specialist psychologist Dr Laura Williams, who is helping him to dig down to the source of his issues.
He believes many of his problems stem from his childhood and the verbal and physical abuse of his father, a military policeman.
Paul said: “He would hit me anywhere really, mostly round the head. The slightest little mistake he’d turn round and give me a wallop.£
His father also struggled with his weight, and when his mother once tried to serve him as salad, Paul recalls how he threw the plate across the table and shouted: “I don’t want this s***!”
He was also sexually abused for three years from the age of six by a women known to the family.
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