Nov/Dec 04

The 300-Pound Miracle
It took David Caruso 32 years to eat his way to 525 pounds, but with determination, dedication and discipline he dropped to 225 in just a year!

By Stephen Hanks

   More than a year before TV talk-show host Oprah Winfrey was giving away “free” cars to an entire studio audience (tax not included), she presented an automobile to someone during one of her trademark inspirational episodes—and this person really deserved it. During her April 2003 show titled “Incredible Weight-Loss Stories,” Oprah told the tale of one David Caruso, a 34-year-old man from Wilkes-Barre, PA, who somehow managed to lose more than 300 pounds in one year the all-natural way. It was a personal extreme makeover without the stomach stapling, the liposuction or the tummy tucks. Cue triumphal music. Introduce hero. The now 220-pound Caruso runs onto the stage, arms upraised in the manner of a fictional Pennsylvania hero named Rocky.
   Caruso, his now thin face beaming, offers Oprah’s audience some anecdotes about his immense-person past, and how he handled his massive weight-loss program to win the battle over obesity. Like one of the books Oprah reviews on her show, Caruso gets the host’s praise and seal of approval, and then Oprah gets coy. “I hear that your dream car growing up was a Porsche,” she teases, before a $63,000 white Boxster S convertible rolls onto the stage behind Caruso. He looks wide-eyed at the car and Oprah invites him to try it on for size. A year before Caruso could barely fit into any standard-sized vehicle, let alone a sports car, but the Porsche fits his newly svelte body like a glove. “You know what, David?” Oprah exclaims. “The car is yours.”
   Caruso begins to cry and the tears are so genuine a viewer couldn’t be blamed for crying with him. It was a nice reward for someone who worked so hard, achieved so much and now was inspiring so many.
   David Caruso doesn’t buy into the theory that his obesity was the result of genetic predisposition, depression or low self-esteem. Instead, he believes it was the result of a combination of a childhood skin disease, being Italian—and love.
   When Caruso was born, his father had already abandoned his mother, Connie. His mom not only had to raise David as a single parent, she was also caregiver to her own mother, Mildred, who had suffered a stroke at age 35. If that wasn’t enough work for a woman of modest means, her son David developed eczema shortly after birth. Eczema is a nasty disease that leaves the skin dry, hot and itchy, and in severe cases the skin can become broken, raw and bleeding. David had eczema over about 90% of his body.
   “The first two years of my life I was in the hospital,” David says. “And from the time I was 3 to about 6 years old, I never wanted to go outside and have other kids see me. So I just stayed home. Since my grandmother lived with us and was always sick, my mom took care of her, so she was home cooking all the time.”
   So he ate. And ate. And ate.
   “Hey, we’re Italians,” he says, laughing. “We eat a lot. But it wasn’t just that. Love to my mom was about making sure there was a roof over my head, clothes on my back and food in my belly. She didn’t have a lot of money to buy me fancy clothes or shoes or really cool toys. So she told me that she’d always be there to love me, care for me and make sure I’d never be hungry. She’d always ask me, ‘You hungry, David? C’mon, I’ll make you something.’ When I got older and started hanging out with friends, she’d tell me, ‘Make sure you eat before you go out.’”
   As a toddler, David was already eating immense portions of foods high in fat and carbohydrates—pastas, meatballs, sausages—and tons of fast food. By the time he was in the second grade, he weighed 150 pounds. When he was 11, he was kicked off a rollercoaster at the Great Adventure Amusement Park because they simply couldn’t get the safety bar around his waist. As a teenager, he never knew his actual weight because the standard scales only went up to 350 pounds. (“Whenever I had to write my weight on a form, I said 350 because that’s what the scale said.”) At 17, he discovered how much he weighed only because a friend was working at a manufacturing plant that had an industrial scale. “I thought I’d jump on just for the heck of it,” he recalls, “and it hit 440.”
   Despite having to wear a 7x-size shirt and 72-inch-waist pants, David was a good athlete. He played hockey until he was 16, did karate for 12 years and brags about how, even at his heaviest, he could kick his leg over his head. But once he began inching closer to the 500-pound mark, he couldn’t perform any activity without becoming short of breath. He didn’t realize it then, but his enormous food consumption was a recipe for a death wish.
   “My calorie intake had to be over 15,000 a day,” he says. By the time he was a teenager, David was eating three meals for breakfast, including whole packages of bacon and sausage. Lunch and dinner included vast quantities of pasta, pizza and hoagies, and liters of soda. What makes the weight gain even more remarkable is that David hardly ever ate what he calls “snacks”—no cookies, candy or ice cream. Did he ever eat something healthy like fish? “Yeah,” he jokes, “I ate fish sandwiches from McDonald’s and the fried stuff at Long John Silver.”
    It’s that sense of humor that endeared David Caruso to his friends around Wilkes-Barre. Sure, he endured the standard insults and taunting from strangers (“We can show a movie on your butt!” “Hey, you’re gonna put this elevator over the weight limit”), but in his close-knit community he was the jovial giant known as “Big Dave.”
   “Growing up I had tons of friends,” he says. “I was always upbeat and cheerful and had a lot of fun. Everyone around me was comfortable with who I was, and I was comfortable being ‘Big Dave.’”
   Being the son of a caregiver—and ultimately becoming a caregiver himself—means that making other people comfortable comes naturally to David Caruso. He would book two seats for himself when he had to take airplanes. At Penn State football games, he’d buy three bench seats. It wasn’t just because he needed the space. “I didn’t want the people around me to be uncomfortable.”
   Caruso graduated from Kings College, in Wilkes-Barre, in 1992 with degrees in criminal justice and psychology. One of David’s professors was the head psychologist at a psychiatric hospital and David was hired as a mental health technician. Between 1994 and 2004, he worked at a community mental heath center as a suicide prevention specialist and was on call 24 hours a day to work with people who ranged in age from teens to seniors.
   David Caruso wasn’t only a caregiver on the job; he was also on call at home. He had long helped his mom care for his perpetually ailing grandmother until she died in 1987 when David was 17. By 1998, David was taking care of his mother, who was not only obese herself, but also suffered from heart disease and lung cancer related to a lifetime of heavy smoking. Connie Caruso had to wear a pacemaker and was on an oxygen machine that needed constant monitoring.
   “I had to be there for her every night to make sure the oxygen mask was on tight enough and to make sure she got the right medication,” David says. “But it was never a problem. My mom was awesome. She was my absolute best friend when I was growing up.”
   Two things happened in 2001 that forced David Caruso to an epiphany, leading him to realize that being 525 pounds at 32 wasn’t a good way to live. He was hospitalized a number of times with phlebitis (blood clots and inflammation) of the legs caused by his extreme obesity. When the phlebitis flared up he’d be in the hospital for a week or more getting treatment.
   “I’d always worry, ‘Who is going to be there for my mom? Who will put her mask on?’ One time when I was in the hospital, she had to go into the hospital and almost died. I felt it was because of my selfishness and that put me over the edge.”
   At the end of December, he started doing research on obesity and dieting. He found a website that calculated weight and its relation to life expectancy. When he typed in his age and weight, the computer said his life span was 35 years. David Caruso stared at the screen and thought to himself, “I’ve only got three years to live.” Even then he wasn’t really thinking about himself, but about his mother. “The first thing that popped into my head was how unfair it would be if I wasn’t there for her when throughout my life she was always there for me. So that became my focus: not to let her down.”
   David knew he had to lose weight, a lot of it—and fast. But where do you begin when you’re 525 pounds and you have no experience with diets? For Caruso, losing a lot of weight was not an achievable goal, so he never tried. “I’d see diet ads on TV where people would say, ‘I lost 40 pounds in 8 months,’ and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Great, at that rate it will take me forever just to get to 250!’”
   At first, he considered gastric bypass surgery, a popular but sometimes risky procedure than involves stapling the stomach so that the patient feels full after eating just a small amount of food. A good friend talked him out of it. “He said that I should give dieting a shot and use the surgery as a last resort,” David recalls. He began eating up research on nutrition and weight loss. What’s a carbohydrate? What’s a protein? How do fats get absorbed in the body? What do vitamins do? He picked apart various diets and decided on a simple but common-sense plan—reduce calories and carbs, stop his intake of saturated fats and exercise, exercise, exercise.
   “I learned quickly that the best way to burn fat is through weight-lifting,” David says. “The more muscle you put on the more fat you burn, even when you’re resting.” His diet and exercise program began in mid-January 2002. He had to take it slow at first. David knew that overdoing his workouts when he weighed 525 pounds could easily cause a heart attack. He bought a heart-monitor watch to track his heart rate during training. “It would take me more than 30 minutes to walk a mile,” he remembers, “but I was walking at my maximum heart rate.”
   Soon he was exercising for more than two hours a day, six days a week. He’d start with weight training (“Because I found I’d be too tired if I did cardio work first”), which consisted of working every part of his upper body, and then spend an hour between a treadmill, an elliptical trainer and an exercise bike. Once he dropped some weight, he worked in sit-ups and punching a heavy bag. His diet consisted of fish, salad, diet green tea, water and vitamin supplements, and he wouldn’t eat anything after 6 or 7 at night. Bread, pasta, red meat and soft drinks were verboten and during the first two months of the diet, David felt hungry all the time. “I was dying,” he recalls. But he never gave in to the hunger pangs, and the dedication and discipline paid off. In the first month of a 1,200-calorie-a-day diet, David lost 36 pounds and shed 99 pounds in 99 days.
   Four months into the program, he decided he wanted to add a protein supplement to his diet. His wife Kimberly, an ER nurse he met in 2000 and married during the year of his miraculous weight loss, told him about the benefits of soy-based protein. David carefully studied the labels of a variety of protein supplements. He decided on Nature’s Plus’ SPIRU-TEIN because it offered everything his research said his body needed. He would drink SPIRU-TEIN before a late-night workout or after an early-evening session. “So many of those supplement shakes tasted chalky and SPIRU-TEIN tasted better than anything on the market,” he raves. “And I love having 18 flavors to choose from.” His favorite? “It was Chocolate and now it’s Cookies & Cream.”
   Only one year after his intensive self-improvement program began, David Caruso had lost an incredible 305 pounds. His mother Connie passed away of heart failure in November 2003 at age 60, but she lived long enough to see David get married, become a stepfather to two young boys (from Kimberly’s first marriage), be given a Porsche on “The Oprah Show” and achieve a weight-loss miracle. “What can I say?” David offers. “She was really proud.”
   Now that David Caruso has become a guru of how to lose girth, does he have any advice for those who want to drop pounds? “Watch calories and carbs,” he advises. “Take vitamins and supplements that are best for you even if they cost more. And always remember that thin doesn’t necessarily mean healthy. You have to have cardiovascular health, too.” As 2005 approached, David was maintaining a weight of about 220, although his lowest was 208. “I could be lighter than I am now,” David insists, “but I don’t want to lose too much because my face gets too thin.” We should all have that problem.

Back To Top