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Eating never weighed too heavy on wrestler Mat Jones
In school, Mat Jones was a popular wrestler. "I was ‘the thing,’ I was it,” he said.
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While teammates at Edmond Memorial High School struggled to "pull” weight, as a heavyweight Jones gorged on Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets. Before his senior season, however, the rules changed. Heavyweights would be limited to 275 pounds.
Embarrassed he was 50 pounds over that, Jones said, "I chose to walk away from wrestling and a potential college scholarship.” He took a job at a pizza restaurant where he had "an unlimited supply of the worst thing I could do.”
So it went for years. He could easily down an entire loaf of bread or a whole bag of chips at once. Weekends were all eating and napping.
"I couldn’t get enough to eat,” he said. "There was never enough.”
Life in his prison of weight was painful in many ways. Once on a flight, a woman in the seat next to Jones leaned away from him "like I was a leper.” Jones apologized, saying if he didn’t need to visit his gravely ill brother he wouldn’t have taken a plane. As he was leaving the plane, Jones apologized again.
"She never acknowledged me,” he said. "That broke my heart.”
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