“Does the name Kenneth Brumley ring a bell? He became famously known as the Halon Dad because at his heaviest, he weighed a whopping 122 lb. Check out what happened to this man when he decided it was high time to turn his life around.
Kenneth Brumley gave a desperate sigh as he lay there in his bed. In front of him, yet another day without hope awaited. Being confined to his bed for so many days, he had given up all hope and any quality of life. The title of Halon Dad wasn’t something that made him proud, yet this somewhat unflattering nickname at least brought his plight to the attention of the world.
Born in 1968, Kenneth wasn’t always morbidly obese. Decades of bad eating habits brought him to a point that many would describe as a place of no return. With the pounds continuing to pile on, his mobility gradually started to decrease. Long gone were the days when this talented youngster showed his skill on the basketball and baseball fields. He had even tried his hand at American football and displayed some talent, but no one would believe it just by looking at him now.
Where an average adult consumes around 30,000 calories in a period of 2 weeks, this was the amount Kenny ate every day of his life. Food had become the center of his existence. The less he could move, the bigger he became, and the more he found comfort in food. By the age of 36, this father of four had become bedridden. Over the past seven years of his life, he had slowly but surely begun digging his own grave with his teeth.
At the age of 40, Kenneth was certain to die of obesity. His heart could not sustain life in this oversized body. Although the people who loved him tried their best to care for him, there was no way he could be washed properly and kept hygienically clean. Nobody had the ability to flip his body over and try to wash him. In fact, this man did not have a proper bath for at least 4 years.
In 2018, both Kenneth and his family reached the breaking point. It was clear to all of them that he needed help, and he needed it now. It took some convincing to get somebody to come and rescue him from certain death. It took quite a lot of planning to get a team of people together who were willing and able to get Kenneth out of his apartment and transport him to a hospital. Firefighters were the only people able to tackle this enormous task.
The day when the rescue team arrived at this apartment, they were met with a situation they had never expected before. First Responders are faced with many dangerous and life-threatening situations every day, but they never expected to find a fully grown man lying on the floor of a room that reeked of bodily fluids and excrement. At the time, Kenneth was weighing a whopping 73 Stone, making him one of the heaviest people that ever lived. A 463 kg body is almost impossible to visualize. Kenneth was lying there on the floor, he could hardly move his head, but there was still a little bit of mobility in his arms. For the rest of his body, there was no way he could assist the movers to get him out of the jail he was confined for the last 4 years.
Years of his life later, on a firefighter described the smell in Kenny’s apartment as that of piled-up nappies that had not been disposed of in years. If it were not for his compassionate nature and his dedication to helping everyone, he would have chosen to abort the mission. With almost military precision, the operation of getting Kenneth to the hospital was managed.
One wrong move could easily have triggered a heart attack. The doorways were too narrow to get the body through; therefore, there was no alternative but to knock down a counter wall that gave the Emergency Services access through the garage. After this mammoth undertaking, Kenneth was finally transported on a stretcher carried by a large team of strong men and carefully placed in a minivan. The trip to the hospital had to be done with painstaking medical supervision to ensure that their rescued patient arrived at the hospital still breathing.
For the doctors, it was difficult to imagine that Kenneth Brumley was once a promising athlete. However, he was forced to leave his teams behind when he moved temporarily from Texas to California with his mother, and he swapped his obsession with sports for an obsession with food. While being very active, his body was able to burn the huge amount of calories he consumed.
When he became less active but continued to consume the same amount of calories, that was when he rapidly started gaining weight. As he adjusted to the move, his food addiction rapidly got worse. A lifestyle filled with chili cheese fries, hamburgers, and liters of soda soon made him gain huge amounts of weight. Adding a case of malt per day to his diet did not help his cause. Although Kenneth often thought of turning his life around, he simply did not have the willpower. He had fallen in with various street gangs, and he simply followed the lifestyle they were maintaining. He was heading for his own destruction.
What would be a wakeup call for a person going down this destructive road? The day when Kenneth drove in a car with one of his children by his side and several shots were fired at the vehicle. He realized that he was putting his family in danger and that he would probably not live to see his children growing up. He thought he would be killed by gang life, but several years later, he realized that his own body was dragging him towards an untimely death. As a prisoner in his own body, Kenneth needed help to escape.
Fortunately, a famous bariatric surgeon at the Renaissance Hospital in Houston, Texas, was willing to assist. Kenneth understood that without making radical changes to his life, he might not have much time left to live. The Channel 4 program showed an immediate interest in the story and started filming a documentary known as the Halon Dad.
It was no easy turnaround for Kenneth. He had to stick to a very strict diet, restricting his calorie intake to about 1,500 calories per day. For almost the first time in his life, healthy food had to become the focus of his meals. There was no space left for junk food and beer. Every pound that he lost spelled victory. To everybody’s surprise, Kenneth managed to lose an astounding 154 lb in 40 days. The doctors were satisfied that this man was willing to put in the work and stick to the diet. With the first almost 70 kg gone, doctors performed the first operation and removed various large fat FS from his legs and stomach. The stark change made a huge difference to both Kenneth’s body and his psyche.
After the wounds of the operation had healed and Kenneth had time to regain strength, doctors performed the gastric bypass to help him in the long journey of losing as much weight as possible, with long being the keyword for it. Although Kenneth knew that it would take some time for him to regain some sort of mobility again, he wasn’t expecting to spend an entire year in the hospital.
But after processing the news, he realized that he was privileged to get all the care and support he needed to heal and become healthier. He thought back to the days when he just lay in bed at home, watched television, and ate piles of junk food. Here in the hospital, he was working hard to change his mindset about food and regain the willpower to live a healthy and productive lifestyle.
One of the main reasons he stuck to the program was the fact that he had four children, and he knew if he did not turn his life around, they may soon be left without a father. That was something he did not want them to experience, for he knew what the absence of a father could do to a child. He himself had grown up with a single mother, and while he loved her with all he had and knew that he wanted his kids to have two parents for as long as possible.
After a year in the hospital, Kenneth finally went home in 2009 weighing in at 531.3 lb or 241 kg. Now, he had to keep on losing weight while working to regain his mobility and trying to stand again for the first time in more than a decade. And did he manage to do it? Unfortunately, there are no recent updates on the Halon Dad. Maybe he chose to remove himself from the public eye after a year where his every move was documented and televised. Thankfully, there is no record of Kenneth Brumley passing away. This means he’s alive and well as one of the many success stories of weight loss that saved a person’s life.
What a surprising feat! Do you believe that these weight loss challenges yield long-term results? Where do you think Kenneth is today?
