You don’t need to guide anybody who’s overweight and tell them they’re overweight. It was at that moment the title of Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead really came to me because when I looked in the mirror, that’s what I was. I understood charts and trajectories and I knew where I was gonna end up with the trajectory I was on. And there was something about having a “4” in front of my age.

When I hit 40, there was something about standing in front of that mirror in my birthday suit at 330 pounds, leaning over, looking for my pills with a hangover. Then the doctor basically said, “You’re going to be on these for life.” That’s hard to comprehend, but because that wake-up call wasn’t enough to jog me, I did the pills for eight years until I was 40. As soon as I started to lower the doses, the initial problem would recur. Anybody who knows about that knows it’s an extremely high dose and the side effects are not pretty-moon-face, hunchback, excessive weight gain and, of course, osteoporosis because you’re leaching out a lot of your calcium. It was debilitating and when I went to the doctor, he gave me 80mg to 90mg of the steroid prednisone. I lived with this fear of being touched, of feeling pressure, physical pressure. If someone was to shake my hand with a very firm handshake, four or five hours later it could affect my hand as though it had been slammed in a car door and it would swell up to the size of a balloon. Then I got really sick with a chronic autoimmune disease called chronic urticaria and angioedema, which is a fancy word for saying really bad hives that won’t go away and are not on the surface of the skin-they’re below the dermis, way down deep, which means that the histamine that’s released by your body to try and protect yourself leaks into your joints. The doctor would give me some pills, the course of the medication would be a week, maybe two weeks, and good as gold. I turned my back on Mother Nature and lived predominantly on fast food. With the bank balance growing, something else grew, and it was my waist size. Somewhere along the way from being a little boy who loved going to the beach and playing rugby, running and being very active, the focus went to an obsession over my bank balance growing. It was all about how many boats, how many cars, how many watches-all about stuff. JOE CROSS: I came from a world of finance. What made you want to switch to a more plant-based diet? When you filmed Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, you were living with a painful autoimmune condition as well. It’s incredible what happens-the transformation that takes place. In the first, Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, you come to America, rather obese, and decide to only drink fruits and vegetables for 60 days. Watching all three of them was quite an intense process. Cross’ words of wisdom: “Love yourself and love your plants.”ĬRISTINA CUOMO: Naturalist writer Wendell Berry said, “People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food,” which is very evident in each of your films.

Joe cross weight loss plan