Shedding His Past : Man Lost 400 Pounds, Set for Skin Surgery

In a world where everybody’s looking to save his own skin, Tommy McGruder is the living definition of a selfless man.

Until a few months ago, McGruder tipped the scales at 800 pounds, his weight so great that he couldn’t leave his bed.

Then the 35-year-old resident of South-Central Los Angeles underwent a painful crash diet, losing 400 pounds so quickly that his skin became the saggy equivalent of a wet woolen overcoat, its heavy folds as cumbersome as his flab.

Now, with the voluntary help of several top specialists, McGruder will undergo an operation today in which 75 pounds of his skin will be removed, his excess layers being offered to local children’s hospitals, which could use it for research and skin transplants.

“It’s like a brand-new baby being born,” McGruder said Thursday as he checked into Chapman Medical Center in Orange. “A whole brand-new life.”

McGruder hopes today’s procedure marks a first step on the road to pursuing his dream of becoming a professional animator.

“That’s been a big dream of mine as long as I can remember,” he said. “Since I was a little boy.”

For now, however, doctors simply hope to provide McGruder with enough mobility to leave his house, where he has been a virtual prisoner for three years.

“His main goal is to get walking,” said Dr. Ron Goldstein, a plastic surgeon with practices in Santa Ana and Laguna Beach, who noted that the excess skin he intends to remove from McGruder would be enough to cover a 10-year-old child from head to toe.

At first, UC Irvine Medical Center was going to receive McGruder’s epidermal donation.

But the center decided at the last minute that storing and testing the skin for disease would overly tax its facilities.

“So right now we’re in the process of talking to a few different centers,” said Laurie Kajiwara, a spokeswoman for Lindora Medical Clinics, a Costa Mesa-based chain of weight-loss centers that helped McGruder, free of charge, after congestive heart failure came close to claiming his life.

Doctors donating their time to McGruder’s case say his courage is as rare as his condition.

“One of the things which is really amazing is his passion and his dedication to following his diet,” said Dr. Peter D. Vash, executive medical director of the Lindora clinics.

There was no magic about McGruder’s weight loss, Vash said, no special drugs or tricks.

The secret?

“You want it in a couple of words? Don’t eat.”

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Vash conceded that McGruder’s radical diet--in which he consumed only light meals low in fats and carbohydrates, but high in protein--carried some health risks.

But radical treatment was required:

“You have to understand, this was a drastic condition, this man was dying before our eyes. With 800 pounds crushing your chest, you have to make some rather drastic moves.”

Though the diet was agony, McGruder made an eager patient. Five months ago, he believed himself held captive by his own refrigerator, a bully for which he even picked out a name:

Big Joe.

“I got this thing about potatoes,” McGruder conceded. “I love fried potatoes, fried greasy potatoes, with lots of onions.”

But now he looks forward to the day when he can roam about his city, seeing all the new skyscrapers that have gone up since the last time he was able to take himself for a stroll.

McGruder said he was skinny until he turned 26 years old, when a series of personal problems sent him into a spiraling depression.

“The food was more a drug for me,” he recalled.

But little by little, he’s learned not to snack under pressure.

“This has been,” he said, “one of the best Christmases in a long time.”