Becoming Larger Than Life

By Sean Mulroney and Scott Ragain

"I'm living proof that a person's past can come back to haunt them…to challenge and debilitate them. Morbid obesity and Lymphedema are diseases I continue to battle, along with their accompanying insecurities. My saving grace…one fitness trainer came to my rescue and believed in me so much, I began to believe in myself again. At 687 pounds, my subsequent 110-pound weight loss and fitness journey spawned an Obesity Revolution." – Sean Mulroney

• Language: English
• Publisher: EG Media Group
• Release date: Sep 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223056799

Book preview

Preface

As the final chapters of the final draft of this book were being written, and maybe still at this very moment, the world is in the midst of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. Schools are closed. Everyone in our hometown of Arnold, Missouri, near St. Louis in Jefferson County, has been instructed to self-quarantine. My wife, Jess, and I are at home with our three daughters Madison, Olivia, and Mackenzie.

We’re making ends meet. Jess is an expert at stretching a dollar. Our little home is paid off. Our minivan gets us where we need to go. We lead a very simple life. Our Heavenly Father provides for us, and we are, in many respects, blessed.

Currently, I’ve several projects in the works. I founded the non-profit, Teens of America (TOA), in 2008, with three goals in mind. First, I wanted to reach teens through media with positive, uplifting messaging. Second, I wanted to give teens a vehicle to engage with other teens and, hopefully, improve teen and parent relationships and reduce addiction. Third, I wanted to use TOA as a safety net and help tweens and teens, if and when they needed, it through lifesaving counseling, mentorship, public speaking, or just being there for them during a critical time of need. I believe that we achieved those goals. To engage and reach more tweens and teens effectively and to encourage them to engage with one another, we are revamping the entire platform to include online radio, podcast, music, video, and social connectivity. From discussing entrepreneurialism, personal finance, social and geographical differences, problem-solving in our communities to pop-culture, entertainment, and even more serious subjects like peer pressure, bullying, addiction, and self-harm, today’s teens are intellectually better prepared than any prior generation to engage with one another in meaningful discourse. I believe that Generation Z could be America’s—no, the world’s—next Greatest Generation.

Another project is The Obesity Revolution (TOR). Seeing a need to help those coping with morbid obesity, those left homebound or even tethered to a wheelchair by obesity, and those suffering from Lymphedema, I founded The Obesity Revolution. I became an internet sensation by being vulnerable, honest, and accountable to the world by posting my fitness and weight-loss journey online. My videos and those of my trainer, Brandon Glore, have been viewed worldwide by over ten million people...add another 5mil + people who’ve viewed network news videos.  My fitness journey has been covered by Forbes; I’ve been on local TV, the BBC...it’s been an amazing ride.

Obesity rates in the USA have just about tripled since the 1960s. Today, nearly 40 percent of American adults are considered obese. So, out of 327 million people in America, about 78 million adults are designated as obese. As of 2013, the American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery (ASMB) estimates that about 24 million Americans are morbidly obese, and obesity is linked to about 40 diseases that cost the U.S. economy about 270 billion dollars in 2011. The ASMB also states that obesity is associated with a 50- to 100-percent increased rate of premature death. The UK’s three-fold plus increase in diabetes over the last thirty years is equally staggering.

Some people coping with morbid obesity have underlying hormonal or other health issues that make losing weight incredibly more difficult than it is for a person who is just moderately overweight. Some suffer from mental illnesses as well. There is prejudice among the medical community, and because of the lack of medical training for our family care practitioners, people who suffer from morbid obesity fail to receive the level of care that many Americans take for granted. They are simply treated differently...instructed to eat less and exercise more. Those medical professionals who specialize in the fields of obesity, metabolism, glandular studies, and psychology know that. For many people suffering from morbid obesity, eating less, and exercising more won’t necessarily solve their obesity problem.

The need to reverse the uptick in obesity and save lives is dire. With the help of trainer Brandon Glore and a team of caring people who believe in this cause as much as I do, TOR is now an online fitness platform tailored specifically for people battling severe to morbid obesity. Without judgment or condemnation, but rather with compassion, real solutions, and a feeling of family, we hold one another accountable. We even assist with healthcare options.

Seeing someone become happier and healthier is beautiful to witness. No one wants to lose weight more than the person who IS suffering from obesity, especially people coping with morbid obesity. We get people moving—safely—and provide tailored nutritional plans. Many who suffered from diabetes have been taken off their medications by their doctors, effectively adding years to their lives. Our TOR subscription family and our local TOR workout family have collectively lost thousands of pounds. Our goal is one million pounds lost around the world. Many in the TOR family who’ve been homebound are walking for the first time in years, either inside of their homes or stepping outside to feel the sun on their faces.

Lastly, our management and media team are currently in discussions with a major production company, in New York, regarding a positive, non-exploitative television series about my fitness journey and the journeys of those we’ve helped.

Reading this preface, thus far, some of you might think that I’ve become a larger-than-life personality. That I am living a life with the freedom to do what I want when I want. That I can take my family out to dinner at a restaurant, go to a fun vacation destination, drive to the bank, to church, to the grocery store...maybe even take a thirty-minute walk. Well, you’d be wrong.

The elephant in the room is this: I lost my father to cancer when I was young. I became addicted to drugs and alcohol before the age of ten. I was sexually abused as a youth. I bullied and abused my student peers. I led childhood friends and family down the dangerous path of drug and alcohol dependency. I’ve cheated death and should not be alive today. I finally left drugs and alcohol behind. Though I don’t suffer from diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol, I still battle health issues resulting from years of drug use. God affected my liberation, and I became a more responsible person, a person dedicated to helping youth across America make smarter life decisions than I did when I was a tween and teen. I had subsequently made the emotional mistake of replacing drug and alcohol addiction with food addiction. I ballooned to nearly 700 pounds. I suffer from Lymphedema, and, as a result, I have a growth below my right knee on the inside part of my leg that fluctuates in weight. One day the Lymphedema might weigh about thirty pounds (that the lowest weight the growth reaches), and a few days later, it might weigh as much as eighty pounds. It is about the size of two bowling balls.

I’ve been hospitalized nearly twenty times. Faced with my mortality and the thought of never being able to walk my girls down the aisle on their wedding day and dying at an early age, I decided to launch my fitness journey. Being there for my daughters is my WHY. After being turned down by thirty fitness trainers, I miraculously found a personal fitness trainer, Brandon Glore. With Brandon’s help and my mental toughness and dedication, I lost 110 pounds in one year. I still can’t drive. I can’t run. There’s a lot I can’t do, but there’s so much I CAN and MUST do.

The elephant-in-the-room is not just me and my size; it IS the JOURNEY I took to get where I am today. I am not one to dwell in the past. I’m always moving forward. Revisiting my past and writing this book was terribly difficult for me. My hope is that this book will inspire all readers to persevere despite and in spite of the adversity in their lives. But, for those of you who have struggled with addiction and abuse in all its forms, this story, my story, is for you.

Along with references and source listings, you’ll find important links on the back pages of this book. Please use the links. I have vetted them all and know the people in each of the organizations referenced. My contact information can be found there as well. Your feedback is appreciated, and I look forward to connecting.

Chapter 1 – Little Seany

As I walked out of a restaurant, a man smoking a cigarette, who had apparently been waiting to ambush me, remarked, You’re disgusting. How can you even go out in public? And how did you allow yourself to become so fat?

I faced the man, and upon doing so, I recognized him from earlier, inside the restaurant. He had been staring at me while having lunch with his family...while I was eating my lunch. At that time, I weighed about 500 pounds. Being stared at was normal. But, being addressed as this man was now addressing me, that was rare.

The day that man confronted me, I was exhausted in every sense of the word: mentally, physically, and emotionally. After launching Teens of America the year before, I had spent much of 2009 on the road with my team and was nearing the tail end of a three-month Teens of America tour, speaking to 150,000 middle and high school students all over America.

After calming down my friends, I approached the man. Thanks for the chance to get to know you, I said. I really mean that. Look, you don’t know me from Adam. You don’t know my life story, why I’m overweight, and you don’t know what I do for a living. I talk with kids, all over the country because I want them to make better life choices than I made. I am not ridiculing you because you’re smoking, undeniably shortening your life span, embracing a self-destructive habit your children may choose to emulate. I didn’t approach you that way. So, why would you approach me the way you did? I’m a human being. I do have to eat...as much as I would like for that not to be the case. No one wants to lose weight more than I do. But that’s my problem...and, yes, I know I have a problem.

Well, the way I handled that situation led to an apology, a handshake, and what I would call...a WIN. I apparently grossed this guy out so much he felt he HAD to say something to me. And, in his own way, maybe he was simply alerting me to the fact that I just might have a problem, a big problem. Hey, he was at least bold enough to make an attempt at what he likely interpreted as an intervention. Because of his willingness to both talk and listen, what we both now have is a higher level of understanding and tolerance for one another. Perspective is such a big deal, isn’t it?

Some, even the medical community, seek to de-humanize people suffering from morbid obesity. But, for me and most people, gaining weight is simply a byproduct of other problems, often major emotional problems...sometimes even a chemical imbalance inside our bodies. I do not and never have had an eating disorder. That’s right. I have never had an eating disorder. My weakness is my pain. My weakness, my kryptonite, is that I am addicted to anything that takes me away, if only short-term, from my pain, my emotional distress caused by years of abuse from others, and self-abuse as well. And, for me, addiction and the pain that ALWAYS precedes it, began at a very young age.

And when those blue snowflakes start falling. That’s when those blue memories start callin’. You’ll be doing alright with your Christmas of white, but I’ll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.

In my home, Christmastime 1974, Elvis Presley Christmas music played. My little electric train track encircled our Christmas tree, and my Lionel train was chug-chugging along amongst Santa’s as well as our family’s own thoughtfully purchased and lovingly wrapped gifts.

My parents emigrated to the USA in 1955. Our Irish-Catholic immigrant family lifestyle in our working-class Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania neighborhood seemed...idyllic.

On long weekends, we enjoyed pickup truck camper trips, sometimes to Ocean City, Maryland. And, yes, we kids actually rode IN the camper while traveling down the highway. Illegal now, it was a REAL blast, all of us kids riding in that camper on road trips, sometimes bouncing around like ping pong balls. Crazy. My four siblings were much older than me. Terry and Angie are my sisters with whom I am still very close. Terry was nine years older, and Angie sixteen years my senior. Aside from my parents, Terry and Angie were still at home when I was a little kid. When they weren’t caught up in the normalcy of their own busy, ever-changing lives, they sometimes acted as surrogate parents. I was truly the baby of the family, the youngest Mulroney. My Mum called me Little Seany. My brothers included Tony, eighteen years older than me, and Joe, fourteen years my senior.

To the extent they could, my parents simply transplanted their way of life in Dublin, Ireland, to Pittsburgh. We imbibed alcohol at every meal except breakfast. We attended mass very seldom. I’m not even sure why we even identified ourselves as Catholic. We gave no more thought to our religious beliefs than we did the shape of our ear lobes or the color of our eyes. Catholicism was our heritage and our tradition, but none of us really gave much consideration to what being Catholic really meant. My Dad, Joseph, a skilled welder, found steady work, and Mum, Margaret, worked at a neighborhood bar called The Crystal Lounge Bar on the north side of Pittsburgh. They were hard workers and provided for those of us still living at home. As a family, we weren’t great communicators. I mean, as a family, we didn’t discuss issues (family or otherwise) or address grievances by talking things out.

An interesting thing about my family, most of them anyway, including myself...we are self-confessed nyctophilites (having nyctophilia means that a person has an attraction to darkness or the night, finding relaxation and creativity after the sun goes down). Our household was filled with nocturnal nellies to be certain. My energy centers then and now simply come alive at night. I suspect that I may have some readers who