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WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL, SATURDAY, JULY 7, 1979SECTION 1,PAGE3SEATTLE (UPI) — No one will ever know exactly how much Jon Brower Minnoch weighed last year.But his doctors say he was at least 1,400 pounds — the heaviest human being in medical history.“We were not able to weigh Jon because he wastoo sick, but we estimate that he weighed about 1,400 pounds,” said Dr. Robert Schwartz, an endocrinologist at University Hospital.“He was probably more than that. He was by at least 300 pounds the heaviest person ever reported.”Minnoch, 38, has spent most of the past 15 months in the hospital, in a painful struggle with his body to lose weight and learn how to move again.He has dropped 900 pounds from his 6-foot-1 frame and is down to about 475, but doesn’t want his picture taken until he loses a lot more.It was late March 1978 when a crew of fire fighters rushed to Minnoch's Bainbridge Island home, removed a window, lifted the obese, ailing man onto a thick piece of plywood and carried him to an ambulance.He arrived at the hospital in severe pain, suffering from heart, circulation and respiratory problems and unable to move or speak.“Actually, I was being crushed by my own weight, you could put it like that,” Minnoch said.A crash diet led to his near-death condition.Minnoch, who has driven or owned taxi cabs for17 years, said he “just got so tired” of being heavy all his life that he decided to cut his food intake to almost nothing.But for some reason, his body ceased eliminating waste altogether and everything he ate or drank “hung with me.”“Probably the most unusual thing about the case was the fact that he lived,” Schwartz said. He said doctors have “learned quite a bit about obesity from Minnoch’s case but they still don’t know exactly why he got so large.Minnoch, now on a strict daily diet of 1,200 calories, hopes to eventually slim down to about 210.“I’ve waited 37 years to get this chance at a new-life,’’ Minnoch said
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