one
step
by Gwen Florio photos by Tom Bauer
J
ust over a year ago, if someone had wanted to describe Mayor John Engen’s life in cinematic terms, “Dead Man Walking” pretty much summed things up. Except that the “walking” part would have been a stretch. The mayor is a big guy, 6-foot-2, but even his large frame labored under the weight of more than 425 pounds. People generally assess their weight these days by calculating their body-mass index, a ratio of height to weight. Normal weight people fall into a BMI range of 18.5 to 24.9. People are considered overweight between a BMI of 25 and 29.9, obese if their BMI is over 30. Engen’s BMI at that time? 54.6. “I was teetering on the edge” of a gastric bypass, the socalled stomach-stapling surgery that severely limits how much a person can eat. It’s a drastic solution, performed only on the morbidly obese, the key word here being “morbid.”
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Engen wasn’t teetering on the edge of surgery, he was teetering on the edge of death. The mayor rarely misses an opportunity to crack wise, but it’s hard to smile when he talks about those days: “I had a lot of folks around concerned that I was going to die from being a fattie.” That, as they say, was then. Sticking with the tortured movie metaphors, a film about Engen these days might feature the mayor donning a cape and bursting from a phone booth – kids, ask your parents – to reveal his new identity: “Marathon Man!” (OK, Half-Marathon Man, but nobody’s made a movie called that yet.) In the last year, the mayor has peeled an entire adult human being away from his frame, losing 140 pounds. When he says he did it one step at a time, Engen isn’t just talking