Weight loss: Hamish McKay talks about ‘poignant moments’ that spurred his dramatic weight loss: ‘Bloody lucky I’m here’

New Zealand newsreader Hamish McKay has spoken about his dramatic 50 kilo weight loss.

The longtime broadcaster said he was suffering several health problems after his weight climbed to 135 kilos.

His lightbulb moment was when his wife shared an image of him sleeping when he should have been working. She later told him he needed to “do something about this“.

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“There’s a couple of photos that confirm that I was death warmed up,” the 59-year-old said.

He told The F#$%ING NEWS podcast he “blew up to about 135kgs and saw a couple of photos and my wife once videoed me sleeping on the couch in the middle of an afternoon when I should have been at work”.

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He said he had always been able to hide his weight gain in a “nice suit, you know, just sort of got away with it”.

But once his weight went past 125kg things changed.

He explained he had “onset diabetes type two, blood sugar that the scale could hardly read, blood pressure, 170 over 130 and cholesterol. You name it, I had it”.

McKay also said his weight was putting pressure on his heart and lungs and causing inflammation which presented as flu-like symptoms.

He admits he took to “comfort eating” after he lost his sports presenting role on TV3 in 2016.

“Post TV3 was a bit of a negative time. I’d had a great career but I sort of became comfortably numb. I had a lot of good stuff going on, but I couldn’t see the wood for the trees – great family life, incredible kids, wife,” he said.

“I didn’t realise how lucky I was and the bigger I got I sort of ate for this sort of silly comfort and it was just ridiculous.

“Those were a couple of kind of poignant moments where I went, ‘You know what? You need to do something about this.”

After his wife’s comment, McKay decided to start working out, but this too proved to be a struggle.

“I was at a gym and I was doing a bench press and my stomach popped out between my abdominals. Imagine Mt Ruapehu not being there on the Central Plateau, then all of a sudden, popping out at the gym,” Stuff NZ reports McKay as saying.

Next, he turned to his GP who suggested weight loss surgery.

Patients in New Zealand are required to lose 15 kilos before undergoing the taxpayer-funded bariatric surgery.

“You don’t get in to have that operation unless you prove you’ve got the discipline to lose that weight in the first place.”

Today, McKay said he no longer requires any medication and feels he has saved the health system money going forward due to his new-found health.

“I don’t take anything now and I was on all sorts of pills. What cost am I going to be to the health system going forward? Probably about a 50th of what I was going to be. Now I feel like I’ve got 15 to 20 years of a good working life to give some of those taxes back,” he said.

McKay spoke about his sister Deb who suffered from Type 2 diabetes ahead of her death at 62 after a lifetime of battling with weight.

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“I wish she could have had this operation at 25. I always talk about my late dad. He was a big man, uncomfortable in a chair at a restaurant, uncomfortable in a plane,” he said.

“And jovial and jolly on the outside, but on the inside, I wasn’t going to go down that path. And the minute this sort of opportunity came to me, I grabbed it with both hands.”

McKay now weighs “about 82” these days, he told the podcast.

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“I sort of weigh 82 to 84kgs. I got down to 75 which was a little light. I was skin and bones,” he said.

McKay said the biggest difference he has noticed now his health has improved has been his “energy levels”.

“The energy levels, the vibe, the positivity … birth certificate says 59, I feel 39, and it feels like I was born in 1985 and I’m not gonna waste that,” he said on the podcast.

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