Man Loses Weight Riding Bike

Late one afternoon in 2002, Scott Cutshall's Grand Am rolled toward the leafy Jersey City, New Jersey, neighborhood where he, his wife and their daughter lived on the ground floor of a brownstone apartment.

In the driver's seat sat his wife, Amy, who had asked him to see a doctor about his weight, which then hovered at 427 pounds, and would later top out at 501. In back sat three-year-old Chloe, who Cutshall cared for as best he could given how little he could move.

The news was not good. The doctor gave him six months to live without bariatric surgery. With it, the doctor said, Cutshall had a 50 percent chance of making it out of the operating room.

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Over the next few years, even as he defied that dire prediction, every doctor, every authority he consulted would give him equally urgent warnings. Everyone told him the same thing: Lose weight or die. At the doctor's office that day in 2002, Cutshall had voiced the foremost question in his mind.

Cutshall had known despair before this—especially during one bad patch, when Amy had grown so frustrated at his refusal to undergo surgery that she'd taken Chloe and left. For good? For a little while? He didn't know. But while she was gone, Cutshall had followed the only path he could see out. He'd gone into the bathroom with a box cutter and carved open his wrists.

But they hadn't. They were still there. He was still there. So he cut deeper. It had hurt more, but still, nothing had happened. Later the doctors would tell him that because he was so obese, his blood kept clotting and pooling inside his wrists. Being fat had saved his life...for a while.

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Now, as the car stopped outside his apartment, Cutshall opened the door and reached for the ground with his foot. He pushed off the steering wheel to get himself out, but the column cracked loose under his weight. Somehow, he managed to exit and lumber up the front stairs. There, he settled back into the deep hole he'd dug for himself.

I think you can do it yourself, she said. But you have to want to. Cutshall was always fat; it runs in his family. Growing up in Meadville, Pennsylvania, he and his older brother blew up right around puberty, no matter how much they ran, how fast they swam, or how hard they rode their bikes. Their swim coach called them Gut and Minigut.

Rick Cogley met Cutshall when he came to Meadville to attend Allegheny College in 1982. He remembers Cutshall for his charisma, energy and caustic humor. He would just talk your head off, says Cogley. He's into avant-garde jazz, which is a free- flowing jazz idiom, and it really suits his personality, because he's like that when he talks. Cogley also remembers how they'd get together and eat like it was an event. One of the things we used to say to each other was, 'Hey, let's pact the pizza.' And we would go find a lot of food and just eat all of it.

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When college didn't flow enough for Cutshall, he dropped out during his senior year to tour with a band before setting off for New York City, where he spent the next 14 years playing the kind of obscure music that promises small venues and empty seats. Hauling his drums up and down Manhattan seemed to keep his weight in check.

One night while taking a break from playing to a half-empty room, he sat next to a cute, round-faced girl from Michigan. He was really funny and smart, Amy remembers now, and we just hit it off. But it seemed like we would just be friends.

They stayed in touch. Their connection felt so natural and right that three months later, Cutshall traveled to Flint, Michigan, for a visit. Once he spent some time there, he decided to stay.

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The couple married in 1998 in Michigan. But there wasn't much of a jazz scene in Flint, and soon Cutshall was at loose ends. After a year in the Rust Belt, they moved to New Jersey to start a family. Amy worked as a nurse while Cutshall stayed home with the baby.

He weighed about 300 pounds when Chloe was born in 1999. Then he started packing on serious weight. He rarely ate fast food, preferring Thai, Vietnamese and Middle Eastern. But he ate a lot of it. By mid-2001, his weight had climbed to 380. In 2004, two years after that fateful visit when the physician predicted Cutshall's imminent demise, he hit 470, and by his last doctor's visit in 2005, he tipped the scales at 501.

With every extra pound, Cutshall's mobility decreased; he could walk only 10 steps before needing to rest. He left the apartment just two or three times a year, and then only to sit on the stoop. When Amy took Chloe to the park she reported back to him via cell phone, sending pictures of his daughter playing in the sun. Doctors warned him he was inching closer to dying.

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Sometimes before she left for work, Amy would help her husband move to the window so he could observe the world while she wasn't there to tell him about it. On one of these days, he saw a man ride a bike past their house. The average-looking middle-aged guy rode a touring bike with two panniers. He wove through traffic as if he were a fish swimming up a stream, slipping past boulders and rocks with grace and ease. I remember, says Cutshall, he had the biggest smile on his face.

As Cutshall watched, he thought of Meadville. He remembered the feeling of riding his own bike—the movement, the freedom, the wind. He hadn't felt them for so long, but he almost could again. It hit him like a new kind of hunger.

That same day, Cutshall spent several hours researching bikes online and wondering if maybe he could ride one. He ordered catalogs and back issues of old cycling magazines.

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The next day—and the day after that, and every day after that— Amy helped him over to the window to look for the cyclist. Cutshall started buying bikes. He found a classic, fully lugged '70s Trek touring bike on Craigslist, but it flexed under him as if made of rubber. Then he tried a Rivendell, thinking it would prove sturdier. He and Amy and Chloe took the bike outside. Two times, he got on and rode a little way down the street. But when he pushed down on the pedals, the bottom bracket torqued out the opposite direction, as if trying to escape what was being asked of it.

So Cutshall began contacting frame builders to see if they could make him a bike strong enough to support his weight. The responses trickled in. A few called Cutshall a disgrace. Others took him more seriously, but said they couldn't do anything soon.

Bob Brown, a part-time bike builder from Minnesota, happened to be at a low point in his queue. Honestly, I didn't take it real seriously, Brown says. I've had plenty of people claim to want to get back in shape and change their lives, but they didn't follow through on it. So I responded and said I'd be willing to talk to him about it, but I really never thought I'd hear back from him.

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Five days later, the two settled on a frame and a price. Brown, who would be traveling to New York for his other job as a design engineer, agreed to stop by and take some measurements.

Scott made dinner for me the first night, Brown recalls. He couldn't stand up for more than a minute before his legs were exhausted. He cooked dinner, but he sat at the stove and asked me to get ingredients for him. I remember thinking: Wow, I can't imagine living this guy's life.

Three months after Brown's visit, in early 2005, he flew back into town with Cutshall's new ride, a mono-grammed blue-and-white, steel-framed cycle with tandem-strength wheels and a fork that took Brown as long to build as the entire rest of the bike. It was, he says, at least five times stronger than it needed to be.

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Cutshall loved it. He fantasized about it. He gazed at it. He did everything except ride it, because he was sure he'd break it. After he'd let it sit in the hallway for nearly two months, Amy called Brown and reported that the bike was sitting idle, gathering dust.

Bob called me, Cutshall says, and he just dressed my ass down. He said, 'There's not one thing on that bike you can break that I can't fix, so get out there and ride.'

Even then, Cutshall wasn't ready. This still seems like a dead end, he told Amy. If we keep eating the way we're eating, no amount of riding is going to make any difference.

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So his new bike waited for months while he read books, while he tried different diets,