Food was my addiction: How Cosi dropped a massive 35kg
His media career is going gangbusters, but you’ll be seeing a lot less of Andrew “Cosi” Costello in 2023. Here’s how he lost a lot of kilos.
Lifestyle
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Andrew “Cosi” Costello is half the man he used to be and making no apologies.
After a lifetime at war with himself, battling his weight, he is winning.
Tipping the scales at almost 143kg in mid November, the host of South Aussie with Cosi, which airs on Channel 7, has dropped 35kg in less than four months and is confident of shedding a further 5kg.
Talking exclusively to the Sunday Mail, Cosi wants to share the secret to his weight loss to help others.
After thinking about it for five years, he had gastric sleeve surgery. And Cosi wishes he had done it sooner.
“They cut out 80 per cent of your stomach,” Cosi says. “It’s in the dump at Wingfield somewhere. There’s no coming back. Some seagull’s got that, I’ll never get it back.”
Recognising his critics may argue he took the easy way out, Cosi says he was not a “fat slob on the couch”.
“I have always been flat out, but food consumption wrote off any exercise I did,” he says.
Married to Sam, with whom he shares three children Harry, Matilda and Charli-Rose, Cosi had also been warned – and knew – he was on a path to an “endless list” of serious health issues. They included diabetes, heart disease, stroke.
“I really felt, every day, that I could die,” Cosi says. “I would carry my tripod and I would walk 50m and I would be f---ed. I’d hear pieces to camera (I’d recorded) and I would hear myself panting. Up at the farm, I’d climb a silo and I would feel bloody rooted, like I could die.”
At 44, Cosi now recognises his childhood love of junk food – which his family treated themselves to every Friday night – became an addiction.
“I’ve always been overweight since was a little kid” he says. “I was always teased at school for being fat and I always ate a lot of food … that’s what it boils down to.
“Food to me is like a an addiction, the same way a heroin addict might want a hit of heroin, or an alcoholic wants a beer, or a gambler has to have a punt – it’s kind of like that to me. Food was an addiction and something I battled my whole life. I could just never, ever win. It was incredibly hard.”
As to why food was his vice, Cosi says it could be as simple as “bad food equals great times”.
“When it’s your birthday you have cake … Christmas revolves around food and booze,” Cosi says.
“A psychologist told me your brain is wired to associate shitty, unhealthy food with those good moments of your life. If you have a good day at work you want to celebrate it by eating junk food but, if you have a bad day at work, you want to feel good so you eat junk food.”
In his late teens and early 20s, Cosi was “pretty lean”, thanks to footy and farm work, before he moved to the city and began working in radio and “it just blew out again”.
There was also his famous transformation on national television in 2008, when Cosi took time out from his media career in Adelaide to appear on The Biggest Loser.
With no distractions from the outside world, losing weight became a full-time job and Cosi shed an incredible 52kg in just four-and-a-half months.
“When you have all other things taken away from you – except food, exercise and the show – it’s quite easy because there is nothing else to do,” he says.
“By the end of it I was running 24km on the treadmill. I was fit as a fiddle, my heart rate was so low, my stats were incredible … I could have run a marathon. I felt a million bucks.”
But Cosi says his bad habits won out.
“I swore I would never put the weight back on and then slowly over time the eating creeps in,” he says. “I still came out and failed. Of the 20 people in my series, three have kept the weight off. There were no answers there.”
By mid November last year, Cosi was at his heaviest; at 142.9kg, he was 2kg more than when he signed up for The Biggest Loser.
On Monday, November 14, he took what he calls a “walk of shame” into Ashford Hospital’s operating theatre, after having a “buck’s show for my stomach”.
“We got hot dogs, Hungry Jack’s and junk food. It was like a farewell tour,” he says, before becoming serious: “You think of your kids and ask yourself ‘am I at that point in my life where I have to have my guts cut out to actually control my weight?’.
“It’s a pretty low point … but, in hindsight, it’s the best thing I ever did.
“It was an investment in myself. I’ve cut out carbs, cut out sugar and cut out my stomach.”
Cosi says he became healthier almost overnight; 10 days after his operation he forgot to wear his sleep apnoea machine, but did not snore and hasn’t since.
“I can’t stop touching myself, which sounds bad, but I can’t stop touching where bones are now, that I haven’t felt for years. I will play with my collar bone,” Cosi says, adding he hasn’t suffered from loose skin: “I’m very lucky – everything has just retracted back in and the four-key hole scars are almost gone.”
So too is the self-deprecating humour Cosi used to hide behind: “I would make lots of fat jokes about myself and I don’t do that anymore. I’m 100 per cent, no, 1000 per cent happier.”
He adds: “There’s this whole movement of ‘hey, you’re fat, but you’re happy and it’s all cool’, but I don’t know whether we should fully celebrate being obese like I was. I don’t know that if you are very overweight, like I was, that you can be truly happy – you certainly can’t be healthy.”
While there is still a lock – for which he does not know the combination – on the pantry door at home, Cosi no longer obsesses about food.
“The part of the stomach they cut out produces hormones that make you hungry,” he says, adding: “My cravings are completely gone, the desire to eat copious amounts of food is completely gone and even if you do want to gorge, physically you cant.”
Where once he would eat 10 pieces of toast as a late-night snack after an evening out, he now stops at two.
“People will be super shocked. There will be a (South Aussie with Cosi) segment I filmed in November that’s being aired after something I filmed in February … so, over an ad break. I put on 35kg!,” Cosi says, joking he should have a disclaimer saying “this was filmed pre stomach chop”.
Cosi adds: “I don’t want to lie to anyone. It was an extreme decision that has had an extreme outcome. If that means I live 10 years longer, it can’t be anything but a great decision. I want to say to anyone who is thinking about having it done, ‘this is what I did and come on in the water’s fine’.”
Originally published as Food was my addiction: How Cosi dropped a massive 35kg
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