Did John Keitz really gain that much weight from eating large McDonalds fries?”
John Keitz, 39, the vastly overweight Dundalk, Md., man who last spring began a physical therapy program, vowing to walk again after his extreme bulk had made him a prisoner of his bed for seven years, died yesterday of complications from an infection in a hospital in Youngstown, Ohio, his wife said. Charismatic, funny, pugnacious, at times irascible, Keitz used his outsize personality to make friends and partially compensate for his otherwise restricted existence. He cooked and served chicken meals from his bed, played chess with neighborhood kids, ‘danced’ to rock music by heaving from side to side and used the telephone to stay connected with the outside world. Life got away from John and Gina Keitz, one day at a time, one calorie at a time. His wife, Gina, was at his bedside, as she had been steadfastly since he first ‘went down’ while making the couple a dinner of macaroni and cheese in the summer of 1998, when he weighed about 500 pounds. Keitz’s struggle, profiled in The Washing
