(Source) “At the age of 15, Juan Luis Vanegas Bravo  weighed 320 pounds.

His brother, Pedro, weighed over 300 pounds  at 14.

Obese from childhood, the pair came to be  known as Mexico’s fattest brothers.

But following the 2005 death of their father  Juan Manuel – who died from complications of his own condition after having  eight surgeries – the siblings knew they had to make a change.

Becoming the first minors in the country to  receive gastric bypass surgery, they are now shadows of their former  selves.

‘I realized that if I didn’t lose weight, I  was going to end up like my dad,’ Juan Luis told Vice.

‘We had to try hard to get the surgery,  though – I was underage at the time, so government-run hospitals wouldn’t admit  me.’

The pair first started getting fat when they  were three because ‘there was a lot of eating.’

‘I started getting worried, so I took them  swimming, to soccer practice, Taekwondo, anything,’ said their mother, Juana, 51,  said.

‘My mistake was having a duplex refrigerator  and filling it with cold cuts every 15 days. Anything you craved, you could find  it in our fridge.’

The mom said she didn’t realize the condition  her sons were in.

‘You don’t realize how fat your children  are,’ she said.

‘Every year they went to school, I had their  trousers custom-made.

‘I didn’t realize they were a size 38 when  they were six, or 40 when they were ten. And I didn’t know how to reverse it  when I did realize.’

In 2009, Juan Luis had a gastric sleeve  applied in the Rubén Leñero General Hospital in Mexico City, reducing the size  of his stomach between 60 and 85 percent.

Following the surgery he lost an astonishing  230 pounds.”

I’ve heard of some unflattering nicknames, but this one might take the cake. Not only are you morbidly obese, but you have the distinction of being the fattest brothers in an entire country. Millions of people in Mexico and these two get singled out as the fattest ones. That’s got to be tough to swallow. Which is ironic because these two don’t look like they’ve had trouble swallowing anything in their entire life. I guess when your pants are a size 40 at the age of 10 people start taking notice. Before you know it, you’re the fattest people in Mexico. Somehow the mother didn’t realize how fat her sons were getting. So the fact that you had to custom make their pants every year didn’t trigger an alarm? Thought it was just a fun arts and crafts project? At least they got some help; being that young and that enormous isn’t good for anybody. With that said, if these two ever make it to the states, it’s all you can eat taco bell on me.

– Ryan