Zac Smith with Dr Shashank Shah before the surgery

Mumbai, Nov. 13: Britain quailed, but India cut him down to size.

Not that Zac Smith is complaining; in fact, he can’t stop smiling.

The wheelchair-bound 35-year-old, Britain’s fattest man who weighed nearly 300kg, walked out of a Pune operation theatre last week after a successful weight-reduction surgery.

“I have heard sniggers and nasty things. Now I hope it will be a thing of the past,” Smith told a media conference on November 9, five days after the surgery at Ruby Hall Clinic where doctors removed three-quarters of his stomach with special instruments to get round his 94-inch waist.

If the young man is smiling now, you can’t blame him, especially after doctors back home had told him he had a fat chance of going under the scalpel unless he lost some weight.

Dr Shashank Shah, head of the laparoscopic and obesity centre at Pune’s Ruby Hall Clinic, said it was “a great high” when Smith returned to consciousness “about five minutes after the surgery and walked out” of the operation theatre on his own two feet. “(It was) something he had not done in two years,” Shah told The Telegraph today.

“He calls or emails me everyday from the UK telling me how he has started taking walks in the park. He has lost 25kg since the surgery and I expect him to lose another 150-170kg in the next one-and-a-half years.”

Smith, the “heaviest person to be operated on in Asia”, according to Shah, flew down to India on October 28. He went under the knife the day before Diwali.

Smith did not suffer from childhood obesity but started gaining weight after being put on steroids and other medication for a respiratory infection over a decade back. His diet of curry and love for fast food along with metabolic disorders contributed to his morbid obesity.

A builder by profession, the 6-foot-4-inch Smith went into depression as his obesity kept him confined to home. When he approached doctors in Britain, he was told he could undergo gastric sleeve surgery, which involves removal of a large part of the tummy. But he had to lose weight first and the procedure would cost him about £20,000. Out of a job, and supported by his parents, Smith couldn’t afford the surgery.

“Doctors at the government-run NHS hospitals in the UK refused to operate on him till he lost some weight. After much effort he lost about 10kg, but that didn’t help. Some private surgeons, who were willing to do the risky surgery, demanded astronomical sums. So he turned to India,” Shah said.

Smith was put in touch with Shah by a Europe-based medical tourism company. “They got in touch with me after reading my papers on the subject in medical journals. Plus, I was also the first obesity surgeon in India and had trained for this in the UK,” Shah, whose last big patient was a 275kg woman from Mumbai, said.

Smith reached India on October 28. “We offered him a comprehensive package. It cost him Rs 4.5 lakh. He would have paid about Rs 14-15 lakh in the UK,” Shah said.

For the surgery, Shah and his team organised a “mammoth” operation table, “extra-large” instruments and even did a practice drill.

But the first thing they did was find two mammoth beds and weld them together.