The morbidly obese ex-NYPD cop who’s suing the city for a tax-free, job-related disability pension was notorious for stuffing his face before health problems cut short his career, former colleagues said Wednesday.

Jose Vega, whose weight more than doubled from 180 to 395 pounds during his 17 years on the force, was known to routinely scarf down entire roast chickens or multiple slices of pizza during meal breaks, cops said.

Vega also helped himself to double servings of yellow rice and beans, washed down with lots of soda, especially Pepsi, sources said.

“That cop, all he did was f–king eat,” said a source who worked with Vega in The Bronx’s 42nd Precinct.

Another cop recalled once seeing Vega walk into the stationhouse carrying a pound cake.

“We said, ‘Why did you bring this in? What’s the occasion?’” the source said.

“He said, ‘There is no occasion, I brought it for myself.’”

A source also said Vega especially enjoyed gorging on a starchy Caribbean-style dish of twice-fried plantains called “tostones.”

“He would eat like a plate of those. That was one of his favorite things,” the cop said.

“He’d eat them like they were Skittles.”

One cop accused Vega, a former Marine, of unfairly “blaming the job for not taking care of himself.”

“He was a really active cop, a hands-on cop, one of the best — as long as he didn’t have to run,” the source said.

Vega, 46, retired in 2014, and with credit for his time in the military is collecting a taxable, $4,000-a-month “service” pension.

But his Manhattan Supreme Court suit says he’s entitled to a tax-free, $6,200-a-month disability pension because his staggering weight gain is the result of a heart disease — ventricular hypertrophy — caused by on-the-job stress.

Vega, who’s 5-foot-10 and now tips the scales at 360 pounds, on Wednesday vehemently denied the eating habits described by his former co-workers.

“That’s furthest from the truth because I don’t drink soda. And I’m not a sweet guy, I don’t eat sweets,” he said.

“For a man my size I’m not a diabetic, my cholesterol is normal. As my cardiologist explained I’m one of those rare cases of a person who suffers from extreme hypertension.”

Vega claims his daily diet consists of green tea with honey at 7 a.m., followed by some fruit two hours later.

At noon, he said, he eats “four ounces of lean meat with carrots or broccoli or cauliflower,” then has the same meal at 4 p.m., and finishes his day with “an apple or a banana,” while only snacking on peanuts.

His bulk, he said, comes from “a combination of the hypertension, the stress and the inability to sleep that came from the stress and a side effect from one of the medications I’m on.”

He also insisted he wasn’t “chasing money.”

“You can give me $2,000 more — you can give me $2 million more — it’s not going to replace my heart,” he lamented.