Peter Cosentino used to buy 120-count bags of Totino’s Pizza Rolls, bake them with butter and wash them down with a 2-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi — one of three bottles he’d drink in a day.

Cosentino, 38, of North St. Paul, started gaining weight as a child. At 16, he weighed 400 pounds.

By the time he reached 555 pounds, he couldn’t walk down the block. He was 6 feet tall and wore size 9X clothes.

“If I ate cake, it was a lot of cake, and then half a thing of ice cream,” he said. “I’d buy frozen pizzas when they were on sale, and I’d eat a couple of those a day. I really liked those Tyson’s chicken strips, so I’d eat a ton of those. If I had a large pizza delivered to the house, I’d eat the entire thing.”

He ate so much at all-you-can-eat buffets that restaurant owners would kick him out, he said.

“I kept eating, and I kept eating the expensive stuff like the sesame chicken and the shrimp,” he said. “I was feeding an addiction. I was dealing with pain. I know that sounds weird, but how I dealt with that pain was food. Food was always my go-to. Nothing ever gave me that feeling quite like food.”

On three different occasions, he attempted suicide.

While cleaning out his garage on March 12, 2015, Cosentino stumbled upon a photo of him and his chocolate Lab, Shelby, on the front step of his parents’ house when he was at his heaviest.

“I saw something in my eyes,” he said. “Something changed. I went inside, and I looked in the mirror. I mean, I really looked in the mirror — in a way I’ve never looked in the mirror before — and I accepted personal responsibility, and I cried. I cried for hours. I wept and wept and wept. That’s when my journey really began.”

The journey has included starting a fitness routine, overhauling his diet and losing 300 pounds and 50 inches off his waist. He’s lost so much weight that extra folds of skin — more than 50 pounds — now envelop his middle.

His surgery to cut off the excess skin, called a panniculectomy, isn’t covered by insurance. Friends at his gym, LA Fitness in Oakdale, and at his church, Rockpoint in Lake Elmo, have launched a fundraising campaign to help. The operation is scheduled for April 5.

During a recent workout at LA Fitness, Cosentino lifted his sweaty T-shirt and showed off his extra skin.

“They’re going to take it, and they’re going to cut there and there, and pull it tight,” he said. “I’ll have a completely flat stomach when they are done. I don’t feel shame. It’s part of accepting responsibility, but also, it’s also showing people what it looks like and why I need it done. I’ve been given a chance at new life and the courage to share it.”

‘I KNEW SOMETHING BAD HAD HAPPENED’

Peter was 5 or 6 years old and playing at a playground near his house when a friend of his father approached him. The man was carrying a shopping bag full of wrestling action figures, including Hulk Hogan, who was Peter’s favorite. “He said, ‘Your dad wants you to come to my house.’ We went to his house, which was nearby. He gave me a toy, and then he had me take off some clothes. That’s kind of how it went from there.”

The man, who was never charged or convicted, touched Peter and took photos of him. He then took Peter back to the playground.

“I never told anyone,” Cosentino said. “I knew something bad had happened, but I didn’t understand what. Then I remember feeling ashamed.”

Cosentino started eating — a lot. When he got to junior high, the teasing was merciless, he said.

“I wasn’t just a heavy kid; I was the heaviest kid in school,” he said. “School was torture. It was a nightmare. I didn’t have a way to handle it, so I kept eating. I just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

When he was 13, he came home from school, got one of his father’s hunting rifles and “stuck it in my mouth,” he said. “Our dog, Rock, came and put his head on my lap. I just couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

Parents Joan and Peter tried to help, taking him to doctors and nutritionists, he said.

“But they didn’t have the facts. They didn’t know what had happened to me. … My mom cooked meals. It wasn’t that I got really big off fast food and stuff. I just ate a ton of food. That’s how I got big.”

He was placed in special-education classes at North St. Paul High School, even though he says he was capable of being mainstreamed.

“I used my obesity to hide from the world,” he said. “Going out in the community just caused anxiety so severe that I would black out. I was completely out of my mind. I created that world. I used to seek anything I could do to stay safe in that world. North St. Paul High School was hard. In special-ed, I was babied and coddled.

“I built this pattern of hiding behind this wall of obesity, and it cost me an education and it cost me having real friends,” he said. “But I had food, and that was always there for me. It was a comforting tool. Nobody starts out that way. It builds and builds and builds and builds and builds, and next thing you know, it’s completely destroying and running your life.”

‘I COULDN’T DO A LOT, BUT I DID WHAT I COULD’

Consentino’s recovery began with his dogs, Shelby and Rooster. He would take them out on separate 10-minute walks. He would get so exhausted at first, he said, that he had to take an hourlong break between outings. They walked all summer. The night before Shelby had to be put down, Cosentino checked his email and found a special offer from LA Fitness in Oakdale — the first email he had ever received from them.

“It was a really good deal, and I was like, ‘OK, you’re about to lose your dog, and you’ve done all this work, you’d better sign up,’ ” he said.

He walked in the door three days later. He weighed 500 pounds.

“The gym is a scary place to anybody, but when you’re really, really obese and nobody else looks like you, it’s terrifying.”

He started out swimming, then worked himself up to attending an aqua-aerobics class. “I came every day,” he said. “I couldn’t do a lot, but I did what I could.”

After about three months, he said, he ventured out into the gym area. “People really went out of their way to start encouraging me, and that kept pulling me back,” he said.

One of the first to encourage him was Greg Lohmer, an investment advisory representative for Dougherty & Associates Financial Advisors.

The two started chatting regularly, and Lohmer invited Cosentino to join him at Rockpoint Church in Lake Elmo one Sunday.

Now, Cosentino is an usher at the church, and he and Lohmer regularly volunteer together at church events. This month, they flew to Texas to rehabilitate homes damaged by Hurricane Harvey.

When Cosentino suffered a relapse a few months ago, it was Lohmer who came knocking at his front door to check on him.

“People have really gone out of their way to show me that love that I badly needed, and it’s healed stuff inside of me that died when I was young,” Cosentino said.

‘I’M UNDOING A LOT OF DAMAGE’

On a recent weekday morning, Cosentino did 500 crunches at home, drank a protein shake and then headed to LA Fitness near Interstate 694 and Stillwater Boulevard. He started his workout by doing 45 minutes of yoga and abdominal work.

Then Antwan Pearson, a friend and bodybuilder, came to find him. The two made their way over to an assisted pull-up machine. Cosentino strapped on wrist guards, climbed on the machine and started lifting himself.

“The first time I used it, I freaked out,” he said. “I got up here, and I could barely do one.”

Now, he does 100 of them — four sets of 25.

“He’s gotten a lot better,” Pearson said. “Pretty soon, he won’t need the machine at all.”

Pearson said Cosentino has been an inspiration.

“He just put in the work and, before you know it, he’s more toned,” he said. “Once he has the surgery, I’m going to have to start him over, but he’s going to be a lot stronger.”

Cosentino follows a strict diet that is high in protein and fats but low in carbohydrates.

After his workout, he comes home and eats five scrambled eggs — “four whole eggs and an egg white” — with onions and peppers. About three hours later, he fixes himself a meal of broiled wild-caught salmon and four stalks of celery. He has another protein shake in the evening.

He drinks one cup of coffee and a gallon and a half of water a day.

“I’m undoing a lot of damage, so the more discipline I have with what I put into my mouth, the better my results are,” he said. “I don’t eat that much food, really. I eat nutrient-dense food and high-end vitamins. We don’t need as much food as we think.”

He weighs 257 pounds and wears size 1X clothes. He can do the splits, does 1,500 crunches a day and walks 15 miles a week.

“My goals aren’t weight loss,” he said. “They’re more toning. I’ve actually weighed less than I do now, but I’ve put on a lot of muscle. I’m going to be a bigger guy. I’m going to be a 230-, 250-pound guy.”

‘IF I CAN LOSE THIS WEIGHT, ANYBODY CAN’

Cosentino, who receives disability benefits for obesity and mental illness, said he hopes one day to be a motivational speaker and weight-loss coach. He has started sharing his story with young people.

In January, he spoke to a group of Christian home-schooled students at Hope Church in Oakdale.

“I remember the first time I was able to buy clothes that were not in a big-and-tall section,” he told the students. “I was able to buy them off the rack. I remember looking at these clothes and feeling free for the very first time. I felt like a human being and not a freak. It’s things like being able to fit in chairs, kids. To be able to sit in a chair with arms is amazing. It’s the littlest things that make me feel the most alive.”

He shared a reading from Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old is gone, the new is come.”

“That’s one Scripture that I can really relate to,” he told the students. “I know that as long as I serve the Father, I’m going to be OK, and that’s given me a sense of peace.”

At Johnson High School in St. Paul, Cosentino recently shared his story with a small group of students who have weight issues.

“I wish I had been able to talk to someone who understood what it was like to be in those shoes, to be that obese,” he said. “I understand their pain. When you’re that big, the pain is so intense. I think a lot of kids get bullied, and that’s how the process starts. When you’re a kid, food is everywhere, and it becomes a habit, and the problem grows and grows and grows.”

Cosentino said he told the Johnson students that if he could transform his life, they could, too.

“I said, ‘I know how scared you are, and I know how hopeless you feel right now, but you can change,’ ” he said. “ ‘If I can lose this weight, anybody can.’ ”

A WAY TO HELP

A gofundme.com fundraising campaign has been created to help pay for Peter Cosentino’s excess-skin removal surgery. Go to the website and search for his name.