Andre Nasr, once called Australia’s heaviest man, loses nearly 200kg: Sunday Night exclusive

HE was once dubbed Australia’s fattest man. Andre Nasr was obese, sick and eating himself to death. Now he has lost nearly half his body weight.

At his heaviest, Nasr topped the scales at 468 kilos and broke his couch because of his weight, saying he felt “ashamed ... that it got to that stage”.

Speaking to Seven’s Sunday Night, Nasr said he couldn’t get out of bed and had to be lifted out of his house when he fell ill and needed to be hospitalised.

Then: Lowest point ... Andre Nasr said he was ‘ashamed’ he had to be hospitalised for his obesity. Picture: Sunday NightSource:Supplied

But the Sydney man admitted he felt relieved “because there was finally hope”.

He revealed to Sunday Night that he has lost 199kg in about a year and now weighs 269kg. He said he did it through “a lot of hard work”, dramatically decreasing his calorie intake which had previously been about 12,000 calories a day, according toSunday Night.

At 35-years-old — and weighing his heaviest — Nasr wrote to obesity specialist Dr Nic Kormas “begging” him for help.

Now: Fighting back ... Andre Nasr, right, wants to slim down to 118kg. Picture: Sunday NightSource:Supplied

Nasr said he had “a love-hate relationship” with food, “an addiction” which started when he was a child. He said food was his “enemy” and his “friend” and he has since had to cut off from his parents because he believed they enabled his obesity.

“Now I want to live, I want to enjoy life,” Nasr told Sunday Night.

At a cost ... Andre Nasr, right, and his wife, Natasha, have had to cut family members out of their lives. Picture: Sunday NightSource:Supplied

At his lowest point, Nasr, who spent 14 months in hospital with a life-threatening infection, said he had been “killing myself” with food.

Now, he is determined to slim down to his goal weight of 118kg.

“I can do anything I want,” he said.

Bear Grylls uses son in dangerous exercise

Edward Michael “Bear” Grylls is a British adventurer known for his television series Man vs. Wild. Source: Supplied

TV ADVENTURER Bear Grylls is copping flak for leaving his 10-year-old son on a rock in the sea as part of a training exercise.

The popular British presenter asked the UK’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) to participate in a training exercise for lifeboat crews near the Welsh town of Abersoch, according to the Mirror.

Grylls tweeted a picture of his son Jesse standing alone on rocks that appear to be far from the coastline.

The caption read: “Jesse and the @rnli on a training exercise to rescue him off the rocks!” The tweet has since been deleted.

MORE: 10 controversial celebrity parenting moments

The since-deleted photo Bear Grylls posted on Twitter. Source: Twitter

MORE: The 10 worst mistakes parents make

The Abersoch RNLI manager, who was on holiday at the time of the exercise, has now hit out at Grylls for putting his son at risk.

“The crew tell me they didn’t know Bear’s son was going to be on the rocks, as there is an element of risk”, manager Gareth Hughes told the Mirror.

“I certainly wouldn’t put my young son on those rocks, and also it could encourage people to do the same which would be unfortunate.

“No one was thankfully hurt, but in his efforts to give the RNLI some publicity this is the wrong kind,” Hughes said.

According to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, last year a third of all those rescued by the Abersoch RNLI team were under 18.

Grylls is one of many celebrity ambassadors for the RNLI, joining James Bond actor Daniel Craig and Harry Potter actor Rupert Grint in raising awareness of the charity’s lifesaving work.

‘She came from Daddy’s tummy’: Melbourne dad postponed his gender transition to have a baby

AJ Kearns and Zu White with Jasper, who came from Mummy’s tummy, and Luca, who came from Daddy’s tummy.Source: NewsComAu

THE “where did I come from” conversation can be complicated for any parent, but AJ Kearns’ children seem to get it.

If you ask four-year-old Luca where she came from, the answer is simple: “Daddy’s tummy”.

Although AJ understands people’s confusion at a man having given birth to his daughter, it’s simple to him as well.

“I think people’s confusion comes with how they understand gender, and I’ve had a lot of difficulty understanding my gender in the past so I get where that comes from,” he says.

“My reality is I could bear a child and when it came to having our second child that was the best option. I’m a father doing what he can for his family, and that’s what I was when I was giving birth.”

AJ was born a woman and struggled with his sexuality from a young age. Initially identifying as gay, it wasn’t until later in life he came to the realisation he was a transgender man and made the decision to transition.

The 41-year-old father-of-two has shared his story with ABC’s Australian Story on how he postponed his transition to first have a baby.

Photographer Alison Bennett documented AJ’s transition in a series of photographs. Source: Supplied

Kearns and his now ex-partner Zu White were married in a commitment ceremony in 2009, the same year Zu gave birth to their son, Jasper.

Zu experienced complications during the pregnancy, so when the time came for the couple to have another child, the best option was for AJ, who was identifying as a man but had not yet completed his physical transition, to carry the child.

“Being pregnant was weird for me,” he tells news.com.au.

“Having the opportunity to provide life is a wonderful thing to be a part of, and I quite enjoyed the feeling of being pregnant, but it became hard towards the end.”

He says participating in “such an exclusively female activity”, and using features of the body he had grown to detest was difficult for a man who had so hated being thought of as a woman.

“I had a fairly large disconnect with my physical form, I sort of looked at it as a third party,” he says.

“I’ve never been a woman but I was raised and socialised as one, and although I found the whole thing fascinating, it was hard too, it was like a constant reminder.

“I felt like I’d become invisible and I couldn’t see me for the man that I was.”

AJ says when he gave birth it was “the most incredible thing” and, after a problem-free pregnancy, meeting healthy baby Luca was an extraordinary moment.

But it wasn’t just the thrill of welcoming a new life into the world that was significant for AJ — it meant he could continue his journey to truly becoming himself.

AJ was dying to get to the end of his pregnancy so he could transition. Photographer: Alison Bennett Source:Supplied

AJ realised he was a man about six years ago. Photographer: Alison Bennett Source: Supplied

AJ had struggled his entire life with who he was and couldn’t wait to complete his transition as a man.

The conservatively raised Christian teenager began to come to grips with his sexuality, realising that he liked girls, but endured years of unsuccessful “conversion therapy” to try and “pray the gay away”.

It didn’t work. AJ moved out of his parents’ home, turned to drug abuse and became suicidal.

Eventually AJ regained his parents acceptance, fell in love with Zu and discovered how to be happy.

AJ completed his two-year transition in 2012, with photographer Alison Bennett documenting the process in a photographic series, shooting AJ every two months from when he fell pregnant.

He says he’s now got to a place where he has accepted himself, and everything he’s been through, and wants to share his story.

‘I’m happy now’ Source: Supplied

“I’m never depressed any more, I’m just me,” he says.

“Growing up I always thought I’m never going to have kids, and that was mainly because I didn’t like the world very much, I didn’t want to bring people into it. Now I’m happy, my family’s happy, and I want to share that with other trans people who feel like they’re in a dark place when you’re fighting just to live. Show them that it can be OK.”

Although he’s no longer in a relationship with Zu, he says he still considers her a life partner. AJ says he’s “really happy” with the decision to postpone his transition to have Luca, completing their family.

“They’re awesome kids and they understand the situation of how they come into the world, it’s just the normalest thing in the world for them, and realistically it kind of is.”

Australian Story screens Monday, August 10, 8pm on ABC1

Ryan Corr leaves controversy behind to focus on career

Ryan Corr: ‘It was nice to feel trust and that people knew it wasn’t the person I was.’ Source: Sunday Style

WHAT A difference a year makes. Rewind to May last year, when actor Ryan Corr was caught by police in a Bondi laneway in Sydney with 0.26 grams of heroin. The star we’d named our next big thing was charged and summoned before a magistrate, his name splashed across the papers for all the wrong reasons.

The bust came at a time when Corr was in a “vulnerable state”, as he told the court — his beloved grandfather had suffered a heart attack days before and had fallen into a coma. Corr had picked up the drugs from a hotel — he says he’d never taken heroin before.

It was a lapse of judgment that could have derailed the career he’d built on TV seriesPacked to the Rafters, not to mention the rest of his life. But it didn’t. Corr withdrew from the spotlight and got to work. Now, with more than a year’s worth of hindsight, he’s happy to be moving on. Lucky, too: after a year of controversy, he has the chance to turn it all around.

Ryan Corr faced court for possession of heroin last year. Source: News Corp Australia

“I made a mistake and I stood up and took responsibility for that,” Corr says now. “There was a period where I was getting slammed and being told I was in situations, or doing things, that I wasn’t. I couldn’t put my hand up and put my two cents in; I had to let it go on around me. People find it hard to forgive if you’ve had a f*ck-up.”

Last September, the 26-year-old appeared in Sydney’s Waverley Court House, faced with a maximum of two years in prison. Instead, no conviction was recorded, and he was given a 12-month good behaviour bond. Going underground until the worst blew over, Corr realised that when he did get back to work, he had the support of his colleagues.

“I was shooting for the BBC at the time,” he says of the series, Banished, a historical drama based on the First Fleet’s landing in 1788. “And those I was working with never second-guessed [me],” he says. “It was nice to feel trust and that people knew it wasn’t the person I was.”

But only a year after his arrest, he was in the papers once more for reportedly causing a scene at Sydney airport when he missed a flight to Melbourne. Whether the story was embellished or not, Corr admits he finds it hard to deal with the villagers’ sharpened pitchforks.

The actor was filing the BBC series ‘Banished’ during his trial. Source: Foxtel

“You take things personally,” he says. “It’s like, ‘You’re saying I did what?’ or, ‘I never said that!’ But it’s out there [in the press]. I haven’t always had a thick skin. It was a process to learn to deal with that.”

His saviour came in the form of the leading role in Holding the Man, a film based on the 1995 book by actor Timothy Conigrave. It charts the against-all-odds love between Conigrave and his partner, John Caleo, who tackled everything from disapproving families and discrimination against gay people in the ’70s to the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s — an illness that took both their lives in the early ’90s.

Corr is impressive as Conigrave, and makes you realise how great an actor he is. I mention he’s been described as “mesmerising” and he laughs before humbly asking me to triple-check my sources.

Since 2007, Corr has known Holding the Man was a meaty script he wanted to get his hands on. “I’d just got to Sydney [to study at] NIDA when I saw [the play] at Belvoir St Theatre,” he says. “I was introduced to how important this piece is to Sydney culture and gay culture. I was too young to play [Tim], but I saw its effect. When they said it was turning into a film, it was a no-brainer to try to be a part of it.”

The film is directed by Neil Armfield — the man responsible for making us weep over the tortured love story of two drug addicts, played by Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, in 2006’s Candy.

Corr, left, and Craig Stott in Neil Armfield’s film adaptation of ‘Holding the Man’. Source: Supplied

Corr says he’s “never auditioned so much for a role”. Producer Kylie du Fresne said they auditioned hundreds of actors, but knew as soon as they saw Corr that he was their Tim. “We didn’t know if we could find an actor who could convincingly [play] a 16-year-old until a man in his early thirties with life experiences,” she says. “We saw Ryan very early on and, when he auditioned with Craig Stott [who plays Caleo], we knew it was a done deal.”

The film came not long after Corr’s drug charge. But du Fresne says she and Armfield were behind him.

“It didn’t move our thoughts and commitment to him,” she says. “We’d got to know him and we understood it was a silly mistake. By the time we got to the process of shooting, we knew it was history.”

They couldn’t have picked a better time to tell this beautiful story: the US Supreme Court legalised gay marriage across the country in June and, this week, a same-sex marriage bill is being introduced for debate in our own government.

#lovewins, indeed.

“The book helped a lot of young men come out and have something to turn to, understand and relate to; the film is an extension of that,” Corr says. “The script had been around for ages and I remember having a meeting with Kylie where she said the story had to tell them when it wanted to be made. We often felt the boys’ presence on set; it felt good knowing they were looking down on us.”

At the world premiere of ‘Holding The Man’. Source: News Corp Australia

The film also stars Guy Pearce. Fitting, as he got us talking about gay culture and equality in 1994 with The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Corr baulks when I mention his film could be the Priscilla of this decade, but he does hope it elicits the same reaction in audiences.

“This focuses more on love and equality as opposed to drag queens,” he says. “I’d like to think it has a similar reach. The gay community has a huge ownership over this story, but I’d like to hope that [the film] spreads its wings and gets into a much wider audience. That’s when changes in understanding happen.”

Priscilla launched Pearce’s career internationally and Holding the Man could do the same for Corr. But a career in LA isn’t a top priority for Corr right now.

“Some wonderful projects are becoming available here — I’m so busy, I don’t know which way is up,” he says, only giving away that he’s exploring a few “local and international” film options. “Going to the States and leaving work that’s available here is a big thing.”

Corr is doing well in all areas, it seems, including love: he’s dating dancer Kyla Bartholomeusz. A huge grin spreads across his face at the mention of her.

Ryan is dating dancer Kyla Bartholomeusz. Source: Supplied

“She’s a goddess,” he says. “I’m lucky that Kyla is in the Entertainment industry — we have an understanding. [Dating] someone who’s not in the industry can be hard. [They say], ‘What do you mean you’re going away to Japan for six months to pretend to be in love with someone else?’ That doesn’t work.”

Bartholomeusz is currently in the stage show of Dirty Dancing so, with both of their packed schedules, love has got to be hard work, right? Not quite.

“I’m so smitten, I’ll run to wherever she is,” Corr says. “We try to make it a one-

week rule to see each other. I like being around her and trying to make her laugh. I think we make each other’s lives better.”

So, if 2014 is a year to put behind him, 2015 is a year to charge forward in career, life and love?

“I’ve never been busier or happier — it’s all looking up,” he says. “[I’ll] follow the yellow brick road, one brick at a time.”

Holding the Man is in cinemas on August 27.

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Inside one of Germany’s ‘flat rate’ brothels: What it’s like working at the King George Club

Professional sex worker Undine de Riviere says there are advantages to working in flat rate brothels. Source: Supplied

WANDERING past the sushi bars, shops and churches that line the well-heeled Schöneberg district of Berlin, it’d be easy to walk straight past the King George Club without giving a thought to what’s happening inside.

Only a sticker plastered underneath a string of red light bulbs on the venue’s drab grey walls gives the game away, spruiking the club’s offer: 99€ ($145) for all-you-can-drink at the bar and as much sex as you can manage, every day between 4pm and 3am.

In a country where sex laws are among the most liberal in the world, ‘flat-rate’ or ‘all inclusive’ brothels like this are a familiar sight, there are at least six in Berlin alone. Some in the capital city charge as little as 60€ ($90).

The King George Brothel in Berlin. Picture: Conor Creighton/Vice.com Source: Supplied

Stepping in to the King George, the first thing you see is the bar, staffed by a woman wearing a top that leaves literally nothing to the imagination. She’s joined by a few of her colleagues, who smoke and chat on the bar stools in their underwear.

On an average day, six or seven girls will be working, with the numbers rising to nine or ten at weekends. Some of them may have sex up to 20 times per shift.

On the surface they appear happy and engaged. Vanessa*, originally from the Dominican Republic, said she largely enjoys her work, which is why she’s been here for 13 years.

Many of the women, mostly from Eastern European countries like Romania and Bulgaria, consider the job to be transient and short-term — a quick way to save money to send back to their families. However, most have been working in the brothel for at least a year or two.

As time passes and tinny chart music blares from the speakers, men emerge after sitting alone at a table or sharing free beers with a friend in the booths and begin to approach the women, with little need for subtlety.

Alina, of the sex workers at The King George brothel, as photographed by Vice. Picture: Conor Creighton/Vice.comSource: Supplied

Once the formalities are over, the pair will enter one of five bedrooms that line a narrow corridor located just past the pole dancing stage. The women are able to refuse a customer if he is particularly unpleasant or aggressive but it’s rare.

Once in the bedroom, ‘extras’ are negotiated by the women, who keep 100% of any further money that changes hands. Not much is off limits, with the exception of unprotected sex. The city police and ‘red light police’ check on the women’s wellbeing once every few months, although some doubt the efficacy of this system.

Most of the men are reluctant to say too much about why they pick this particular place but admit the price point and “unrushed service” are the major selling points.

Sascha Erben’s office lies at the end of the bedroom corridor. Mr Erben bought the club six years ago at the height of the recession in the eurozone, with the intention of opening the city’s first all inclusive brothel. He says that, in a country where there are approximately 400,000 prostitutes and in a city where there are about 500 brothels, he needed a new approach to stand out.

Sascha Erben, who owns The King George says he needed something to stand out in a city with 500 brothels. Picture: Conor Creighton/Vice.com Source: Supplied

The native Berliner says he needs at least 15 clients a day to turn a profit. While he points out that “a woman is not like a casino (pokie) machine”, it’s clear the business model is driven purely by the numbers.

“I don’t employ top models like Naomi Campbell,” he said. “But I try to keep a balance (in how attractive the women are). I don’t want everyone running to one girl and I don’t want women who (would) turn their nose up at the job. It’s a difficult business.”

Mr Erben says the flat-rate model works from a financial perspective because men over-estimate how many times they can have sex (two or three at most, he said) and want value for money. From the women’s perspective, he says the guaranteed daily pay is the main lure. Of the entrance fee, 49 euros goes to the club and 50 euros to the women.

Even so, there’s little denying the potential physical and mental impacts such a volume of sexual encounters present. Mr Erben defends it as a personal choice — and recruitment doesn’t seem to be a problem.

“The women bring the women,” he says. “There’s a lot of publicity and they all talk to their friends about it.

“This week already I’ve had five girls come to the door — that’s normal because we have a good and clean reputation and they leave every day with money.”

The King George has a ‘good and clean’ reputation. Picture: Conor Creighton/Vice.com Source: Supplied

Under German law, workers like those at King George pay taxes and receive social security and health benefits. However, Undine de Rivière from Germany’s Professional Association of Erotic and Sexual Services Union says the “internalised stigma” of the job is still a huge issue for prostitutes.

Ms de Rivière has been a sex worker for about 20 years. She now mainly works independently, offering BDSM services for between €250 ($371) and €500 ($742) an hour or up to €1200 ($1782) for an evening. She also works in commercial brothels and at sex parties and has “experienced” flat-rate brothels.

Undine de Riviere, who has been a sex worker for 20 years. Source: Supplied

She says that despite the public perception of prostitutes as ‘victims’, for many women prostitution is a legitimate career choice and, for some, flat-rate brothels are the best environment to work in.

“I do talk to a lot of colleagues that tell me about wanting to have another job but they don’t see alternatives and they don’t think they can get a different job,” she said. “But I also know a lot of colleagues who say that the job is totally OK for them or they really like their job.”

She added that for some women the lack of competition in flat-rate brothels builds a better ‘team’ environment, reduces the need for self-promotion, makes the language barrier less problematic and makes for a more reliable job.

“If you are young, attractive and good at negotiating you’d probably be better off in a sauna club or in some other kind of brothel. But if you’re a bit shy — or even if you like that orgy atmosphere that a few of us really do — you can also help each other out in those type of places,” she said.

Ms de Rivière represents the German union for sex workers. Source: Supplied

Not everyone agrees though. Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) have drafted legislation that seeks to ban flat-rate brothels, among other things.

For now though, King George remains on the throne.

*Not her real name