One Man’s ‘Beer Belly’ Turned out to Be a 30-Pound Tumor

Sometimes beer bellies are caused by a lack of exercise, poor diet, or in rare cases, because you have a 30-pound tumor on your stomach.

New Jersey native, Kevin Daly, who had always been tall and slender thanks to living an active lifestyle in his younger years was the center of a medical mystery when doctors discovered a 30-pound tumor in place of a beer gut.

According to PEOPLE, the 63-year-old first noticed his belly was growing after undergoing heart surgery in 2015.

“I came home a week after the surgery, and I looked in the mirror for the first time and I was all upset,” Daly said. “This thing was growing, but my shoulders and chest had atrophied from the surgery, so it made my stomach protrude more. I brought it to the attention of my doctor, but [any] doctor would say the same thing — you’re in your 60’s, low testosterone, visceral fat. You’re fine; it’s just how it is.”

Daly was encouraged by his doctor to lose weight. Over the next two years he dropped 34 pounds, but his belly always remained the same.

He went back to his doctor in October 2017, asking why he hadn’t lost a single ounce around his stomach despite everything else looking healthy. The doctor agreed to do a cat scan of his stomach, where they found a massive growth.

“For a second I was vindicated, and then I was completely panicked, because when a doctor says that you have an extremely large mass, you assume that you have a cancerous tumor growing in your stomach,” Daly said. “Am I going to live, am I going to die, am I going to suffer?”

Dr. Julio Teixeira at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City agreed to operate to remove the tumor, which turned out to be a low-grade liposarcoma, on Dec. 28.

“I took a look at the images and immediately got very concerned, given the size of this mass,” Dr. Teixeira told PEOPLE. “I’ve seen tumors that are large, but not of this size. Just the mere fact that something was able to grow this big shows that it has a malignant behavior, so I was concerned.”

The surgeons thought the tumor would only be about 12 pounds, but it wound up being a whopping 30. Daly made a full recovery, and told the magazine he feels great now that the weight has been lifted from his belly.

“I feel tremendous,” he says. “I had lost a tremendous amount of weight already and then I came out of the hospital weighing 172, and that was my high school weight. I’m now up to 187, which is my college weight. It feels really, really good. It’s made me feel 35 again.”

You can check out the photo of that massive tumor here.