For years, Jacqui McCoy hated to leave her Wellington house. At 355 pounds, she was afraid people who saw her with her firefighter-paramedic husband would say, “What is he doing with her?”

She felt she was an embarrassment to her family. She knew she was a disappointment to herself.

Worse, her desire to have a baby was compromised by her weight. Doctors said the fertility treatments she needs are too dangerous for someone in the category known as “super obese.”

How McCoy lost more than half her body weight in a year is the subject of tonight’s Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition at 9 p.m. on ABC.

According to McCoy, 31, she is a bigger loser than any of the Biggest Losers, TV’s other weight loss franchise. “I had the largest weight loss by percent of body weight of anyone on weight loss TV,” she said on the phone, barely breathing hard even though she was leading - leading- a hike through the Arizona mountains on a day forecast to be 100 degrees.

Her transformation was so dramatic the show hired her as a coach at its Mesa, Arizona training facility, to inspire the next season’s participants. McCoy returns to Wellington in October.

The program’s producers don’t want McCoy to say exactly how much weight she lost until after the show airs tonight, but she said her dress size went from a 4XL to between a 6 and 10.

For McCoy, losing the weight that had imprisoned her since she was 14 was far easier than losing the voice in her head that said she deserved to be fat. She was in 9th grade when she was raped at a party she wasn’t supposed to attend. Her girlfriends persuaded her that telling police or her parents would only get her in more trouble, so for years she kept quiet.

“I didn’t know how to cope with the stress and shame and guilt. Instead, I learned that any time something was stressful, I could turn to sugar,” she said.

She’d never made the connection between the attack and her escalating size until the show’s producers asked to see old photos. There was the evidence, she realized. Her photos before the rape show McCoy at a normal weight. The pounds started accumulating soon after. The program provided for McCoy’s visits to a local therapist during her transformational year, which began in September 2010.

Now she helps new participants understand that the mental and emotional components of weight loss are more important than the sweatiest workout.

“We’re battling our brains, not our bodies,” is her mantra.

While she made several trips to Los Angeles and Arizona, most of her weight loss year was spent living at home with her husband, Shawn, who works for Palm Beach County Fire-Rescue. McCoy said her Shawn dropped about 20 pounds during the same time, eating the same foods as his wife and sometimes working out with her.

“He never brought junk food into the house or made me feel guilty,” she said.

For her daily workouts, she joined LA Fitness in Wellington and Cast Iron Crossfit in suburban West Palm Beach. Near the end, the show arranged for McCoy to have surgery to remove the loose skin on her arms and stomach before her “big reveal” in Wellington High School’s theater eight months ago.

With her weight mastered, McCoy has one more challenge ahead of her.

She expects to begin fertility treatments when she returns home this fall.