Recently in the news there was an account of a woman who died of complications resulting from obesity. Apparently she never left her bed/couch after she got too heavy, and she lived with her family. I hear a lot of these tales, so my question is: who feeds these people? How does someone get so large without help from others - any insights?
Their family, spouse, and friends. Their enablers true and true. Some are in denial that their loved one is as big as people say, others know but they want them to be happy, and others know but just don’t care at all.
Oh, and some know and continue to feed them because they like them as big as possible. It’s a phenomenon known as “feeders,” and it’s usually men feeding their large (and getting larger) wives/girlfriends, and often they post pictures online and brag about how big they’ve gotten their SO.
Sorry but I cant help but laugh at the idea of a bunch of guys bragging about who has the fattest missus. It just seems a lot different than most males who wouldn’t be caught dead tagging a fatty.
Anyone got any links to these sites?
People with such severe food addictions, like drug addicts, can also be extremely manipulative. I vaguely recall seeing one of these specials on severely obese people on TV. One of the subjects, after a couple days of shooting, had two of the camera crew sneaking in food for her from the outside. These were experienced documentary-makers who know not to get involved with their subjects, but they did anyway.
I can see someone feeding them at home, but why do the obesity clinics allow people to “sneak” them in food? Can’t they have a guard up front checking for that?
:rolleyes:
VCNJ~
Well, that took three posts, and two and a half hours, longer than I expected.
–Mal, a fatty.
I’m not sure there’s one factual answer to the OP that would make the question fit in GQ. Sure, some of it (maybe a majority of it) involves family members/friends enabling the super morbidly obese person to eat. Some of it, as someone else pointed out, is extreme manipulation on the part of the obese person. One TV documentary I saw on subject, the obese man had a whole “system” in place for ordering home-delivery food. He had a bucket on the end of a rope hanging out of his bedroom window. He would call and order food (a great deal of it, most of the time, sometimes several times a day), would lower the money down to the delivery person in the bucket, the delivery person would put the food in the bucket, and the man would pull the bucket up to his bedroom, using the rope.
I think comparing this kind of eating to drug or alcohol addiction is fair and accurate. And like other addictions, the addict will manage to get his/her fix.
Perhaps some family members realize the futility of refusing to feed them, knowing they’ll just turn around and spend way too much money getting someone else to do it.
It’s a sad, difficult situation, without an easy answer.
Seriously, food may be the most difficult addiction to deal with. It’s the only addiction that you actually must continue (in moderation!) in order to survive. Can you imagine being an alcoholic or a herion addict and being told that you still had to have a drink or a fix every day?
What, exactly, are you rolling your eyes at here? The poster? The phenomena he’s describing?
Last year there was a thread on this topic that got to be a few pages long. It had a lot of great answers in there, links as well. I’ll do a search for it and post what I find.
I imagine the usage of the term ‘fatty’, which is a bit insulting.
A warning: though the links Sitnam posted are SFW, there are NSFW pics on that site.
Yanno, feeding the morbidly obese may seem to be a logistical challenge, and enabling behavior, but what I’d like to know is how do these family members deal with having to take over cleaning up the other end? When I hear about morbidly obese persons, my first reaction isn’t the feeding - it’s the cleaning.
If they’ve not left their bed, or couch, in years just what the Hell are they doing about fecal matter and urine? And even given that bedpans can work, I cannot fathom how anyone can rationalize around that.
Oh, come on. What are we supposed to say? Woman of weight? Mass impaired? Metabolistically challenged? Physically disabled?
I can come up with twenty words and phrases that would be much more insulting than “fatty”. I don’t see how it’s more insulting than “chubby”, “thick”, or “voluptuous”.
But, since we’re speculating, I thought it was because somebody would want to see aforementioned sites, dedicated to how to get your SO even more… umm, scale worthy?
There’s an interesting series on one of the cable channels called something like “Inside the Brookhaven Obesity Clinic”.
I think she was rolling eyes at the claim that ‘most males who wouldn’t be caught dead tagging a fatty’… maybe most men he knows are that shallow, stupid, and immature, but hey.
As to the OP, what are family members supposed to do with a homebound morbidly obese family member? Starve them?
I believe he said “most.” That is far different than “all.”
And quite frankly, IME most of us are that shallow, stupid and immature. So there! 
Starve them? Absolutely not. Feed them what ever they want? Hell no.