They are very active. But they will over-eat given the chance.
Their Mom is chief cook around here and she’s very good.
They get very little fast food.
No soda.
We don’t keep very many cookies, chips, candy(well the adult kids have hidden stashes). The boys have supervised snack time.
I tell my daughter all the time don’t harp on them but keep them eating healthy. And active.
They are genetically prone to be big and tall men. Their dad is.
I can see one or both being very obese, easily.
I think Mid-dau is doing all she can right now. When they are late teenage if things shift into young adult and it looks bad, she can help them with vigorous food limiting. It’s not recommended to diet at all, at this age, by their doctor.
It’s worrisome.
I recently lost a friend who topped 600 lbs when he died. There were all sorts of reasons he was morbidly obese: his mother sneaked dessert to him whenever his dad sent him to his room as punishment; he had lymphedema, and a plastic surgeon mistakenly removed his lymph nodes; sodium made him gain weight whenever he stood up, so he had to spend virtually his entire life in bed; his weekend caretaker said he gained 160 lbs before he died because he somehow got his hands on cans of ravioli and pasta despite their high sodium content. I didn’t think he was capable of leaving his bed, but somehow he found a way.
Scott was like a giant teddy bear. He could charm anybody. We lived in separate states, so I only visited a few times a year, and didn’t know everything going on behind the scenes. I gave him Amazon cards so he could buy padding that wasn’t covered by his disability, but maybe that’s how he got all that ravioli and I was an unwitting enabler. Short of sending him to prison, I don’t think there was any way to force him to eat responsibly. He had evil genius cunning.
I think you are grossly misunderstanding the relationship between an enabler and the enabled. People absolutely do do this. It’s not a matter of “they will get mad” that is just the simplistic way they sum it up - the downplaying of the situation is part of the pathology. Both/all people in the relationship have very real and very traumatic conditions and none of them are able to “just” do something to make it stop.
I can’t believe you watch this show a lot and have not noticed the extreme human conditions it showcases. They are all well beyond the “simple” advice you prescribe.
Some enablers of the super-morbidly obese are normal-weight boyfriends and girlfriends, as evidenced by “My 600-Pound Life”. Helping to get their SOs down to a less catastrophically dangerous weight would run counter to the kinkitude that often attracted them to such people in the first place.*
*i.e. adipophilia.
**I do a swell impression of Dr. Nowdarazan, not that there’s much call for it.
I’ve always wondered how people with super obesity, maintain their living standards while consuming probably a majority of their financial resources in grocery/fast food bills.
They’re definitely not homeless, definitely dont work and usually need caregivers.
Medicaid and disability only go so far but meanwhile eating themselves out of house and home is not happening though I’d guess others living in the home are contributing to their needs but at a cost to themselves.
I know how food restrictions and being on a very strictly controlled diet is.
Logically, I know it’s bad for them. In my heart I’m thinking, well they got this far without dying.
He’s strangely charismatic, but also not much of a nice guy from what I can gather. From what I can gather, the whole reason the show was started was because he needed money after getting divorced. The reason he got divorced? Supposedly because the persona on the show is his actual real life personality, and his wife got tired of putting up with him behaving that way.
Nobody involved in any kind of self-destructive compulsive behavior is capable of giving an honest assessment of what they are doing or why. You can write off the whole “they’d be mad at me” or “they’d get food somewhere else anyway” stuff just as easily as you would dismiss anything said by a person tolerating their spouse’s alcoholism or domestic violence. It has no relationship to the reality of their emotions or motivations at all.
Someone brought up lymphedema… This also is very interesting to me. Dr. Charming never, at least on camera, seems to address in any respect whatsoever, the effect that severe lymphedema has on the numbers.
I know a lot of these people probably most of them are full of shit and delusional when they say that they’ve been following the diet. On the other hand, it seems to me like it could be possible that they’re trying and doing much better and still are not seeing Weight loss because lymphedema is worse or something… But I don’t know how lymphedema operates. Can it suddenly flare up and add 40 pounds of fluid in a couple of months?
I’m still not exactly sure about what lymphedema is, but I can tell you Scott’s legs looked like melted candle wax, which presumably was the result of fluid buildup. That’s why he had to remain horizontal most of the time. His disability coverage wasn’t enough to cover proper treatment to prepare him for surgery. He had home health personnel visit and bind him like a mummy to try to control the swelling. He had some other underlying condition to treat as well, but I don’t recall its nature.
In the end, his kidneys failed and he could either spend the rest of his life on dialysis or get transferred to the hospice wing and made comfortable until the end. He passed about an hour after the April solar eclipse. My friend Joel, who was his weekend caretaker, thinks he could have controlled his eating, but decided to give up on life. I remember times when Scott folded like an accordion when confronted with having to maintain some degree of self-discipline. I think it was roughly 50% hard luck and 50% his own slackness that contributed to his death. Still, I credit him with inspiring me with creative development that helped my career, and I miss having him around to pick his brain.
I mean this sincerely: thank you for loving him. Or caring, or however you frame it. Thank you for thinking of him and treating him like a human being with value.
I’m sorry for your loss. May we all remember that there are whole human beings behind these stereotypes.
I’m fat. I’m skeptical that this is a problem that can be solved, or even that it should be solved, but I’m pretty mobile, even jog occasionally, walk and meditate, cook a lot of meals, the kind of stuff you’re supposed to do for a “healthy lifestyle.” Doesn’t make me less fat but it keeps me feeling some sense of control over my life.
I am trying to ask myself what it would take for my food issues to push me that far over the edge, and I can’t. I have way too much to do and people who depend on me. But not being able to imagine it, I assume there are complex factors at play that I really don’t understand or have any business judging.
I also have friends much heavier than I am and their various health conditions just make me glad mine are relatively minor by comparison. They are already significantly older than I am and I fear losing them in the not too distant future. I also worry about my own premature death, as I’ve got a kid to raise. Which is why so much of my life is focused on self-care.
Exercise is the closest thing we have to a panacea, it can cut all-cause mortality all by itself, without weight loss, so with anyone asking my advice I’d probably start there. Assuming the doctor cleared it. And yes, there are ways to exercise while bed-ridden. We’ve all gotta start somewhere.
Aren’t these shows a way for the obese person to end up getting the bariatric surgery?
Dr. Now has them get below a certain weight then he ends doing the surgery.
I’ve seen a couple real life people lose massive amounts of weight with surgery. They weren’t any where near 600lbs.
One niece of mine lost 130lbs with some fancy weight loss center. No surgery. (Well, after she got tummy tucked to remove the belly fat which wouldn’t go away, no matter what she did).
It all took 3 years. She’s in the maintenance program now. Gained some back with pregnancy.
She said they change your thinking about food. And she’ll always have bad-motoivation to over-eat and get sedentary.
She said it took exactly one week after she found she was pregnant to go back to her ways of grazing all day and not doing anything.
I just watched the most recent episode (the “Where are they now?” on J.T., who was a major success story), and Dr. Now discussed in detail the impact that the lymphedema was having on his weight. When he finally removed it, he weighed it and talked about how it weighed around 65 pounds, but with the fluid that had leaked out of it, it was probably about 80 pounds, and how close that would bring J.T. to his goal. So he has definitely addressed this aspect of the situation.
I was struck by the enablers in this episode, but it was more thinking that the people who don’t have enablers are the ones who never get to the most extreme weights. It would be nice if there was a simple answer to addiction, like “just say no” or “stop enabling people,” but that’s not how it works.
My partner at the time, who was much younger than me and young generally, showed up at my door with tears in his eyes after watching that movie, crying that he didn’t want me to die.
It was sweet and kind of disturbing all at the same time.
This. I think Dr. Nowzaradan makes it pretty clear in the show: his patients can’t do a moderate diet, since they will be dead from morbid obesity before moderation would have a meaningful effect.
About 50% of each episode deals with the patient who doesn’t do the diet she was given, but cuts down on food & drink, and comes back for checkup with almost nothing to show for it, the clock ticking fast.
To illustrate the need for drastic changes, there have been numerous deaths on the show, of people who didn’t heed the drastic advice, and died from obesity within a year, or a little over that.
When I visited Scott in hospice, he was unconscious and had two days left. I held his hand and thanked him for being my friend, thanked him for getting me interested in writing, composing music, designing games (via The Game Crafter), helping me understand computer use, and so many other things.
There was so much more to him than the freak show caricature we see in mainstream media.