I’m imagining Meals on Wheels. With 18 wheelers.
sorry.
Anybody here care to make a distinction between Morbidly Obese people and those people who are housebound due to weight?
Why, yes, I am morbidly obese. I am also a budding entrepreneur who is on my feet at least 8 hours a day and have been known at times to be the sole contributing income for me and my baby boomer parents. I’m happy that I’m not one of the unfortunate people who are house bound. But I guess I don’t feel like I should be in the same group as far as discussions like this are concerned. I’ll concede that I was already in a somewhat bad mood before I opened this thread, but reading it made me feel like I should run off and join the freak show for fat people or something.
And, for the record, I do have a boyfriend who apparently must be a freak himself if he could ever dare to love a fatty like me. We’ll be celebrating our first anniversary in about a month. Oh yeah, and he’s about 6’ and weighs about 155.
So you’re able to refute mantis’s suggestion, then, that most men would pass up the opportunity to chase enormously obese women? Also, you’re satisfied that you’re not part of the group being discussed, but you’ll go ahead and feel offended anyway? Also[sup]2[/sup], why the need to emphasise the boyfriend’s skinniness - does that make him more of a trophy, and if so, why?
I made a distinction in my last post. The terms Overweight, Obese, Morbidly Obese, and Super Morbidly Obese, while politically charged, have scientific definition. It all depends on your BMI. I’d have to do some research to find out exactly where the line is between Morbidly Obese (MO) and Super Morbidly Obese (SMO), the SMO classification is the one you’d most likely fall into if you were so large you were completely incapacitated by your size.
Like you, I was never very handicapped by my size when I was MO. I got around pretty well (although less so as I got older), certainly held a number of jobs where I was on my feet/very active.
Although you didn’t ask this question of me, I’ll go ahead and field it from my perspective of a woman who was MO, and “managed” to snag a “normal” guy anyway. If Always Brings Pie has more to add or a different perspective, I’m sure she’ll chime in.
If it had been me making that statement (and it very well could have been), it wouldn’t have been the idea that him being skinny made him more of a trophy. It was the idea that some people, upon hearing I had a boyfriend/husband, felt the need or desire to know if maybe there was something wrong with him, like maybe he was a “fatty”, too, that meant he had to “settle” for someone like me. But in fact, he didn’t “settle” for someone like me, and he’s not one of the guys who prefer large women. In fact, he preferred thinner ones (though he never nagged me about my weight or eating). But he got to know me, he fell in love with me, he married me. But some people are so prejudiced against large people, they’d find that hard to believe. After living with those attitudes from people for a number of years, you do tend to get defensive about it, and feel the need sometimes to qualify things, before questions can be asked.
Of course, none of this is helping to address the question in the OP. I honestly don’t know what my husband would have done if I’d gotten to the point where I was unable to care for myself because of my size. I can’t believe he’d have brought me bunches of junk food, but I can certainly believe I’d have been wanting it. And I don’t know how we would have dealt with the question of bodily functions, either. Yeah, he married me “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health” and all that. And has been my care-taker at times I’ve been very ill. But none of those illnesses were self-inflicted to the extent that the disability discussed in the OP is.
Well, clearly you don’t belong in the housebound group; otherwise your screen name would be Always Bring Pie. 
After watching a couple of those shows, I was disgusted with the across-the-board refusal of the show’s producers to address this issue. The SMOs were almost universally presented as helpless victims of the “disease” of obesity", rather than manipulative addicts who did this to themselves.
I’m also curious if anyone has EVER stood up to one of these people and simply said “No, you’re not getting a single twinkie, pizza or candy bar until you can get out of bed and go buy it yourself. Now here’s a salad”. THAT would make an interesting reality show.
I think that is the point. If the person didn’t have an enabler they wouldn’t be obese to the point of being housebound. Certainly there are people capable of gaining that much weight but do not have an enabler and therefore it doesn’t happen.
Didn’t we have a doper awhile back who was caretaker to her SMO mother and wanted out? Just what does happen when the enabler dies or leaves? Does social services then have to care for the SMO person? Are they sent to an institution (hopefully better run than Brookhaven)?
Yeah sorry, I didn’t really look at everything on the cite before putting in the link. :smack:
Sure. But my point is, why do the shows not only refuse to point this out, but seem to actively avoid the entire subject? That guy John Deitz that was on the “700-pound man” or whatever show died a few years ago. They NEVER ONCE asked his wife why she kept buying him all the junk food. Never asked about the grocery bill. Never asked why she didn’t just say “no” when John demanded an entire box of Little Debbies brought to him in bed. Never said “WHY.THE.HELL did you bring him four extra-large pizzas for dinner last night?”
Maybe if these shows would stop tip-toeing around the truth and actually show how the enabler is KILLING the SMO person, we’d have fewer of these situations going on.
p.s. I think John’s wife should be charged with manslaughter.
And what the hell’s with that 600 pound GANG MEMBER who seems to do nothing but order jumbo buckets of KFC delivered** right to his room** and spew obsceneties at everyone. Who the hell is paying for his stay anyway?
Yes, we did, I think - I remember she said that she wouldn’t overfeed her but her mother would lie to all of her friends and visitors and they’d bring her stuff.
In the other TLC SMO documedntary, Half Ton Man, the guy is a nasty over bearing abusive man who bosses around his meek, not particularly bright wife. She clings pathetically to her role as a caretaker and he gets a servant. It’s obviously an extremely disfunctional relationship coupled with plain ignorance of any nutrition knowledge.
Nah, not much to add here because norinew covered it all for me. After all, we’re sharing a spouse. 
Sorry, I guess I jumped the gun. The rest of my post, still stands, however.
I’d watch that.
Manslaughter seems a little harsh. I’d go with some form of negligent homicide (which, in some jurisdictions, is called a form of manslaughter, so I guess I really don’t have anything substantial to add.)
On several of these documentaries, they portray the cheating and enabling issues. At Brookhaven, they have tried different versions of rules. If they outlaw and prevent people bringing food in, the people leave, and Brookhaven does not achieve their goal of helping these people survive. For a while they separated patients onto two floors by whether bringing food in was stopped.
The whole enabling thing is all about pathalogical psychology. Perhaps people only reach the super morbidly obese state in those rare setups where eater and enabler find each other and the other pieces (money, health, isolation, etc) fall into place. Perhaps we are seeing the one in ten million cases, which would be the 30 worst cases in the USA, and there would be thousands of 700 lb bedridden people if the rest of the world cooperated with their leanings.
Is morbid obesity a new phenomena? I can’t imagine ANYONE reaching such a weight in the 19th century-food was much more expensive then, and no hospitals exited which would treat these people. I’d be willing to bet that morbid obesity is a 20th-century phenomenon-having to do with cheap, high-caloric food, and the welfare system. How elese couth these people survive? Do 19th century authors ever talk about MO? 