The Lives of the Super Obese
We flipped the channels on Friday night and found a fascinating program on Discovery called Super Obese. How could we resist? The show featured five profiles of super obese people, all currently in a clinic to help them reduce their staggering weight. The stories were similar, and all of them painful yet compelling to watch. One woman with a pretty face who weighed about 800 had a leg that accounted for at least 50 of these pounds.
She cried when she spoke about how people viewed her, and said that there was a vascular problem so that all of this weight collected in her left leg. The one appendage was about two feet wide, startling to look at, in the show they showed how they cut about 24 pounds of it off.
Another obese man just wanted to be able to get into his truck. He was about 840 pounds when he entered the clinic, and had dropped about 250 pounds–enough to get behind the wheel and return to his family.
The last man profiled was the biggest, he really couldn’t even move on his own, but had shed hundreds of pounds. He was hugged by Richard Simmons, who visited the clinic, and told him tearfully that he had managed to walk 550 feet that day.
December 8, 2005 @ 9:16 pm
Sounds like an interesting show. I kind of considered myself super obese, but I am half the size of these folk. The fear of getting hurt and ending up bed bound has frighten me — thankfully the last few months I have lost over 60 pounds from a high of 431 pounds. I have a long way to still go, but thankfully I did not let myself go as far as these folks. But I am not proud of how far I got out of control.
May 8, 2006 @ 5:05 am
I’m sitting here, online, at midnight after my 6th cellulitis attack to my left leg. This time, not too bad – only 5 days in the hosptial, while other bouts have cost me up to a couple of months to retreat.How can this not scare me into some kind of program??? Do I want to die? What is even sadder is that my 23 year old daughter was hospitalized right along side me with her own cellulitis attack – her 4th. How did we let this happen to us?
July 6, 2006 @ 3:39 pm
I just watched the program on the telly. It’s too scary. There aren’t many super obese people here in Singapore. You can be a 150lbs, 5’6 girl here and be labelled as “obese”. Perspectives, perspectives…
August 20, 2007 @ 1:12 pm
There’s obviously some sort of medical condition why people get this obese. However, that doesn’t mean people should just let themselves go to this point. The bottom line, in my opinion and this applies to just about anything – people are too lazy and weak to make positive changes for themselves, even when risk and danger is obvious. People can act like there’s more to it, but it all just comes down to “will I make a change or not”.