Britain's fattest man

Tuesday:

Well I had four days of feeling too sick to exercise (but not too sick to eat), where even walking the kids to school yesterday took all my energy, but I am feeling mostly better today. Not well enough to run, but well enough to return to normal household duties. So I need to build back to exercise from here. So hard to get back into a routine. I feel guilty for even writing that: oh, my life is soooo difficult. All difficulties come from within myself, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

I watched a show about Britain's fattest man last night -- possibly the world's fattest. He weighed nearly 57 stone which is around 800 pounds or approaching 400 kg. I think he hadn't been out of bed for eight years and had a carer for 12 hours a day -- four hours of which was just washing him. He needed bariatric surgery but they had a lot of trouble finding an ambulance big enough to get him to the hospital and they had to reinforce all the floors. The doctors had difficulty getting close enough to the middle of his stomach to do the surgery because of all of the folds of fat hanging off the sides of the table. They also had to cut off a huge roll of fat on his inner thigh because it was forcing his legs far apart and stopping him from walking even when he did lose some weight.

In the hospital before the operation they put him on a 500 calorie per day diet for a while. Don't you sometimes have crazy thoughts about doing a diet like that? Just for a while?

The thing about these really enormous bed-ridden people is that someone must be enabling them to get all that food. This guy was eating up to 20,000 calories a day. 20,000! He couldn't get out of bed to cook it or even open the door to home deliveries. I suppose his carer was just paid to do what he wanted, not make his decisions for him.

If it was a family member you loved would you keep giving them 20,000 calories a day, knowing how bad it was for them, letting them make their own choices ... putting another mortgage on your house so you could afford the food and the supersize bed and the carer ... or would you put them on an enforced diet that they couldn't do anything about? Tell them they could have bacon if they walked to the shops and bought it themself?

Obviously I found the show quite disturbing. Maybe because I know what a slippery slope weight gain is. Generally I think "I'm not that bad, sure a bit overweight but not huge" but then I see myself at an unflattering angle or, God forbid, naked; and I realise that I am seriously obese. I know I need to lose weight but I still eat junk food ... just this bit then I will get back on track tomorrow. Or next week. I need this food to make me feel better when I am sick, or sad, or lonely.

I'm not judging this guy. I'm terrified it would be so easy to be him.