Ginormous People

First of all, let me clarify here. I am not talking about just "fat" people. I don't care. Health and size are not as related as everyone thinks. You can be big and still very athletic and healthy. According to height/weight charts I'm thirty pounds overweight and I can run for at least an hour straight (with my inhaler, of course) and work out regularly. I'm talking about GINORMOUS people. I'm talking over 400 lbs, driving those little carts at the supermarket people. I'm talking out of work on disability people. These are folks who cannot function. They cannot walk from the sofa to the bathroom without getting winded. The government gives them money because they cannot work. There may be a small handful of those people who have genuine genetic disorders and government help for them is fine by me. But the vast majority of ginormous people do not need to be that way.

The other day one of these ginormous people came within two inches of running me over in her little cart that goes far too fast, thus the rant. Would we allow an alcoholic to drink until they cannot walk, let alone work? No. We would help them, have compassion for them and their situation, but view their behavior as unacceptable. So why are ginormous people different? Why are we only ever allowed to talk statistics, epidemics, never real people? Is their behavior really acceptable?

Is it rude to tell someone they're dying?

My father was approaching ginormous status. He was at around 350 and gaining. My brother had to have a little fridge with a lock on it to keep enough food in the house for him to eat. My father chose to eat his problems away. He couldn't get drunk he was so fat. I worried about him. It pained me to see him eat. We tried everything to get him to stop, to exercise, to do ANYTHING. But he didn't. And I had no sympathy for him when his knees hurt. When he couldn't fit into a booth at a restaurant. When he got winded on a walk with the family. When he needed an extension for his seatbelt on airplanes. When he was exhausted all the time. Because he chose to use food as a tool to cope. Even if his choice was because of depression or stress, we all have problems and an array of options of how to deal with them. For most of his life, he chose food.

Then he got the surgery. Not the way I would have gone. Almost killed him. More pain pills than I have fingers, every day, for months, due to doctor error. But he made a decision. And changed. He's under 250 now. And still losing. I'm proud of him for taking responsibility, even if our insurance paid for it. That surgery cost a lot less than the government paying him disability for eating a pound of cheddar cheese every day. Even if he gains a lot back, I don't see him ever being as big as he was again. And he will certainly never be on disability because of his weight, which was a real possibility before the surgery.

The surgery (stomach staples to make your stomach frickin tiny) does not make you skinny. It makes your body so sensitive to food that you are aware of every bite you take. This is something that ginormous people find shocking when they first get the surgery. The realization that there is a connection between food in your mouth and the state of your body is made sometime after the surgery. It's like a light bulb turning on. And when you lose enough weight, you have a lot of energy to play with. My father has used his to discover exercise. He loves it.

He tells me all the time now, "just write down what you eat every day, you'd be amazed". I guess he didn't hear me say it a half dozen times before the surgery. But no matter. He made his decision and is able to function now. He chose to stop killing himself with food. The rest of America can do the same, whether with surgery or old fashioned eating reasonably and exercising. I know that being poor means eating crappier. Being poor can equal being fat (and that's a big problem; a rant for another day I suppose), but to be ginormous, unable to work, you really have to try.

I see a lot of similarities between ginormous people and alcoholics. And I think that a lot of the same techniques, therapy, strategies for changing their lives can work. But AA and their disease model are wrong. You do not have to turn yourself over to a higher power. God will not make you skinny or sober. You DO have control over your behavior, your body, your life. Getting back under control and staying that way is very, very difficult - even for people who have surgery. But it is a matter of life and death. And you have to choose to live.

I know I can't tell anyone else how to live their life. But the un-PCness of talking about extremely, morbidly obese people has got to go. How can they change their life if we can't even talk about the fact that there's a problem? My father was very defensive and embarassed about his weight. But part of the catalyst for his decision to change came from our, as a family, making it very clear to him that he was going to die if he continued. Call it an intervention, call it sticking your nose in someone else's business, but either way it saved my father. Actually, it convinced him to save himself.



***Also: see this for thoughts on parental responsibility and childhood obesity