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Family Fat Surgeons

A hospital patient awaits surgery
  • Posted at 10:59am
  • 24 October 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

I'm on something of a regime at the moment. Which is a vague, roundabout way of admitting that I'm attempting to eat less, and exercise more. In fact, I'm exercising on one of those contraptions from TV Warehouse that I was so disparaging about on this blog a couple of weeks ago. And my eating plan consists of muesli for breakfast, a banana and a yoghurt for lunch, and in the words of those adverts for magic weight-loss milk shakes, "a normal dinner".

Whatever “normal” might mean. For me, a normal dinner means one plate of food, not three, not topped off with a fried egg and not scooped up with several hunks of buttered white bread. But for some of the folk featured on Family Fat Surgeons, my "normal dinner" would pass as an unsatisfying midafternoon snack. These people either are colossal, were colossal, or are in the process of being made significantly less colossal.

No guesses as to the country in which the action takes place. The show features an American father and son partnership who are specialists in operating on gigantic people – from the insertion of "gastric bands" restricting the size of the stomach, to a complete gastric bypass – which presumably means installing a solid plastic tube which connects your mouth to your bottom.

The show focused on three people. The first, Marc, was one of the most enormous humans I've ever laid eyes on. Weighing in at somewhere around 57 stone, his urgent operation was initially put on hold because his medical insurance company were baulking at paying out a substantial sum for a procedure which had a fair chance of going wrong.

We saw interviews with his (thin) mother and father, who both, quite understandably, looked extremely concerned – but it was almost as if they'd seen him have an accident, a severed artery or a broken neck, rather than monitor his slow ballooning in size over the past decade. At what point should your family attempt to seek medical attention? When you can't get up from a chair unassisted? When you can't get through the kitchen door? Or, in Marc's case, when you can't move at all?

Marc's experience was traumatic to watch from beginning to end, from getting him into hospital (a team of eight men were needed to lift his immobile bulk onto a special stretcher and load him into a van) to the operation itself (an exceptionally gruesome rearrangement of his internal organs, in full colour, which I watched through the gaps between my fingers and from behind a door, but it was still really unpleasant).

Fortunately, the other two cases didn't make me feel quite as queasy. Two women who were both a fraction of Marc's size had nevertheless been admitted for treatment: one, a 30-year-old, had successfully halved her weight to a lithe and supple ten stone, but was having trouble dating because she still had "a fat girl mentality". The other, conversely, was getting grief from her partner, a man vehemently opposed to her plan to get a gastric band. This was mainly because it would mean him also eating "healthy stuff". (He, of course, was substantially larger than she was.)

With all the current hoo-ha about obesity, this new series of Family Fat Surgeons is particularly timely, and should probably serve as a harsh warning against the perils of overeating. I have to say, though, after watching these unhappy people grapple with their mounds of flesh, I found myself feeling quite smug. "I may be fat," I thought, while eating my normal dinner, "but at least I'm not that fat. I'll exercise tomorrow."

Family Fat Surgeons continues on Discovery Real Time (Sky 250, Virgin 271) on Mondays at 10:00pm.

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