Dot and I have watched a number of episodes of “My 600-lb Life”. We’ve found many of the stories incredibly encouraging, and they’ve helped shore-up our own determination to lose weight.
And then we watched “Penny’s Story”.
The Internet can be a nasty place, so I won’t engage in the meanness burning up the message boards and comment sections of articles about this disturbing episode. Suffice to say, unlike every other story on this wonderful show, Penny really knows how to twist the screws.
A year after gastric bypass surgery, a patient weighing 600 pounds can expect to have lost as much as 350 pounds. In Penny’s case, in the year following her surgery, she’d gained weight. Her friends and family had paid for the surgery. It wasn’t stated in the show whether her disability money, her insurance or remaining charity was used to pay for her four months of hospitalization. Regardless of who was paying for it, nothing was working.
With all this opportunity to succeed as a backdrop, it was particularly hard watching her sneak food throughout the entire episode. It was painful to witness the child she loves have to visit her in the same bed she declared is “my bed, my bathroom, and my dinner table.”