800-pound-man-kicked-out-of-hospital-for-ordering-pizza
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And the truth starts to emerge. ....you tube videos of him mocking those paying for his treatment and him abusing a nurse.....0
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pootle1972 wrote: »And the truth starts to emerge. ....you tube videos of him mocking those paying for his treatment and him abusing a nurse.....
Whaaaaaat! Linkypoos??
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Can't link on phone but YouTube Steven assanti.....guys a narcasist.0
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Traveler120 wrote: »Being 800 lbs is surely worse than death.
Are you sure? That's a pretty oblivious statement to make for someone who has had to face neither one.0 -
Is it a mental illness to be overridden by a compulsion like over-eating? Sure, they are killing themselves. But it's legal and voluntary. Like smoking and drinking.
As for the enabling family, I believe the bedridden is well-practiced in the powers of coercion, and the family members conditioned to respond. An "unhealthy" symbiotic relationship if you will.
I always find myself wondering about the enabling family. If I think about my husband on one hand it's his choice, who am I to say what he can/cannot eat? On the other, if he was imbed ridden because of his diet I might start telling him!
With my son, I thing it would be much harder. He's only 3 so maybe it changes, but right now I am conditioned to attend to that vast majority of his needs. Watching him eat makes be happy and I will bring him food when he's sick. I can't say that I wouldn't want to do the same if he was "sick" from all that food.
I pride myself on trying my hardest to be objective, but it's really hard to be objective with your kid
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Okay, I started to derail this, I should repent and get back on subject:
Let's say they get this guy to check himself in on the condition that he waives his right to come and go freely or to get food from any source besides his dietitian. And then he dies after begging and pleading for food and saying he was starving literally to death. Lawsuit city. I do get that facilities are in a mess when they treat anyone against his or her will.
I have to assume, and it is just an assumption, that an autopsy would have to prove that he died of malnutrition and not a heart attack or some other reason.
People die in hospitals often, it's kinda inevitable, but I think you have to show malpractice, you can't sue if an obese guy dies of a heart attack0 -
Just a snap thought without knowing the full story I think the guy was not taught the meaning of NO as a child.
Our kids just turned 18. No was not a hard concept to teach our son because he seemed to take the meaning of words literally when he was young.
We still have an old Blazer with a broken powered seat recline feature of the driver's seat because our daughter pounded both feet into it for 10 minutes with me driving down the road when she learned we were not going where she wanted to go. She stopped kicking at the half way point because she knew I was not going to turn around at that point. I guess she was about 9 or 10 at that time. She still wants her way but she knows today the world does not revolve around her.
Parents want to make kids happy but being an older parent I was aware that I might not be there long term so I could not permit myself to abuse her for the long term by letting her rule her Mom and Dad as a child on all matters of interest to her. When kids are permitted to take the role of parent and the parent the role of the child 10,20, or 30 years down the road it can turn out badly.
Both are awesome kids functioning well today at work outside of the home but the daughter took more effort to teach the world did not revolve around her.
The 33 year old guy sounded spoiled base on one posted story. Perhaps he associated being given food with being loved?0 -
pootle1972 wrote: »Can't link on phone but YouTube Steven assanti.....guys a narcasist.
Some sort of personality disorder, has to be. I tried to watch his candy review from the hospital bed, but I couldn't.0 -
crazyjerseygirl wrote: »Okay, I started to derail this, I should repent and get back on subject:
Let's say they get this guy to check himself in on the condition that he waives his right to come and go freely or to get food from any source besides his dietitian. And then he dies after begging and pleading for food and saying he was starving literally to death. Lawsuit city. I do get that facilities are in a mess when they treat anyone against his or her will.
I have to assume, and it is just an assumption, that an autopsy would have to prove that he died of malnutrition and not a heart attack or some other reason.
People die in hospitals often, it's kinda inevitable, but I think you have to show malpractice, you can't sue if an obese guy dies of a heart attack
Yeah, but right to refuse treatment denied (even if someone agrees to it beforehand) coupled with a death could get it into court. Even though our justice system usually follows the money, companies still try to avoid lawsuits. And also, what is the guy's ability to pay? If he was rich enough, I'm sure a private hospitalization would have been arranged with possibly stricter rules about food in his room and if he could pay enough I doubt he'd be tossed out for any reason. Cynical, but that's our world.1 -
GaleHawkins wrote: »Just a snap thought without knowing the full story I think the guy was not taught the meaning of NO as a child.
Our kids just turned 18. No was not a hard concept to teach our son because he seemed to take the meaning of words literally when he was young.
We still have an old Blazer with a broken powered seat recline feature of the driver's seat because our daughter pounded both feet into it for 10 minutes with me driving down the road when she learned we were not going where she wanted to go. She stopped kicking at the half way point because she knew I was not going to turn around at that point. I guess she was about 9 or 10 at that time. She still wants her way but she knows today the world does not revolve around her.
Parents want to make kids happy but being an older parent I was aware that I might not be there long term so I could not permit myself to abuse her for the long term by letting her rule her Mom and Dad as a child on all matters of interest to her. When kids are permitted to take the role of parent and the parent the role of the child 10,20, or 30 years down the road it can turn out badly.
Both are awesome kids functioning well today at work outside of the home but the daughter took more effort to teach the world did not revolve around her.
The 33 year old guy sounded spoiled base on one posted story. Perhaps he associated being given food with being loved?
The fact that you let her kick that long, to the point that she actually destroyed the seat, is still a problem. Even though you didn't go where she wanted to go, she still got to abuse you and your property physically. That's not okay.0 -
Here's an article taken from Slate.com. The author mentions MyFitnessPal several times.
I Once Was Obese And now I’m not. Please don’t applaud me for losing the weight.
By Shannon Chamberlain
I am a veteran of weight-loss support groups and 12-step programs, in-person and online. So I know well that the only acceptable way to do this is to make my confession up front: Only by admitting our problems do we have any hope of overcoming them. And when it comes to obesity, there’s only one confession that anyone has any interest in hearing.
I once weighed 352 pounds.
Or 356. The trouble is I don’t really know my starting weight. When you cross over from merely obese to morbidly obese, it’s hard to find a scale in the bath part of Bed Bath & Beyond to accommodate your girth. Even many doctors’ offices don’t carry a scale large enough for the truly fat. This usually ends in a nurse whispering, “Well, how much do you think you weigh?” as if you, the nonmedical professional, were a better judge of this than anyone else—despite the fact that according to many medical professionals, you are lazy, unattractive, stupid, and stubbornly unwilling to comply with treatment.
One thing about not knowing your starting weight: In those early days of weight loss, when you can reasonably expect the numbers to diminish rapidly, you may not have any accurate way of accounting for them. So you miss out on that Pavlovian spur to greater feats of diet and exercise when you need it the most.
Now that I’m merely on the chubby side of normal (size 12) and weight loss is considerably more difficult—an hour-by-hour grind of Zumba and deprivation, of parceling out each ounce and calorie on my constant companion, a chrome Cuisinart kitchen scale—the fact that I don’t get to put an accurate starting number on my MyFitnessPal weight-loss ticker prevents me from presenting my numerical value and virtue to the world.
“Virtue” may seem like an odd word here, but only because I haven’t quite reached my goal weight. When I do, I can imagine the praise that will come in. In MyFitnessPal Internet speak, “WTG!!!!11!!” In co-worker speak: “OMG, what’s your secret?” or “Congratulations on your achievement,” like I’ve just delivered a really superb Nobel laureate address. A quick scan of Amazon or the international reach of The Biggest Loser tells us that we revere people who manage to drop obscene amounts of weight, and the more housebound and disgusting to begin with, the better. These are tales of midnight binges and food combinations (Twinkies wrapped in bacon and dipped in guacamole) to make even the strongest stomach twist, and the grosser they are, the greater the moral redemption at the end.
Harmless encouragement, perhaps, but there’s a darker underside. If obese people who drop their excess poundage are to be commended and given book deals, those who can’t manage it—well, let’s regard them as the child rapists and five-pack-a-day self-destructive hedonists that they are. We need someone to hate, and smokers are a dying breed. Obesity, as every reputable news source has been reminding us for the last 25 years, is the new normal. Except that it’s still OK to hate the obese. In a perverse way, people like me make it harder for every fat person out there. If Formerly Fat X can do it, why can’t my morbidly obese sister-in-law?
This despite the fact that every shred of evidence available to medical science indicates that it’s nearly impossible to take off large amounts of weight and keep it off. That was largely the point of Tara Parker-Pope’s New York Times Magazine article from earlier this year, from which the main takeaway was that even a more than typically well-informed healthy eater and marathoner like Parker-Pope is 60 pounds overweight. And her experience is not unusual. Of the statistically minuscule number of people who ever manage to take off serious poundage in the first place, an even tinier number manage to keep it off in the long term. The article describes the complexity of metabolic changes that occur in dieting obese patients that seem to effectively convince their bodies that they are perpetually starving and should conserve every calorie consumed and burn fewer calories than most people would easily shed through normal activity or exercise. “A sobering reality,” writes Parker-Pope, “[is that] once we become fat, most of us, despite our best efforts, will remain fat.”
Parker-Pope personalizes that point through the story of Janice Bridge, one of the statistically small number of people qualified to join the National Weight Loss Registry, which tracks 10,000 people who have permanently lost a lot of weight. Bridge weighs her lettuce, eats 500 fewer calories per day than every means of medical measurement says she should be able to eat, and burns off another 500 calories in exercise. Medically speaking, she is nearly starving to death. In reality, she’s maintaining at a number that indicates that she is still overweight.
This is the story of my adult life. Bridge initially lost most of her weight by following what is technically termed a Very Low Calorie Diet (VLCD), or fewer than 800 calories per day, usually in liquid form. These diets are poorly studied beyond their implications for patients, say, with diabetes (the diabetes usually goes away), but anecdotally, they seem to work for a lot of obese patients who haven’t seen weight loss with other eating plans.
The blandness of that pronouncement can’t possibly describe the reality of actually being on a VLCD. Mine wasn’t medically supervised or liquid, and perhaps this made it harder than usual. Every morning I ate a packet of raspberries—an officially low-glycemic, low-calorie food—and drank three cups of coffee, because caffeine staves off my appetite. Then I’d go home at the end of the workday and eat exactly half of my dinner so that my husband wouldn’t realize what I was doing to myself and intervene. I knew that if anyone told me it was a bad idea, I would stop. Eating 800 calories a day and burning up about 400 of them on the treadmill at lunch doesn’t leave you with much will to resist. Brain function slows. Your entire life becomes about a set of numbers on a page. Was it only 758 today? Excellent work, but you’re still a fat pig. 811? You fat loser, you.
The desperation that drove me to such an extreme diet was a long time coming. Like Dara-Lynn Weiss’s daughter in the now infamous Vogue article, I was a tween dieter. I went on my first diet at 8 or 9: 1,500 calories and 20 fat grams and a lot of Healthy Choice hot dogs, which are truly and technically the worst food on the planet. When I was in middle school, my mother and I went on Jenny Craig together. She quickly got to her goal weight; I languished after about 6 pounds, lied to her about how much I was losing, and was eventually caught and ended up even more humiliated than if I’d just admitted the truth in the first place. No matter how long or faithfully I ate Jenny Craig food, I couldn’t lose the weight, and I was distractingly hungry every minute.
Weight Watchers was next because my mother thought it might offer more flexibility, but I clashed with our local strip-mall location’s staff, who found me to be belligerent and ill-suited to a group weight-loss support environment. I was 14, and I questioned everything. Why points? Why not just calories? Why calories instead of carbs? Why carbs instead of protein? Above all, why—despite playing organized sports and walking the dog 2 miles every morning before school and consuming my exact point tally—could I not lose weight? Why didn’t I get to bask in the warm collective and reinforcing praise of the Monday night meeting?
Throughout college, I tried all of the trendy plans to little or no avail. My bookshelves are littered with South Beach, Atkins, and Zone manuals, Protein Power handbooks, and every form of the lie that the sensation of hunger is really just dehydration. (One month, I drank 5 liters of water every day. This must go on the record as my least favorite of any of the diet plans I tried.) Every time, the same pattern: about 10 pounds of initial loss, very quickly, great joy throughout the land, and then … nothing. Although I’d made no changes to my eating plan or introduced any new food, I would stagnate. I followed every rule to the letter but always got stuck.
And then, slowly, the pounds would begin to creep back on.
When I finally turned to the raspberries and coffee diet, I did it for less-than-stellar reasons. I was trying to flee a job I disliked for a competitive graduate school program just as it was becoming clear that a recession was a’coming. I felt out of control, and, like other anorexics, sought complete dominion over something clear and measurable. Five months later, I was still obese, but I wasn’t seriously worrying about fitting in an airplane seat anymore.
I (mostly) kept it off by staying on what other people would call a “diet” but what is just maintenance for me (1,500 calories per day, at least five days per week of heart-rate-raising exercise). But my ridiculous low-calorie diet had made some of my hair fall out, turned my skin dull, and rendered my life miserable. And, predictably, my weight plateaued again. So I tried vegetarianism for a year. Then I tried low-carb. Three years later, I finally began to consider surgery.
My beloved aunt, my father’s last living sibling, had just died far too young of obesity-related causes, the cascade of diabetes, high blood pressure, and congestive heart failure that seems to kill everyone in my family. My future at my current weight looked bleak. Complicating matters, the present was pretty good. Continuous activity had kept my sugar levels decent, my cholesterol excellent, and my blood pressure on the low side of normal. I had none of the usual obesity-related complications to make surgery recovery difficult. In fact, I was at the perfect weight for surgery: fat enough that the insurance company wouldn’t deny the claim but not so fat that I had to lose massive amounts of weight even to fit on an operating table. Most of all, I was in my 20s. “You carry your weight well,” said my bariatric surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, noting the difference between my (relatively) toned appearance and the actual numbers. He saw mostly older patients, and I could tell that he was looking forward to my surgery because it would be easy. “Are you ready to do this?” he asked. Without hesitation: “Yes.”
Bariatric surgery effectively puts one on a 600-800 calorie per day diet, at least to begin with, but supplements with vitamins and cuts away the hunger hormones that make this all but impossible for people with normal stomachs, let alone the enlarged ones of the obese. Naturally, I’ve lost a lot of weight. Fifteen months out, it’s starting to become harder. Most days, I engage in 90 minutes of exercise and eat 1,000-1,200 calories. Everything in my life is parceled out into packets, and I know the precise value of it all. An ounce of goat cheese has fewer calories than an ounce of Gruyère. My grandmother’s cookies have 114 calories each and must be a rare treat. Protein, protein, protein. Protein before everything else. Protein über alles or my hair falls out in chunks in the shower and my nails peel off the tips of my fingers.
I’m now at a weight where my daily life in the world has changed. When I was in my middle state of moderate obesity, I rarely got a nasty comment on my appearance. I used to think it was because I wasn’t all that fat. Now I know that, as with other bright, round objects, nobody wanted to stare directly at me. Men now feel comfortable approaching me in coffee shops to suggest that if I only lost 20, I’d be hot. Drivers who cut me off when I’m riding my bike shout “fat *kitten*” with some regularity. I hate it and find it encouraging at the same time. Finally, my fat doesn’t make me invisible. It just makes me fat.
And, naturally, I’m starting to get solicited for weight-loss advice, but I refuse to provide it. Nothing about the way that I’ve lost weight was in the short term safe or healthy, if you define health as the pursuit of overall system happiness. Bariatric surgery was about the safest thing I’ve ever done for myself, in the sense that it was medically supervised and I got a special 24-hour-advice nurse number to call—and it involved five hours of getting cut open to have my intestines rerouted. Also, on this great wide Internet of ours, surgery is cheating. On a MyFitnessPal forum I follow, someone who was recently denied for weight-loss surgery because she’d been asked to lose 50 pounds before the surgery and managed it was now congratulated because now she’d have the satisfaction of “doing it on her own,” the virtuous way. As I stare down my post-surgery 90 minutes of aerobics and bike riding and my 178-calorie lunch ahead, I beg to differ.
The fact of the matter is: I don’t know anything about weight loss. Neither does anyone else. What is emerging from the best research is that the old nutritional mantra—burn fewer calories than you consume—is correct in the thermodynamic sense but useless on the individual level. You and I don’t have a clear idea of how many calories we’re actually burning up. Gary Taubes tells us that some calories count more than others. Michael Pollan says mostly vegetables. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks that putting our soda in two cups instead of one is the magic ticket. The federal government is so swollen with corn-industry money that I can’t even look at the food pyramid—old or new—without laughing. Absent these precise measurements or solutions, how can you look at someone who is obese and hold them personally responsible for each pound? Or personally virtuous for each pound lost?
Let’s say you had to starve yourself daily for bare maintenance of your health and physical appearance. Could you do it? Forever? And would you be happy? I doubt very much that you would. But still, it’s what I have to do.
Shannon Chamberlain is a graduate student at University of California-Berkeley and blogs at dofatpeoplehavesouls.tumblr.com.
Too bad so much about this is wrong. We do know quite about weight loss. And burning fewer calories than you consume is quite useful on the individual level - this poor girl obviously either isn't asking the right questions on the forums, or she isn't listening to the answers. She says she doesn't have a clear idea of how many calories she's burning up - but there are several solutions for her to calculate that. She also never mentions knowing exactly how many calories she's taking in. One wonders if she's weighing her food.
another thing - she's too preoccupied with the idea of 'starving' herself for weight loss. It's not the numbers - the amount of calories taken in - it's the satiety provided by those calories. If she feels like she's starving, she's not eating the right foods for her. It's quite possible to eat the number of calories she's allowed and feel satisfied, if she's willing to do the work and find the right combination of foods that will satiate her.0 -
She did mention an eating disorder. The article almost reads like she used both MyFitnessPal and bariatric surgery to support her unhealthy eating habits. And since she doesn't know about weight loss, well. No one else must0
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She did mention an eating disorder. The article almost reads like she used both MyFitnessPal and bariatric surgery to support her unhealthy eating habits. And since she doesn't know about weight loss, well. No one else must
One positive note, I no longer feel too silly to apply to graduate school!0 -
While I am not a Dr. Phil fan, the man from the OP has clearly been struggling for some time, and seems to either walk away from help, or burn the bridges with people who have offered help. I was curious, so went digging around and found this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASGkG7mdIs4
There comes a time when the individual must make the choice to take the help that is being offered and work with the professionals, or face the consequences. I don't know anything about the hospital program, but I would hope that the hospital offers counselling for underlying psychiatric/emotional issues that would contribute to his condition. As others have said, given the slow rate of loss, I would also suspect that this has not been the first time he has broken the care plan laid out by the program.
For those who are saying he needs help now, he was getting help. By the looks of it, he has been offered help on multiple occasions. Short of forced confinement into a program, I am unclear of what additional help he could be given.
ETA: I have not gone digging to see what happened with the support offered by the Dr. Phil show, and to be honest, I sometimes wonder if there is much help beyond what is said on camera. So there could be much more or less to this story.0 -
He was actually mobile in that video0
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Assanti's father says taking his son home will be a death sentence, because he'll just fall back into the habits of lying in bed and eating.
Read more: http://www.wfsb.com/story/30210822/800-pound-man-kicked-out-of-hospital-for-ordering-pizza#ixzz3oCjH6700
Who, pray tell, is the one preparing and bringing him the food that got him up to 800 pounds?
Hint: it's not the 800 lb man.0 -
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nutmegoreo wrote: »I am unclear of what additional help he could be given.
Yep. I work with the super morbidly obese in a clinical residential setting. I have never met a single one who is compliant with the suggestions and/or care plans offered to them and I've never seen one recover. I really understand eating too much and gaining lots of weight so I feel for them. But there seems to be a point of no return that people get to with this curse. Even if the hundreds of pounds of weight were to be taken off, there would be so much damage done internally and externally with the skin stretching and hanging. The entire body from the outside would basically have to be sewn back together to keep from dragging on the floor. I don't think the cardio vascular damage is reversible either.
That's so bleak. I've watched every weight loss surgery program I could find. I'm trying to imagine people who are physically worse off than some of the people I've seen on these programs, especially Patrick Deuel. He was inpatient and his family was frisked and his con jobs on staff were stopped to keep him on the program. I don't know if he ever tried to assert any legal rights during that time, perhaps he didn't push the issue so far as to be thrown out by the doctor in charge. He was very close to death when he was admitted.
The My 600 Pound Life people sometimes comply, sometimes don't, I think every one of them went off program at least once. Surprise surprise, they stopped losing weight when they didn't follow Doctor's orders to a T. When I do something stupid, when I go off my own program (and I do, sadly) I often hear snippets of these shows in my head to at least remind me, "Don't justify it, girl, you're screwing up, you know what the outcome will be, don't lie to yourself."
I can't judge these people, though. It's all an escape. Food, drugs, maybe sometimes even giving in to full blown delusions instead of fighting it. This world is nasty and cruel and full of carnage without rhyme or reason. Maybe some of us just break easier under it.0
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