Britain’s fattest woman, Sharon Mevsimler - who weighed a staggering 45 stone - died of a heart attack last Saturday.
As a nation we’re always slightly disgusted and baffled by people who get so fat they can’t get out of bed anymore.
Perhaps it’s easy to be so when you don’t struggle with your weight - not to that excess anyway.
It’s simple to think that if you ever topped the scales at, let’s say, 25 stone, you would look in the mirror and think ‘hang on a minute, I’m rather large. . . I need to do something about this’? But maybe we don’t pay enough attention to considering obesity as a medical condition.
It seems our sympathies for eating disorders always lie with those who starve themselves to death, while gripped with anorexia or bulimia for example.
Those who are obese are often just told to eat less, exercise more, but not much attention seems to be paid to the underlying issues which have led to their weight increase.
Instead we just see pictures of morbidly obese people and ask ‘why don’t they just cut down on the pies?’ However, when you see somebody who weighs just a couple of stone you feel sorry for them, that the depth of their ‘illness’ distorts their ability to simply eat more.
On the flipside, there are those who are given help and choose to ignore it.
Even when Mrs Mevsimler got to the point where she had to have a gastric band fitted (of course at the expense of the taxpayer) she still moaned because she apparently found it hard to eat her usual takeaway meals.
What was more shocking were the refuted claims that while she was in hospital supposedly on a strict diet, her family smuggled in buckets of chicken and chips for her to scoff.
If it is true, maybe they didn’t think a few pieces of chicken here and there would make that much difference to the woman, who was apparently consuming more than 12,000 calories a day.
Or maybe she was so pleading with them they simply had to give in.
But whatever the reason, the real tragedy is not simply her death, which seemed inevitable the way she was going.
It’s the fact that despite everything and all the alarm bells, she, allegedly ‘aided’ by her family, just couldn’t stop eating.
We hear about pro-anorexia websites being shut down for encouraging people to stop eating, so perhaps more should be done to prevent those who do the opposite and encourage people to eat more.
As you may have gathered the person who usually writes this column is on holiday, the lucky thing.
You may also remember that the last time he was away (which was not so long ago) he was ‘stranded’ in Madeira because of the ash cloud.
Of course in true Steve Lowe style he didn’t keep quiet about it. Instead he sent us a daily blog of his ‘woes’ in having to suffer an extra week’s holiday.
And this time isn’t any different, except there’s no volcanic disruption to keep him away longer than necessary.
But he is stranded. On a cruise ship in the middle of the Mediterranean to be precise.
Well for a while anyway, until it stops at the next island. He’s already made sure we know all about his trip by sending us a rather funny daily blog of what he’s been up to. He’s so very kind.
You can also read all about it by visiting our website www.bedfordshire-news.co.uk and going to Steve Lowe’s Blog.
