Brenda Flanagan-Davies is a 42-year-old woman who weighs 42 stone. She receives £300 per week benefits - and her careers cost taxpayers an extra £400 per week. Aged eight she weighed seven stone - the average weight of a 13-year-old. All her clothes are bought from a specialist store for the morbidly obese.
Most days, she barely leaves her bed, eking out her hours watching television amid piles of clutter, playing on her laptop and, of course, consuming the chocolate bars and pop that make up the lion’s share of her 6,000 calorie-a-day diet.
How, you wonder, can anyone live like this, day in day out?
Like many people, Brenda Flanagan-Davies put on weight over Christmas. ‘Piled it on,’ is how she puts it. ‘I’m not proud of it. It’s just a fact.’ This is a common enough phenomenon, however, there is nothing commonplace about 42-year-old Brenda’s circumstances, given that as 2011 drew to a close she was already tipping the scales at close to 40st.
As Brenda puts it: ‘I do want to change, I want to have a normal life, but at the same time it scares me. My weight is my shield against the world. It’s who I am. Take it away and what do I have left?’ Lying on her specially-reinforced bed, surrounded by discarded chocolate wrappers and empty bottles of fizzy drinks, even Brenda seems to struggle to comprehend how she arrived here.
‘I’m not blaming anyone else for this, it’s my doing and I take responsibility,
’ she says. ‘I don’t like what I see in the mirror — in fact, I don’t look in the mirror. But I can’t really explain why it’s happened.’
She cannot even have gastric band surgery to help her lose weight, because she would never survive the anesthetic.
It is both heartbreaking and repellent in equal measure: even the flintiest heart must muster some pity for someone who has lost themselves to such an appalling degree.
But it’s also hard not to feel frustration verging on anger at Brenda’s total inability to even try to help herself. ‘I take so much pleasure in chocolate that, when I can’t eat it, I feel like I am being punished and I can’t stand it,’ she says.
‘And I’m scared, too.
I know my weight is stopping me from living my life and it pushes people away, but part of me is too scared to change. It’s hard to think about facing the world again.’ Asked whether she can ever see a life with normal mobility, her reply is honest. ‘Not at the minute,’ she says. ‘I can hope for it, but it seems very far away.’
And somehow, this self-knowledge makes her story all the more pathetic and deeply depressing.
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