tee-hee!
Anyway, here’s a news story from our friends in the UK that will cause you to shoot blood from your eyes.
(Quotes from the original article are in bold. )
Say hello to the Chawner family: Samantha, 21 (18 stone), mother Audrey, 57 (24 stone), father
Philip, 53 (ditto), and baby Emma, 19 (17 stone, the same as a newborn elephant). Total: 83 big 'uns.
Now, if I do my conversions correctly (and I do) and 1 stone=14 pounds…
Sweet guinea pig of Winnipeg!
Combined, the Chawner family weighs in at ELEVEN HUNDRED SIXTY-TWO F**KING POUNDS!
Yup, they’re fat. Disgustingly fat. But that’s not the only reason we were encouraged to laugh and point at the Chawners last week. This fatty family is also on supersize benefits: housing, unemployment, disability – you name it, they get it. The Chawners are all permanently latched on to the teat of the state and guzzling to the tune of £22,508 a year.
11 hundred pounds and not 1 neck amongst the four of ‘em.
And yeah, if all they are getting is 40K a year for four people, I can see how it'd be hard to buy enough food to cram down their vast, Sarlaac-like gullets.
Philip developed weight-related diabetes and gave up his job as a lorry driver. Like Audrey, he hasn’t worked for 11 years. “We love TV,” he said. “It’s on from the moment we get up. Often I’m so tired from watching TV, I have to have a nap.”
Holy shit, I think I just felt part of my brain just give up and die, right there in my head. Let me repeat that for everyone who’s brains didn’t give them instant aneurisms to spare them the stupidity:
Philip is sometimes so tired from watching TV that he has to take a nap. You’re so fat you’ve become diabetic, and can no longer drive a truck, because it’s what, too strenuous?
Audrey disclosed her weekly shop, as if to prove how birdlike they were, although the first item was 18 bags of crisps. “We all love nibbling on biscuits. I once bought some pears, but they tasted funny.”
Yes, you imbecile, they tasted like food. What kind of birds are they? Northern Big-Bellied Sap Suckers? East London Broad Bottomed Buffet-Sparrows? Fat-arsed Budgies?
Although they refuse to diet, the Tele-tubby family still feels hard done by. It’s not their fault they’re so fat, they say; someone else should do something.
“What we get barely covers the bills and puts food on the table,” said Philip, who joins 2,000 other Brits in receiving £84.50 a week because they are too fat to work. “We deserve more.”
Yes, well I imagine getting near 40 thousand dollars to sit on your corpulent backsides and get paid for it is very difficult. I imagine it’s tough to gather enough food in one spot to satiate your Sarlacc-like appetites. I imagine it’s tough to put food on the tale when you’re jamming in your craw so fast it never sees the formica.
Audrey put it best. “It’s not my fault I’m this size. I’d work if I wasn’t disabled,” she said. She didn’t say “hugely fat”. She said “disabled”. And if Audrey is disabled from a recognized medical condition, then who are sizeists like me to judge? People like Audrey know there’s something wrong, that they do not conform to society’s accepted standards.
Yes, it is your fault, Mrs. 18 bags of chips. You did this to yourself. It’s not like some Gene Hunt like tough-guy came round with a tin of shortening and a spoon and forced you to overeat by gunpoint. You did it. Now, there may be psychological reasons you overeat, there usually are. Going on television and claiming it’s not your fault and then expecting a handout however, is repulsive.
Like I said before, I am fat and dangerously so. If this family was asking for help and the UK equivalent of Richard Simmons came swanning in and offered to save their lives, I’d be all for it. However, it seems to me, that the Chawner family does not come across as someone looking for change, unless it’s to have their benefits upped.
Who’s paying for Philip’s diabetes medicines? You can bet it’s not Philip. According to another article the wife gets somewhere along the lines of $600 a month for asthma and epilepsy, caused by her weight. Did I mention the family has been on the dole for ELEVEN YEARS?!?!
From another article:
The family claim to spend £50 a week on food and consume 3,000 calories each a day. The recommended maximum intake is 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men.
"We have cereal for breakfast, bacon butties for lunch and microwave pies with mashed potato or chips for dinner," Mrs Chawner told Closer magazine.
"All that healthy food, like fruit and veg, is too expensive. We're fat because it's in our genes. Our whole family is overweight," she added.
Yeah, you spend only 100 bucks to feed a family of four every week. Maybe it the BACON SANDWICHES and the FRIES and MICROWAVE PIES! Your diet is so bad I’m going to have a stroke!
Emma says she’s a student so there’s no time for exercise. Perhaps shut off the TV, and go out for a walk? She claims they want to lose weight but don’t know how.
Stand up, go outside and walk. Do it again tomorrow. Keep doing it. Yeah, it sucks and you’ll miss bacon, but Jesus, have some pride, people!
Original article below
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rachel_johnson/article5949800.ece
Say hello to the Chawner family: Samantha, 21 (18 stone), mother Audrey, 57 (24 stone), father Philip, 53 (ditto), and baby Emma, 19 (17 stone, the same as a newborn elephant). Total: 83 big ’uns.
Yup, they’re fat. Disgustingly fat. But that’s not the only reason we were encouraged to laugh and point at the Chawners last week. This fatty family is also on supersize benefits: housing, unemployment, disability – you name it, they get it. The Chawners are all permanently latched on to the teat of the state and guzzling to the tune of £22,508 a year.
They made sorry reading. Philip developed weight-related diabetes and gave up his job as a lorry driver. Like Audrey, he hasn’t worked for 11 years. “We love TV,” he said. “It’s on from the moment we get up. Often I’m so tired from watching TV, I have to have a nap.” Audrey disclosed her weekly shop, as if to prove how birdlike they were, although the first item was 18 bags of crisps. “We all love nibbling on biscuits. I once bought some pears, but they tasted funny.”
Although they refuse to diet, the Tele-tubby family still feels hard done by. It’s not their fault they’re so fat, they say; someone else should do something.
“What we get barely covers the bills and puts food on the table,” said Philip, who joins 2,000 other Brits in receiving £84.50 a week because they are too fat to work. “We deserve more.”
I admit that when my appalled gaze rested on the Chawner family, I almost had a heart attack myself. In a week when The Lancet published the findings of the biggest survey on obesity, which showed that being quite fat (up to the size of the BBC DJ Chris Moyles) shortens your life by three years, and being vastly fat (the size of a hippo) takes 10 years off your life, the Chawners really did seem to be the poster family for everything that we didn’t want to be as a nation.
Putting the fattist prejudices to a side for a moment, before you rush to “fatty-bait” – the practice of shaming fatsos into losing weight – consider, please, the Chawners’ case from the other side of the elasticated waistband.
Audrey put it best. “It’s not my fault I’m this size. I’d work if I wasn’t disabled,” she said. She didn’t say “hugely fat”. She said “disabled”. And if Audrey is disabled from a recognised medical condition, then who are sizeists like me to judge? People like Audrey know there’s something wrong, that they do not conform to society’s accepted standards.
And, as it turns out, the Chawners and their ilk do have a case to make, and here it is. Susan Ringwood, chief executive of Beat, the eating disorders charity, says those who overeat are, in many cases, as worthy of concern as those who undereat, but for obvious reasons don’t get as much attention as skeletal teenage girls who look almost like size-zero models.
“Overeaters know they are unhealthy. They know about their five a day but it’s no easier for them to make the long-term lifestyle changes to their diet than it is for anorexics,” she says. She also points out that when it comes to the spectrum of eating disorders, those who don’t eat, the anorexics, constitute only 10% – the tip of the iceberg. Most eat too much.
In the US they are way ahead of us. There, obesity has achieved the status of a “disease” even though it is caused by a combination of voluntary and involuntary factors: genes, sedentary lifestyles in the suburbs, the McDiet and an inability for various reasons to lose weight through exercise.
Stateside, the long-term effects and costs of what is regarded as the – sorry – ballooning obesity “epidemic” is the hottest issue in public health. Here, too, where two-thirds of us are carrying too many pounds of adipose tissue, we are beginning to wake up; the word “pandemic” has been applied to the nation’s thickening waistline by Brio, the Bristol University Research Into Obesity.
Dr James Le Fanu, the medical historian and GP, is one clinician who challenges the orthodoxy that chubsters have only themselves to blame. He thinks the cause of obesity is “not known”. He’s seen women on restricted diets failing to lose a single pound. His guess is that we all have thermostats, which govern our “energy balance” – how much weight we lose or gain relative to what we put in our mouths. He also believes that fatness runs in families, from observing this in his surgery.
This is the essence of the Chawner case, too. “We’re fat because it’s in our genes. Our whole family is overweight. Even when Philip went into hospital with septicaemia in 2006 he didn’t lose any weight. And he was eating tiny portions.”
Right, then. Fair enough. I am prepared to concede that being fat or being thin is partly in our DNA. But come on – it’s also a matter of choice, habit, lifestyle. It’s like smoking, drinking, sun-bathing – you can choose to gorge. Only, unlike smoking, which is in decline, more and more of us are “choosing” to be fat, or allowing our children to get fat, and that’s not good for any of us.
According to some estimates, obesity could cost the NHS in England £6.3 billion by 2015 unless the flab is fought. Some councils are having to shell out thousands of pounds on fat-friendly services, such as wider crematorium furnaces and bigger school chairs.
Whatever obesity’s cause, and however sympathetic we may or may not be, it doesn’t matter. Obesity is a national emergency. It is, yes, the new smoking. Rather than see them like animals in the zoo, we should commend the Chawner family freak show for displaying their bulk. They have drawn our horrified eyes to a health crisis that concerns us all.
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