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I know you Europeans are infinitely fascinated by the legions of morbidly obese Americans. You put them on television, you make fun of them, and you generally prattle on about them to no end. But I think, deep down, you wish you had more super-heavyweights in your own countries. Well, let me put you at ease - if you've seen one 1000-pound person, you've seen 'em all. They look alike! The grotesquely swollen cheeks, the cute little mouth and chin seemingly about to be submerged in lard - it looks identical on all of them.
Doctors Treat Nebraskan Who Weighed 1,072 [pounds] [CNN via Netscape]
What are these "pounds" of which you speak?
(For people who use a grown-up measure of mass, the man weighed just over 487 kilos, and for those of us who use an even more benighted metric for human weight, it's 76 stone.)
Posted by: Aidan Kehoe on August 23, 2004 08:52 AM"A group known as the League of Human Dignity helped arrange for Deuel to be driven to a local livestock scale, where he could be weighed."
Sniff, that's so beautiful...
Posted by: Simon on August 23, 2004 10:16 AMI've found that eating less always seems to solve obesity problems in people.
Posted by: Stefan Geens on August 23, 2004 11:50 AMYeah, my favorite part was this:
"I got scared because I couldn't help him anymore, and I didn't know who would help him," said his wife, Edith.He sure as heck wasn't cooking for himself, darlin'. Maybe if you'd switched him over to the sugar-free soda? Cut him down to ONE Stouffer's Hearty Man Dinner per night? There's got to be a dual problem there - she probably likes to feed just as much as he likes to eat.
This comes right on the heels of a 5', 500-pound woman who died after she became fused to the fabric of her couch.
Posted by: Sterling on August 23, 2004 06:08 PMWasn't there also a case of a woman who, feeling intense irritation in her side or back, but unable to see what is was on account of the fat, took herself off to hospital where the docs found a doughnut or some such that had got stuck in the folds of flab months before?
Posted by: murray on August 23, 2004 08:07 PMMurray - I think that happens all the time. A friend of mine is just about to finish residency, but when he was first doing orderly work, after his first year of med school, an incredibly obese woman came in complaining of agonizing pain in her side. A topical inspection revealed nothing, so she was then X-rayed. Nothing immediately popped out at the doctor examining the X-ray, but someone else noticed a perfectly rectangular black spot just on the very edge of the image. Turned out it was the profile of a coin, which was trapped in the crease beneath a roll of fat. They removed it, put some balm on the sore, and she was fine. (Though still 450 pounds.)
Posted by: Sterling on August 23, 2004 10:25 PM![Doctors Treat Nebraskan Who Weighed 1,072 [pounds]](http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/story.jsp?photoid=/cp/news/top/i/half_ton_man135.jpg&floc=FF-APO-PLS&idq=/ff/story/0001/20040811/1007957830.htm){kind=link}