Posted by I’m watching this one again, and picking up on things I didn’t get the first time.
I should say watching—because the first time I spent most of the time listening on audio only while I was doing mundane computer tasks. Usually that works for this show because I’ve seen this show so much that the visual material gets repetitive. Dr Now and his strip-mall clinic look the same every show. The hospital and the therapists offices are the same. The patient’s apartments when they stay in Houston are the same. The fast food joints on the journey down the Houston are the same.
It’s no longer a visual shock to see this level of obesity so graphically displayed. While I do notice how certain aspects of super-morbid obesity are rendered in different patients—skin infections, lymphedema nodes, being confined to wheelchairs and beds—they are no longer titillating to me. So I feel I am now more interested in the human struggles these folks are dealing with. And I do enjoy the victories many of them have in the end.
So when I write these reviews, I’ll focus on those aspects and leave the circus freak-show stuff for the viewer to watch—unless I think it ties into the salient aspects, or I think it’s funny for some reason.
So Lindsey (Hills, IA, near Iowa City) actually finished the show in good shape. She did struggle throughout the first few months under Dr Now’s care, but she made some smart moves that got her finally going in the right direction.
Lindsey developed her food addiction as a child, when she learned bad eating habits from her dad. Her dad abandoned the family when she was about 10, and he later stole her truck and betrayed her trust in other ways. Dating a chubby chaser made things worse.
She grew into the 500s before getting a sleeve gastrectomy, which brought her down into the low 300s before ascending again. But when she was down, she met her future husband Paul online. Paul was a recovering alcoholic and has many of the issues that come with that, but he did—and does—love Lindsey very much.
Under Dr Now’s care, Lindsey screwed around instead of strictly following the diet. To Paul’s credit, he tried hard not to give in to her demands to eat snacks. There’s a scene where he throws some snacks at her and dares her to “eat death!” Then he walked off and broke into tears. He’s an emotional guy—kinda whiny, but still he fought against enabling her.
She went in for her first follow up and naturally lost way less than she should have. Dr Now gave her another goal and she went back home. What happened next was to me the most interesting part of this episode—some major events that in the end got her moving forward properly.
Still struggling with the diet, Lindsey decided to implement limited “cheat meals” in her regimen, and thought she could get away with it. (Whenever patients on this show talk about “cheating” or “moderation” or the like, you know there’s trouble coming. It’s never an extra vegetable or slice of bread or 3 ounces of meat or something like that. At least at the subsequent appointment, when she logged less than 20 pounds of weight loss, she confesses to Dr Now that she was consuming danish and coffee drinks!)
Meanwhile, figuring her bariatric surgery approval was a certainty, Lindsey started planning for her move to Houston. Paul didn’t want to commit to the move, so she searched online and found a woman named Irene who had had bariatric surgery previously and who had a room to rent to her. By moving in, Lindsey would also enjoy support from someone who went through the same ordeal as she.I
Irene even accompanied Lindsey to the follow up appointment with Dr Now—who told her there was no point in moving to Houston if she would not properly commit to the diet regimen. Lindsey was told to request another appointment within 4 months—but only if she could show a drop of 35 pounds for every month between that appointment and this one.
At first, Lindsey wanted to throw in the towel and go back to Iowa—but Paul, who had figured Lindsey was moving to Houston for a year, rented space out to someone for extra money. So Lindsey was forced to move in with Irene and work on her weight loss.
It turned out to be fortuitous: Irene proved to be the support she desperately needed. Lindsey lost sufficiently enough weight to earn a revision on her sleeve gastrectomy, and when the show ended she was about to go into therapy to deal with the underlying psychological causes for her overeating.
People do need proper support for this! Paul did the best he could—but he appeared to be handicapped by his own struggles as a recovering alcoholic. Without Irene, it is unlikely she would have gotten as far as she had.
I really liked this episode. I hope Lindsey is continuing to do well. For the Where Are They Now episode, we’ll see if she met with Lola Clay or Dr Paradise for her therapy.
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A word about direction.
I mentioned before I often just listen to the shows on audio via TLC Go, and I pick up most of the relevant content without seeing what’s going on. (A notable exception is when a black screen message pops up and there’s nothing but background music in the audio, and I have to stop and rewind to figure out what’s going on in the current segment—usually somebody had a medical emergency and I have to read that to make sense of what everyone is now talking about.)
One thing I do miss is the bizarre way that the “backstory” sub-segments are directed. This is typically in the middle of the introductory segment of the show. The intro segment, of course, is the one in which the patient is introduced to us waking up in his or her home, struggling to get out of bed (if they can), using the restroom and trying to clean themselves (if they can), dressing themselves (if they can), moving to the main part of the house to begin feasting, and interacting with the other people they live with.
The backstory usually takes a few minutes and is fully narrated by the patient. We hear a lot about trauma of some sort or another, and the phrase “By the time I was ____ years old I had gotten up to ____” is repeated several times.
The fascinating part to me is what is being displayed on the screen. The director keeps switching between the following three visuals:
- Still images of family photos
- The patient doing the narrating (they are always sitting, with the camera at a low angle at their feet, so their legs/stomach/lymphedema nodes fill up most of my 60-inch screen and their heads looking tiny in the background)
- The patient preparing or eating food, sometime with family and sometimes alone—this is particularly jarring if they are talking about some incident of molestation or violence that they have been using food to cope with
In Lindsey’s case, she is preparing baby-back ribs with dry rub, wrapping them in plastic, and putting them in a Hamilton Beach slow-cooker! It happened to be the same model I own. Looks like at least some of the stuff she ate is really good!
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Coming soon: a review of James King and his common-law wife Lisa, formerly of Paducah, KY. I will try my best to see the good in these people. It might prove too tough, however.
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