Body Healthy. Soul Happy.

We all know people who look like this. Sure, they’re overweight, but they’re not bed-ridden or even close to the weight of some of the people featured on the Discovery Channel and TLC. Yet wait until you hear their story.

The Chawner family

The Chawners, who live in Blackburn, England receive a monthly stipend that equals a yearly salary of $30,000 American dollars because, “they’re too fat to work.” Philip and his wife Audrey, 57, weigh 336 pounds each. Daughters Emma, 19, and Samantha, 21, weigh in at 236 pounds and 252 pounds, respectively. Audrey Chawner, who has epilepsy and asthma as a result of being overweight, told “Closer” magazine her family’s weight is genetic and they cannot afford to eat healthier. Philip Chawner has Type 2 diabetes and was eligible for gastric band surgery until he developed a heart condition.

“I’m a student and don’t have time to exercise,” Emma Chawner said. “We all want to lose weight to stop the abuse in the street, but we don’t know how.”

“What we get barely covers the bills and puts food on the table,” Philip Chawner, 53, told the The Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper. “It’s not our fault we can’t work. We deserve more.”

This article gulls me on several levels. First of all, no one wants to help people live healthier, eat more nutritiously and feel better about themselves than I do; I’ve dedicated my career to it! I know that our relationship with food is often a very personal one and I absolutely get that changing that relationship can be difficult both physically and emotionally. I myself battled with my weight most of my life.

But, this family is NOT completely unable to work and it’s not fair to place the burden of their care on the shoulders of the tax payers. Moreover, it’s doubly unfair to both the family and the taxpayers to provide the family with money for the rest of their lives and no support or guidance helping them to change their lifestyle and live healthier, productive, enjoyable lives.

Which leads me to the second level on which this article gulls me. Hearing a 19 year old student say that her family doesn’t know how to lose weight simply makes my face turn pink. It’s hard to believe that in this day and age anyone doesn’t know *how* to lose weight. It’s been scientifically proven time and again that to lose weight you need to burn off more calories than you take in. I wholeheartedly agree that losing weight is often difficult and that many people benefit from and even need help, whether in the form of a professional coach, a support group, a nutrition/meal plan, an fitness trainer or exercise buddy and perhaps a physician or any combination thereof, is 110% perfectly understandable and OK. But to say that you simply can’t lose weight because you don’t know how really is absurd.

The third thing in this article that gets my goat is that the family says they can’t afford to eat healthy. Yet look at what they are choosing to purchase at the store. “We have cereal for breakfast, bacon butties for lunch and microwave pies with mashed potato or chips for dinner,” Mrs Chawner told Closer magazine. Purchasing prepackaged foods is at least as expensive as buying fresh fruits and veggies and cooking meals at home. The difference is that it takes considerably more effort to plan and prepare meals than it does to simply pop a high fat, high sodium, high calorie one in the microwave.

What do you think? How fat is too fat to work and should families (or individuals) who are overweight be paid a monthly disability stipend without being taught and assisted in losing the excess pounds?