And Jessica Simpson thinks she has weight issues.
Donna Simpson, a 42-year-old mom from New Jersey, already holds the Guinness World Record as the world's biggest mother. She was a whopping 520 pounds when she gave birth to daughter Jacqueline three years ago, becoming the largest woman to give birth.
Now, clearly there's a difference between someone genetically predisposed to being large, as opposed to someone willfully eating herself toward the title of heaviest woman alive. Which is exactly what Donna Simpson is doing, with a target of 1,000 pounds.
Breaking the rules
This alone tells us Donna Simpson has a big problem. I'm no shrink — which is what Donna Simpson needs, someone who can shrink her — but I think it's painfully obvious this woman has psychological problems.
First piece of evidence: I've never heard of a woman — of any size, on any planet — allowing someone to even mention a scale after she just gave birth. It would be like painting a target on your chest and handing a machine gun to a homicidal maniac.
Then, to make the case even stronger, she went public with how much she weighed. Just to test whether this is strange or not, I went to the delivery area of a hospital and asked five new mothers how much they weighed. The first four either hit me, threw something at me or tried strangling me. Luckily I was prepared with the asbestos
shield when the fifth woman took out the flamethrower.
Four-figured dream
I'll say this for Simpson, she at least has goals. Currently she weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 pounds — and is making a run at the big one: a thousands pounds.
According to the folks at
worldsbiggest.com — and really, they should know — Carol Ann Yager weighed around 1,200 pounds when she died in 1994 at age 34 of natural causes. She had breathing difficulty, dangerously high blood sugar, cellulitis, and massive organ failure. Her muscles had atrophied and, in medical terminology, you could say she was a complete mess.
To be fair, Yager still holds another record — most weight lost without surgical means, with 521. And hers was a tragic life and a sad ending, especially since she traced her eating disorder to childhood sexual abuse.
Which brings us to Donna Simpson, who wears size XXXXXXXL dresses, eats whole cakes and bags of doughnuts and tries to move as little as possible. She was quoted in the London's "Telegraph" as saying "I'd love to be 1,000 pounds. It might be hard, though. Running after my daughter keeps my weight down."
I can't imagine, at 600 pounds, there's much running involved.
Not much future in it
People can make their own choices about their bodies, to a certain degree. But Simpson may not make it to see her daughter turn 5, not to mention see her older son — now 14 — grow up. I think she's missing the point about being a parent. To have legitimate weight issues is one thing. But what she's doing is like smoking 10 packs a day to set some sort of lung cancer record. Which I don't think they have, but that's not the point.
To fund her family — and her quest to reach 1,000 pounds — Simpson runs her own Web site where people pay to watch her eat, or see her wash her huge body. The cash helps fund the family's $750 a week bill for food, which Simpson shops for in the mobility scooter she uses, despite telling the paper that's she's "healthy."
"My favorite food is sushi, but unlike others I can sit and eat 70 big pieces of sushi in one go," she said. "I do love cakes and sweet things, doughnuts are my favorite."
Sadly, probably not for long.