My father hates me because I'm fat: 219kg Singapore woman

[The_King]

SINGAPORE - She pulls out from her wallet a laminated photo of a young girl with long hair in a bright sundress, smiling sweetly at the camera.

In the same photo is her beaming father, who has his right arm around her as they are about to blow the candles out on a birthday cake that she had made for him.

It's a photo that this 30-year-old woman, who asks to go by her Chinese name Huiru, holds close to her heart. The person sitting in front of me looks nothing like that girl.

 

Huiru says in a mix of English and Mandarin: "I think I weighed like 50kg in that photo."

At her lightest, she was 50kg. Her heaviest? 302kg. She says without emotion at my stunned silence: "I can hear the silent gasp of shock. It's okay. I'm used to it." Huiru weighs 219kg now.

She is bravely telling us her story after The New Paper on Sunday went looking for people who can speak about being obese after this week's headlines about a 200kg woman who died in her sleep. Seven men were needed to remove her body from her home.

 

But she is also speaking to TNPS against her father's wishes, so she asks that we do not use her full name.

Her businessman father, she says, is so ashamed of his only child that he wanted to send her off to the UK in 2010.

"My mum and I cried and pleaded. I begged, then mum quarrelled with daddy and even threatened to kill herself before he finally relented and changed his mind," Huiru recalls with an unconscious shudder.

Her father confirms his earlier decision on the phone with us, but declines to "discuss the issue".

 

"I don't see why anyone should be interested in our child's weight or lifestyle," he says to me. The line is then abruptly cut.

Yet, Huiru wants to share her story so that people realise that it can be a hard existence, physically and emotionally. And that it hurts.

She says, though, that she can "fully understand" how her father feels because "I am such a disgrace. I feel like a giant - when I walk, you don't hear footsteps but loud thumps."

She still remembers Christmas Eve, 2009. Says Huiru: "I think my parents and I were just deluding ourselves and so, we didn't confront the truth about the weight I had put on until that night."

 

At the party, she was mingling with guests when she heard a remark: "Who's that elephant?"

"The person was clearly talking about me and I could see daddy's face turn red with anger," she recounts.

"He was so disgusted and embarrassed that he sent me an SMS, 'Retire to your room please until the party is over. Please. Just disappear. Now.' He refused to even look in my direction."

As much as it hurt her, Huiru did as she was told. "He was definitely more hurt than I was," she says quietly.

She knows when she started putting on weight - in junior college, after she was dumped by the boy she'd been dating for four years.

Nursing a broken heart, she sought solace in eating.

 

"It was comfort eating. I gorged on tubs and tubs of ice cream. The sweetness and cold brought relief to the burning pain in my heart," she says.

"Chocolates, as you know, also makes people happy and relaxed."

At first, Huiru wasn't bothered by the fact that she had started to put on weight, even though she had gone up one size for her tops and her waist went from 24 to 27 inches.

It took another year before it spiralled totally out of control - when she bumped into her ex-boyfriend with another girl.

She says: "I was devastated."

Huiru returned to an almost empty home - her parents were overseas - and cried herself hoarse.

By the time she had calmed down, she realised she was hungry and asked the maid to order two buckets of fried chicken - 30 pieces in all - which she downed at one go.

"My maid was so shocked, she kept asking if I was okay, and I could not even answer her because my mouth was filled with chicken," Huiru says.

One hour later, she drove out and found herself inside a prata shop, where she cleaned up three pieces of egg and two pieces of cheese pratas. Plus two mugs of Milo dinosaur.

"I felt so stuffed and sick, like I was going to puke. I drove home and headed straight for the toilet," she says. But try as she did, she just could not throw up.

 

"I felt sick, nauseous. I even put all my fingers into my mouth but it didn't work. In the end, I sat on the bathroom floor and wailed like a helpless idiot."

From a svelte 50kg on a 1.57cm frame, Huiru went to 90kg and then over 100kg, and "it just went up and up".

"I refused to step on a scale for a long time after that," she says.

She recounts how she was shocked when she first tipped the bathroom scale at 90kg.

"I thought maybe the scale was out of order. I actually drove out to Tangs and bought a new one," she says. "I went home, stepped on it and thought, 'S*** man, I am in trouble.'"

It was about three months to her 21st birthday.

Her mother says in Mandarin: "One of the biggest mistakes Huiru's father and I made was not to get help for her immediately. We ignored it, thinking it'd be a matter of time before she recovers on her own."

Huiru still remembers how she "just could not find the energy to do anything".

"And as my weight climbed, I shrunk further and further into the comfort and safety of my room," she says.

"I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything. I practically lived inside my room, or rather, on my bed. I spent almost 24 hours of each day on it - sleeping, eating, watching TV, surfing the Internet and Facebook, all on my king-sized bed. The only time I got up was to shower or use the toilet."

She says with a sheepish grin: "Anything else, I'd call for the maid."

 

Her appetite also grew. Huiru was eating every two hours - each time, it was a full meal for an average person.

Says Huiru: "I no longer knew what it was like to feel full."

For critics who may ask why she didn't do anything, she shows me a thick folder of all the packages with leading slimming and beauty centres in Singapore that she had signed up for. None worked.

She admits: "I'd go one or two times and I'd feel it was too tough and give up. Most (of the centres) had diet plans - which they called nutrition guides - but I lacked the discipline.

"I also had to exercise regularly with certain routines that I had to keep to diligently."

Huiru sighs loudly, then says: "But for all their good intentions, these consultants and therapists didn't understand that it was an effort for me to even get up from my bed and take that few steps to the bathroom to pee.

"It took tremendous effort and I'd feel breathless."

She also found that there were physical consequences when she stopped eating. "I was literally suffering withdrawal symptoms, shaking so badly that I even suffered headaches".

Her clothes are custom-made. A tailor comes to her four-storey home in Bukit Timah to take her measurements.

Two years ago, her father also decided to build a lift so that she could move from the first storey to her room on the second level.

 

She says: "He was so sick of hearing the thumping sounds I made when I walked up and down the steps. He said the sound jarred his ears."

After that Christmas fiasco and her father's threat to send her away, Huiru finally summoned the courage to try and turn her life around three years ago.

She got the help of a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner whom her father hired from China. A dietician also helps plan her menu, cutting down her intake gradually.

She has shed "several tens of kilogrammes" because she eats less now. By less, she means she has only three main meals a day.

Each meal consists of three soup bowls full of rice, taken with either steamed cod fish or salmon, one side dish of vegetables and a bowl of double-boiled herbal soup.

Snacks are now limited to fruits.

She has given up red and white wine for two bottles of mineral water a day, and takes only one cup of black coffee in the morning without sugar.

On Sundays, she allows herself a cup of warm skimmed milk as a treat.

Huiru admits: "Sometimes it's very tough, especially when I crave red meat or even chicken. So I am allowed to have it for one meal once a month."

But she says: "I'm getting better now."

 

According to the World Health Organisation, an estimated 115 million obesity sufferers worldwide develop serious health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke, sleep apnea, hypertension, severe knee and back pain, cancer and metabolic syndrome that may cause sudden, unexplained death.

But Huiru claims that she suffers only from hypertension and osteoarthritis.

She admits that last week's stories on Madam Hong Xiuhua, 47, who was found dead by her husband in their home in Jalan Teck Whye, was sobering. Madam Hong weighed 200kg.

Says Huiru: "When I read about how many people it took to carry her or how they had to custom-make her coffin... well, I pray now that by the time I die, I'd have shed at least half this weight. I also told my mum what she should do if I didn't."

Huiru's mother slaps her daughter's arm gently, then tells me with tears in her eyes: "She told me, don't ever order a coffin because it'd embarrass my husband.

"She told me to find a butcher who can help to cut her body up into several pieces and stuff them into two or three coffins."

Huiru smiles sadly, then assures her mother: "It's okay, because after all, I don't have any friends. No one will come to see me for the last time.

"I don't socialise. The only friends I keep in touch with are through Facebook, where my profile picture is that of me when I was in JC. These friends don't even know that I have grown so big."

She doesn't work for a living, so she has no other social network.

Huiru now measures her success in losing weight through her tailor, who comes every two months now.

 

"The numbers on the weighing scale don't go down so fast or dramatically. But the tailor's measuring tape that goes around my waist and hip matters," she says happily.

Instead of using three measuring tapes joined together, her tailor now only needs two.

She takes pride in being able to get out of the bed to walk down the staircase from her room to the garden, where she spends about an hour strolling.

She says: "But I do this only when my father has left for work, so he does not have to put up with my thumping feet."

Huiru hopes that she will be able to find enough courage to look at her naked self in the mirror one day soon.

"The last time I saw, I really cannot remember when, I nearly wanted to kill myself," she says. The most humiliating part of being big?

She needs help bathing because she can't quite bend down.

As much as it hurts her, Huiru says she is telling her story to show people the torment that overweight people have to go through.

For a girl who once dreamed of a church wedding and being walked down the aisle by her father, she now has only one wish: That the only man she loves in this life - her father - will eventually find it in his heart to give her a big, loving hug.

"That's all I want now. I wish I can be daddy's little princess again."

[The_King]

She have 1 thing I am envy about, her DNA gene is Strong. Eat so much nv have diabetes

I guess that life

[coffeenut]

For 157cm, to get to a manageable 60kg from 219kg is about 140kg of fat, 5-6kg of muscle and 13-15kg of just water weight

 

She can easily drop 1.5-2kg/week under supervision without bariatric surgery or such shit .. and get to where she wants in 1.5 years   But don't want to know how she got to 302kg on a 157cm frame in the first place 

 

 

[Huat Zai]

1 hour ago, coffeenut said:

For 157cm, to get to a manageable 60kg from 219kg is about 140kg of fat, 5-6kg of muscle and 13-15kg of just water weight

 

She can easily drop 1.5-2kg/week under supervision without bariatric surgery or such shit .. and get to where she wants in 1.5 years   But don't want to know how she got to 302kg on a 157cm frame in the first place 

 

 

Depression is living hell.

[sTiCkY]

heng moi ish not fat rike dis biatch

[noobmaster]

sounds like some eating disorder or depression

[zendude]

No pic...but reminds me of the meme

 

https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSFdDpvvR/

[canot_lidat_lah]

Victim/sympathy card all the way

[aaur4man]

if i ever become a a trainer one day, i will love to specially train such fatties