Eating herself to death: The 42stone 42-year-old woman who costs taxpayers £700 per week and needs a team of carers to look after her



Brenda Flanagan-Davies receives £300 per week benefits - and her carers cost an extra £400

Aged eight she weighed seven stone - the average weight of a 13-year-old

All her clothes are bought from a specialist store for the morbidly obese

She can't have gastric band op because she wouldn't survive the anesthetic

Like many people, Brenda Flanagan-Davies put on weight over Christmas. ‘Piled it on,’ is how she puts it. ‘I’m not proud of it. It’s just a fact.’

It’s a common enough phenomenon, except there is nothing commonplace about 42-year-old Brenda’s circumstances, given that as 2011 drew to a close she was already tipping the scales at close to 40st.

Two months later, she no longer knows what she weighs, except that today the figure probably corresponds — at least — to a stone for every year of her life.

Huge meals: Brenda's daily menu includes a large pizza, chips, six bottles of fizzy drink and up to nine bars of chocolate

It’s a barely fathomable number, and one which now affords Brenda the dubious distinction of being Britain’s fattest woman.

It’s a title previously held by Sharon Mevsimler, who weighed in at 45st before her death two years ago of a heart attack, aged 41. She had, effectively, eaten herself to death.

So now we have Brenda, a year older, but weighing much the same and heading the same way — an extreme case even in a country battling growing levels of obesity.

Brenda’s weight is so limiting that she has not been outside her overheated two-bedroomed bungalow home in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, for four years, and she requires a team of carers seven days a week to help her with basic functions such as washing and eating.

Most days, she barely leaves her bed, eking out her hours watching television amid piles of clutter, playing on her laptop and, of course, consuming the chocolate bars and pop that make up the lion’s share of her 6,000 calorie-a-day diet.

With its commode, safety rail and buzzers to call for help, her bungalow looks as if it has been equipped for a frail pensioner, not a woman who should be in the prime of her life.

It is a profoundly depressing situation — not least if you are a taxpayer and therefore footing the bill for Brenda’s care. She receives £300 in weekly benefits and it costs her local council an additional £400 a week to fund the twice-daily visits by her carers.

But Brenda’s plight is also highly distressing, and baffling too.

How, you wonder, can anyone live like this, day in day out? How can things have got this far? How can Brenda not want to change?

The answers to these questions can probably be found in her blighted childhood, together with her ability to luxuriate too readily in self-denial and weakness.

As Brenda puts it: ‘I do want to change, I want to have a normal life, but at the same time it scares me. My weight is my shield against the world. It’s who I am. Take it away and what do I have left?’

What a terrible question for anyone to ask — and what a terrible situation she now finds herself in. Lying on her specially-reinforced bed, surrounded by discarded chocolate wrappers and empty bottles of fizzy drinks, even Brenda seems to struggle to comprehend how she arrived here.

Big Brenda: She tips the scales at 40st and has not left her house for four years. But Brenda is addicted to food and eats more than 6,000 calories of food each day

‘I’m not blaming anyone else for this, it’s my doing and I take responsibility,’ she says. ‘I don’t like what I see in the mirror — in fact, I don’t look in the mirror. But I can’t really explain why it’s happened.’

The clue, one suspects, seems to lie in her childhood, an unhappy affair which saw Brenda placed in a children’s home between the ages of three and ten.

The youngest of four children born in Edinburgh to Margaret, a hospital cleaner, and Joe, a bus driver, her move into care came following her parents’ divorce which left her mother unable to cope.

Brenda claims to remember little of that undoubtedly traumatic time, although it’s clear that this unhappy little girl was comfort-eating at a very young age: by the time she was eight she weighed 7st — the average for a 13-year-old. ‘The little pocket money I got, I spent on bags of sweets,’ she recalls. ‘I didn’t like sport and didn’t do anything active.’

Although she dimly recalls being taken to see a specialist, nothing seems to have been done about her burgeoning weight. Meanwhile, she was already being called the names which have followed her ever since: ‘Fatty’ and ‘Big Brenda’.

At ten, she returned home to the house her mother by then shared with her stepfather — a man who, Brenda says, abused her as a teenager. She does not want to go into details, but says her weight was her armour against him. ‘Part of me thought if I kept getting fatter he’d leave me alone,’ she says. ‘I was too scared to talk to anyone about it.’

Small meal: Brenda was overweight as a child and saw her size balloon in her 20s as she turned to comfort eating

Instead, she kept on eating and, as her teenage years ticked past, Brenda’s weight continued on an upward curve.

By the time she was 18 — a period when most young women are acutely body-conscious and pursuing romantic relationships — she was a size 20 and 20st.

There were no boyfriends, although there was, briefly, a job when she left school — a stint on the shopfloor at a nationwide clothes store, where she was already so much bigger than the other assistants that her uniform had to be specially made.

She lasted a couple of years before handing in her notice because she was unable to cope with standing all day long.

The rest of her 20s, from what she can recall — and she has, she says, blanked out a lot — were spent largely alone in a forlorn bedsit. ‘It was a lonely time,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have any money and only a few friends and I didn’t really see my family.

‘I didn’t go out much and when I did I was on my own. I couldn’t see any way through my problems and used food as comfort.’

And, of course, it was a certain kind of ‘food’, in the form of gallons of fizzy drinks and mountains of chocolate bars. Save for a brief three-month stint behind the counter of a fast food restaurant, she has not worked for more than 20 years.

40 stone: During one trip out with her husband Ronnie, Brenda's weight broke the suspension on the vehicle

And so, by her early 30s, Brenda was nudging 30st, and had been diagnosed with depression — inevitable, you might think, for someone who was already effectively housebound.

Perhaps something could — should — have been done before, but as the millennium dawned, doctors were sufficiently concerned about Brenda’s physical and mental state to admit her to hospital for a few months. Here at least, you might think, it would be easier to control her diet. Not so. While doctors put her on appetite suppressants and instructed nurses to give her a healthy diet, Brenda, in her own words, was ‘having none of it’.

‘I could still get to the hospital shop, so even if they gave me salad, I would just go and buy my chocolate and pop,’ she says.

Diet drugs were not a success, either. On one occasion, Brenda lost four stone over a period of two months but then declined to take any more medication.

‘There were terrible side-effects, so I came off it,’ she recalls. ‘When I did stop taking the pills, I put twice as much weight back on again.’

She left hospital the same weight she’d been when she went in, warnings about the dire consequences of weight gain ringing in her ears. But, ever since, her weight has only gone one way — upwards — at a rate of almost a stone a year.

Reinforced bed: Brenda spends her life in her bedroom - with a fridge full of snacks at her side. She spends a lot of time watching the television and has never even been in the living room

It’s astonishing, then, to learn that against this backdrop Brenda has found love. Two years ago, in January 2010, she married Ronnie Davies, a 65-year-old retired labourer who also struggles with ill health.

Brenda had known him for several years, but six years ago their relationship shifted from platonic to romantic after she made it clear she had deeper feelings for him.

‘Ronnie was able to see past the fat to the person I am,’ she says. ‘He has expressed concerns over my weight but he also loves me for who I am.’

Ronnie certainly crashed up against the restrictions of their life as a couple early on: even their courtship outings, such as they were, were brought to an abrupt halt because of Brenda’s size.

‘He used to take me out in his car, but eventually he wasn’t able to turn the steering wheel or change gear because my flab was in the way,’ she admits.

Indeed, Brenda’s weight even dictated the venue for their wedding. Unable to leave her bungalow, the ceremony took place in her living room conducted by a registrar from Gateshead Civic Centre.

Instead of the white dress she had once dreamed of, Brenda was clad in black trousers and a smock, purchased online, as are all her clothes, from a specialist store for the morbidly obese.

At the moment Ronnie — who at 13st is less than a third of his wife’s weight — still does not share Brenda’s home full-time, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

‘He needs to sort his own flat out and that’s taking time,’ is all Brenda can say on the subject.

Even when he does move in fully, Brenda will still require state-funded day care, as Ronnie is unable to cope single-handed. And so, twice a day, the council-provided carers have the task of helping Brenda to the loo, changing her bed sheets and clothes, and washing her down, including giving her a ‘deep crease clean’ on her bed to tackle bedsores.

It is the carers who also prepare Brenda’s meals, which on paper seem modest enough.

Breakfast is yoghurt with two slices of toast, lunch is bread and cheese, dinner is steak.

Obese: In six years Brenda's weight has ballooned by 11 stone and she has never even been into her own living room because she is too big

That, however, is not the full story, for in the fridge next to Brenda’s bed is the rest of what she eats —stacks of chocolate bars and bottles of fizzy drinks. She confesses to eating at least ten bars a day, although I suspect she eats many more, and ‘litres’ of Irn Bru and cola. ‘But it’s the diet kind,’ she says. Given that she can’t leave the house, I wonder how she gets her hands on it all.

The answer is simple: she orders it over the internet from her local supermarket, which then delivers to her door and even brings it inside. ‘I order it myself as the carers can’t be seen to get it for me,’ she says.

Indeed they can’t, but nor can they stop her eating it, despite the damage they know is being inflicted. ‘I know the chocolate and sweets and pop are the problem,’ she says simply. ‘But I just can’t stop eating them. I crave them. I’m addicted. I’m my own worst enemy. I know it’s killing me but I just can’t stop.’

Certainly the health effects are dire. Although she has — amazingly — so far managed to avoid diabetes, Brenda has knee pain, arm pain, bedsores and relies on an armoury of medication to get her through the day.

She cannot even have gastric band surgery to help her lose weight, because she would never survive the anaesthetic. It is both heartbreaking and repellent in equal measure: even the flintiest heart must muster some pity for someone who has lost themselves to such an appalling degree.

But it’s also hard not to feel frustration verging on anger at Brenda’s total inability to even try to help herself.

‘I take so much pleasure in chocolate that, when I can’t eat it, I feel like I am being punished and I can’t stand it,’ she says.

‘And I’m scared, too. I know my weight is stopping me from living my life and it pushes people away, but part of me is too scared to change. It’s hard to think about facing the world again.’

I ask whether she can ever see a life with normal mobility, and her reply is honest.

‘Not at the minute,’ she says. ‘I can hope for it, but it seems very far away.’

And somehow, this self-knowledge makes her story all the more pathetic and deeply depressing.