By the age of 24, Amber Rachdi of Troutdale, Oregon, was more than just overweight. She had had a problematic relationship to food for years and now weighed more than 650 lbs. She couldn’t walk without help, much less prepare her own food, drive, or exercise. She lived with her parents and her boyfriend Rowdy and had long stopped going outside, not wanting to be seen at her current size. But it was clear that she couldn’t go on like this.
On the rare occasions that she and Rowdy would go grocery shopping together, she would have to ride in a mobility scooter. Rowdy didn’t generally object to her weight but she had gotten too heavy for them to be intimate and he began to be frustrated too. The weight affected her daily life, with infections between folds of skin that she could only clean with a long-handled brush.
But then Amber decided to do something drastic: she signed up to be on the TV show “My 600 lb Life” to try to get her situation under control with the help of a television audience.
At the time she was eating four or five gigantic meals per day, plus sweets and desserts. It was as much a psycho-emotional problem as it was a physical one. Her parents and Rowdy helped
