This thread got me interested in watching the show and I've watched quite a few episodes on Hulu over the past few months. I actually find it really, really sad that these people have no idea what a healthy diet really is. Deep fried chicken is healthy because chicken is healthy, orange juice is healthy and doesn't count as consuming sugar, etc. You can also see that they have been raised to eat incredibly unhealthy foods by their family members, all of whom are usually quite large themselves, if not 600 pounds. It hurts my heart when I see the patient trying to stick to their healthy diet, but then still going through the McDonald's drive thru because "my kids still have to eat." It is easy to see why the childhood obesity epidemic is so bad.
I don't think I updated this thread after my mom came to stay with me a few months ago. She had gastric bypass surgery 2 years ago and she is a skeleton now. She still hasn't stopped losing weight and she has become unhealthy in the other extreme. One day when she was here I kept track she only ate 500 calories, and they were all empty calories devoid of any nutrition. I tried talking to her about healthy eating and how to eat healthy and she still doesn't get it. With her "healthy diet" she is allowed to eat <10g of sugar at one sitting - so she will honestly sit down and eat 5 sour patch candies as one meal. Because each individual candy has 2g of sugar, she can have 5 and stay under her limit, SO SHE THINKS IT IS A HEALTHY MEAL. At each of the *actually healthy* meals I cooked she took no more than 2 bites and said that is all her stomach can hold. At one meal she actually threw up afterward and said I must have put in things she can't have; that isn't true and I actually looked up the dietary guidelines following gastric bypass when I made our meal plan. I even substituted quinoa in place of rice because quinoa was on her "highly encouraged to eat" list - she had no idea what it was. She would rather eat a slim jim for her meal - it has protein!
At one point I got really frustrated and almost lost my temper. Instead of the meal I cooked she ate those processed cheese and peanut butter cracker sandwich things instead. I made a comment about how that wasn't a healthy meal and it didn't have any nutrients. She got really irritated and said it was on her list of approved foods so she can eat it. I told her it might be on the list of approved foods, but it doesn't mean that it should be the only thing she eats for a meal! It also doesn't mean that it is "healthy" and it certainly isn't healthier than eating a balanced meal. It just means it is something her stomach could process when she started solids again after her surgery. I've found that she completely has blinders on - she looks at the list of foods they gave her and sees 3-4 processed, packaged items that she recognizes and wants to eat, and sticks with those and completely ignores the 100 other healthy raw foods on that list that are full of nutrients. On her first day here she tried saying she couldn't eat what I cooked because it didn't have a label and she doesn't eat anything without a label to check the sugar content and calories. She made it sound like it was a really good thing and she said before her surgery she had never looked at a label in her life, and now she is so good and checks every label. I pointed out to her that we try to only buy things that don't have labels, because if it has a label it probably isn't healthy. She didn't like that comment at all.