Meet World's Fattest Woman Donna Simson
Meet World's Fattest Woman Donna Simson...
The super-sized 43stone mother who is determined to become the world's fattest woman
Donna Simpson already weighs 43stone, (One stone is 14 pounds or 6.35 kilos)
but she is determined to nearly double her size to become the
world's fattest woman.
The 42-year-old from New Jersey, U.S, is set on reaching the 1,000lb mark
(71st) in just two years. Remarkably she insists she is healthy,
despite now needing a mobility scooter when she goes shopping.
01.jpgDonna Simpson already weighs 43 stone but is consuming an astonishing
12,000 calories a day in a quest to become the world's fattest woman
'My favourite 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 favourite.
Donna, who wears XXXXXXXL dresses, eats mounds of junk food and tries to
move as little as possible.
Ms Simpson already holds the Guinness World Record as the world's fattest mother,
when she gave birth in 2007 weighing 38stone.
She needed a team of 30 medics to deliver her daughter Jacqueline during
a high-risk Caesarean birth.
Yet although she can only move 20ft before needing to sit down, she wants
to be even bigger. 'I'd love to be 1,000lb,' she said.
'It might be hard though. Running after my daughter keeps my weight down.'
Ms Simpson can no longer walk more than 20ft before needing to sit down.
She goes to the shops in a mobility scooter
You might expect her long-term partner Philippe, 49, to advise her to
slim down, but instead he encourages her to eat more.
He met Donna on a dating site for plus-size people and is a self-confessed
fat admirer, although he himself only weighs 150lbs.
'I think he'd like it if I was bigger,' said Donna.
'He's a real belly man, and completely supports me.
To achieve her goal, Donna says she will need to eat up to 12,000 calories
a day (the average woman should consume only 2,000.)
To fund the massive $750 weekly food shop, she runs a website where men
pay her to watch her eat fast food.
Donna's weight problem began early. Her mother made big meals for Donna
and her brothers and gave them lots of treats and fattening food.
By the time Donna was nine, she weighed 13 stone. 'Food was her way of
showing she loved us, she wanted us to eat, and she was
very protective of us,' Ms Simpson said.
'She wouldn't let anyone say anything bad to us about our weight.
She would argue with doctors who said it was dangerous.
Donna's mother died soon after, and her dad married a woman who put
the children on a strict diet.
'I used to steal food from the cupboards, which were still full because
my mum used to store food,' she said.
But as she got older, Donna began to worry about her weight and started
taking diet pills.
Between the ages 14 and 18 she slimmed down to 11 stone,
but was still unhappy.
'Dieting just made me miserable because I was thinking about
food all the time.,' she said. After she left school, Donna got
a desk job and no longer felt the need to fit in with other girls.
'I felt so much better when the weight came back,'
she said.'It felt like who I was meant to be.'
When Donna was 19 she met her first husband, who worked as a chef
at a steak restaurant. 'He worked night shifts and would come home at 2 or 3am and
bring the leftovers with him,' she said.
'We'd stay up and eat huge piles of steak, mashed potatoes, and
gravy with butter. 'I started gaining weight quickly and
my husband liked it. 'He said I was sexier
when I was bigger, and I felt happier too.'
01.jpg
Walking fish: A reality?
Washington, Oct 16: An extraordinary fish that existed 375 million years ago had unique features in its head that helped pave the way for vertebrate animals to live on land, scientists said on Wednesday.
Scientists for the first time described features in the underside of the skull of Tiktaalik roseae, the so-called "walking fish" discovered in the Canadian Arctic in 2004. It is considered an important transitional animal in the evolution of fish into amphibians, the first land-dwelling vertebrates.
The findings showed that the migration from water to land was more complicated than merely having a fish's fins transform into legs, the scientists wrote in the journal Nature.
The head showed changes from more primitive fish that helped adapt to the new feeding and breathing conditions presented by a terrestrial environment, the scientists said. Like some other fish of its time, it had gills and lungs.
"It's not to say that Tiktaalik itself is a terrestrial animal. It spent most of its time in water, for sure," Jason Downs of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
"So what it's really demonstrating is that many of these changes that are occurring and things that we once associated with terrestrial life are turning out, in fact, to be adaptations for life in shallow water settings that Tiktaalik might had found himself in," Downs added.
