This is a pretty painful subject for me because I was heading in the same direction as the guy you saw. I seem to remember there was an episode of Jerry Springer that had a man in a similar situation. I'm in the UK so I didn't see the show you saw.

At my heaviest I weighed about 408 pounds and I've often wondered how I could have gotten that big and how much bigger I'd have got if my Doc hadn't intervened. I'm now 206 pounds and maintain that weight through excercise and eating lots of fruit and veg. I really struggle to feel full though. Sometimes I think if I let myself I could eat till I passed out which is pretty scary.

Is it my childhood or this gene you spoke of? I'm fascinated. My feeling has been that my mother always taught me that if I cleaned up my plate I was being a good boy, so eating a lot became a way of getting praise. I'd not really considered the possibility I might have a dodgy gene.

I'm shocked that guys wife didn't get him help a long time ago. Denial on a huge scale? No pun intended.