Beware the Bodyshock: it's a taste of our future

Aged just 29, Renee, from Austin, Texas, was an unforgettable sight. Spreading out over the bed she could no longer leave, she was a vast, bulging, shapeless mass. We're now used to all kinds of gross-out special effects but the reality of an individual so monstrously swallowed up in her own wobbling flesh is still shocking: hard to look at but also hard to look away from.

Renee belonged to a new and evergrowing social group: the "supermorbidly obese". It's estimated that there are now more than two million Americans who weigh 40 stone and 400,000 a year are killed by obesity. They are leading the way; as Europe's biggest consumers of fast food, we're just following.

Renee had gastric bypass surgery in a final attempt to control her overeating but died of a heart attack a few weeks later. Looking at her, it seemed amazing she could have lived at all in such a condition. Yet she took no responsibility for her plight and seemed delusional about the state she was in.

She still had "a flat stomach", she claimed - though this was only because her flesh had spread out sideways so extensively that she was more like a puddle than a heap.

She'd become bedridden after a car accident and blamed this mishap for her subsquent weight gain. But she'd already piled on more than 40 stone when it happened.

Renee also maintained that she didn't eat much, as the helplessly greedy often do. In fact, she regularly downed eight mega-burgers at a time, her daughter said. In the few weeks she survived the gastric bypass, she lost four stone. If she'd simply been given less to eat, she would have shrunk a bit too.

Was this "Bodyshock Special" merely another shameful Channel 4 freak show? Unfortunately not. It was more like a message from the future: a preview of ourselves as we'll soon be. Obesity rates have quadrupled in Britain over the past 25 years. It has been calculated that, on current trends, by 2050 60 per cent of men will be obese, 50 per cent of women, and a quarter of all children.

It has long been the case that if you go to Manhattan you get a misleading picture of just how fat most ordinary Americans are. Something similar is happening here now. If you work and socialise among London professionals, you hardly ever see gross obesity, let alone supermorbid obesity. But step outside this charmed circle and it's another story.

The real special relationship we have with the United States is that up and down the country we're all eating ourselves senseless too. Remember Renee. Because Renee, c'est nous. Or it soon enough will be.