Tonight on TLC their fan-favorite series My 600-lb Life airs with an all-new Wednesday, April 15, 2020, Season 8 Episode 16 and we have your My 600-lb Life recap below. On tonight’s My 600-lb Life season, 8 episodes 16 called “Leneatha’s Story’ as per the TLC synopsis, “For 23 years, Leneatha has worked as a pharmacy tech at a local hospital.
Now, she has a young daughter to support, but she’s so big that it’s hard to move; if Dr. Now can’t help her stop eating, losing her job could be the least of her worries.”
So make sure to bookmark this spot and come back from 8 PM – 9 PM ET for our My 600-lb Life recap. While you wait for the recap make sure to check out all our Television news, spoilers, recaps & more, right here!
Tonight’s My 600-lb Life Recap begins now – Refresh Page often to get the most current updates!
Leneatha Reed is six hundred plus pounds. She’s young. She’s in her forties and she is also the single mother of one child. Her daughter Kenlyn. Kenlyn has asthma and she needs care. The child stays with Leneatha’s aunt while Leneatha works. She has been with the same company since she was eighteen and she knows she needs this job, but she also knows she’s at risk of losing the job because of weight. It was just the weight. The pain in her legs and arms that came along with it. There was the fact Leneatha couldn’t always take a shower in the shower. She sometimes had to clean herself on the toilet because she was afraid of falling if she did get into the shower and the toilet issues carry its own problems.
Leneatha has to keep watch because she could fall into the toilet or even possibly break the toilet seat. Her weight is a problem and it wasn’t always like this. Leneatha first came to love sweets because of her father. Her father was the sole provider and he didn’t always have the time to spend with them. It was when he was home that he gave them sweets as a special treat from daddy. Leneatha loved those moments and she was almost two hundred pounds when she left home. She later was married to an abusive man. He mistreated her and told her that no one would ever love her and the final straw was that he was also cheating on her. Leneatha left him after that.
Leneatha’s weight didn’t really blow up until she had a pain in her shoulder. The doctor thought maybe she could get a breast reduction and something went wrong in the OR. Leneatha’s lungs gave out. The doctors had to focus on that and so they never performed the surgery. Leneatha kept the pain. She also had to be mindful of her lungs now and so that and rising medical costs caused her to turn to food. She didn’t feel in pain when she was eating food. She gave in and she went up to four hundred plus by time she met her daughter’s father. He had seemed like a nice guy. He had stayed around in spite of Leneatha becoming pregnant after two months.
Kenlyn’s father supported Leneatha as she dealt with a high-risk pregnancy. He was by her side through most of it until one day he began looking at her and her plus size weight with disgust. Leneatha had lost all control of her weight by then. She couldn’t help herself and so her daughter’s father left. He didn’t want to be around Leneatha anymore. Leneatha was fine with him gone. It just made things a little harder with her daughter. Leneatha was a single mom and she was unhealthy. She knows she has to get her weight under control. She doesn’t want to die and leave her daughter alone. She wants to see her daughter grow up one day.
Leneatha went to Houston to see Dr. Now. She went with her sister Pam and a family friend as a support system. They all made the drive down there together. The drive was hard on Leneatha because her joint pain acted up and so she was hoping this trip would be worth all the suffering. She made it to Dr. Now. She was weighed and she learned she lost some weight. Not enough weight. She was still over six hundred pounds and Dr. Now didn’t why she would think she would lose weight. She doesn’t exercise. She thinks this surgery will fix her eating disorder and it won’t. Dr. Now told her as much.
Dr. Now was very honest with her. He told her that she had to cut out the sweets. She was diabetic and overweight. She shouldn’t be having sugar at all. Dr. Now asked her to cut that out of her diet. He wanted to see her lose at least sixty pounds in two months and that would show she was ready to try. The surgery wasn’t going make sense if Leneatha didn’t try. She needed to work out twice a day and she needed to eat healthier. Both of those things were hard to do for Leneatha. She said her schedule was sometimes too full to workout twice a day. She even made excuses for eating junk food.
She would say that was the quickest thing she could grab to eat was junk food. She also said work was coming in the way. She got in trouble for taking too much time off and she had to reschedule with Dr. Now. She had to give herself an additional month. She, therefore, had three months to lose sixty months and she thought she would make the weight this time, but then life got in the way. Her daughter’s asthma flared up and she had to take her to doctor appointments. She was bound to miss another appointment with Dr. Now and so Dr. Now asked for a video appointment. They face-timed each other.
Dr. Now asked her about her weight loss. She told him all the excuses she had and he told her he was disappointed. He said that she wasn’t eating right. He asked her if she was serious and she said she was. She said she was going to be serious about losing weight now. He didn’t really believe because he said why now and asked what the difference will be. Dr. Now also told her she could skip a meal. She said she had to eat because she needed nutrition and she didn’t want to starve. Only she wasn’t going to starve. She was an overeater. Her calorie content was stored in her liver. She could miss a meal and her body can finally start losing weight.
Leneatha came to see that for herself. She had two additional months to lose weight after her appointment with Dr. Now and so she finally worked out. She went to the gym and family friend Frank pushed her to the limit. He was even helping her with her calorie intake. Leneatha would write down everything she ate and she would show it to Frank who was acting as her trainer. Leneatha ended up losing some weight because of her work. She lost twenty-nine pounds. She lost that in five months and so Dr. Now was not impressed. He still thought Leneatha was eating too much.
He asked her to go on a liquid diet for three days. He said broth and light liquids. He wanted her to see how much weight she could lose if she really tried and Dr. Now believes her whole problem is with perception. He thinks she doesn’t understand how much she’s eating. Its why he gave her this project and so that made Leneatha upset because she claims she’s not overeating. She said ate an egg, bacon, and later two pieces of chicken with coleslaw. She said that’s not a lot of food. She’s said she’s not overeating and she broke down in tears when Dr. Now didn’t seem to believe her. And so she swore she would follow his directive to show him that she was working on herself.
Leneatha would later say that she struggled with finding a work/life balance. She never got around to the liquid diet and she knows she hasn’t lost the weight she was supposed to. Leneatha’s daughter’s health also took a turn. She required breathing treatments and there was only so much Leneatha could ask her family to do. She wanted to take care of her daughter herself. She also realized she couldn’t do that while staying in the program and so she called Dr. Now to tell him she was dropping out of his program. She thought it would be simple. She didn’t know that Dr. Now would give her one last lecture.
Dr. Now asked her not to use stress as a reason to overeat. She told her she should make her health a priority and Leneatha said she couldn’t do that because her daughter had to be first. She’s using the daughter as a reason to ignore her own health, but she didn’t realize that she heading downhill fast and that if she doesn’t something then soon it will be too late.
THE END!