Ask many teenagers these days about their hopes and dreams and the answers are often depressingly predictable. They want to be pop stars, movie stars or just, simply, famous.
But not Georgia Davis. All she wants is to be normal. Normal, happy and healthy.
At just 17 years old, she tops the scales at more than 40st, a jaw-dropping statistic which affords her the dubious distinction of being Britain’s fattest teenager.
Constant struggle: Georgia Davis, pictured with mum Lesley, is Britain's fattest teenager weighing around 40 stone - and could do with a bit more family support
It also brings with it health problems including constant knee and back pain — despite her tender years, Georgia can’t walk far without getting completely breathless. She is also a borderline diabetic. From this position, ‘normal’ is indeed something to strive for.
Even in a country accustomed to growing levels of obesity (10,571 people were admitted to hospital last year because their weight was life-threatening, it was reported yesterday), Georgia’s situation is extreme, and deeply troubling.
Georgia was deemed to be Britain’s fattest teenager two years ago, when she actually weighed 7st less.
In the wake of that revelation, she was offered a scholarship by a U.S. weight-loss camp, Wellsprings, and returned from a nine-month stay having shed 15st. Revitalised and rejuvenated, she declared that the world was now ‘her oyster’.
Yet it has proved anything but. Twenty months later here she is, heavier than ever and back in the grip of all her terrible old habits.
How, you wonder, can this have happened? How can a young girl look into the mirror day after day, see someone she barely recognises and not want to do something about it?
What about her parents? Why did they not intervene for the sake of their daughter’s health when she reached a level of obesity that is almost off the chart?
Georgia, it must be said, is unwilling to cast blame. ‘I’ve always accepted that my weight is my responsibility, my issue,’ she says. ‘I’ve never blamed anyone else and nor will I. This is my fault.’ But is the truth a little more complicated? Spend any time with Georgia and her 55-year-old mother Lesley — herself chronically overweight — and you realise that here is a sorry set of circumstances representative of the situation in thousands of British households.
Early signs: Georgia was an overweight toddler, and the rapid growth has continued to this day
Denial, complicity, illness, lack of education and a wider culture of cheap fast food have all fanned the flames of Georgia’s own relationship with food, as they have with so many others who are long-term obese.
Georgia lives in a cramped two-bedroom semi-detached in Aberdare, South Wales, with Lesley and her 73-year-old stepfather Arthur.
It says much that both Georgia and her mother still smoke despite the fact that Arthur is recovering from lung cancer.
Still, it is both breathtaking and distressing to see Georgia in the flesh. Certainly, if you have ever wondered what 40st looks like, the answer is straightforward enough: it really is enormous.
Georgia takes a size 36 in clothes — although she struggles to find anything to fit even in a plus-size shop — and her vital statistics measure 69-82-80.
Her weight has been an issue for much of her short life. She says her problems date back to when she was five and lost her father, Geoff — a musician scraping a minimal income — to emphysema at just 38.
But it’s clear they actually began long before that.
Although Georgia fiercely defends her mother, Lesley’s parenting leaves a lot to be desired.
When her daughter wouldn’t take formula milk, she fed her condensed milk. Georgia’s weaned diet consisted of little more than mashed tinned potatoes.
Lesley, meanwhile, is testimony to a lifetime of unhealthy eating. Still only in her mid-50s, she weighs 17st, has no front teeth, and walks with a stick.
So perhaps the die was cast from birth — and the death of Georgia’s father served only as another stepping stone on the path to obesity.
‘When he died, food became a sort of comfort for me,’ Georgia admits.’When I was eating I felt less unhappy.
‘I suppose I was filling a physical and emotional hole, although I was too young to understand that at the time.’
Her solution, as it had been for so long, lay at the bottom of the biscuit barrel, or indeed wherever food could be found
In fact, unknowingly, Georgia was embarking on the vicious cycle of comfort-eating that would sabotage her childhood.
Already teased for being a ‘fatty’ at primary school, the more she ate the more she was ridiculed and the more isolated she felt.
So the more she ate again.
By the age of ten, Georgia weighed 12st and alarm bells were ringing sufficiently loudly for her to be placed on the ‘at risk’ register with social services.
By now the authorities were also worried about her mother’s health. Battling osteoarthritis, she had a heart attack when Georgia was 12.
Although she had remarried, Georgia’s stepfather Arthur was older and ill himself, meaning Georgia effectively became her mother’s main carer. The strain took further toll and by the time she started secondary school Georgia was piling on ever more weight.
‘A lot of things came to a head then,’ she says.
‘I’d never really dealt with my dad’s death and I was also now caring for my mum and worrying about her health. I felt under a huge amount of pressure.’
Her solution, as it had been for so long, lay at the bottom of the biscuit barrel, or indeed wherever food could be found.
Most nights Georgia would consume a takeaway or two on the way home from school — pizza or fish and chips being her favourites — before munching her way through the contents of the kitchen cupboards.
‘It didn’t matter what it was. Crisps. Chocolate. Entire loaves of bread. I ate anything, really.’
Success: After the US weight-loss camp, Georgia managed to lose 14 stone
Doctors warned her — and Lesley — time and again that there would be severe consequences if she carried on eating, yet carry on she did, arriving at a record-breaking 33st in the autumn of 2008, still some months short of her 16th birthday.
While her daughter languished in her room watching television and drinking litres of Coca-Cola, Lesley carried on stocking the larder with food and cooking gigantic portions of pasta for tea.
Even today, she seems unable fully to comprehend the consequences of this, even when they are sitting right in front of her.
The best she can manage is this: ‘You can’t control everything your daughter eats.’
For her own part, Georgia’s take on proceedings is heartbreakingly simple.
‘I did know how I looked and what it was doing to me,’ she says.
‘I knew what I had to do too — eat less, move more — but I didn’t even know how to begin. I didn’t know how to handle it.’
But there were, at least, grounds for hope. While her school and social services seemed to do very little to help, her doctor tried his best, and one of his surgery’s nurses attempted to intervene.
She told Georgia about the U.S. weight-loss camp and encouraged her to apply for a scholarship.
She was accepted, and in September 2008 Georgia travelled to the mountains of North Carolina with 60 other overweight teenagers, all forced to adhere to the camp’s structured timetable of strict mealtimes and a rigorous exercise regime.
Instead of late-night pizzas and little more than a walk from her room to the fridge for exercise, Georgia was suddenly restricted to three meals a day.
She was presented with salmon, salad, chicken and lean buffalo steak — and inducted into a rigorous physical regime of walking, tennis and swimming.
The transformation was immediate: in the first week Georgia lost 21lb.
‘It was a great feeling,’ she admits. ‘I realised I had the tools around me to help me turn my life around.’
After nine months, she had shed almost half her body weight and slimmed down to 18st.
‘I felt like a completely different person,’ she says. ‘I liked what I saw in the mirror, the shape of my face. I liked the clothes I could wear. I felt everything was possible.’
She intended to lose more weight too, but returned home in June 2009 to support her mother after learning that Arthur had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
The plan was to return to Wellsprings for a further three months to shed another 6st.
‘That didn’t happen,’ she says now with a rueful smile. ‘I didn’t ever go back.’
Instead, within a day of leaving she was locked in her room in Aberdare, eating junk. It says much that her welcome home meal was a portion of fish and chips.
‘But not,’ Lesley interjects, ‘from the chip shop. I bought fish from Iceland and they were oven chips, so they weren’t bad for her.’
With this definition of ‘healthy’ food, it was always going to be a struggle for Georgia to keep up her good work.
‘I knew immediately that it was going to be a lot harder back at home,’ Georgia says. ‘As I was eating the fish and chips, I thought “this is going to be impossible”. But I was still determined.’
Determined or otherwise, by the end of the summer she had already gained several stone.
‘At first I did think “I can’t believe this is happening”,’ she admits. ‘But then, after a while, I started blanking it all out again.’
Lesley insists that she nagged her daughter to lose weight again — a tactic which, she insists, only made matters worse.
‘I think I may be to blame in some sense because I was always on at her, but then she would just argue and we didn’t get anywhere.’
The truth, I sense, is rather more basic: Lesley actually had no idea what to do, and did very little to change the routine of stodgy meals and mountains of snacks in the cupboards — hampered, she argues, by lack of funds.
‘I tried my best to shop more healthily, but the reality is that the unhealthy stuff is cheaper,’ Lesley says.
‘We don’t have much money and what we have is stretched to the limit just to get by.’
Many food economists would argue that it’s perfectly possible to eat healthily on a tight budget. But the reality is that, like so many other families, the Davises exist on cheap takeaways and junk food.
Georgia, while fiercely protective of her mother, admits that contrary to Lesley’s assertions they never really talked about her weight. ‘We never properly communicated,’ she says. ‘We didn’t know how to. We were too close and too far apart at the same time.’
By October last year, Georgia weighed more than she did before departing for Wellsprings and had succumbed to a crippling depression.
‘I don’t really know what brought it on, but it was like my whole body and mind had shut down,’ she says. ‘I didn’t see the point in anything any more.’
When Georgia did leave her bedroom, it was only to come down for meals or take more food upstairs.
Most of the time she just lay there, watching TV, or tapping away at her laptop, communicating on social networking sites with her handful of friends, who are all leading lives she can play little part in.
meanwhile her mother professes to have been ‘very upset’ by this tragic drama unfolding once more under her own nose, but pinned her hopes on Georgia being prescribed slimming tablets on her 18th birthday — another way of placing responsibility firmly elsewhere.
Her daughter’s best hope, you cannot help thinking, is to move away altogether and start afresh.
Georgia turns 18 in April, an age at which many young women are excitedly planning their long-term future. But Georgia cannot think that far ahead.
Her hope instead is for normality — to walk down the street without people calling her names, to walk into a clothes shop and buy a pretty dress she knows will fit her.
As she puts it: ‘People take normal for granted, they think normal is boring, but for me it will be an achievement.’
In the meantime, Georgia cuts a very sad and lonely figure.
