The facts are these: my sister is 5ft 5ins tall and 19 stone, giving her a BMI of 44. She is only 22 years old and has been constantly gaining weight since she was about 18, when she was a healthier size 14/16.
Myself and the rest of the family are desperately worried about her as her health is now really beginning to suffer, and presumably will only become worse as she gets older.
She can walk only a short distance before becoming out of breath; she avoids going up stairs at all, and she's also now been prescribed inhalers for asthma, which she never needed when she was lighter. She does no exercise at all and will make excuses to get taxis even for what would be a five-minute walk.
In addition to this, the weight gain has exacerbated symptoms of PCOS and she now has a lot of excess dark hair on her face and the rest of her body. The doctor has told her that if she wants to conceive one day she will need to lose weight, but this doesn't seem to have had an effect.
In the last year alone she's gained around four stone, since she got together with her current boyfriend and they started living together.
The two of them view food as a "treat" and a way to show each other how much they care. As a result, they frequently go out to eat or get takeaways, buy each other chocolates and drink a lot of alcohol. If they go to the cinema they feel they're "missing out" if they don't have popcorn AND a large coke AND ice cream. Every leisure activity for them has to revolve around food. He is also chubby, but by no means obese - probably because he does a manual job.
Whenever she begins a diet, she does well in the first week, often losing 7 or 8lb, and then gives up. This is partly due to him, as he refuses to help her and brings takeaways into the house if she tries to cook healthy food. Any pleas to him fall on deaf ears - he says she'll lose weight "if she's ready" and doesn't seem to realise that she will struggle to do so with no support from him.
The rest of our family are perfectly healthy, eat well and do a lot of exercise. My mum and I are the same height as her and both weigh around 10 stone. In the past, any reference to her weight, even when put kindly, has made her cry, get defensive and say that we're "being mean."
We've tried all the obvious things to try and encourage her to be healthy, such as volunteering to go for walks with her, offering to go to WW/ Slimming World with her, buying her gym membership, and all the rest. We've also ignored it and not mentioned her weight at all for months on end, in the hope that she'd do something about it herself.
Nothing seems to have worked.
So am I being unreasonable to think that, now, something more drastic needs to be done? I don't know what, but she's gaining weight very quickly, is obviously very unhappy with herself and is getting no support from her waste-of-space boyfriend. Her weight now puts her in the morbidly obese category and this is very worrying as obviously the health implications are serious.
In addition, she's avoiding going out with friends, choosing instead to stay in every night with the boyfriend. She's given up on makeup and nice clothes altogether, whereas in the past she'd spend hours getting ready for a night out.
So AIBU to step in and try and do something at this point? Should I tell her what an absolute tool her boyfriend is?! Or should I leave it to her? Sorry for the length of the post...