For three years, Chitoka Light has lived her entire existence from her bed.
Weighing 680 lbs., she finds it it too difficult to move further than a few feet.
“I do everything from this bed,” Light, 49, says in this exclusive clip from TLC’s new show, Family By the Ton. “I have strategically placed mirrors, where I can see reflections all over the house. Cameras, and monitors. It doesn’t matter what’s going on — this is central base for everything.”
And even moving the couple of feet to the bathroom is excruciating for Light.
“I ambulate to the restroom, which is only a few feet from my bed,” she explains. “Even for the few steps that it takes to get to the restroom is putting this weight on your joints because I have the same frame as a normal person. It’s just like wrapping four or five of you and carrying it somewhere. It’s just painful.”
Light says she started getting heavier than her classmates in fourth grade, and she continued gaining from there.
“When the weight started causing pain and difficulty in moving around, instead of me saying, ‘Hmm, I should probably start losing weight,’ I said, ‘I’ll just stop taking the stairs,’ or ‘I’ll just park a little bit closer,’ or ‘I’ll just get a bigger car,’ ” she says.
It continued to escalate, until she was unable to leave the house.
“I’m encased in a flesh prison,” Light says. “What started me not going out is pain. Just carrying this much weight around. When it got to the point where I couldn’t leave my room, that’s when it became more of an alarming situation for me.”
Now she — along with her cousins Naomi Anderson and Drew Stewart — is considering weight loss surgery. But going under anesthesia is a major risk at her weight.
“Because I’m the heaviest member of my family, I have a lot more to think about and consider as far as going through with the surgery,” Light says.
