Brianne Dias made her My 600 Lb Life debut with a tearjerker of an episode. In fact, the show’s producers were so sure that the My 600 Lb Life Brianne episode would be one of Season 7’s standouts that they made it available for early streaming weeks before its actual TV debut.
As we learn in Brianne’s introductory segment, the Oregonian experienced something of an unusual trauma, by the show’s standards. The thing that pushed Brianne into excessive eating wasn’t outright neglect, or sexual abuse. Instead — as the preview clip below makes very clear — it was an absent relationship with her father that turned verbally abusive with shocking speed.
My dad was in the Air Force, so he was gone a lot. So my earliest memories are mostly of me and my mom. And it wasn’t until I was five that my dad started being around more. But that’s when my mom had my younger brother. And the next year she had my sister. And with two newborns in a year, I remember, it felt like my dad didn’t have time for me. And as they got older, it seemed like they had this connection that my dad and I just didn’t have.
When she was thirteen, Brianne went on a bike ride with her younger brother and sister. “For some reason,” Brianne explains in the clip, “my dad was upset about it.” He sent the children to their rooms, and the younger two kids got a spanking. But Brianne received a very different punishment — one that was much harsher, and longer-lasting.
“He was just, like, telling me I’m an awful person, calling me a ‘fat f*ck,'” Brianne says in the clip. “And at that moment, I remember feeling, like, ‘He really hates me.’ And I was just heartbroken.”
It sounds like that moment was also a turning point in Brianne’s relationship with her entire family. From then on, she says, “When we fought, it felt like it was my whole family against me.”
The trauma from that event and all subsequent fights shaped the eating habits that would come to define Brianne’s body and personality for years. “It was around that time that I started putting on weight,” she said. “Because when no one else was there for me, food was.”
Now that the My 600 Lb Life Brianne episode has finally aired, how does Brianne look now? We’ve got the latest pics she’s made public — but first, we thought it might be nice to show a couple of throwback pics Brianne and her husband Rick have shared, from several years before TLC’s cameras entered their lives.
For starters, here’s Brianne celebrating her birthday back in 2010, in a photo that Rick appears to have taken:
And here’s one of Brianne and Rick celebrating their wedding anniversary the following year, in 2011:
Now — on to the newest pics! Enjoy this sweet shot of Brianne and Dr. Nowzaradan, from one of her recent checkups. We don’t know exactly when it was taken, only that Brianne shared it on December 31st, not long after creating her official Facebook page:
Here’s another of Brianne and Rick, from what looks like around the same time as the image above:
And here’s the most recent picture Brianne has made public that we can also definitively date. It’s from the late autumn of 2018, and, though it’s only from the chin up, it sure looks like Brianne’s face is quite a bit slimmer than it is in both the throwback pics and her clip from the My 600 Lb Life Brianne episode:
To follow along on Brianne’s weight loss journey, check out her official Facebook page here. And, if you missed the My 600 Lb Life Brianne episode when it first aired, you can stream it here, on the show’s official site.
(Photo credits: My 600 Lb Life Brianne via Facebook, TLC)
John Sharp is a Starcasm’s chief editorial correspondent-at-large. Tips: E-mail john@starcasm.net or Twitter @john_starcasm.