Obesity Is A Choice, Not An Illness
Jimmy Moore
July 19, 2004

Obesity is a topic that is extremely personal to me and I cannot remain silent on the ramifications of a recent public policy change by the government that could have dramatic consequences on American society in the next few years.

On Friday, U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson described obesity as "a critical public health problem in our country that causes millions of Americans to suffer unnecessary health problems and to die prematurely."

As a man who allowed himself to tip the scale at 410 pounds earlier this year, I know about the physical consequences of obesity. Cholesterol and blood pressure problems are the norm for most people who allow themselves to get that big and I was no exception.

In fact, my brother, who is only four years older than me, had three consecutive heart attacks a few years ago that nearly killed him because of his weight problem. He is still alive today, but with limited ability to live the life he once dreamed about.

For those of us who have battled maintaining weight loss our entire lives, it is easy to think there's no use trying to lose weight because it will keep coming back over and over again.

Now the U.S. government is telling us the same thing by labeling obesity as an 'illness' that will be covered by Medicare to be 'treated' with surgeries and diet programs.


All I can say is, oh my! Do they even realize what they have done?!

Since when do we need the government's help with an individual decision based on personal responsibility?

If someone, myself included, balloons up to an unhealthy weight, why does the government feel it needs to redistribute tax dollars to pay for 'treating' this?

If someone eats a bunch of Big Macs and fries and gorges himself on every food known to man, why should a skinny person who eats fine and is in good health have to bear the burden of paying for obese people's medical bills? It's not right!


Thompson boasted to a Senate panel last Thursday that Medicare will "review scientic evidence" to determine what methods work best to help obese people return their weight to normal.

I've got an idea for you. How about getting the lard butts to start hopping on the treadmill several times a week to get their heart pumping while significantly cutting down on the amount of food they eat?! Gee, that's a start!

Again, I can speak with authority on this since I have been there, done that with being obese.

Let's be clear on one thing: Obesity is NOT an illness, but rather a chosen condition.

Nobody wakes up with obesity or catches obesity like a cold. It's the direct result of eating too much food while living a couch-potato, exercise-deprived lifestyle.


I finally realized this myself at the turn of the new year this year when I decided to start losing weight doing the low-carb Atkins diet along with regularly scheduled exercise.

While I started at 410 pounds on January 1, I am now down to 292 pounds and still losing weight and regaining my health. My cholesterol and blood pressure have significantly dropped while my overall health has skyrocketed. It is amazing what an individual can do if he is willing to make the right choices for himself.

My ultimate goal is to get back down to 200 pounds, which would make me very skinny at 6'3" tall. But it is my goal and I am confident I will make it and stay there as long as I remain committed to the exercise and change in eating habits.

Did I need the government to tell me how to lose over 100 pounds? No.

Has the government paid for the program I have been on to lose over 100 pounds? No.

Did the government require me to walk on the treadmill and incorporate exercise into my life every day to lose over 100 pounds? Hardly!

The choice was mine to make the decision to lose weight, just as the choice was mine to eat all that food that made me once weigh 410 pounds.

I will never weigh that much again in my life because I am personally committed to keeping my weight off for good this time.

And I don't need the government to make it happen!

I'm sure the 2/3's of the country that are overweight wake up every day thinking of new ways to make themselves fatter, because they like being that way.

I think he really doesn't get it.

Obesity is a condition which, if not treated, can expose a person to all kinds of other conditions-- diabetes, heart disease, etc. These conditions are traditionally considered diseases and are treatable under the tiny little piece of socialized health care that we have in the US. They're also every expensive to treat.

Obesity can be treated, in most cases, by the obese individual alone, but health professionals can help, expensively or inexpensively, and that help may lead to greater success rates. If obesity is going to be treatable under this plan, then we may in fact be saving a lot of money. Better to spend a little now and avoid the expensive diseases later than to just wait for the expensive diseases to develop.

I'm all about people taking personal responsibility for their health. I quit smoking on my own, but I'm glad that my father's doctor was able to provide him with a nictonine patch to help him quit. I'm losing weight on my own, as well, just as I self-medicate for colds, infections, stomach problems, and a number of other conditions on my own-- I have no health insurance, so I get no medical assistance. However, for all these conditions, I think that if a professional health care can be available to someone, they should get that assistance.

Oh, and I wanted to add-- does this writer have health insurance? Did he use it when he got the blood work done at the beginning of Atkins (as the plan requires)? If he used private health insurance to get that medical treatment, how is that different from someone using medicare?

Unless it's that they're poor and don't deserve the same health care he's getting.

I agree with the writer. It's basically the same thing as lung cancer caused by smoking. It's your fault and I don't want to pay for it.

You know...based on this type of logic, why should Federal dollars be spent remedying situations such as unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and drug/alcohol addiction since all of these arise from "decisions based on personal responsibility"?
If his criteria for whether or not tax dollars should be spent aiding people is based on whether or not the condition was either totally or partially under the person's control, there's a whole lot of cutting that needs to happen.
Of course, I can't see the writer of this article suggesting cutting support to any of those programs that support those with the other conditions that I listed; it wouldn't be PC. But it's perfectly okay, in his mind, to leave those who are overweight and obese out there to make it on their own "because it's their own fault"?

I agree with what was proposed as non-PC above. If someone gets AIDs from doing heroin with a contaminated needle, why should we pay for their health care? It's ridiculous. People need to learn responsibility; it's ludicrous that the rest of the country should pay for them.

I've thought that our world would be entirely different if food was priced by the calories ( low calories- cheap food). This would help lots of those people on restricted budgets, vending machines, sure make some of our choices easier....
And at work, we used to say you should have a certain IQ before you could concieve!

Tell that to inner city kids who have never had fresh produce and survive on junk food, that it is their fault.

Certainly there is a government interest in promoting public health. You've got to keep us alive long enough for a lifetime of tax paying but not enough that we drain medicare too much.

The poor in this country either aren't educated to make good food choices or do not have access to proper nutrition. (Same goes goes for the 3rd world)

If I'm wrong somebody please tell me...But was it or was it not the government that issued that food pyramid that all of us were to follow and eat lots of carbohydrates. Since that pyramid obesity has skyrocketed. They are partially at fault. Especially since the pyramid is basically upside down. School lunches were even based on them. We were taught that food pyramid in school. Let them fix their mess!!

Baby you come back in two years when your weight is creeping back
and see what you have to say
Pene

I can't think of too many reasons except for perhaps mercy and compassion. Everyone makes mistakes. For some, the personal price that they pay for their mistakes is higher than others.
If you stop and think about it, your insurance premiums (if you have private insurance) don't just pay for your own health care. It goes into a pool and pays for the health care of others in that same pool. Some utilize the system more than others, but whether you like it or not, your insurance premiums likely pay for the sickness of others in your same insurance pool whether it's their fault they got sick or not.
Besides...people don't tend to do too much learning once they're dead, so I'm not quite sure what lesson, if any, society would be teaching someone who is dying from AIDS by denying them health care on the grounds that it was their own fault they got it in the first place.

Do kids have a choice about being overweight? Do the mice they breed to be obese have a choice in the matter?

The difference between smoking and eating, is that you HAVE to eat to live. Your body is wired to make you eat. If you cut out calories, your body has entire systems throughout your brain and body that make your metabolism slow down and make you want to eat.

This system works fine, until you're in a time period where there is too much food. Then it works against itself. We were built for a different sort of life than the one we have now.

Now, my hope is that government money won't be spent doing gastro bypass surgery, but will get spent looking for real effective ways to help people lose weight, that they'll fund research to find solutions that work!

We all think we've found the solutions and, knock wood, hopefully low carb is THE solution for us all, but there's a lot of people that are afraid of low carb and there's a lot of people that just can't stick to it. How many times do you go into the Atkins group and see someone coming back to lowcarb for the Nth time? I don't necessarily think they're defective people, I think they're just unable to battle all the body mechanisms that cause us to eat more than we need. We're in a society that barrages us with food that makes us fat and most people don't have the iron will and discipline to resist that.

So to solve the problem you either need to:

a) Figure out how to get people to act in ways it is unnatural for people to act (i.e. starve themselves).
b) Figure out how to manipulate the endocrine system to defeat the hormones that make people overeat.
c) Take away all the extra, bad, over-caloric, carb ridden food and not let people eat them any more.
d) Disregard the issue and deal with the fall-out of diabetes, heart disease and all the rest.

I Personally don't think A or C is going to happen. B or D is much more likely.

Well, yeah, but that was to bow to corporate lobbyists. The gov only wants to keep us alive paying taxes and medical bills. A true pyramid would kill the grain, potato, and rice industries.

Wow! I am truly shocked at the bitterness and lack of compassion expressed by several people here. So, say you're elderly grandmother goes out to the mall in October and ends up getting pneumonia,or falls and breaks her hip, why, we should just let the old bat die, it was her fault for even going out in the cold weather at her age...she should have known better! It was her choice to go out in the first place.And that woman who had complications during childbirth, well, it's her choice to get pregnant in the first place, isn't it? Let her deal with it on her own, because I don't want to pay for it. Or how about the childbirth all together? Why should I pay for some woman to give birth, she's the one who chose to get pregnant. You live in Kansas and your house gets blown away by a tornado, why should MY tax dollars go to the federal disaster relief fund to pay for your house? You knew Kansas was prime ground for tornadoes, and yet you CHOSE to live there anyway. Why should we pay to help people in Missouri who get flooded out AGAIN? Or people on South Carolina's shores when a hurricane strikes? Why should we help people in California who are earthquake victims? Isn't it their choice to live in these disaster prone areas?

All of these things are the result of choices and all of them generally receive some kind of government funding. My point isn't to say all these situations are equal, my point is that judging such things based on worthiness for aid based on the "choices" of the recipient is not as clear cut an issue as one might think.

Making such judgements is a very slippery slope, and the fact that some conditions or diseases are deemed worthy of government funds through medicaid or medicare and others aren't seems like a call to easy for one to make, as long as it's someone else or someone else's loved one who suffers when their particular condition or disease or situation is deemed unworthy. Good for the writer than he is losing weight on Atkins. I hope he is successful in taking off the weight and keeping it off. I'm glad he has enough money to afford the Atkins diet, and a job that provides him with health insurance. But I would think he would be glad that the government is finally taking a stand on actually helping people who need it, instead of spending yet another gazillion dollars shoring up the oil industry or the airline industry or paying for another senators lifetime healthcare and haircuts.

No, I don't like paying for smokers suffering from cancer or for alcoholics getting liver transplants or going through rehab again and again. I don't make alot of money and I don't like the idea anymore than the next person, but such is the price of living in a society. If you're going to start making decisions and judgements on such "choices" then you need to follow the argument all the way through.

We all make choices every day, some of those choices are bad ones, some are good. Is every choice a "well, you did it, so tough, if you die, you die"? UNLESS of course you are rich enough to pay for it yourself or have insurance to cover it. Instead of resenting medicare for trying to combat what is now being called the nation's number one health risk, why don't you save your anger for a medical system in which the richest people get the very best treatment first, and the rest of society just has to take whatever they can get, depending on their jobs, and their insurance. Or the economy that's come about in recent years that is filled with the working poor, folks who have jobs and work hard every day to bring home $7.00 an hour ...try paying for the Atkins program or any other program on that, and your rent in your nice home and your car and your insurance.

In the end, I don't know if it is a good thing for medicare to pay for obesity treatment or not. I do know, however, that basing the decision on the fact that obesity is a "choice" so why should the government help or pay for treatment is a completely erroneous argument.