Tom Sawyer

I've seen a lot of news reports and the like recently talking about how obesity should be treated as a disease on the same level as any other disease and the people that suffer from it are victims who don't have any control over how heavy they are. I have a lot of problems with this view. It seems to me that if you expend more energy than you take in, you'll lose weight. I'd have to see some pretty convincing data to change my mind on that.

Granted, a lot of these people do have a medical condition and their thyroid doesn't convert food the way it does in the general population and more of it becomes fat. However, if someone has that condition, they just have to take it upon themselves to regulate their diet more. If a diabetic chooses to eat a lot of sugar, he's got no business whining to the rest of us when he goes blind. It's sad that he has to take that extra effort in life and can't eat the same things as all his friends, but this medical condition is one of the cards he was dealt and he has to live with it.

Some people have put forward the argument that the healthy options in restaurants tend to be more expensive than the unhealthy ones, so that poorer people have less access to the healthier foods. The way I see it is that if an extra dollar for a meal is going to make that much of a difference to a person's economic situation, he probably should be making his own lunch more often and not eating out at all, it's cheaper and it's healthier to just bring a sandwich and again, if he has a medical condition that affects the way he processes food, he should be taken more steps than the rest of the population to regulate his diet.

This may have come off sounding callous and unsensitive to the obese. However, I have read a number of articles recently saying that obesity is going to cost the health care system more than smoking. Here's one article about that pulled at random from a Google search:

<a href="http://www.lef.org/newsarchive/aging/2002/03/11/eng-healthnewsdigest/eng-healthnewsdigest_033225_170_395070223603.html" target="_blank">Obesity</a>

Those are my tax dollars going towards treating this at a later stage, when I think that people can do a lot to overcome the problem at an early stage. Yes, it's hard for them and yes, they have to do more work to overcome it than the general population; but if they have a medical condition, they should take the steps early to deal with it rather than letting it wait and have me pay for it later.

Just my two cents. Am I looking at this all wrong? Because I don't have as much sympathy for the obese as everyone is saying I should.

Ab_Normal

I pretty much agree with you, peteyh. I managed to get rid of 40 pounds over the last year through diet and exercise. And I know a lot of folks who have acheived similiar losses, using the same tools. (A few on Weight Watchers, but none went the fad diet route.) Some of these people were considered morbidly obese, and have been making quite satisfactory progress. My non-scientific sample proves to my satisfaction that the folks who cannot lose weight must be in the minority.

My family has found that it is *cheaper* for us to eat a balanced diet. But we eat very few of our meals away from home.

What I do not want to see is the government trying to solve this problem by putting "sin" taxes on "junk" foods, using the public expense of medical care as an excuse. That seems to me like an incorrect application of gov't power.