Obesity is a disease, period

Obesity was declared a disease by the American Medical Association in June 2013 after many debates and a long history of unsuccessful trials we finally achieved another milestone. Nevertheless, we are still facing a lack of awareness of this fact not only by the general population but also by the healthcare system. There is this false idea that obesity is associated with a behavior, bad choices or even a weak personality, just laziness or lack of willpower.

Unfortunately, I am still hearing different health practitioners in the area of weight loss giving the same old advise "eat less and exercise more" when new science has been showing that this does not work. This is like Einstein's definition of "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”

The truth is our body weight regulation is a very important and delicate mechanism like blood pressure or body temperature. It is ingrained in our genes from our ancestors as a survival trick with millions of years of evolution. Likewise, increase in body fat is related with gene expression, our interaction with the environment and biological/biochemical complexities. Furthermore, other internal and external factors drive body weight gain like medications' side effects, chronic sleep deprivation, chronic stress and hormonal changes like menopause or insulin resistance. What I want to point out is that Obesity is a complex disease, so that the most effective strategies to prevent and treat it are approaches that recognized this complexity and develop a stepwise program that is individually tailored and combine lifestyle changes, medications, stress reduction and more.

I just wanted to bring some light to the subject, since we are facing a global epidemic of obesity that is affecting not only adults but also children and even babies, so that I consider we need to fight Obesity together with all the tools science is providing us today and stop blaming the victim, in this case patients.

We need to start treating Obesity seriously.