Losing weight does not address poor eating habits - If a doctor wants you to improve your diet, then it is best to consider manageable, long-term changes in order to ensure that you are eating better. Weight loss may coincide with this change, but no benefit will occur if the focus remains on weight instead of food intake.
Losing weight does not address inactivity - If your doctor wants you to be active for a certain number of minutes per day, engage in cardio exercise or increase muscle mass through strength training, then it is best to work with a professional trainer in order to develop an individualized workout plan that addresses your needs. Again, weight loss may coincide with this change, but no benefit will occur if the focus remains on weight instead of activity level.
Get where I’m going with all of this? Weight loss is the scapegoat. Weight loss is the easy out. Weight loss is the blanket-statement, low-effort, don’t-think-too-hard advice that doesn’t actually address any of the sources that a person’s health problems may be stemming from. A doctor who advises weight loss instead of actually treating the patient is not a doctor that you spend another minute talking to. Correlation does not equal causation.
If you are ever put into a situation where you are required to lose 20 pounds in 20 days in order to receive some form of life saving medical treatment…Oh god, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You should never be put in that kind of situation. Someone, somewhere along the line massively messed up and you’re the one paying the price. This kind of thing should never, ever happen, but knowing the American medical system and the sort of discrimination that runs rampant, I would not be surprised.
Because losing weight does not address whether or not a surgery will be successful - If a doctor wants to schedule you for a life-saving surgery, then they need to find a way to get you that surgery as soon as possible. Your life is not going to be more valuable just because you have put your body under significant stress in order to lose weight. This is why so many fat people die from lack of medical treatment.
70% of fat people report that they have experienced prejudice or discrimination from a doctor or other health care provider.
Fear of medical discrimination stops many fat people from seeking medical attention
Many doctors even believe that non-emergency medical treatment should be denied to fat people until they lose weight.
Doctors spend less time with fat patients, and many healthcare professionals are reluctant to even touch a fat patient. Doctors are often even uncomfortable performing pelvic exams on a patient who is fat.
The number of deaths “caused” by fat is vastly overrepresented in the media. In a 2005 re-analysis of a CDC sponsored study, only 25,000 deaths per year are related to being “overweight” or “obese.”
The truth of the matter is that fat people do not inherently need to lose weight in order to safely undergo surgery or get anesthesia. The concerns that are often expressed over fat people getting anesthesia are correlated with fatness, not inherent: Not every fat person has sleep apnea, for instance, nor does every fat person have diabetes. These are the concerns most often cited, but they do not apply to every person who is prescribed weight loss. Not to mention that there are significant medical concerns across multiple cohorts when it comes to anesthesia. Red heads are at significant risk of complications, as well as smokers, the elderly, people who take anxiety or sleep medication, people with COPD, and those who are underweight. Different bodies process anesthesia differently, and it is the job of trained anesthesiologists to work appropriately on diverse bodies. Of course there’s risk! There always is! Losing weight does not inherently negate that risk! And if a surgery is life-saving, then there is no legitimate reason to force a person to wait longer in order to obtain that benefit!!
Fat people can (and should!) benefit from life-saving surgeries. The sad truth is that they are often overlooked due to bias within the medical community.
As quoted from @bigfatscience, on the subject of kidney transplants:
Fat and thin people with kidney failure experience similar benefits to health and longevity when they receive a live donor kidney transplant. Yet fat patients are routinely denied kidney transplants until they lose weight, a delay that can increase the risk of serious complications like graft loss by as much as 68%.
Fat people have an approximately 20% to 40% greater risk of death in the eight years following a kidney transplant compared to thin people (although we cannot know if that increased risk was caused by a delay in treatment, weight regain post transplantation among patients required to lose weight, or another confounding factor). But that risk is far outweighed by the survival benefits of transplantation, leading researchers to conclude that “obesity should not be a contraindication for transplantation.”
Do not let doctors simply prescribe weight loss for you. You deserve better. Also quoted from @bigfatscience, Dr. Jon Robison offers this excellent advice:
If you have a health condition commonly considered to be “weight-related,” (most likely candidates are hypertension, abnormal cholesterol, abnormal blood glucose) and a health professional recommends weight loss as a solution, ask [them] the following questions:
What is the long-term success rate of the approach you are suggesting? What is the likelihood I will regain the weight I lose?
What is likely to happen to my health condition if I lose the weight and then regain it?
Is there any way to treat this condition that does not involve a focus on weight loss? (How would you treat a thin person who had the same condition?)
The answers given by your health professional to these questions should look something like:
The success rate is no better than 5% and it is quite likely that you will gain back all of the weight that you lost and perhaps a bit more.
It is quite possible that your health issues (high blood pressure, diabetes, abnormal cholesterol, etc.) will get worse when you regain the weight.
All of these conditions can be helped through lifestyle changes with little or no weight loss. (A Health-Centered Approach) The best treatment for a fat person for any of these conditions is the same treatment that would be recommended for a thin person…
NOTE: If you don’t get something like these answers, consider seeking help elsewhere.
Women are the ones who suffer the most from fatphobia within the medical field. The treatment that fat people receive from doctors often pushes women to either learn not to seek medical help, or they are left without the kind of life-saving treatment that could have made a significant difference in their health:
So listen, man: I am not the one who is “scaring somebody away from a life changing opportunity.” The medical system already does that. Because if you think for one second that fat people haven’t already been pressured from all sides to lose weight as quickly as possible? To their own detriment? You’re wrong.
Bias toward overweight individuals is evident in children aged 9 to 11 years. And considering that 54% of people in a 2012 poll by Esquire stated that they would rather be dead than fat, this is not something for us to just brush aside.