3 Reasons Why Obesity is Not a Disease?

I bet you didn’t know this, Obe­sity, even being over­fat is a dis­ease. No, not really.

At least that’s what sev­eral social groups wish you to believe. “Suf­fers Of Obe­sity” is just one of those groups. Their entire stance is obe­sity (which, btw, can be only 30lbs or so over your ideal body weight) is an actual disease.

Well, is it? Yes and no.

Come­dian Ricky Ger­vais has a hilar­i­ous go at this stance that obe­sity is a dis­ease. You some­times have to laugh, you know?

“No, it’s not a dis­ease, it’s greed. You just love to eat,” or so Ger­vais believes. Well, in my pre­vi­ous post, I have wrote about overeat­ing does mat­ter, today, as a new decade with new ideas, I’m here to share a new idea with you:

We really need to rede­fine some words. One of those words is “disease”.

Case-in-point: Wikipedia.com defines disease…

“In human beings, “dis­ease” is often used more broadly to refer to any con­di­tion that causes pain, dys­func­tion, dis­tress, social prob­lems, and/or death to the per­son afflicted, or sim­i­lar prob­lems for those in con­tact with the per­son. In this broader sense, it some­times includes injuries, dis­abil­i­ties, dis­or­ders, syn­dromes, infec­tions, iso­lated symp­toms, deviant behav­iors, and atyp­i­cal vari­a­tions of struc­ture and func­tion, while in other con­texts and for other pur­poses these may be con­sid­ered dis­tin­guish­able categories.”

Let’s think about that.

If you bump your knee against a sharp object, is this a new dis­ease called “bum­puskneeitis?” Er… no. It’s an acci­dent. Sure, it may ’cause’ a spe­cific set of symp­toms that could broadly (as in as broad as the back-side of a barn) be con­sid­ered a “dis­ease”, but … no. It’s an acci­dent with bio­log­i­cal consequences.

Social prob­lems? So, if I decide to read 17 books on why par­ents suck as a teenager and develop anti-social behav­ior, is this a “dis­ease”? NO! This is the angst of youth com­bined, per­haps, with poor par­ent­ing! Sure, it can lead to men­tal issues that could be clas­si­fied as “dis­ease”, but guess what?

It’s totally within your con­trol. No one force-fed the books to the teen. And no one is force-feeding you, or any­one you know. That deci­sion is yours and yours alone, and any­one, repeat ANYONE on the face of planet earth can change their behav­iors and atti­tudes toward food.

Okay, some more thoughts on disease:

Let me give you a few exam­ples of what is typ­i­cally thought of as “disease”…

* Lep­rosy
* Can­cer
* Hypothyroidism

We’ll just take three, as you know, there are thou­sands of them …

Now, we can all agree that these three states rep­re­sent true “dis­ease”. The first you could catch by acci­dent; the sec­ond is a com­bi­na­tion of genet­ics, envi­ron­ment, and who-knows-what-else, and the third is almost always genetic.

One, can­cer, is some­thing you ‘may’ be able to do some­thing about. For exam­ple, lung can­cer. 90% of lung can­cer patients con­tract the dis­ease from smoking.

Let’s just cover these 90%, and folks, I’m ask­ing for an open mind here…

Is lung can­cer, in the case of the 90%, REALLY a dis­ease? Or is it a bio­log­i­cal consequence?

Sure, “can­cer” is a dis­ease. But what caused it in this case? Some­thing invol­un­tary? Hardly. Some­thing that could not be stopped?

No way.

The 90% caused it. Period.

Wel­come to the real world.

So, I pro­pose this: We rede­fine “dis­ease” as an abnor­mal bio­log­i­cal con­di­tion that we DO NOT have direct cause or effect over.

Air­borne viruses: Dis­ease. Obe­sity: NOT a disease.

And yes, lung can­cer in chain smok­ers is NOT a dis­ease; it’s a bio­log­i­cal out­come. The end result should be treated as a dis­ease, of course, but come on — Where is the respon­si­bil­ity guys?

Life, if you want to life it fully and with­out fear, is ALL about tak­ing total respon­si­bil­ity. That’s empow­er­ment. Any­thing less is… well, LESS.

In our exam­ple, lung can­cer is no more a “dis­ease” than, say, me hit­ting myself over the head with a ham­mer every day and caus­ing brain dam­age is a disease.

Brain dam­age (not self-induced) = disease.

Brain dam­age caused by self-inflicted hammer-hitting = bio­log­i­cal con­se­quence. In this case of sheer stupidity!

Now, one could (and many will) make the argu­ment that I had a “men­tal” dis­ease that caused me to WANT to hit myself over the head with a ham­mer… but… well…

At this point we need to rede­fine the word “dis­ease” in my opin­ion. Here’s why:

First, if this were the case, I could say that all crim­i­nals have a dis­ease. They all have a men­tal dis­ease that makes them want to kill, steal, you name it. This may in fact BE true, we do not know, but do we hold them NOT respon­si­ble if it is? No, we do not.

And that brings us back to obesity.

Obe­sity and being over­fat is not a dis­ease folks, it’s a bio­log­i­cal consequence.

And, with the excep­tion of the extremely ‘rare’ cases of total glan­du­lar dys­func­tion from birth, obe­sity, your body weight is your responsibility.

Period. End of story.

To not obese any more, you need to found a bet­ter way to eat. You need to retrained your body to crave the style of eat­ing (and exer­cise) over stuff­ing your­self with pizza and burg­ers every day.

It torches belly fat and it repro­grams the body and mind to use food as fuel espe­cially if you use together with Jon’s 7 Minute Body work­out sys­tem

Jon, the author doc­u­ments his jour­ney from obe­sity to total lean­ness in EODD. He had to over­come ‘real’ dis­eases, like pitu­itary fail­ure from a high fever (i.e. viral pneu­mo­nia that almost killed him) and clin­i­cal depres­sion (par­tially what he calls “his fault”; par­tially not… i.e. half dis­ease, half bio­log­i­cal con­se­quence.) He KNOWS what you can do once you have a solid plan in place and a deter­mined mind.

Then no “dis­ease” can stop you, at least the ones that do not kill you.

So go for it .. be brave, be fear­less, be respon­si­ble and be lean!