An anonymous reader turned me on to a website for “Obesity Advocacy”. There is no way in hell I’m linking to it so don’t ask. It is a website encouraging people to get involved in convincing Congress to recognize obesity as a disease and “support legislation to provide greater access to and acceptance of all effective treatments, including weight-loss surgery.”

The group sponsoring this is called CHOICE – Choosing Health Over Obesity and Inspiring Change Through Empowerment.

Let me check these words against my card…Woo Hoo I just won bullshit bingo!

Let’s get a few things straight. You can’t choose health over obesity for a couple of reasons. First, they are not opposites, they aren’t mutually exclusive. You have your body weight and you have your health, two different things. Secondly neither of those things is just a matter of choice. Both your body size and your health are multi-dimensional and include things that are and are not within our control including things like past behavior, current behavior, genetics, stress, environment, and access.

Calling people’s bodies “diseased” based only on what you can tell by their weight and height is not inspiring or empowering. Sadly, it’s also not change.

So I call shenanigans on their slogan. But let’s look at the meat of their argument:

In their list of the truth about obesity they include:

People do not choose to be obese — medical research now indicates obesity has more to do with science and the biology of fat, rather than willpower or discipline.

By dieting alone, many people affected by obesity regain as much as two-thirds of the weight within one year, and almost all of it within five years.

For adults affected by obesity who have at least one obesity-related health condition, like heart disease or type 2 diabetes, weight-loss surgery, in combination with diet and exercise, may help them overcome obesity and live a longer, healthier life.

True. True. What?

First let’s be clear that “obesity-related” means a condition that has been correlated with obesity – which is to say that it sometimes, but not always, happens at the same time as obesity. This is not to be confused with conditions that are proven to be caused by obesity, of which there are almost none. To give an example: Men who are bald have more heart disease. They are correlated, but they are not causally related: baldness doesn’t cause the heart disease and growing hair won’t prevent it. However, if the people at the CHOICE campaign were working on heart attacks, they would be trying to advocate surgery to grow hair as a way to prevent heart disease and I’m guessing they’d be stumped when it didn’t work.

Also, once again we are saying that we recognize that large bodies are part of human diversity, and yet we want to treat them as a pathology and make them go away. Let’s not forget how well and truly we do suck at making bodies smaller (as they mention in their own material), but somehow it’s still an incredibly lucrative field. Moving on…

Under misconceptions they included:

People affected by obesity choose to be this way — they’re lazy and they lack willpower.

Exercise and diet should do the trick for everyone

Weight-loss surgery is a last resort or a sign of failure.

True. True. Run that last one by me again?

What is with the random surgery references? Oh.. I see, CHOICE is actually Allergan – the makers of the LapBand. And they have signed up over 16,000 people to lobby Congress to create a problem that they will then sell their product to fix. This reminds me of that time when several people who were affilitated with weight loss companies got to lower what the CDC considers a healthy BMI. Then the next day they got to recommend their product to solve the problem that they just created.

Truthfully, nothing that Allergan does surprises me anymore. Let’s look at their greatest hits:

Paying for a study with abhorrent research methods that “shockingly” found that obesity costs the workplace $73 Billion a year, and then using that study to convince health insurance companies that it’s cheaper to pay for lap bands than to have fat employees.

Holding a CONTEST where you could win a lap band which you could take yourself or, I am not kidding, give to a friend or family member.

And this is a big deal because their surgery isn’t that safe. Over one third of patients require follow up surgery. Try to imagine the outrage that would occur if more than 30% of people who had an apendectomy required a second surgery where the doctors went back in to correct potentially life threatening issues, and those people had to pay for the second surgery. And that doesn’t even include the plastic surgery to remove loose skin that often isn’t covered by insurance, or the follow up that often isn’t covered by insurance.

Plus many people who have the lapband regain their weight, and then there are the dangers of slipped band (The Band has to be dissected out, all the sutures removed, and the position of the stomach made right), band erosion (when the band actually erodes into the stomach), concentric pouch dilation, esophogeal dilation, and a host of other complications.

Yet Allergan wants to push Congress to get behind their product while they are also pushing to be able to do the surgery on younger and lighter patients despite all of the side effects we just talked about and the fact that people die from this voluntary, elective procedure. Their stock is down and apparently this is their idea of marketing.

To be clear, I don’t believe in telling anyone how to live so if people want to get a lap band I support their right to do that. However, they can absolutely cut out the “obesity advocacy” message because I don’t want or need these people as my “advocates”, and I would appreciate it if they would refrain from getting my existence declared a “disease” by Congress in the process.