Would you inject yourself to melt your fat away & lose weight? Is Obesity a disease?

Would you inject yourself to melt your fat away & lose weight? Is obesity a disease?

A novel injectable weight loss drug has been approved in Australia. This drug mimics the body’s natural satiety hormone, GLP-1, a hormone which signals the brain that you are full after eating a meal, reducing your drive and desire to eat.

This medication is currently available for patients certain patients with a high BMI and obesity-associated syndromes, and is prescription only, so if you are interested it would be worth discussing further with your GP. The drug works in addition to lifestyle changes, so patients are encouraged to improve their diet through minimising fast food and sugary drinks, in addition to going for a daily walk or attempting to increase their incidental exercise.

Some of you reading this may perhaps consider injecting yourself as very drastic measure to lose weight…

However, with levels of obesity in Australia affecting 63% of adults and 1 in 4 children, it is time that obesity is considered the serious disease it is.

When a patients walks into the doctors rooms with raised blood pressure or raised blood glucose, doctors act quickly to investigate these findings, and treat and manage the patient accordingly.

However, obesity is not treated this way, like a disease, despite placing the patient at increased risk of obesity-associated diseases (type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, sleep apnoea, even some cancers) and directly increasing their risk of morbidity and mortality. Instead, the issue of the patients weight will be raised, as will their diet and what they’re eating, and the patient will leave the consult with the discussion in mind, but without a real plan of action as to how to break their poor dietary habits and improve their lifestyle.

Whatsmore many patients may feel embarrassed by directly addressing and discussing their weight issues, causing them to avoid re-presenting to their GP. And so they remain a ticking time bomb, only representing when symptoms of obesity-associated diseases occur, at which time their choice of interventions is limited.

It is my belief that medicalising obesity as a ‘disease’, rather than simply a lifestyle choice, and so in turn implementing a “first line treatment, followed by a second line treatment should that fail” plan for patients at various thresholds of BMI will likely become the way we treat obesity in the near future. And for patients who have failed to lower their weight time and time again, despite undergoing gruelling diet and exercise regimes, they may welcome this classification, especially if it enables early intervention and treatment.

In labelling obesity as a disease, it takes the onus off the patient, reducing the stigma associated with obesity and empowering medical bodies and government to develop framework to really help these patients. I suspect this classification is in our near future, and I hope that if obesity is officially recognised as a disease, it can be managed and prevented more effectively, improving outcomes for both patients and society alike.

What do you think - is obesity a disease?