Stuart Thomas
My major question is this: why do we wait until someone is ill and then spend lots of money on treatments instead of supporting a healthier lifestyle that prevents the need for those costly treatments and at a fraction of the price?
27 March 2008
The Hon Nicola Roxon MP
Minister for Health & Aging
MG 50
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Dear Minister
I have been working in the fitness industry as a personal trainer, rehab therapist, health and fitness coach and gym owner for the past 9 years. I am passionate about helping others improve their lives and achieve their goals but I am currently very frustrated by the direction society is taking, and I would like to pass on my thoughts on the current hot topic – The Obesity Epidemic.
In my opinion there are 2 major issues surrounding our current obsession with the obesity epidemic
1. Societies, diet industry driven, focus on Weight Loss
2. Governments lack of support for those who take care of their health and the heavy subsidies for those who don’t
1. The focus on weight loss.
It is time to think about Fitness and Health not just weight loss.
Instead of living a balanced and healthy life eating a wide variety of nutritious foods and undertaking regular activity and exercise we now focus on how skinny we can be in the shortest amount of time, using the latest celebrity fad diet. The big question is how this is affecting our health………The answer is badly.
There are literally hundreds of different diets, all proclaiming to have the cure to the weight problem. They can’t all be right and in my experience the vast majority are completely wrong.
Most of these fad diets are totally unrealistic. They completely ignore one or more of the food groups, robing the body of essential vitamins and minerals. The pills, shakes and other supplements are often made with synthetic vitamins and minerals that the body doesn’t use effectively and so end up being a complete waste of money and can also cause other more serious problems with the liver and kidneys. Diets don’t provide us with enough energy and as a result slow our metabolic rate giving us less energy and only making it easier to get fatter. The cycling between weight loss and weight gain, which occurs when you move from one failed diet to another, can cause a loss of muscle mass, dehydration and the loss of calcium from the bones.
In general terms these calorie restriction diets are unhealthy and do more harm than good.
These diets also deny us our enjoyment of food, making eating far less pleasurable because it now becomes something you can fail rather than the essential fuelling of our bodies and its systems. And in spite of all the so called miracle cures to the overweight problem, whether they are fad diets or supplements we can take, we as a population continue to get fatter. The fact that the in the US they spend a staggering 40 billion a year on the weight loss industry and yet the percentage of the population who are listed as overweight or obese continues to increase is a clear indication that the focus on weight and diets alone is totally off the mark. Here in Australia we are following the same pattern.
I love this definition of insanity “doing exactly the same thing twice but expecting different results”. How many different diets are people going to go on before they realise that they don’t work and just make you fatter and unhealthier.
What we need to do is change focus from our body weight to our health and well being. The vast majority of major population studies clearly indicate that body weight alone is not necessarily bad for your health, given that there are so many other factors that can cause bad health, many of which lead to an increase in body weight.
In fact what the studies do show is that the fitter you are the greater the decrease in risk factors, irrespective of your weight.
So from a health perspective it is much better to be supposedly overweight and fit than it is to be skinny and unfit. It is also significantly better for our economy as a person who is fitter and healthier will be individually far more productive than a person who is not. “The Obesity Myth” by Paul Campos is a great read if you are interested in a view that is different to the diets industry spin which dominates the current media frenzy on this subject.
The key is, to a large extent, to spend less time worrying about weight and more time focusing on those things that cause people to put on weight in the first place, which generally are that
1. we consume to much energy in both food and drink forms
2. we eat poor quality, highly processed food that is low in nutritional value and full of fat, salt and sugar
3. we are not active enough to use up the energy that we have consumed
Many of the health issues that we attribute to being overweight can be caused by our lack of fitness and muscular conditioning or individual genetic predisposition. High blood pressure and coronary heart disease, and diabetes are often linked to fatness; however I have a number of clients who are fit, strong, exercise regularly, eat well and have a healthy body weight and still have high blood pressure or diabetes because of their genetics.
We should not automatically point the finger at body weight as the cause of our health problems.
And what about other issues such as arthritis, osteoporosis, lack of energy, back pain, poor posture, poor balance & co-ordination or decreased motor skills. Simply losing a few kilos of body weight will not have any significant impact on any of those issues. They require a personalised and specific exercise program to slow, halt or reverse. In the case of osteoporosis a little extra body weight can be a benefit.
The result of all this is that if we are interested in improving the long term health and fitness of the population we need to ignore what the scales say or what a persons BMI result is, as they do not provide a clear indication of an individuals health status. You could take a sample of 1000 people, line them up and it would be impossible to make an accurate assessment of their individual health status just by looking at their bodies.
The under lying basis linking BMI measurements and health are flawed. The assumption that every woman in our country who is 5’ 5” or 162.5 cms tall should have a body weigh within a narrow range to be healthy is insane. Instead of forcing people into this ridiculous ‘normal’, we need to worry about their aerobic fitness, muscular strength and endurance, body composition, posture, flexibility, core stability, balance, co-ordination and motor skills as these will have a far greater impact on an individuals overall health and well being than losing a few kilos in body weight.
What we need is to make people feel stronger, healthier, fitter, and have more energy to do the things that they enjoy doing. In my experience there will probably be the added bonus of losing those few kilos but it isn’t the focus because people start to feel great and have more energy and their weight becomes less of an issue.
So which should we focus on; more energy, fitter, stronger, more productive, happier and no more aches and pains or; 10 kilos lighter but still with a sore back, no energy and unable to climb the stairs or play with the kids/grandchildren, unhappy and unproductive.
In my opinion our choice is simple, we need to stop the focus on our weight in the misguided belief that all our ills are caused by being a few kilo’s over the ideal, of which there is no such thing in a world full of very genetically diverse individuals; and we must change our focus to our health and wellbeing and aim to live full happy lives, fit, strong and healthy.
2. Governments lack of support for those who take care of their health and the heavy subsidies for those who don’t
My major question is this: why do we wait until someone is ill and then spend lots of money on treatments instead of supporting a healthier lifestyle that prevents the need for those costly treatments and at a fraction of the price?
Surely is must be better for our economy to prevent the illness in the first place? The cost of a knee replacement in a public hospital or 12 months of subsidised drugs on the PBS will far outweigh the average cost of a gym membership. And by encouraging people to be fitter and healthier we make them more productive and happier. How can this not be a good thing for our economy?
The health system is far too reactive and not proactive enough. We need to make exercise far more attractive for the population by providing tax relief or some other form of subsidy that encourages people to exercise. The health system now encourages people to take pills or go to public hospitals when they become ill, usually as a result of their poor lifestyle choices, and so why should the rest of the tax payers subsidise their poor choices?
The PBS cost the tax payers billions of dollars a year and much of it for lifestyle based issues such as diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol. Whilst there is a genuine need to support some use of these drugs in a number of cases why don’t we direct people away from these heavy subsidies where the only ones who really benefit are the manufacturers of the drugs. The first option should be towards fitness and health and not pills but our current system heavily favours the taking of pills. Why?
Across the country we hear about the long waiting list at our public hospitals for elective surgery. In fact a key election promise from the Rudd labour government was to throw millions of dollars into the public health system to cut the long waiting lists. Again I ask how many of the elective surgeries would be needed if we were encouraging people to look after their health and fitness instead of waiting for something to go wrong and then spend thousands of dollars on heavily subsidised surgery’s?
To sum up:
Do we have a government that has the strength to change the way we run our health system?
Fitter, stronger and healthier individuals will actually contribute to the increased productivity of our economy. They work better and have less time off, they are less stressed and are far less likely to be sick. They take fewer medications, saving cost under the PBS, they visit the doctor less, saving cost under Medicare.
So why don’t we support them? Why do we throw millions of dollars at the illness rather then spend it on preventing the problem in the first place.
Surely it must cost far less to give a tax refund on a gym membership than to put someone on a drug that is on the PBS?
So again I ask why we don’t encourage more people to exercise by providing some form of subsidy or tax benefit.
I thank you for taking the time to read this letter and I hope that it gives you a different perspective that could have a positive impact on the future health and happiness of the Australian population and at the same time be a positive for the public health system and the broader economy.
Yours Sincerely
Stuart Thomas
Managing Director
My lifestyle Connection
