The Big Fat Lie: Why Your Weight Didn't Cause Your Health Condition

Medicine has built an entire mythology around weight as the root cause of disease, including diabetes,  sleep apnea, and arthritis. In this episode, I introduce you to three fictional patients whose stories expose the fatal flaws in this narrative. Through Madison's diabetes diagnosis, Mason's struggle with sleep apnea struggle, and Morgan's joint pain dismissal, I dismantle the logical fallacies that confuse association with causation. 

The truth is simple. Your weight didn't make you sick - but being blamed for it, denied treatment, and forced into weight cycling absolutely will. I challenge you to ask: if weight causes these conditions, why doesn't weight loss cure them? And more importantly, who profits when doctors prescribe weight loss instead of evidence-based care? 

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Episode 7 of Season 6 of the Fat Doctor podcast. I am your host, Dr. Asher Larmie.

You may hear my dogs barking in the background throughout this episode and the next few episodes as I'm recording it. My dog is currently wearing the cone of shame after having emergency surgery at the vet's over the weekend, so they bark, and they will bark, you're just gonna have to ignore it.

It's been quite a hectic couple of weeks, it's a hectic time of the year. We're in the midst of the eclipse season right now, and oh boy, I'm feeling it. I have tried to lock myself up in my Fortress of Solitude, predominantly editing my book, and trying to just kind of seal myself off from the rest of the world. And it's kind of working.

I'm trying to minimize the amount of contact I have with other people right now as a means of survival. It's a bit tricky out there. It's particularly tricky for people who are trying to access healthcare, and to be fair, it's always been tricky, especially for my wonderful listeners. Most of you are struggling to access healthcare for a variety of reasons. I've got friends in the States at the moment who are telling me just how much higher their copays are after this big, beautiful bill got passed, and just how impossible it is to manage the copay. My husband got referred to see a specialist, and the waiting list is 102 weeks. That's 2 years to see a specialist. There's something desperately wrong there.

Wherever you are in the world right now, I imagine that you're struggling to access healthcare. And when you do manage to get an appointment with a doctor, it's pretty brutal, isn't it? Especially if you're fat, it's not pleasant. It's not fun out there.

Today I thought I'd introduce you to a few people, a few people that I made up in my head. I went for M names this time, so we've got Madison, we've got Mason, and we've got Morgan. These feel like very American names, but I like them.

The 3 Ms today are three patients that I have created for your listening pleasure, and I hope to use them as a way of highlighting the big fat lie, which is that you are to blame for your health condition, or I should say your weight is to blame for your health condition. That is a big fat lie. Hopefully by the end of this episode, either it might be new to you, and this is all gonna be news, or you already know it, but I have just reaffirmed that you are never to blame for your health condition. You didn't do anything wrong, it's nothing to do with your weight.

Just because something, two things are associated with each other does not mean that one caused the other. A lot of us know this, association is not the same as causation, but I want to highlight that in very practical terms. Maybe give you some food for thought, especially if you're carrying around some guilt or some shame about a diagnosis that you received. You're blaming yourself, maybe this will help you to stop blaming yourself. Or maybe you need to be able to question or challenge your own doctors, in which case, hopefully there's something to be gained from this.

All of this is coming from chapter 2 or chapter 3 of my book, No Way. If you're interested in hearing the chapters before the book is released, which won't be for a few months now, if you want first look, early bird access to the book, I am reading chapter by chapter in my book club, which is exclusive to members of my online community, The Waiting Room. You can find out more about that at the end of this episode.

Let's get into it, shall we? Let's start off with Madison, the diabetic that should have known better.

Picture this. Madison, delightful 42-year-old, hardworking individual, goes in for a routine blood test for a medication review, blood pressure review. Gets a phone call from the receptionist at the GP's office saying, we're gonna need you to make an appointment with the GP, the doctor's looked at your blood test and needs you to make an appointment. That's really stressful. And then, of course, they say, and the next appointment available is 6 weeks from now. Maybe not 6, maybe 3. But, you know, bit of a wait.

Now Madison's sat at home, really worrying, wondering what it might be. Has a clue, right? Because let's face it, we all know the things that we're going to be told. We're gonna be told it's either gonna be blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, generally. It's funny how we don't worry nowadays, like, it might be something serious. And by serious, I mean, you know, like, I could be dying. Once upon a time, that was the biggest fear, I think, for me, when I phoned up a patient, it was like, I'm gonna need to discuss your blood test with you. You know, they thought I was gonna tell them some really bad news. I suppose a diagnosis of high blood pressure is not good news, but it's not a devastating diagnosis, is it? But because of the shame and the guilt, and all of that, the blame, that turns this, what should be a relatively, you know, it's not the end of the world, is what I'm trying to say.

It's not the end of the world. It's not, you know, I'm not the harbinger of doom when I'm telling you that you have diabetes. But it feels that way, doesn't it? Why? Because, of course, Madison finally goes to see the doctor, doctor sits Madison down and says, I've got your blood test results here, and you have a HbA1c of 53, which is 7%, and that means you have type 2 diabetes. And then immediately launches into a 20-minute, you-need-to-lose-weight lecture.

Nothing else. The first thing they say is weight, weight loss. It's all about weight. Of course, implying that Madison caused this HbA1c level of 53 through poor lifestyle choices, and that the only solution now is to never eat sweet things again, and to never enjoy yourself, and for whatever happens, you better lose weight. And possibly there's the promise of remission. If you lose weight, then you can go into remission, and they might even give a referral to the Pathways to Remission program, which is based on a load of bullshit.

Madison leaves feeling shamed and guilty, and hating themselves. And spirals very quickly into some very problematic, disordered eating that perhaps they'd finally managed to get on top of, but it doesn't matter, once you get a diabetes diagnosis, it all goes to shit. Ask me how I know.

Nothing to do with me. I'm not Madison. Don't know what you're talking about.

Here's the truth, alright? It's got nothing to do with your weight. It's got nothing to do with your weight, and this is why.

We've known this for a very long time. I should also point out, we've known about this from the 70s, 80s, that type 2 diabetes is genetic. It is inherited. If you look at twin studies, you know, the vast majority of twin pairs where one is diabetic, the other is diabetic too, right? And that's pretty convincing evidence when we look at twin studies. But you don't even need that. Also, if we look at the children or siblings of people with type 2 diabetes, we find that they, at a very young age, are overproducing a hormone called insulin.

Now, you've heard of insulin, you know what insulin does, right? Insulin is the hormone that helps you to absorb sugar from the blood into the cells. People who are predisposed, who are genetically predisposed to type 2 diabetes, will be overproducing insulin from a very early age, like, late teens, 20s, and so on. And we've got studies to show this, and this is regardless of weight, it's got nothing to do with weight or BMI, it's just genetic.

So why is this important? Why is it important that we know and we recognize that people who are genetically predisposed to type 2 diabetes overproduce insulin? Well, for lots of reasons. Number one, if you're constantly producing too much insulin, your cells, over time, become less and less sensitive to it. You know, think about it. If you're constantly being bombarded with something, after a while, you begin to tune it out. And the same goes with cells. It's a bit of an oversimplification, but that's essentially what happens. Lack of insulin sensitivity, better known as insulin resistance, is the precursor to type 2 diabetes. So over time, we become less sensitive to insulin, become a bit resistant to it, and that is the precursor to type 2 diabetes. Now, not everybody with insulin resistance will develop diabetes, but you can't really develop type 2 diabetes without having insulin resistance, right? That's the process.

Overproduction of insulin does other things as well. It tells your body to turn sugar into fat. It tells your fat stores, hold on to the fat, don't turn it into sugar. Don't turn it into energy. So, over time, you build up your fat stores, because insulin's really good at making you fat. It's kind of like, its job is to build up your fat stores, part of its job is to build up your fat stores.

So on the one hand, we're becoming resistant to insulin, and on the other hand, we're just getting fatter and fatter, over time, over decades, in fact. So then what happens? We see people who are insulin resistant also happen to be fat. And we mistakenly assume, oh, well, being fat caused the insulin resistance, but it didn't. Had nothing to do with it. It was a genetic predisposition.

We once called it the thrifty gene, and genetics are not personal failures, right? We just inherited them, and there's nothing we can do about it. Just because the weight gain preceded the diagnosis of diabetes does not mean that it caused it. Again, I say this is a post hoc fallacy. Just because one thing came before the other does not mean that the first thing caused the second thing.

In this case, it was the overproduction of insulin, or the hyperinsulinemia, that caused both.

Translation! To all the insulin-resistant people out there, to all the people with PCOS, to all the people who have got diabetes, it's not your fault that your genes are thrifty. You have thrifty genes, that's not your fault, that's just life.

So the questions you have to ask yourself, some of these are more obvious than the others. If weight causes diabetes, which it doesn't, but if it did, then why do some thin people get type 2 diabetes? Why do thin people get type 2 diabetes who happen to have relatives who are type 2 diabetic? It's very rare to find somebody with a type 2 diabetes diagnosis that doesn't have any history of diabetes in their family. It's possible, because there are other factors at play, lots of other factors. For example, if you have PCOS, and you're producing lots of extra androgens, that predisposes you to insulin resistance, so that's kind of separate. But oftentimes, more often than not, you can say, yeah, my mum had it, or my sister has it, or my grandfather had it, or whatever. It runs in families much more than anything else, it runs in families. As I said, we've got twin studies.

If being fat causes insulin resistance, then why don't all fat people have insulin resistance? To some degree, right? If it was the weight that was causing it, then everyone would have some degree of insulin resistance, and more importantly, the fatter you were, the more insulin resistant you'd be, right? But that doesn't happen. Plenty of fat people out there that don't have any insulin resistance, plenty of thin people out there that do. So it can't be, right?

And then here's the real, it's the real kicker. If being fat causes diabetes, why doesn't weight loss cure diabetes? Now, some of you will say, yes, it does, it does cure diabetes, and this is based on one study. One study, called the DIRECT study, took place partly in Scotland, in the north of England. Sad, as a Scottish person, I feel ashamed to say that we are partly to blame for this. But it took place in the UK, 300 people were placed on a very low energy diet, we're talking about 800 to 850 calories, for I think it was between 12 and 16 weeks, so a few months.

And in the first year, about 50% had gone into remission. And that was it. It's a miracle! People lost weight, they went into remission, losing weight cures diabetes.

Here's the problem! Diabetes is not like pneumonia, right? It's not like, how do I put it? I can tell you when you've been cured of pneumonia. You no longer have any signs that you have pneumonia. You don't have pneumonia on your x-ray, you have normal blood results, you have normal CRP, normal white cell count, there's no evidence of the pneumonia left in your lungs. You've been cured of pneumonia, right? That's not what happens with diabetes.

Diabetes, the definition of diabetes is kind of like high blood pressure. You hit a certain cutoff point, a rather arbitrary cutoff point, one that we, together, in our infinite wisdom decided was the cutoff point, and then you're labeled as type 2 diabetes. So, just because your levels went below that number doesn't mean you're suddenly cured, doesn't mean you stopped being insulin resistant, doesn't mean your pancreas is suddenly working better than it used to. That's not what actually happens, right? When you have cancer and you go into remission, we've got rid of the cancer, there's no evidence that the cancer exists anymore, it's disappeared from your body. But that's not the same for diabetes.

It just means that your blood levels were a bit lower. It's like with high blood pressure. Okay, so you had high blood pressure, and then your blood pressure came down, okay, so now it's within normal range. The process, the pathological process that causes high blood pressure hasn't disappeared. What that means is it's gonna come back, so you're in a temporary remission, and that's exactly what happened with the direct trial. In the first year, it was 50% of people, in the second year, it was only a third of people, and by the third, fourth, fifth year, virtually no one was still in remission. It didn't last.

It didn't last, and what was really bad was that the vast majority of people either dropped out of the trial because they couldn't handle it, experienced this kind of dramatic weight loss, followed by a dramatic weight gain, and we don't know what happened to them. We don't know what happened to their HbA1c levels, to their diabetes. We don't know how that impacted them in the long term, because they're not included in the study. So, it's really problematic.

This study in of itself, and to suddenly say, oh, weight loss cures diabetes, that's a lie. That's a lie brought to you by the weight loss industry. In particular, I think it was the Cambridge Weight Loss Plan, or don't quote me on that, it was one of the manufacturers of these meal supplements, you know? They sponsored the study, or they produced, gave the meal supplements away for free, so yes, they sponsored the study.

Weight loss does not cure diabetes. Doesn't work. And I go into this in more detail in my book, I probably explain it a lot better in my book. But yeah, it's not, it's not your fault that you have diabetes, you've just got thrifty genes. What can you do? It is what it is, and it's not something to be blamed for.

So that's Madison's story. Let's talk about Mason.

Mason has been exhausted for years! And they were told all sorts of things. It's because you're lazy and fat, it's because you're female and fat, it's because you're stressed and fat, it's because you don't do enough exercise and get enough fresh air and fat.

And then one day, a doctor went, do you wake up in the morning feeling like you had a good night's sleep? And Mason's like, no, the opposite, I never feel like I've slept, I wake up and I feel like I could sleep again. And Mason's doctor was like, well, you are fat, so you've probably got sleep apnea. And does a sleep study, and lo and behold, turns out Mason's been having multiple episodes of apnea, which is when breathing stops for a bit, and then restarts, happening throughout the night.

That's the diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea, or sleep disorder breathing, I should say. And their doctor says, you just need to lose some weight. Lose some weight, you're not gonna have this problem.

Now, Mason's been trying to lose weight on and off for the last 25 years. Every time, they succeed for a little while, then they regain the weight. And actually, when they look back at how much they weighed 20 years ago versus how much now, they're significantly heavier.

So, of course, Mason feels like shit, it's my fault that I have sleep apnea, and there's talk of CPAP, which, you know, is a treatment, a well-known treatment for sleep apnea, but that's really embarrassing, isn't it? I'm gonna have to wear this machine on my face every night. You know, it's quite stigmatizing, I think, actually, having sleep apnea. Because, once upon a time, I believe it was called Pickwickian Syndrome, and that's to do with some cartoon character from the 1960s who basically was very fat and had large jowls. And so, yeah, we have this idea that sleep apnea is all about having a fat neck, which is not true at all.

It has to do with the muscles inside your throat, essentially, and how sometimes they collapse when you're sleeping. And this happens to lots of people, and actually it's happened to a lot of thin people. But thin people aren't being diagnosed with it, because doctors assume you have to be fat in order to have it. So it's actually quite problematic for thin people, because they should be getting a sleep apnea diagnosis, but their doctor rules it out because of the size of their collar. Once upon a time, neck collar size was one of the diagnostic criteria in order to even suspect sleep apnea, and to refer you for a sleep study, you know, depended on your neck collar. Oh, no, you've got a thin neck, can't possibly be sleep apnea, which is not true.

Anyway, again, this is a condition that is blamed on being fat, as I said, and this idea that if you lose weight, it'll go away. Sleep apnea is a classic example of reverse causation.

What is reverse causation? Well, remember I said, just because one thing preceded another thing, doesn't mean that the first thing caused the second thing. Sometimes it's actually the opposite. Sometimes the second, the first thing didn't cause the second thing, the second thing caused the first thing, and in this case, think about it.

Poor sleep causes weight gain. It increases stress levels, increases cortisol levels, which causes weight gain, it increases inflammation, which causes weight gain. Poor sleep is a risk factor for weight gain, sleep deprivation. Sleep apnea causes sleep deprivation. So in this case, the sleep apnea probably preceded, in many cases, in most cases, preceded the weight gain. And even if it didn't precede the weight gain, it is almost impossible to lose weight when you can't sleep during the night.

Doctors just don't think logically sometimes. How can you tell somebody to lose weight when they have a condition that basically is preventing them from losing weight? Forget the fact that, you know, weight loss almost always results in, well, weight loss is unsustainable, results in weight gain, oftentimes, and you end up heavier than when you first started. Forget that, that's just standard fare, but that's especially the case when you are not sleeping through the night, and you're only getting, you know, a couple of hours of decent sleep, or it's very interrupted.

So we need to start thinking of sleep apnea as a risk factor for weight gain. That's not the reason to treat sleep apnea. We should be treating sleep apnea, not because it makes you fat, but because it makes you miserable. And everyone deserves a good night's sleep. And there's a reason that sleep deprivation is a really nice form of torture, right? It's not nice. And a lot of people who treat their sleep apnea, and who find that their CPAP is effective, will say, it really changed my life. I'm actually getting a decent, nice sleep now. And it's not without its issues, I get that CPAP can be really difficult, and can cause various issues.

But at the end of the day, it's better than nothing, and it works. It works. Whereas, of course, weight loss doesn't help people with sleep apnea at all.

So, again, if weight, if higher weight causes sleep apnea, why do thin people get it? Why don't all fat people get it? And why doesn't weight loss cure it?

Stop blaming things on weight. Folks, we've got to stop doing that.

Then there's Morgan. Morgan is 55, and has painful hands and knees. And goes to see the GP about this painful knee that's really been bothering them for the last 6 months. And the doctor gives a cursory look, probably doesn't even examine the knee, certainly doesn't organize any tests, just looks at them and goes, yeah, well, that's all that extra weight on your joints, isn't it? It's like carrying a 100-pound backpack 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Of course your knees hurt. If you lose weight, your knees will stop hurting.

That's what Morgan gets told. And it doesn't really make sense, because Morgan also has pain in their hands. And that's, I mean, the backpack analogy doesn't work for hands, does it? And that's the thing. This idea that higher weight causes arthritis or joint problems, it's riddled with holes, and the minute you start picking apart this theory, it's obvious that it's not true.

And the first one is that lifting weights strengthens your muscles and improves your joint health. And I've talked about this many times. The second is that hands are not weight-bearing joints. But hands are one of the most common places where you get arthritis. So if it's about load on the joints, then you cannot explain why people get it in their hands.

The real cause of arthritis is a complex interplay of genetics and environment. Inflammation, definitely linked to arthritis. There's definitely a genetic component. Hormones and hormonal balance is linked to arthritis. If you have a history of injury to a particular joint, so for example, if you had a soft tissue injury to your knee in your teens or 20s, that can predispose you to arthritis at a later date. So mechanical pressure, or load on the joints, is not the culprit. The evidence is very clear here. It's much more complex than that.

If load on the joints was really a problem, then we wouldn't be going to gyms to strengthen the muscles in our legs in order to stabilize our knee joints and hip joints. That's not what we would be recommending. You can't, in one breath, say, the key to treating arthritis is to strengthen your quadriceps and your hamstrings, and in the next breath say, but you're fat, and it's all your fault, because fat people by definition will have stronger muscles, just to hold them up, to hold them steady, to hold their weight. So it doesn't make sense.

If it was just mechanical load, why do your hands hurt? If weight training is good for your joints, then why is carrying weight bad? If fat people are sedentary, then how are they damaging their knees by standing on them? Which one is it? Fat and lazy? Or damaging their knees by being on their feet all day? You can't have both. You must pick one.

So the thing we have to understand about all of these conditions that get blamed on weight is that they often have some underlying confounding factors which kind of ring true across the board. So, chronic stress is one of the most important ones. If you have chronic stress, then you will be bathing in cortisol. And cortisol causes inflammation, it causes hormonal disruption, it increases your blood pressure, it increases your blood glucose, and it causes weight gain. So when we have two things that are associated with one another, diabetes, sleep apnea, arthritis, and being fat, these two things are associated with one another. We look for underlying factors or confounding factors that could be causing both.

Chronic stress is one of the main ones. If you're bathing in cortisol, more likely to have inflammation, more likely to have high blood glucose, more likely to have high blood pressure, and more likely to gain weight over time.

If you're experiencing stigma, then that causes more stress, which causes more cortisol, which causes blah blah blah blah. If you're blaming yourself for something, and feeling guilt and shame all the time, that also increases your cortisol. It also causes you to avoid doctors, right? You avoid healthcare altogether, you delay your treatment. You don't seek healthcare because you're afraid of how you're going to be treated.

That also impacts your health. It can also impact your mental health, right? Experiencing stigma, and sorry, I say experiencing stigma at the doctors, but actually experiencing stigma everywhere.

What you're seeing here is none of these conditions are actually caused by weight. All of these conditions have treatments that work regardless of weight. Weight loss doesn't cure any of these conditions.

And yet, there is this narrative that allows doctors to blame their patients, to delay their treatment, to deny them healthcare. Poor, poor Morgan with that painful knee is not gonna get any actual healthcare, right? They're just gonna say, sorry, there's nothing much we can do for you because you're too fat.

So, it allows, it provides justification for doctors to deny us healthcare, to prescribe weight loss instead of actual treatments that work. And then who does that serve? Who does that serve? When doctors are prescribing weight loss, either instead of or in addition to, other treatments, who benefits from that? It's not the patient, because weight loss is never a positive experience. You get treated better, and that's a positive experience. Being treated better is always good. And so, yeah, I loved it when I was losing weight, because people were nicer to me, and I felt good about myself, and I also had a sense of accomplishment, like, you know, I cracked it, I'm amazing. But then, of course, the weight loss slows down, and then you start regaining weight, and any of the positive feelings that you had are overshadowed by all of the negative feelings that you have once the weight starts coming back on.

So even if it's a temporary high, it's not benefiting you in the long term. And as I said, you end up regaining the weight, that has a negative impact on your body. It's not that you're just as fat as you started with, it's the process of losing weight and regaining weight that's causing so many of your symptoms and causing long-term damage.

So who does it serve? Who is benefiting from this narrative? In a way, it serves doctors, because it makes life a lot easier. If we can focus on you, and how you're feeling, and how you're to blame, and how you need to fix your own problems, it means we don't have to, right? It means we don't have to figure out what's going on, we don't have to spend time talking to you, reassuring you, and providing you with health information and helping you to manage your condition. We can just go, it's all your fault, lose some weight and go away. That makes our lives easier.

But I think it goes much beyond that, you know, I think if it was just benefiting doctors, I don't think it would be sustainable. The people who are benefiting from this narrative that being fat causes any number of diseases is the weight loss industry. It has always been the weight loss industry, and that is why the weight loss industry is profiting so much. That is why the weight loss industry is worth around $425 billion in 2025, that was what it was estimated as. Supposedly by 2035, will be worth something like 800 and something billion. That's almost a trillion. A year. That's how much the weight loss industry is worth.

In a later episode, further down in the series, I'm going to talk to you about Novo Nordisk, and how much money they've made in the last two years. Pretty unbelievable when you look at the numbers. But yeah, it's serving their narrative. The more the weight loss industry can convince you that your weight caused any number of diseases, the more you are likely to lose weight, or the more likely your doctor is to prescribe weight loss.

And nowadays, weight loss prescriptions are actual prescriptions, right? For a long time, we were prescribing, you know, in the UK, in the NHS, we were often sending you to Slimming World, Weight Watchers, and being like, here you go, you can have 10 weeks free. It's not free, it's free for you, it wasn't free, the NHS was paying for it. Nowadays, of course, it's the shots. We're prescribing weight loss injections, and that's who's making money. Also, bariatric surgeons. They didn't exist. Now they do, and they make bank. A lot of them are doing it privately, right? You are being pressured into losing weight, so you fund your own surgery.

And the only people who are benefiting are the weight loss industry. It's not you. It's not you, you're not benefiting in any way, shape, or form. And the thing is, that because weight loss is unsustainable, what happens is that even if you do the injections, or the surgery, or you go on a diet, or whatever it is that you do, you won't be able to sustain the weight loss in the long term. You'll start regaining the weight. And when you start regaining the weight, guess what's gonna happen? Your doctor's gonna blame you again!

They're gonna blame you for your body doing exactly the thing that your body's supposed to do. They're gonna blame you for experiencing a natural, biological, evolutionary phenomenon.

It's just the perfect situation, it's the perfect scenario. The weight loss industry has created the perfect conditions for them to thrive, and to make a ton of money, and for us to suffer as a result, and nobody cares.

So, I'm gonna leave you with this. Your weight didn't make you sick. Your weight isn't going to make you sick. If you're sitting there worried, oh, I'm worried that I'm going to get sleep apnea, or diabetes, or arthritis, whatever, your weight doesn't make you sick, your weight isn't going to make you sick.

Being blamed for your weight? Being blamed for a medical condition. Being denied treatment until you lose weight. Weight cycling from repeated diets, weight stigma from your healthcare providers. These will all make you sick.

Being blamed for your weight will make you sick. Being denied treatment until you lose weight will make you sick. Going on diet after diet after diet will make you sick. Experiencing weight stigma at the hands of your healthcare providers, that will make you sick. There is no question about that. There's plenty of evidence to support this. We know this is true.

We don't have any evidence to really prove that being fat causes any illness, but we do have evidence that stigma causes illness.

The solution here is for you to stop blaming yourself, and I get that that's not easy. But you don't let them make you sick. Don't carry around this shame and this guilt and blaming yourself. And going on diet after diet after diet, because that's what your doctor told you to do. They're wrong, you're right, they're the problem. You don't have to listen to them. You can opt out, and I know that's not easy, because it means they're denying you healthcare based on your BMI. I get that. It's not an easy choice to make.

But what is your alternative? And that, I guess, is a tricky place to end this podcast, but it is the reality. It's a catch-22. Because if you refuse to comply with weight loss, then you'll never get the healthcare that you need. But if you comply with weight loss advice, then you'll end up sicker.

And that's tricky, isn't it? Because there should be an option C. A third option. That sucks.

I am around, if you're struggling. I think there is, to a degree, there is an option C, which is to assert your rights to evidence-based healthcare on an individual basis. So, if you're being denied healthcare because of your BMI, there are ways to challenge this, and I have helped many people to challenge this. I consult with people, I help people write appeal letters, I help people write complaint letters, I come to doctor's appointments with people, virtually, most of the time, just in your pocket, on your phone. I'm like, hey, how's it going? And challenge doctors during the consultation process as well. So, I have, you know, I have experience with this.

It's not fair that you should need to hire Asher in order to get the healthcare that you need, but it is an option. It's not a great option, but it is an option, is what I'm saying. So if that's something that you need right now, then let me know.

If you've got a friend or a family member who is just blaming themselves for their current predicament, send them a link to this episode. Let them know the truth. And, you know, they may not believe you to begin with, they certainly, in my experience, are just like, what a load of nonsense. But eventually, the message gets through. And it helps. Because, like I said, shame, blame, these things are making people sick. So if we can try to address those things that we have some control over, then that's something. It's not everything, but it's something.

Alright, folks, that's been me. As I said, don't forget, this is all coming from my upcoming book, No Way. Everything You've Been Told About Weight Loss is a Lie, and you can listen. Now, you don't have to wait until the book comes out. If you are a member of my online community, then you can come to Book Club every week, and also, if you just want to support me, by the way, if you're like, oh, Asher, I really love the work that you're doing, I really want to support you in some way, please do join The Waiting Room. That is a way that you can support me financially, because sometimes that's really what I need, is your financial support.

Yeah, okay. Thanks very much for listening, folks, and I'll catch you next time, when I will be talking about something. What will I be talking about? I will be talking about the Mediterranean diet. You'll love it. Alright. Take care, folks. Bye.