Experts calling for Operation Transformation to be taken off the air

Yes, I'm including anyone peddling weight loss medication for those who could use diet and exercise instead as a bad actor. And they sell their snake oil via social media and influencers to convince people that their way is the only way. And before you know it the tax payer is paying the bill for everyone over medicalising and the huge costs associated with that; and any side effects etc etc etc. And it becomes a religion, whereby if you say something like this you are ostracised.

But they have tried the 'diet and exercise' approach for a long time, even if you believe that it would work if people actually stuck to it, it can't be considered a successful treatment or realistic option if no one actually sticks to it. The drugs actually help people to stick to it.

The taxpayer is already paying for obesity related health care and all of the other illnesses and costs associated with it though. It seems that the weight loss drugs don't work for a lot of people anyway so they might end up paying X amount for the group they work for, for the others they're just paying X amount for something else.

Well it seems that the way the HSE use it 'obese' just means that your BMI is in the obese category on the scale. But it's obesity when you are obese on the BMI scale AND have other associated health problems.

If you're none the wiser then it seems to be because you're just not accepting that blood tests etc can tell you anything about a persons health….what's so unscientific about blood tests? 🤔

I can't personally provide a straightforward answer because I'm not a doctor and I don't have access to their diagnostic tools or perhaps the guides they have been given to use before landing at an 'obesity' diagnosis (or not).

I understand the concerns in the summary, however I notice that they said they think it will steer people away from prevention methods which I don't think is going to happen. I do think that prevention is going to be a key focus and warning people to not get obese in the first place. That kind of makes it sounds like they won't bother with prevention because they'll think ah well if they become obese we'll just stick them all on medication. I don't think that's going to happen. The plan seems to be to 'treat' those who currently are considered to have 'obesity' and to encourage prevention in the rest of the population.

I would certainly hope that obese people won't be labelled as sick if their body is in fact functioning well and in those cases I would hope that their GP tells them look at the moment your body is pretty healthy despite the weight so you might have a chance to pull it back here…or else it could be lifelong medication for you. Whether people manage to is a different story.

As for the last sentence in the summary I think they are really going to have to keep emphasising health….even if you can't lose weight a healthy lifestyle can still benefit you and cut the risk of x, y and z. But that's really a population wide problem anyway, even among a lot of normal weight people, a lot of people have very unhealthy lifestyles.

You can be obese without having some of the health issues, but you wouldn't be considered to have obesity unless you have some of the associated health issues.

It does seem like the language is causing problems, especially if WHO are trying to also push that 'X amount of people live with overweight'. It just doesn't work and sounds ridiculous 😅

To confuse the whole situation even more or perhaps even help to explain it, there's also Normal weight obesity/metabolically obese normal weight AKA 'skinny fat'

Normal weight obesity is definitely referred to as a condition or syndrome in some literature but not sure if any health departments officially recognise or refer to it as that, but many of those people are at risk of or would have the same issues as people with obesity and some are apparently at higher risk, depending on where they store their fat.

So you can be 'obese' but your body is otherwise healthy

You can also be normal weight but your body is not and has a lot of the markers of 'obesity'.

So the health issues are definitely something separate to the actual label of 'obese' going by the BMI scale.

It is a pity that the show has been cancelled. It probably had run its course although in recent years it was trying to move away from focusing solely on weight and getting overweight people to try and run to looking at other health metrics and exercises. Was not a fan of the focus on the sob stories but what it did show was that there were complex reasons for why someone was overweight and at time I felt the issues (eg mental health) may have been outside the remit of the show. But what the show did do while it was on air was influence its viewers. I would see in the dark, cold wet evenings in Jan/Feb people out walking the streets in their hi-vis, but the numbers reduce dramatically by March. You see in supermarkets promotions and advertising of health ingredients for the OT recipes but again once the show finished airing the supermarket was no longer advertising veg or fresh meat/meat substitutes - it's back to processed high sugar/salt foods with higher profit margins.

The show's purpose wasn't to cure obesity but it certainly scratched the surface and brought attention to it. I don't think it wasn't overly successful in "curing" people - I think maybe one person per season actually continued to lose weight or maintain a healthier lifestyle. Look the show wasn't perfect by any means but it did try.

Looks like it hasn't been killed off completely. The Instagram page has had a rebrand but still has the OT content. The Sun and Classic Hits radio are taking over the broadcast side of it.

To be fair to it, it did evolve away from weighing scales tracking in the latter series to a more overall health view and the initiatives like Ireland Lights up where GAA pitches offered their pitches for communities to meet and walk around were good ideas. But I fear under the tabloid influence of the Sun and Classic Hits, it's returning to it's Gerry Ryan's fat camp origins.

The Sun and Classic Hits is an odd station mix seeing as The Sun is owned by the owners of Classic Hits rivals… however, it does have marginally more coverage (Galway + Clare) than what Wireless can put together across its network.