When I read about people defending their excess weight, I get sad. I mean, too much of everything is bad, we all know that. But if you do not recognize your illness, how will you find a cure?

So while I was snooping around on matters arising, I found something interesting on obesity which is now considered a disease! Did you hear about this?

Sometime within this week, the American Medical Association decided to recognize and treat obesity as a disease. So if you know you are obese, it is officially not healthy! Now is the time to check yourself into a hospital that can ‘treat’ you properly.

“The American Medical Association today officially endorsed recognizing obesity as a disease, a move member physicians hope will spur better reimbursement for treating overweight Americans and create better health outcomes.

Doctors, meeting in Chicago for the AMA’s annual meeting, said such an endorsement would lead to greater investments and potentially health insurance coverage specifically for a diagnosis that someone is obese when there is a payment mechanism for evaluating and managing obesity.

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By an overwhelming vote of the AMA’s policy-making House of Delegates, the group voted in favor of a resolution to “recognize obesity as a disease state with multiple pathophysiology aspects requiring a range of interventions to advance obesity treatment and prevention.”

Though today’s action by AMA delegates has no legal authority, its policy stances in the past have been used by policymakers in Washington and in state capitols across the country when medical policy and health regulations are debated and made.

The vote was not without opposition, however, as doctors worried some patients considered obese by various measures such as BMI may “otherwise be fit and healthy” and not need aggressive treatment.

“BMI is a very imperfect measure,” said Dr. Robert Gilchick, an AMA delegate who is also director of Child and Adolescent Health Program and Policy with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and chaired the AMA’s Council on Science and Public Health, which issued a 14-page report for the delegates to consider.  The council, which wrote the report and heard debate on the obesity-as-disease recommendation, opposed the resolution and urged the AMA against endorsing obesity as a disease.

In the report, the council offered its membership pros and cons of classifying obesity as a disease.  On the proponent side, the report said obesity is “similar to other diseases . . . (such as) hypertension, diabetes, lung cancer that result from a combination of genetics and environmental factors.

Yet opponents to classifying obesity as a disease state say “obesity results from personal choices to overeat or live a sedentary lifestyle.” Therefore, opponents say obesity is not an illness, the council on science and public health said.

Some worry that classifying obesity as a disease would lead unnecessarily to a spike in health care costs and not necessarily improve patient outcomes.

Employers and insurance companies say the current reimbursement structure for obesity as a condition is adequate and those who pay for health care have increasingly added new benefits to address the obesity epidemic.

“We understand obesity as a condition and a risk factor for other diseases,” said Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, which includes the nation’s largest health plans, UnitedHealth Group (UNH), Aetna (AET), Cigna (CI), Humana (HUM) and many Blue Cross plans among its membership in an interview with Forbes before this week’s AMA meeting.

“The important thing is to get programs and supports in place to address it, as health plans have done and are doing,” Pisano added.

So like I said, if you know you are obese, it is time to take serious steps and stop deceiving yourself about being big and fine because really, there is big and there is excess fat, Do not mix the two, get help.