NANA AKUA: Too fat for life insurance? You’ve no one to blame but yourself Though the ‘body positivity’ movement tells us obesity is okay, as a fitness trainer I know how dangerous it is

Hats off to Edmund Greaves, 34, the financial blogger who wrote in Monday’s Daily Mail that he had been refused life insurance for being ‘too fat’.

Let me explain. Edmund, at 5ft 9in, weighs 25 stone and has a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 49.3. Insurance company Vitality, he discovered, has a policy of declining to give life insurance to people with a BMI over 40.4.

To put that in context, the NHS defines anyone with a BMI over 30 as ‘obese’ and above 40, like Edmund, they are ‘severely’ so. More than 1.4 million people in England are in the latter category — so many find it a challenge to get life insurance.

But rather than bleat about being discriminated against, Edmund has treated it as a wake-up call and is working hard to lose weight. Good for him.

By taking personal responsibility for his health, Edmund will likely increase both his quality of life and his life expectancy. Vitality has done him a favour.

People often need a wake-up call to help them slim down, writes Nana Akua

Financial blogger Edmund Greaves, 34, said he had been refused life insurance for being ‘too fat’

As a former fitness trainer, I welcome anything that prompts people to slim down.

I have taught or trained more than a thousand clients and I was always amazed how many of them were high-achieving workaholics who had built careers and companies, calculated risks and invested wisely. But they had clearly neglected to invest in the most important thing of all: their health.

Often it took a wake-up call, like the one dished out to Edmund, for them to realise they needed to shed the pounds.

And when they finally did, without exception, it made their lives far better.

Yet there are still too many people who, despite endless warnings about the obesity plague, remain overweight — many of them in denial about their problem.

This creeping epidemic is partly down to the comforting lies of the body positivity brigade, such as the rap star Lizzo, who glorify fat.

No doubt many of these ‘fat-fluencers’, as they call themselves, are up in arms at Vitality’s decision to ban Edmund.

But here’s the hard truth: insurers aren’t making a moral judgment. They treat obesity as a risk because, like it or not, it is a terrible threat to a person’s health. In fact, being fat represents a bigger health risk than smoking or heavy drinking.

When compared with normal-weight individuals of the same age, sex and demographic, obese people have a 67 per cent higher risk of suffering from a chronic condition.

In contrast, the increase for normal-weight daily smokers is only 25 per cent and for normal-weight heavy drinkers, 12 per cent.

Obesity can lead to conditions such as depression, anxiety, infertility, high blood pressure, painful joints, breathlessness and broken sleep, cancer, dementia, heart failure and Type 2 diabetes.

In 1950, less than 1 per cent of the UK population was clinically obese. Today, the figure is 28 per cent.

Our obesity epidemic is so serious that by 2035, the NHS is expected to spend more on treating Type 2 diabetes alone than it does on treating all the various types of cancer today.

Edmund wrote about his experience in Monday’s Daily Mail

Of course, there are many explanations for this surge. People no longer walk to school and work. Jobs are sedentary. Processed food is everywhere.

So yes, staying slim isn’t easy. But we all have a responsibility to ourselves — and each other — to keep those pounds off. It’s about choices.

I’m a single, working mother but I always build exercise into my day — yoga, swimming, weights, walking. Any able-bodied person can, and should, even if it’s only for a few minutes a day.

It will make us happier, too, as exercise releases endorphins.

I say to those people who claim to be ‘fat and happy’: not one of my clients has regretted losing weight. There is nothing fun about feeling breathless, lethargic and with thighs that rub together uncomfortably.

People need to be honest. One good litmus test is to look at yourself in the mirror and ask: ‘Would I insure myself?’ If the answer is no, then do something about it, fast.

If you’re not prepared to look after yourself, why should anyone else be prepared to look after you?

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