We have taken the bold step of asking for government funding to make 46 Gone free to all users.
Some time ago — on World Obesity Day — the government announced a raft of measures to combat obesity. These mainly centre around one-dimensional approaches such as calorie counting and traffic light schemes.
These are all well and good, but they only address one aspect of obesity, and we all know that it’s much more complicated than that. So Mike wrote to his MP — Dame Cheryl Gillan — and asked for her support. Her office responded very positively, but tragically Dame Cheryl passed away after a long battle with a terminal illness. Mary Shaw, her Senior Parliamentary Assistant, advised us to contact the relevant minister in the Department of Health, so we have now contacted Jo Churchill, who is Minister for Public Health, Primary Care & Prevention.
We are asking for government funding to allow us to make 46 Gone FREE to all users. As it is we only charge a nominal amount for membership, but how incredible would it be if we could roll this out to the whole country — the whole world!
The potential benefits are huge. The enormous cost to the NHS of our national obesity epidemic is a crippling burden at a time when the NHS needs all its resources to pull us through what we all hope will be the final stages of the Covid 19 pandemic.
As we recover from the pandemic we need to take on board the lessons it has taught us, and one of those lessons was that obese people were more susceptible to the symptoms of Covid 19. Their underlying health conditions brought on by obesity, such as chronic heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure etc. left their immune systems wide open.
We’ll keep you posted as we get responses, and we’ll keep the pressure on to get 46 Gone adopted as part of the government’s healthcare strategy.