Are We Feeling Grateful Yet? We Have Good Reasons

Nope. We didn’t get our way on everything this year. But it’s not too hard to count up reasons for feeling grateful as we start this day of Thanksgiving.

Of course, we have personal reasons for feeling gratitude – health, happiness, friends, family, and the privilege of serving a purpose beyond ourselves.

More specifically, though, we are feeling grateful for a great deal of progress on the subject where we devote time and energy here at ConscienHealth – better care and better policies for addressing obesity.

After CMS announced a new rule this week to treat medicines for obesity like medicines for any other disease, it is hard not to feel like we are witnessing great progress.

For more than a decade, we’ve been asking for this.

An Important Need

In recent research on gratitude, Glenn Fox, Kalee Shah, and Katrina Brownell asked a seemingly simple question. When we receive a gift of beneficence, what influences the gratitude we feel? Is it the need for that gift or the effort that went into providing it? If “it’s the thought that counts,” then one might think that effort matters most. But that is not exactly what they found.

Though both need and effort are important in leading us to feel grateful, Fox et al find that “a gift that fulfills an important need is the most likely gift to generate gratitude.”

The need to replace longstanding and dysfunctional ideas and policies about obesity is great. Obesity is driven by biology, not just behavior. Aspirational prevention policies are not enough when 40% of adults are living with obesity.

At long last, it is plain that the public and policy makers are moving toward dealing with obesity as they would any other complex, chronic disease. This is what we have been working toward for more than a decade because the need is great.

Thus, we are feeling profound gratitude for this progress.

For further perspective, click here and here.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Guardian of Turkeys, painting by Charles Angrand / WikiArt

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November 28, 2024