Private medical insurers should offer gastric banding and gastric bypass operations to morbidly obese patients, the private hospital group Spire Healthcare has stated.

The comments come after the Department of Health (DH) announced that it would be calling for a national movement to tackle the growing problem of obesity.

Dr Jean-Jacques de Gorter, Spire's clinical services director, has written to health insurance providers urging them to cover weight loss surgery on their private medical insurance (PMI) policies.

As a teenager, Jonathan Miller's quest to lose more than 100 pounds started off as a massive challenge. When Miller first stepped on the scale, the then-385-pound student in Ann Arbor, Mich., was disappointed to learn that he couldn't weigh in: The scale only went up to 350 pounds.

Results of two surveys -- one of patients and another of doctors -- are shedding light on the impact that rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is having on the lifestyles of 1.3 million Americans who have the disease.

If you are one of the millions of people in the United States living with morbid obesity, one of the options to consider is bariatric surgery, often referred to as weight loss surgery. In the last 6 years more than 800,000 people who have had no long-term weight loss success through other means, have chosen this procedure to transform their lives.

A few weeks ago at work, as Cassandra Nichols tried to climb a flight of stairs, she had trouble breathing. Obese for years, she now weighs almost 300 pounds and fears for her future.

"I don't want to die," said Nichols, a 24-year-old showing signs of Type 2 diabetes. "I need to lose this weight."

Adequate, quality sleep is an essential component of every individual's overall health.

Although scientists are still exploring why we need sleep, studies have shown that we need sleep to survive. Lack of adequate sleep, or sleep deprivation, is a serious condition that impairs judgment, delays reaction times and leads to serious chronic health conditions. Unfortunately, healthy, revitalizing sleep eludes the estimated 40 million Americans who suffer from chronic sleep disorders.

At 5 feet 3 inches and 215 pounds, one thing J. never expected to hear was that she was not obese enough.

For years, the Boulder woman dieted — at times shaving calories to almost starvation rations. She ran until her knees begged for mercy. But the weight didn't fall off. So she decided to have surgery.

That's when she learned that, as heavy as she was, she wasn't heavy enough to have gastric-banding surgery. Nationwide guidelines stipulate that only adults with a body mass index, or BMI, of 40 or greater — 35 for patients with weight-related conditions — qualify for bariatric surgeries.