Let’s talk about obesity and VA claims. There are a few things you should know if you believe that your service or your service-connected disabilities have caused you to become obese.
First, I want to say I’m talking about medically obese. Not your, or my, subjective idea of whether someone is obese or not. The medical definition of obese is “an increase in body weight beyond the limitation of skeletal and physical requirement, as the result of an excessive accumulation of fat in the body.” That’s from a medical dictionary, Dorland’s if you’re curious. And the threshold for whether someone is medically obese is probably lower than you think. You can check out the CDC’s website on that. I’ll put a link below. It all seems to be based on height and weight, which surprises me a bit, but I’m definitely not a doctor so I’ll leave that alone.
Second, and probably most important, so I probably should have led with this, but obesity is not a disability as far as the VA is concerned. That means, the VA will not pay you any disability for obesity no matter how clearly your obesity is caused by your service. So, obesity alone won’t get you there, but that’s not where things end.
If you have an event, injury, or illness in your service, that causes you to be obese, and that obesity caused a disability, you can service connect that second disability. Same thing if you have a service-connected disability that caused you to be obese and that obesity causes another disability. The rule is that while obesity is not a disability in itself, it can be an intermediate step to another disability.
To give an example, let’s say we have a veteran with service-connected PTSD, and because of that PTSD, the veteran self-medicated for years he has a serious problem with alcohol and those two things caused him to be obese. And because of the PTSD, alcoholism, and obesity, the veteran has sleep apnea. This veteran should claim sleep apnea secondary to PTSD. But he should say that PTSD caused sleep apnea and also PTSD caused alcoholism and obesity which in turn caused sleep apnea. Now, I’ve complicated this example quite a bit by mixing in PTSD and alcohol, but this is a fairly common situation.
That leads me to another point, if you are trying to use obesity as an intermediate step, you still have to line up solid medical evidence. Don’t think that obesity is a magic bullet, it’s not.
One last thing I should mention, if you are going to try to use obesity as an intermediate step you have to explicitly state that in some document that you send to the VA. Just because it says somewhere in your medical records that you are obese or lists your height and weight, or something like that, it’s not good enough to raise the issue of obesity as an intermediate step. You have to explicitly state it. My best advice is to put it on your claim form and put it in your lay statement. Both places, at a minimum. When you have to appeal a bad decision you’re in a much better place if you point to a document and say, see here where I told the VA I was making this claim.
As always I hope that helps. If you want me to help you with your claim, you can reach out to me through the links on this website.