Deducting Costs of Weight Loss in a World with Donut Sandwiches

An idea from The Simpsons

There’s an episode of The Simpsons in 1995 where Homer Simpson decides to try to get himself on disability insurance so he can work from home. To do this, he decides to gain 61 pounds, and consults an expert on weight gain, who recommends he eats lots of fatty and unhealthy foods and combines his gorging with a lack of physical exercise.

The Dunkin’ Donuts Sandwich

This leads to the recent announcement from Dunkin’ Donuts: they have begun to offer a sandwich where the halves are actually composed of glazed donuts. That’s right. Instead of bagel halves or English muffins, the people responded to their survey by asking for sandwiches made of donut halves.

How this relates to weight loss deductions

It’s important to read on if you’re interested in trying out the sandwich with any degree of frequency. Alternatively, contacting your accountant might let you know how weight loss expenses are treated when tax time comes around.

According to the IRS’s ruling 2002-19, it is possible to deduct the fiscal cost of participation in a program of weight loss as long as the program was a legitimate treatment for a physician’s diagnosed disease or diseases. This means you could obtain lap band surgery New Jersey if you were clinically obese, for example.

This is because the IRS looked to the diagnosis of obesity as a disease and decided that having such a diagnosis meant you could deduct your weight loss program costs. The kinds of fees you can deduct include the startup fee to join whatever program you were interested in, as well as the attendance fees that would surely follow.

It’s important to keep in mind that you can also deduct the participation fees in a program for weight loss when the participation means you get treated for diseases besides obesity but with physician diagnoses, including hearing problems, heart disease, high blood pressure, or other issues that could come from eating the Dunkin’ Donuts donut sandwich.

That said, there was another ruling by the IRS, 79-151, where it was found that weight loss costs related to the improvement of general appearances or health could not be deducted, even if these programs were started under physician’s advice.

As a result, there needs to be a medically significant reason for your participation, which means you’ll probably want to get your physician to write on a piece of paper that you were actually diagnosed with obesity or a similar disease, as well as a recommendation in writing that participating in the program would be beneficial for your treatment of that specific disease. That way, you’ll have coverage if you’re audited.

If you’re in need of more severe help, such as with lap band surgery, your tax deduction eligibility will depend on whether you got the obesity diagnosis from a doctor as well as the specific treatment prescribed as a way of improving your health. Right now, you can only have lap band surgery New Jersey or elsewhere with an obesity diagnosis.

Image Credit: Sidereal