What they DON'T address in the typical 'fat people are stupid' vein, is that ALOT of the women who are having fertility problems AND are obese most likely have Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome. A disease that CAUSES obesity as well as infertility.
If they treated one, they would probably rectify the other.
But doctors are Gods and all they have to do to absolve themselves of any responsibility or good doctoring is say "Diet and exercise". Unfortunately, there are medical reasons that make it difficult, if not impossible for some (not all of course) to lose weight even with Diet and Exercise. I was eating 900 calories a day and walking two miles four to five times a week and managed to lose a whopping 10 lbs in four months. I hear other people say they got sick and lost 10 lbs in a week. People's bodies ARE different, but it's ok to hate fat people so don't bother having an understanding or compassion for them.
900 calories isn't enough for anyone to maintain normal body processes. You were starving yourself.
The medical literature has not established whether PCOS often causes obesity or vice versa, and it appears that there's some of both going on. What is known is that only about half of women with PCOS are even overweight, so it's clearly not a direct relationship. And in obese women, the PCOS symptoms including fertility problems improve with weight loss; for normal weight women, pharmaceutical intervention is the only thing that helps.
What's very clear, though, is that obesity with or without PCOS is strongly correlated with poor outcomes for IVF and other fertility treatments, so it's not unreasonable to limit access to expensive taxpayer-funded treatments when they're unlikely to be effective. Obesity is also strongly correlated with serious pregnancy complications, often with great harm to the fetus, so there's a good argument to be made for a policy of not encouraging artificial fertility treatments to bypass a natural mechanism which tends to shut down fertility in women for whom it would be dangerous.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?itool=abstractplus&db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=abstractplus&list_uids=12080440
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16790100&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16816057&query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_docsum
It is well-known that once obesity is established, regardless of the cause, it results in permanent changes to body chemistry that make losing weight extremely difficult, as you have the misfortune to discover first-hand. I'm sure researchers will eventually figure out how to reverse that effect, but in the meantime, despite my government-shrinking urges, I think it's urgently important to mount a huge campaign against childhood overweight and obesity. It makes me livid to see parents buying candy bars and huge non-diet sodas for their already severely overweight children. The children are too young to know any better, but will be permanently saddled with the problem their parents inflicted on them (and given our increasingly socialist society, all of us get socked with the increased medical bills). A free society needs to emphasize personal responsibility, but how can you hold someone responsible for something which was taken out of their control during childhood by their parents?
There seems to be a widespread notion that some people are just more susceptible to gaining excess weight easily (no doubt true, though it only explains a fraction of the current obesity problem), and that therefore there is no point in aggressively attacking the problem in those people before their weight gets out of control, which is usually in childhood/adolescence (dangerously false). IMO an 8 year old who is 15% above his/her ideal weight should be treated as a medical emergency -- the severest consequences won't appear for many more years, but the opportunity to treat the condition and prevent those consequences is already quickly slipping away at that point.