Tax deduction for losing your weight!

Reducing weight is almost everybody’s dream. You join gym, take medicines and improve your diet.  All of these are expensive propositions and the taxman was not at all concerned about your expense on them.  However, obesity is now considered as a serious threat to health and your spending to control it may be eligible for deduction out of your income.

If you are diagnosed by your doctor for obesity, he will advise you for weight loss treatment.  Some other problems related to obesity like heart disease, hypertension or high levels of cholesterol may also force your doctor to prescribe for such treatment.

This treatment may include a lot of things – hospital based treatment including surgery, use of medicines, counseling for diet, joining programs like weight watchers and behavioral counseling.  Expenses on all of these can be legitimately claimed as deduction on your tax return.

However, you cannot claim this deduction without knowing the requirements of IRS.  Here are some important tips if you want to claim your expenditure on weight loss treatment –

1. First of all, you must have a written intimation from your doctor about your obesity and the suggested treatment.  This is very important.  You may not summit this with your tax return but you should keep it with you in case of any enquiry from IRS.
2. You should also keep the receipts and invoices for getting such treatment.  Once again, it is not required to be submitted with your tax return but you must preserve it for some time.
3. Make a total of all such expenditure for the full year.  This expenditure must be over and above your insurance cover. If such expenditure exceeds the 7.5 per cent of your adjusted gross income, the excess can be claimed as a deduction on your tax return.  So if your adjusted gross income is $75,000, your expenditure should exceed $5,625 in order to be eligible to claim this deduction.
4. You cannot deduct expenditure on account of health club subscriptions, over the counter medicines, purchase of diet foods and nutritional supplements and purchase of exercise equipment even though such expenditure helps in controlling obesity. IRS treats it as expenditure to improve your health which is non-deductible.
5. You must itemize for claiming this deduction on your tax return.

Interestingly, IRS does not specifically mentions what is obesity. It leaves such discussion to your doctor.  But at the same time, good news is, once your doctor decides on the treatment, you need not prove any improvement in your condition to claim that deduction!