Tue, 24 Nov 2009 6:48p.m.
David Lange had his stomach stapled, as did National Party MP Chester Burroughs and former Council of Trade Unions head Ken Douglas.
None of them did so in order to enter Top Model - all of them did so because obesity can not only ruin your life, it can shorten it too - which is why severe cases are called morbid obesity.
It is also why Tariana Turia, who has spent her life watching people around her die young of strokes, heart disease and diabetes, has decided to give herself a fighting chance not only of another term in Parliament but a ripe old age.
She knows that a gastric by-pass is not really a laughing matter. Her stomach will be divided to create a small pouch and part of her intestine bypassed. But she's in the hands of top gastric surgeon, Richard Stubbs.
"What she's expressing is normal anxiety," says Dr Stubbs. "I've done 1200 of these operations and we've had just two deaths in that time."
Ms Turia has weighed up the risks. Her type 2 diabetes, asthma, weight and high blood pressure is making life for the 65-year-old tougher by the day.
"I have found particularly in the last three months, I'm getting very, very tired," she says.
The demands of political life and life on the run isn't conducive to good health.
"When you're starving the nearest thing you can get is chips, so very difficult."
Some days she has attended up to five hui, where she is always offered food. But all the same, has she tried to lose weight?
"Oh yes. I can probably espouse many diet books to you, none of which have worked for me."
So she decided, with her whanau, at her own expense, to have the $20,000 stomach-stapling operation. The greatest benefit? It's expected to end her diabetes.
She know's she's fortunate. She has diabetic relatives hooked up to dialysis machines.
Her doctor is thrilled she's publically talking about the operation and helping to erode, he says, the stigma of stomach stapling. There are others, he says, now in Parliament who have had the operation on the quiet.
But most politicians seem happy to talk about it. Mr Burrows had it done, and Donna Awatere-Huata famously initially denied it despite her dramatic transformation.
Her policies may polarise some people, but the matriarch seems to maintain respect, even of her opponents.
As for rogue MP Hone Harawira's future, there's bound to be a few edicts from her hospital bed - but for now things are in her co-leader's hands as she's got other concerns.
"I wonder if my skin will hang down," she says.
And she will have an entirely new relationship with food. Her favourite, steak, will probably be out.
When she returns to Parliament at the end of January, she will have lost nearly half her weight.
"She will look like she can slip in and out of the crowd but she's well-known - she never will," says Dr Stubbs.
It wasn't public life that led her to the operating table - she says it was concern for her family. She doesn't ever want to be an invalid dependent on them.
"I don't want to go there. I've got a life to live and I do want to live it."