Welcome to phenpro.com

phenpro.com is a new interactive site dedicated to helping both patients and doctors with weight loss.
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The old website is more oriented toward patients and people unfamiliar with blogging. If you don't know about phen-pro, the safe effective treatment for obesity, you may go to the old website for a more traditional introduction to the subject, although most info can be found by clicking on the buttons at the left.
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Afterwards, please return to this site often to join the national conversation on the best way to deal with the country's number #1 problem, obesity. Any honest question or comment on any aspect of obesity is welcome.
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Michael Anchors, M.D., Ph.D.
16220 Frederick Road, Suite 210
Gaithersburg MD 20877
(301) 990-6061 phone
manchors@aol.com
Map Showing Where My Office Is

Keeping It Simple

A good way to help people deal with a problem that appears, to them, complicated and intractable is to give them a simple way to think about the problem. Besides telling fat people to cut back on starch and sugar, the other helpful approach, I find, is to remind them that in a country like the U.S. where everything is so flaming big, you are not dieting or losing weight unless one of the following is true, really truly and for real: Read more...  |   Email This Article

Exploring The Mind

These are questions I ask patients to show them their errors in thinking. Sometimes the sunshine breaks through. Read more...  |   Email This Article

HAZMAT

This morning I mailed a copy of Life Between Meals to Dr. Malcolm Kendrick whose book The Great Cholesterol Con convinced me, and would convince anyone, that cholesterol does not cause coronary atherosclerosis. The fact that so many "experts", editorials and "studies" have said otherwise, for so long, exposes the stinking rot in the way medical research is conducted by pharmaceutical companies and the people they pay. Read also Our Daily Meds by Melody Petersen. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Vicious Cycles

Two vicious cycles play a major role in the eating of obese people. One cycle is biological, the other habit. The habit-driven cycle is this. People make or order extra food . . . because, well, god forbid, anyone shouldn't get everything they want. Then the people eat the extra food so none of it will "go to waste". (See "The Notion of Waste" MOW Dec. 16, 2007) Read more...  |   Email This Article

Experimenting On Myself

I spent last week in San Diego, visiting my daughter, missed the snowstorm back home and gained 6 lb in six days sort-of-on-purpose as an experiment. At the free hotel breakfast, I made myself a waffle everyday, one only but it wasn't small. With the large intake of carbs at breakfast I found I was hungry by eleven, "ravenously hungry" or "starving" as my patients might say. I ate lunch and dinner in Mexican restaurants. I figure I was eating 5000 calories a day. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Changing Patients to Students

I'm not going to call my patients "patients" anymore; I'm going to call them "students", instead. The word "patient" comes from Latin patior meaning 'to suffer'. The idea is that the doctor's sick patients are suffering. But most of my obese patients don't think of themselves as sick, though they should; they will be in the doctor's office or the ER soon enough. And my formerly-obese, now-cured patients think of themselves as still suffering, but I want them to think of themselves as healthy, restored to sanity; let them think of the rest of the country as sick. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Leaving The Nest

Most of my patients graduate, reaching a point where they have lost so much weight that they feel less hunger, and by golly they have learned the Six Lessons. I nudge them out of the nest; they can fly on their own. They usually don't gain weight back, or lose a little more, or don't gain back much. How do we know? We do regular call-backs. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Brown Lumps

Often, in teaching, it is helpful to give a visual image of an idea. An example is when I talk about brown lumps. Explaining Lesson #2 (the Anchors' Pyramid) I say, "Eat more fruits and vegetables, and by vegetables I don't mean potatoes [I can hear myself saying this]. You have to eat some salad, some soup. Everything fat young men eat is a solid brown lump. In a typical week--pizza, hamburgers, chicken, mexican food, pizza again. It's amazing those boys don't get scurvy. Didn't their mothers teach them how to eat? You can't lose weight if all you eat are brown lumps. You must eat something green, yellow, red . . ."
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Thanks Giving

For Thanksgiving I give thanks for the intelligence and creativity of my patients which makes my high success rate possible. Something I did has ensured that nearly every one is realistic and sharp. Maybe because so many come by referral from other patients (smart people tend to have smart friends) or through the internet, patients travel from other cities to see me. Whatever I did, I don't want to change it. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Labeling in Restaurants

On NPR today I heard that the state of Maryland passed a law requiring fast food chains to display on their menu the calorie count of the food items on offer. All studies agree that calorie counts on menus have no effect on calories eaten, in both high- and low-class restaurants. No surprise. The overweight people among the aristocracy as well as the hoi polloi ignore calories; and the lean people, who might be influenced by calorie counts, don't do much of the eating. Since this fact is so widely known, why did Maryland bother to pass the law? Why is the U.S. Congress considering a similar provision in the health care reform bill? Why don't calorie counts work here? Read more...  |   Email This Article

Pizza

It's not true that the U.S. never developed its own cuisine. That illusion arises from the fact that so many of the foods we think of as Mexican or Italian or (you name it) were really developed in the U.S. The chimichanga, enchilada and hard-shell taco, all created here, the first in California, the rest in Texas. Caesar salad? San Francisco. Chop suey? Ditto. The hamburger? Not Hamburg. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Getting the Right Focus

The most frustrating thing I face is patients and doctors who focus on the pills and pay no attention to the Six Lessons. Such people will never lose weight or help other people lose weight. The greatest thing achieved in my life is not my plays and novels, not my scientific publications (textbooks omit that glucose-6-phosphatase plays a role in the brain), not my own children (my wife did most of that work). The best thing I ever did was the Six Lessons. The trouble is, in our materialistic society, no homage is ever paid to ideas or advice. But you cannot hold happiness or success in your hands. Read more...  |   Email This Article

More Funny Diet Books

Twice before I gave you a list of funny ideas for new diet books. This year one of my funny ideas actually became a book, The Cookie Diet, and it is a best-seller, the most searched topic on the Internet. No publisher ever went broke banking on the stupidity of the American people--I am not the first to say so. Here are more funny ideas. Borrow any of them if you want to get rich. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Social Isolation

The most common cause of diet failure in general is depression & social isolation. Among my patients the most common cause is social isolation, because the SSRI part of phen-pro takes care of the depression. Most patients do very well, but I continue to think about the people who don't, the ones who return, having done nothing real to change. Almost all are unable to comply with Lesson #6 because they have no friends or their only friends have four legs. Read more...  |   Email This Article

High Fructose Corn Syrup

The manufacturers of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) are fighting back against public ignorance by launching a TV campaign and a website www.sweetscam.com I have mixed feelings about it. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Humor in Bariatrics

My daughter the smart lawyer praised my recent MOW, but said it's "depressing as usual". This year has been my best year for MOWs, but do you think my MOWs are depressing? I don't find that the words "depressing" or "optimistic" apply to the truth. An "idea" can be depressing, one's "hopes" can be optimistic, but the truth is immune to such adjectives. Ideas and hopes are man-made, but the truth is not. A molecule can't be optimistic. A black hole can't be depressing. They are just nature. Just there. Read more...  |   Email This Article

The Real Reason To Lose Weight

From the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." I'll let the beauty of those words reverberate for a moment, before getting to the real stuff... Read more...  |   Email This Article

I Made My Dog & Fish Fat

I didn't tell you this before, but years ago I made my dog and goldfish fat in an experiment. "Experts" on radio & TV go on and on about hormones and "fat genes". David Kessler is on the radio constantly--I wish I had his agent! Louis Aronne was on ABC Nightly News last Friday. But the hormonal/neurotransmitter explanation is absurd. Americans were not fat in 1970 and Europeans aren't fat now. (WHO statistics. https://apps.who.int/infobase/report.aspx?rid=111) Don't Europeans have hormones & transmitters? Why is obesity so American? American researchers searching that closet are looking for justification, not truth. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Where is the Mainstream?

To get Americans to lose weight, I had to unfasten myself from my moorings as a typical MD, to become a lay-psychologist or life-coach. Last Friday I treated patient #6000, still spending thirty minutes with each patient, tailoring my approach to each person. There's no other way to be successful, if by "successful" you mean getting people to lose weight and keep it off. Read more...  |   Email This Article

From Greece

Many Americans are just faking it every day, and/or try to fake it in my office, but for those who like to think, here is ancient advice that has nourished & sustained me. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Eat with Fat Friends?

I have been avoiding it, but I should answer the question patients have been asking me. I had emphasized Lesson 6, to get people to stop eating & snacking alone, getting them, instead, to eat meals (only) with friends and family. I learned the vital importance of this by observing the Italians in Italy. My American patients could see that eating with lean friends would help, or eating with dieting-fat-friends, but how would it help, they asked, to eat with impenitent obese friends? Read more...  |   Email This Article

Tea Parties

While bicycling in Connecticut I stopped in a charming establishment called Helen's Teahouse, run by an Englishwoman. The store is filled with stuffed animals and lacy bricabrac. Helen is often hired to give tea parties for little girls. She expressed her dismay that this traditional English entertainment for girls does not work well in the U.S. Instead of happily chatting and "making believe", the girls gulp down their cookies, slurp down their tea and ask, "What's next?" Read more...  |   Email This Article

Health Care Reform

Yesterday the serious effort to reform the U.S. health care system collapsed, when President Obama signaled he would accept a bill without the optional public health care alternative. Many people have asked me to comment on health care reform (there was one person actually), so I will. You will be surprised to learn that I agree with the subhuman mud people shouting at Senators at town hall meetings, but the reason I agree with them will surprise you. Read more...  |   Email This Article

My Anniversary

Today is the one year anniversary of my retirement from general internal medicine and my complete specialization in bariatrics. It has worked out well. My schedule is full. Today I saw only patients doing well, perhaps because it was mostly women. One amazing lady coming for her third visit has lost 48 lb in 4 months. A pair of sisters from New Jersey, a lady from Florida and a latina from New York City. About 20% of my patients are from out of state. About four new patients a day. This is August, so we are calling up the patients who have not returned since 2008. Almost all of them are doing well. They lost weight and learned the Six Lessons. They don't need me now. They'll call if they do. I salute my heros. Read more...  |   Email This Article

The Beginning and the End

To get patients to lose weight, I make them uncomfortable with the U.S. culture. They must feel like strangers in a strange land. Complacent people do not lose weight. This first objective is accomplished by my first visit speech, accompanied by the evidence on display in my office. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Obesity in History

The first historical evidence of obesity are the obese clay figurines of fertility goddesses at Mohenjo-Daro. The figurines do not prove that obese people then existed. I mean, Barbie exists, but no current woman has her dimensions. The first known real obese person was Hatshepsut of Egypt (pronounced ha-chep'-sutt) who served as pharaoh from 1473 to 1458 BC. Obese with diabetes, she died from an infected tooth. (National Geographic, April 2009). Read more...  |   Email This Article

The Automatic Pilot Diet

The best diet for losing weight, for the long run, in the majority of people, is a diet on automatic pilot consisting of habits and rules the patient thought about once, set in place and forever does. It may be useful initially for some patients to count calories, weigh portions, keep food diaries, etc., but it is a poor strategy in the long run. People don't have time or motivation; they won't keep doing it, and if the bariatrician insists too much, the patients will stop going to the doctor. If the teacher gives too much homework, the students play hooky. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Titanic Plates, Really

Over the weekend in New York City, I saw the exposition of materials recovered from the wreck of the Titanic at the Discovery Museum near Times Square. The dinner plates onboard were small, about 9", and another thing . . . Read more...  |   Email This Article

A Goal Attitude, Not a Goal Weight

"Experts" urge me to set a goal weight for my patients, but I know that is counterproductive. If a patient fails to reach their goal weight, they feel disappointed and give up. If they reach the goal, they get lazy. To ensure they reach the goal, I make the goal too easy. Setting a weight-goal corrupts everybody. Even doctors who recommend the practice can't tell me why. They haven't thought about the issue. I have. Read more...  |   Email This Article

Why Public Eating Reduces Obesity

Lesson #6 commands you to eat with friends as often as possible. You should (almost) never eat alone. I learned this lesson from the Italians in Italy, who are almost all lean & happy. Public eating is a major cause. There are four reasons. Read more...  |   Email This Article