Archives: December 2009
Mon Dec 28, 2009
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. More...
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Tue Dec 15, 2009
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. More...
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Fri Dec 11, 2009
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. More...
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Mon Dec 07, 2009
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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