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Tuesday, Aug 03, 2010
Cholesterol Has Nothing Do With Heart Disease
In my Messages of the Week and my daily preaching in the office, I have passed on the fact that cholesterol has nothing do with heart disease. The French eat butter, eggs and cream and outlive us. The U.S. is the only nation that eats margarine.
I got this from Malcom Kendrick's book "The Great Cholesterol Con"
and confirmed it with more study and thought. The subject is relevant to obesity because I observe that...
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Sunday, Jul 11, 2010
Obesity And Social Diversity
I suspect that a big part of the increasing obesity of Americans is due to ethnic diversity. It's a paradox, right? Think of Hispanic families having a picnic or Asian families taking an after-dinner walk. You would think the inclusion of such family-oriented cultures into America would increase socialization and reduce obesity? Read more... | Email This Article
Sunday, Jun 27, 2010
Increasing Protein/Reducing Carbs Works By Reducing Eating
Several authors recently have misconstrued the meaning of Sacks FM et al: Comparison of weight-loss diets with different compositions of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. N Engl J Med 2009;360:859--. The authors said that the NEJM study shows there is no difference in weight loss between a high-protein diet and a high carbohydrate diet, implying that Atkins and the rest of us got it wrong.
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Friday, Jun 18, 2010
Vitamin B-12
Many bariatricians give patients vitamin B-12 shots. Some tell the patients the shots may help with weight-loss. I love it. "May help!" Safe, right? Can't be disproven. But in fact there is no study anywhere showing that vitamin B-12 makes people lose weight. Moreover bariatricians sell these shots for up to $40 each. I want to tell you that each B-12 shot costs the doctor less than $2, including the syringe (I use an insulin syringe). Where do these doctors get off charging so much for B-12 shots? Read more... | Email This Article
Friday, May 28, 2010
The Only Three Reasons To Eat
My daughter Rachel, a competition-dancer and motion-picture-animator, taught me that in good dancing and good animation, there is an illusion of continuous motion, but what we really see & remember is a series of poses. The brain does not easily remember smooth motion itself. Read more... | Email This Article
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Zen And The Art Of Losing Weight
I reread Eugen Herrigel's wonderful 1953 book Zen and the Art of Archery, an 80-page gem about learning Zen through the process of learning to shoot arrows accurately in a relaxed, mindless manner. At one point Eugen asked the Master why he watched him as he shot, but the Master did not look where the arrow went. The Master gave two answers. Read more... | Email This Article
Friday, May 14, 2010
How To Live A Long Time
When you talk to very old people who are doing very well, ninety years old, ninety-five, a hundred, you discover they have three things in common. They are not obese. Obese people die young, but the body can handle a moderate degree of overweight pretty well. We are not as delicate as false experts claim. Read more... | Email This Article
Thursday, Apr 29, 2010
How It All Fits Together
It is amazing how well everything fits together when you understand the U.S. culture! The fact that it fits so well gives you the feeling there is a Higher Power directing the country. How could so much evil be so orchestrated unless someone directs it? My favorite candidate for the role is Richard Nixon and his dark angel, Rusty Butts. After they changed the farm loan program to one of paying farmers directly to grow corn, U.S. food output doubled and we lurched toward obesity. Scientists scrambled to develop processed foods & other products from the excess corn. High-fructose corn syrup & gasohol. Your toothbrush is made from corn silk, and the shine on your furniture and paperback books. Read more... | Email This Article
Sunday, Apr 18, 2010
Change My Shingle?
My approach has continued to evolve. At this point I'm not as focused on weight-loss as I used to be. I want my patients to lose some weight, but more than that, I want them to stop thinking like Americans. If they continue to be materialistic and distracted, there is no way they will keep weight off, no way they'll be happy. Read more... | Email This Article
Tuesday, Apr 13, 2010
New Obesity Meds Are Not So New
I read an article today in the Wall Street Journal about the three new obesity drugs being reviewed.
The article says...
"Obesity has many causes, and ferreting out what is going to work in individuals requires more options," said Charles Billington, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota and medical director of the obesity program at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center.
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Friday, Apr 09, 2010
The Dental Diet
The obese people I examine tend to have more dental caries and gum disease than the lean people I see. No surprise--fat people eat more sugar and more often. So how about the Dental Diet! Get compulsive about brushing and flossing after every time you eat. You would be less likely to snack then. And even if the "diet" didn't lead to weight loss, it would sure lead to healthier teeth. Read more... | Email This Article
Wednesday, Mar 31, 2010
Ming Lo Moves The Mountain
The small number of my patients who don't lose much weight are almost all incapacitated by stress. There is no point talking to them about the Six Lessons until the stress is reduced. One technique is to read from a children's book, Ming Lo Moves The Mountain. Like all good children's books, Ming Lo is entertaining to children, but contains an important message for adults. Read more... | Email This Article
Sunday, Mar 14, 2010
At A Party With Dr. Anchors
Many of you have asked, "What's it like to be a famous weight-loss doctor?" Well actually no one ever did. But I'll tell you anyway. Last night, with my lawyer-wife, I attended a fund-raiser held by the Women's Bar Association. I knew very few people there, but I did spot several of my patients among the crowd. Some who had done well spotted me and came over to greet me, smiled, chatted and introduced me to their friends. Others who had not done well, recognized me and kept their distance. I gave no one a meaningful look; it's not my place to embarrass people or expose personal information. Read more... | Email This Article
Thursday, Mar 04, 2010
Magnets
A year ago I began giving students a reminder-magnet to stick to their refrigerator. Using my computer I printed a gleaming rendition of the Six Lessons (and my name & phone number) onto 4" x 6" white magnets from www.MagnaCard.com The magnets considerably improved the students' learning and retention of the Six Lessons, and increased the frequency of follow-up appointments. Read more... | Email This Article
Wednesday, Feb 10, 2010
Buddha Teaches Marx & Jefferson
The fact that so many Americans are obese is strongly connected to the fact they are so unhappy. Listen to what fat people say.
"Do no harm" is not the first principle of medicine (it can't be done); instead, it is "listen to the patients". That isn't done enough. You cannot make unhappy people stop overeating, but you can make some people happy. I'll tell you how in a moment.
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Monday, Feb 01, 2010
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
Thursday, Jan 28, 2010
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
Tuesday, Jan 19, 2010
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
Tuesday, Jan 05, 2010
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
Monday, 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. Read more... | Email This Article
Tuesday, 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. Read more... | Email This Article
Friday, 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. Read more... | Email This Article
Monday, 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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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
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
Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009
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
Sunday, Nov 15, 2009
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
Friday, Nov 06, 2009
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
Friday, Oct 30, 2009
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
Thursday, Oct 15, 2009
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
Thursday, Oct 01, 2009
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
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