My education in the trials of weight management began years before I went to medical school. For decades I’d watched the collateral damage of failed dieting strategies at home, where my own family offered a telling example of the individual, and often elusive, nature of weight gain and loss.
My father’s side of the family is overweight. My mother’s side is thin. Unfairly, my wonderful older sister, Shelley, inherited my father’s genes. Ever since childhood I’ve watched Shelley struggle
with her weight. She’s the classic yo-yo dieter. She goes on a diet, loses weight, falls off the wagon and, in a fit of despair, gains it all back. Over the years, she’s tried every weight-loss fad on the market, as well as ones that weren’t (such as amphetamines, when she was much younger).
Every failure is accompanied by a cycle of self-loathing and depression which begins its own cycle of eating and exercise lapse. I love my sister, and it’s painful to watch this intelligent and self-aware woman struggle to manage her weight. She remains locked in confusion - in part because the emotional issues involved are so threatening and, in part, because the facts about successful weight loss simply haven’t been available.
Shelley is typical of the failed dieters I meet every day in my clinical practice. They see their lapses as moral failures, proof of their weak wills. But dieting isn‘t about moral strength it’s about compatibility between an individual and the chosen diet. I’m writing this article
to offer people like Shelley a way out of their cycle of guilt and shame by helping them find a weight-loss program me they can live with. They need hard information
so many dieting ‘facts’ are, in fact, fictions
and they need encouragement in tackling the very tough challenge of shedding weight in an environment rigged to make us gain. This is a article
for everyone who’s struggled to lose weight, whether it’s 5kg or 50 – it’s for stressed-out, overweight executives; fat senior citizens; obese diabetics; potbellied middle-age laborers; chunky teenage girls; and every other variety of diet refugee you can think of.
My girlfriends, my patients and anyone meet who finds out that I‘m a ‘diet doc’ ask me the same question: Is there anything that actually works? These people have been beaten, both physically and psychologically, by a series of failed attempts at dieting. They are all looking for authoritative news about how to end the cycle of failed diets and finally succeed at weight control.
I’m convinced that this article, and the research it’s based on, will be at the forefront of a new trend in personally tailored, medically based diets, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all approaches that have dominated the field for decades. Now that mainstream science is finally engaging nutrition and obesity as a serious field, we will be seeing more and more authoritative information about how our genes, our lifestyle and our personal taste preferences affect our ability to control our weight. The Perfect Fit Diet is every dieter’s long-sought compass for navigating the thicket of competing diet claims, the rational path for the thinking person who wants to lose weight.
