Refuse To Regain

Your Resolution to Lose Weight This Year - YouTube

Your Resolution to Lose Weight This Year - YouTube In the best of all possible worlds we would all be maintaining successful weight losses. In the real world though a great many of us are making the traditional New Year's resolution: to finally lose weight this year. If you are one of these people, or you know one, learn to start with the basics. Click the link above for some starter suggestions. Read more →

End of the Year Thoughts, 2015

by Barbara Berkeley, MD At the end of the year I like to look back at what has changed in my field and how I have changed in my practice and beliefs. Has new information about weight and weight loss come to the fore? Am I using different techniques than I used to? And most importantly, what have I learned from my patients this year? My interactions with patients are always the most powerful teachers. This fact reflects what is... Read more →

Food Holds the Power, Particularly Over the Holidays

Imagine sitting at a table. Someone places a pencil in front of you. OK. Someone puts a piece of paper in front of you. Alright. Someone puts a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie in front of you with the steam still rising off. Now that's a different story. Why? Because a pencil, a piece of paper, a stapler, a box of thumbtacks are all objects that are incapable of creating a hormonal response in your body. The cookie, on the... Read more →

How Cold and A Bacterium Might Work Together

Mirko Trajkovski's team, at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, demonstrated few weeks ago that the absence of gut microbiota can be linked to increased brown fat activation as a mean of limiting obesity. Today, pursuing their research, the scientists show that mice exposed to cold experience a sharp shift in their microbiota composition, rendering them leaner and more sensitive to insulin. Transplantation of this cold-modified microbiota to germ-free mice is sufficient to enable complete tolerance to cold. Indeed, it... Read more →

Holiday Food Blizzard: How to Avoid Getting Buried

by Barbara Berkeley, MD Take a deep breath. We got through Thanksgiving. But just as we are recovering from too many mashed potatoes and the extra pie we didn't even want, it's time for the real storm to begin. Yup. The forecast calls for fattening food. A blizzard of it. Even worse, this food is all wrapped up in a bow and gilded with a lacquer of emotion and memory. No doubt about it, this is the hardest time of... Read more →

Are You An Easy Keeper? Weight After Menopause (and Before)

by Barbara Berkeley, Do you feel like you can gain weight from eating air? Overweight individuals often feel that they gain weight just by looking at food, yet our culture disbelieves this. " No", it says, "the reason you are overfat is because you are weak and have no willpower. Look at that thin person over there, now there is a role model." This is utter nonsense as far as I'm concerned. While we debate about whether different people store... Read more →