by Barbara Berkeley, MD
Hello again to you dear readers and hello as well to those who are new to this blog.
I've been on a sabbatical for the past year and now I'm finding that I want to write again....so I'm back.
Despite my silence on these pages, I have still been reading and observing. There is not much new in the weight loss world: no magic pills, no easy solutions. Weight gain and weight regain remain vexing problems that feel too complicated to solve despite the best efforts of legions of scientists and big money investments by pharmaceutical companies.
Yet there is one thing that appears to be changing and that is our collective attitude toward our weight. I offer this strictly as my observation so feel free to push back. I think things are different.
I have been involved with treating obesity for the past 30 years. During that time, a great many people I met seemed urgently concerned with being overweight. My husband used to roll his eyes when, at a dinner or an event, I told people what I did for a living. Revealing that I helped people lose weight meant an entire evening of questions about how best to lose weight, often to the exclusion of other conversation. It seemed like just about everyone wanted to lose weight or knew someone who needed help.
I would say that this intense interest in dieting started to change about 5 years ago. In our practice, we noticed a drop off in new patients. Of course there were many competitors by this time, including less expensive online programs and over the counter supplements. Yet something seemed different. I started to notice fewer storefront weight loss programs and fewer ads for new practitioners claiming to cure obesity. I read fewer stories online about miracle supplements like raspberry ketones and garcinia cambogia. I heard about fewer people having pressure beads attached to the back of their ears. But mostly, I was struck by the change in the dinner conversation thing. Revealing my profession no longer led to more than a raised eyebrow. I was rarely accosted for an entire evening about how to best lose weight. Had I become suddenly boring or were people just sick of the whole weight loss thing?
I don't know the answer. But if my observation is correct and if people have lost interest in weighing too much, I would guess that there are two factors at play. First, the obesity epidemic is now about 35 years old. That's a lot of years. Those who have fought their weight over that time have been mostly frustrated by temporary successes and crushing regains. They have waited for a scientific solution that has not come. It has been a long and frustrating battle and I think that they are simply burned out. Who can blame them? Better drugs have made it easier (although certainly not optimal) to treat obesity related diseases like high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes. And the big food establishment in the United States continues to put addictive processed foods out there. There are only so many cycles of failed dieting that people can tolerate. Second, our younger generations have been born into a world where people are appreciably heavier than older Americans remember. It is interesting that we are so shocked when we look at photographs or movies from the 50s or 60s and see the size of the people. The memory of that world is fading and a new normal has taken its place. For younger people, the urgency to lose weight may be less intense simply because the world is just....bigger.
None of this would matter if weight were simply an issue of size. But for so many it is the outward symptom of a bodily imbalance that is creating so many unfortunate health consequences. While I don't blame anyone for throwing up their hands, it is still so very worthwhile to try to correct this imbalance. This is admittedly a difficult task that takes tremendous focus and persistence. But it is possible as I have learned from patient successes and from the responses to my blog and facebook page. If weight loss has not jumped the shark in your world, let me suggest the Best of Refuse to Regain section of this blog (or my book Refuse to Regain available on Amazon.com) to read more about how to proceed.