Refuse To Regain

News Flash! People Who Lose Weight Gain it Back!!!!

by Barbara Berkeley, MD Weight maintenance is in the news. Finally. Not to say I told you so, but this blog has been talking about the vital importance of studying and learning about successful weight maintenance since 2008. When I wrote Refuse to Regain that year, there was only one other book on the shelves that was focused on how to avoid regain after weight loss. Nothing much has changed. You still can't find any books on the subject. Although... 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 →

Practical Weight Guidance for the Menopausally Challenged

by Barbara Berkeley, MD Whenever I see a new patient, I take a history of his or her weight gain. With rare exceptions, the story is almost always the same. At a certain point, the patient started to become susceptible to weight gain. Once this turning point occurred, weight escalated over time--reversing occassionally during periods of dieting---but quickly reaccumulating. Yet, when I ask patients to tell me when their weight gain began, they usually will refer to a bookmark in... Read more →

JAMA Study Confirms Maintenance Benefits of Low Carb Diet

By Barbara Berkeley, MD The debate about whether a calorie is a calorie rages on, but not I think, in the minds of most successful weight maintainers. The same may be said for successful dieters who reflexively cut carbohydrates from their menu when they start a weight loss plan. While their thought may be to reduce calories, something quite different may be occurring when they ditch the bread and pasta for meals of chicken breast and salad. Too few scientific... Read more →

What Causes Weight Gain? What I Believe Today

by Barbara Berkeley, MD I have now been specializing in obesity for close to 22 years. With each passing day I become more certain that the endlessly repeated weight "truths" are utterly wrong. We are doing irreparable harm to ourselves and our society by believing in them. These supposed truths? Overeating makes you fat. Exercise makes you thin. Calories are the be all and end all of weight control. People who are overweight lack willpower. Obesity is, in some way,... Read more →

Is Your Irisin A'Risin?

by Barbara Berkeley, MD The latest chemical substance to get scientists into raptures is irisin, a hormone that is produced in muscle cells but exerts its effect on fat. We've all figured out that exercise and weight are somehow tied together and that this means that muscle and fat must communicate. Unfortunately, we've showed a woeful lack of imagination in tryng to come up with the mechanism. For decades, we've persisted in trying to jam the same puzzle piece into... Read more →

A Calorie Just a Calorie? No Way

by Barbara Berkeley, MD A calorie is a calorie. This is my least-favorite dietary mantra. Why? Because in the real world of real people and real weight loss, it isn’t true. In scientific terms, a calorie is a specific measure that refers to the amount of heat needed to raise the termperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade. We can measure the amount of heat contained in any substance by burning it in a machine called a calorimeter.... Read more →

You're On a Diet...So Why Aren't You Losing Weight?

by Barbara Berkeley, MD This post is an update of a previous entry. Hope our new readers enjoy it and our long-term readers will consider re-visiting these ideas. Refuse to Regain is primarily designed for maintainers--- that small and exclusive group of people who have managed to lose weight and are stabilizing (or stable) at their new size. But comments to our site reveal that many of those who read us are still in the process of active weight loss.... Read more →

Controlled by a Cookie: When Foods Become Drugs

by Barbara Berkeley, MD Do you take medicine to treat your blood pressure? Once you swallow your pill, can you control your blood pressure via sheer willpower? While such feats of bodily control are reported by swamis and other advanced body-mind practitioners, they are not in the average person's repetoire. And a good thing too, because the power of drugs to take over ailing body systems is the reason they work. Medicinal drugs are substances which enter from the outside... Read more →

How Is Your IBM Doing?

By Barbara Berkeley No. I don’t mean the stock. I am referring to your Intake Balance Mechanism. You’ve never heard of an Intake Balance Mechanism? That’s not surprising since I just made it up. I love inventing new words for the ins and outs of weight loss! It turns out that the story of fat and its fellow-travelers (high blood pressure, elevated lipids, high blood sugar, increased inflammation, a tendency to blood clotting, etc.) is so complicated that it needs... Read more →