Refuse To Regain

Habit and Reward: Good for Target, Good for Maintainers

By Barbara Berkeley, MD Here's an article everyone should read. In yesterday's New York Times magazine section, there was a long and eye-opening piece on the science of consumer behavior. It seems that we buy things because it becomes our habit to do so. Marketers rely on this habit and try to create it. There are times in our lives when we are more susceptible to changing habits. Target has found that pregnancy is one of those times, and it... Read more →

The Fat Trap: My Response

By Barbara Berkeley, MD Once a month, in a small room off the lobby of Lake West Hospital in Willoughby, Ohio, a special group convenes. For someone observing the group and unaware of its purpose, it might appear to be a simple mix of everyday people….young, old, racially diverse. The members would seem to be old friends but with a particular seriousness of purpose, perhaps a community group attending a lecture or learning some new skill together. What a casual... Read more →

What Causes Weight Gain? My Take

by Barbara Berkeley, MD How do we lose weight? The answer is--- cut calories until the body is forced to burn itself for energy. This is so intuitively obvious that the converse would also seem to be true: if we lose weight by cutting calories, we must gain weight by accumulating them. But is this true? Perhaps weight loss has nothing much to do with weight gain. Perhaps they are two quite different things. ' For some time, I have... Read more →

Getting Past the R Word

by Barbara Berkeley, MD While I don't take as much of a beating on the internet as some diet writers do (thank you for that, readers!), most of the negative comments I get are directed at the fact that my diet recommendations are too restrictive. Restrictive is the R word. I think that we often confuse structure with lack of freedom. As our society increases its amount of available choice, we tend to bridle at the idea that any of... Read more →

Novak Djokovic: The Diet That Conquered Tennis

Welcome tennis fans, tennis players (like me!) and those with an interest in optimum diet! This page tends to get alot of hits when Djokovic is playing in a major. It was written in 2011 and I confess I do not know what his diet looks like currently. I do know that my own athletic performance and health is enhanced by eating a 90% primal diet. Regardless, if you are interested in weight loss, athletic performance, optimal diet, or primal... Read more →

From Simple to Simply Impossible

By Barbara Berkeley When did eating get so complicated? When I was growing up, I don’t remember my mother advising me to keep my fat intake at 30%, avoid saturated fats, boost monounsaturates, keep a mental list of low glycemic index foods or make sure to consume antioxidants. We didn’t worry about where our fiber came from or whether we ate whole grains rather than plain old Uncle Ben’s converted rice. Of course, in those halcyon days, very few people... Read more →

Kooky?

I want to welcome all of you who’ve never visited our site before. I know we have many new readers that are coming to us as a result of Jennette’s guest blog and I want to thank Jennette Fulda for her excellent post. For those of you who are new to us, we hope you’ll stick around! After all, maintenance is where we’re all headed and it’s never too early to start learning about how other people are managing it.... Read more →

The Heart of the Body

By Barbara Berkeley After two years of basic science lectures, our third-year medical class had been assigned to an actual hospital. We thought we knew it all standing in our starched white coats with stethoscopes so stiff that they could hardly bend around our shoulders. We so wanted to drape them casually around our necks as we’d seen the “real” docs do. They just refused to go. For our first assignment, we were told to fall in behind a well-known... Read more →

Orthorexia, Nutritionism and Our Immoderate World

By Barbara Berkeley Several years ago I was attending a local meeting of nutritionally oriented healthcare professionals. At the meeting, I expressed my dismay at the abysmal lack of nutrition education in our schools. At that time, my girls were in high school and I saw that they and their friends were struggling with how to make sense of the toxic food environment that surrounds all of us. To my surprise, there was a vocal negative reaction to my comments.... Read more →

What’s In Your Life Charter?

By Barbara Berkeley I enjoyed Lynn’s last post especially. Not only did it resonate with the essence of maintenance, but it was completely familiar. I suspect we’ve all come to pretty much the same way of feeling about the process of keeping weight off for a lifetime. In my soon-to-be-released book on maintenance, I discuss the usefulness of establishing a “life charter” to help clarify this permanent commitment. After reading Lynn’s blog, and following my challenge to readers to describe... Read more →