Refuse To Regain

The Magic Pill

by Barbara Berkeley, MD Imagine I had a magic pill. And imagine I told every overweight person in America that this pill could keep each one of them at the lowest weight he or she could achieve. All each had to do was diet down to that low weight and this wondrous little pill would prevent regain forever. I believe that if I could promise such a pill, pretty much every overweight person would be able to achieve a very... Read more →

Mr. Warburg Surfaces Again. The Link Between Diet and Cancer

by Barbara Berkeley, MD Because of my interest in the potentially toxic effects of too much sugar on the body, I became fascinated with the work of one Otto Warburg back in 2010. At that time, I published this blog about him. Warburg believed that cancer cells were unable to live by normal cellular processes and that they relied on sugar...and large amounts of it---to live. The thought was that cancer cells might be able to be starved to death... Read more →

The Body Mysterious: Time to Lift the Veil

by Barbara Berkeley, MD We physicians live in the shadow of rising health care costs. Hospitals want us to cut length of stays and somehow become more efficient. Insurance companies ask us to accept less money for patient visits, forcing us to see more people in fewer hours. The government wants us to check a slew of electronic boxes to prove that we’ve performed what they deem to be “best practices”…. even though there is little evidence that any of... Read more →

It Is BALLOON! Gastric Balloons for Weight Loss Return

by Barbara Berkeley, MD OK. So you have to be as old as I am to get the title of this post. It comes from the incredibly silly 60s comedy "F Troop", a show about the misadventures of a remote US Army outpost somewhere in the Wild West around the end of the Civil War. It featured dumb jokes, broad slapstick and politically incorrect Indians. If you grew up in the New York area, you were only too familiar with... Read more →

BMI: Tool or Tyranny?

by Barbara Berkeley, MD This post is a re-run from 2010. I decided to re-post it after a flurry of patients expressed dismay about being unable to reach the supposed "normal weight" range on a BMI chart. In almost every case, their primary care or specialty physician had insisted that they shoot for a weight in the "normal" section of the chart. I'm here to tell you that it's not necessary or even advisable. The patient in front of me... Read more →

Successful Weight Loss? Stop Celebrating and Go to Battle Stations

by Barbara Berkeley, MD It's been a message I've been repeatedly posting since 2008. That was the year when, frustrated to the max with a lack of attention to regain, I found the energy to write a book about it. My intention was to create support material for my patients and for other weight loss practices. I discovered blogging around the same time and started putting my perspective out on the internet. In the intervening seven years there has been... Read more →

Time Restricted Eating: Does It Work? You Tell Me!

by Barbara Berkeley, MD Last year was arguably the "Year of the Microbiome" in the obesity world. Considerations of gut bacteria, its health and composition, assumed 'hot topic' status. And for the first time in many years, our attention was diverted from the endless and fruitless debate about calories. Amazing! Incredible! There might be factors entirely unconsidered which have changed us from lean beings to fat ones. Indeed, as most obesity specialists had already suspected, we might have been barking... Read more →

Keep Your Internal Thermostat Guessing: The Winter Weight Stall

by Barbara Berkeley, MD During the spring, summer and fall in our Cleveland practice I can generally predict that 80% of the patients we see will be losing weight, while 20% will be struggling. In January and February, the ratio flips. I've often wondered why weight loss becomes so difficult as the winter wears on. This is especially true in northern Ohio, where below freezing temperatures and daily snow flurries are compounded by an unending expanse of grey sky. Over... Read more →

Obesity and the Brain: Let's Talk

by Barbara Berkeley MD An email from a friend of mine started me thinking about this topic again and it's a fascinating one. I am interested in the fact that we spend so little time thinking about the territory above our shoulders. Why is that? Maybe because we can't see our brain so we are continually looking out from it, perusing other parts of our bodies, but largely ignoring the place where we truly exist: in the neural net that... Read more →

Won't You Be My Neighbor? More on the Microbiome

by Barbara Berkeley Are you as fascinated by the microbiome as I am? It seems simply amazing to me that, until just recently, we've completely missed the fact that we are composed of 10 times more microbial cells than human cells and that our bodies are simply teeming with microrganisms that determine our health. We are much more like a neighborhood than we are like individual entities. What else have we missed? Probably a lot. Anthropomorphizing probably doesn't go a... Read more →