Even though you've tried other methods and failed,
you can still lose ugly fat fast.
It was instant results for me.
After six weeks, I've lost 40 pounds.
Ten pounds in two weeks.
This is the diet program to help
you lose weight fast.
The weight-loss diets,
which are more commercially based,
they play into people's desire for thinness.
And the focus on that has really confused people
about what is healthy.
Watch what you eat two days a week
and eat what you want the rest.
We're all sort of
in this state of cognitive dissonance
when it comes to weight.
We are now going to jumpstart our January
with some more incredible weight-loss stories.
For people living with obesity
who are caught in the middle
and getting like a lot of mixed messaging
from everywhere,
from diet culture, from the medical community,
from pop culture, really all we want to do is live.
There's an incredible amount of bias and stigma
for individuals who have obesity
within society, within the health care system.
And these patients have struggled
throughout their whole lives.
There's so many people out there
who have internalized weight bias
and they just have been told by society,
we're not worthy of care.
This big hurdle that you have to get over
of convincing the person that they're worthy of
fighting for themselves.
The first time patients come to see me,
a lot of them tell me that
they almost did not come to the appointment.
The thing that they fear the most
is that
they would be hearing the same thing
that they've been hearing for a long time.
You really should be trying harder.
In that conversation,
an important aspect of it is
not placing personal blame for obesity.
It is that the treatment is failing them,
it's not that they are failing the treatment.
People think that their weight
is completely under willful control,
that they could just eat less, lose weight,
and then maintain that weight loss.
The evidence is that that is not true.
In a dietary, behavioral, exercise intervention,
only about a third of people
will lose 5% or more of their body weight.
Why is that?
There's something physical going on
in the weight-regulating system
that makes it hard to lose weight.
We have these hormones
that are naturally released in our gut when we eat.
They communicate with our brain
and this lets us know
when we're hungry or when we're full.
Your body does not want you to starve.
It also doesn't want you to carry so much fat
that you can't carry out your daily activities.
There's a sweet spot, or what we call
a defended fat mass set point.
Our body and our brain defends this fat mass.
It defends this level of energy.
But, now within our obesogenic environment,
on a population level, this defended fat mass
has been elevated for so many people.
It's not only about how much you eat
and how much you burn,
but how all this is being regulated.
For some people,
their set points move up more in response
to an obesogenic environment based on genetics.
And for some people, it does not move up as much.
It's clear that the environment plays
an important role in causing obesity,
but it's very difficult if you only have access
to inexpensive, high-calorie foods,
you don't get to exercise, you're stressed all the time
because of your environmental situations,
that promotes the storage of excess body fat.
Which can be the cause of problems like diabetes,
heart disease, sleep apnea, and even cancers.
Body-mass index
is used as a screening tool to assess risk.
But BMI is a surrogate for lack of something better.
BMI and body fat are not perfectly correlated,
but many studies have shown that the higher your BMI,
the greater your risk
from an increase in body weight.
But the same is true at the low end of the spectrum.
The lower your BMI, the higher your risk.
The healthiest weight for most
people is in the high end of the normal range
or in the low end of the overweight range.
Many people think they
have to get to the ideal body weight
in order to be in better health.
But the fact is that a weight
loss of just 5% of your total body weight
reduces your risk of developing type 2 diabetes
by 50%, a weight loss of 10% will reduce it by 80%.
That's incredible health benefit from not a lot of weight loss.
Diet and lifestyle,
medical therapies, and bariatric surgery
are the three main categories of treatments
for obesity.
As far as diet and lifestyle,
what some of the best research has shown
is that the best diet
for any given person
is the diet that they like the best,
the one they find easiest to comply with.
But if that doesn't work, what's someone to do?
Bariatric surgery has
been around with us for many years now.
It has the best long-term outcome data
for weight loss,
and also for all these severe chronic diseases.
But on the flip side, it's an invasive procedure
which people may not be wanting
to go through.
More recently,
we have a new generation of highly effective
antiobesity medications,
nutrient-stimulated, hormone-based therapies.
These therapies basically mimic
these hormones that are naturally released in our gut
and that inform our brain about how much energy
we are carrying.
With these newer agents, we're seeing weight reduction
that we've never seen before.
We're seeing efficacy of greater than 10%.
In fact, 15%, and now approaching 20%.
And I think that this is going to be a game changer
in the treatment of obesity.
Making these treatments available is critical
because there's an enormous health burden
from obesity and we can prevent that from occurring.
At the end of the day, it's about you.
Your body is always worthy of care.
Your body is always worthy of intervention
when it's in trouble.
Your body is not taking up too much space.