What lies beneath: The secret to losing weight without exercise

If you’d just lose 20 pounds you probably wouldn’t even need these medications.”  Those words echo in my mind as I think back to a time when I bought into the idea that everyone who was overweight was lazy and gluttonous.  Just eat a little less, exercise a little more. “Voila!”  The weight would just fall off.  Well, if you’ve ever been overweight, you know how absolutely ignorant that kind of thinking really is.

I’ve been in practice for over 12 years and I’ve spent a majority of that time in the operating room as a neurophysiologist.  Time and time again I saw patients turned away from a procedure they desperately needed because of their weight. 

It was hard for me to understand how people could choose to live that way… but just after I hit my 30’s I had a huge change in perspective.  In spite of my immense efforts to workout regularly and eat healthy I was diagnosed with the trifecta of prediabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure.  The doctor ironically told me that if I would lose about 20 pounds I probably wouldn’t have these problems.  No doubt I was frustrated because I had worked so hard, followed the traditional advice and it had failed me big time!

Is fat to blame?

“Obesity is the driver of so many chronic conditions – heart disease, diabetes, cancer – that generate exorbitant costs that are crushing our health-care system,” said Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mouret, former president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  This opinion, that obesity is driving many of the lifestyle diseases that plague our country, is held by many of my peers.  Perhaps this is why they are so quick to judge a person by appearance as being lazy and gluttonous.  This thinking comes from numerous studies that correlate being overweight with having these other diseases (some examples here and here).  As I discuss more thoroughly in other posts, correlation does not always equal causation.

Don’t get me wrong.  I was taught to think that obesity was holding the smoking gun.  It wasn’t until I experienced how little control I had over my health/weight, in light of eating less and exercising more, that I started to make sense of it all.  When I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar and obesity I was challenged to look at my health in a whole other way.  The cholesterol really scared me because it was correlated with heart disease, and heart disease run’s strong in my family.  So, I decided to focus on that by asking myself some basic questions.  What does cholesterol do?  What makes it high or low?  What’s its purpose in my body?  I spent hundreds of hours revisiting textbooks, reading the current medical literature and listening to lectures.  I formulated a plan to address my high cholesterol as a symptom of a deeper problem happening inside of me.  After 12 weeks of implementing that plan, I had labs drawn just to make sure I was on the right track.  The results blew my mind, not only because my cholesterol was completely within the desired range, but so was my blood sugar and blood pressure.  After 6 months of being consistent with this plan, I was down 63 pounds…and I hadn’t exercised one time! 

What did all of this teach me?  It taught me that perhaps there is another way to look at these problems.  What if obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, GERD, low energy, PCOS, headaches, etc. were merely symptoms?  What if they were just signals from my body indicating something deeper going on?  What if instead of silencing them I listened and traced them back to a source?  What if I addressed the problems found there?  How many of these symptoms would resolve?

Why do I feel this way? Follow the clues and solve the mystery …finally!

Could it be that whatever was causing my elevated cholesterol might also have been causing my high blood sugar or weight issue?  The secret to losing weight and feeling better is not buried beneath chronic starvation, fad diet tricks and insane exercise routines.  Change your perspective and become your own advocate for your health care.  Then assemble a team of health care providers who are willing to work together with you, look at the clues and solve the puzzle of YOU.  Then you’ll have found the secret to losing weight and feeling better in a way that is healthy, fun and most importantly lifelong.

Question: When people lose weight they tend to see other health problems resolve. Does obesity cause these problems or is it a symptom of something going on at a deeper level? What do you think? You can leave a comment by clicking here.