grew more
serious. The drugs, surgeries, and procedures weren’t doing any good.
Why?
The root cause of the entire problem was the weight. Their obesity
was causing metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes, which then caused
all their other health problems. Yet almost the entire system of modern
medicine, with its pharmacopoeia, with its nanotechnology, with all the
genetic wizardry, was focused myopically on the end problems.
Nobody was treating the root cause. Even if we treated their kidney
disease with dialysis, patients were still left with their obesity, type 2
diabetes, and every other obesity-related complication. We needed to treat
obesity. Instead, we were trying to treat the problems caused by obesity
rather than obesity itself. This was the way that I, and virtually every
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THE OBESITY CODE COOKBOOK
other doctor in North America, had been trained to practice medicine in
this context. But it was not working.
Figure 1: Standard Paradigm of Medical Treatment
When people lose weight, their type 2 diabetes reverses course. Treat-
ing the root cause of a patient’s type 2 diabetes is therefore the only
logical solution to addressing this disease. If your car is leaking oil, the
solution is not to buy more oil and mops to clean up the spilled oil. The
solution is to find the leak and fix it. As medical professionals, we were
guilty of ignoring the leak and simply mopping up the mess.
If we could treat the obesity at the beginning (see figure 1), then
type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome could not develop. You can’t
develop diabetic kidney disease if you don’t have diabetes. You can’t
develop diabetic nerve damage if you don’t have diabetes. It seems so
obvious with hindsight.
So, I had realized where we were going wrong. The problem was that
I didn’t know how to change course; I didn’t know how to treat the obe-
sity. Despite having worked for more than ten years in medicine, I found
that my nutritional knowledge was rudimentary, at best. This realization
sparked a decade-long odyssey and eventually led me to establish the
Intensive Dietary Management (IDM) program (www.IDMprogram.com)
and the Toronto Metabolic Clinic (www.torontometabolicclinic.com).
Obesity
Medical Treatment
Metabolic Syndrome
Type 2 Diabetes
Heart Attacks
Stroke
Cancer
Kidney Disease
Blindness
Amputation
Nerve Damage
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introduction
Thinking seriously about the treatment of obesity, I realized there
was one singularly important question to understand: What causes
weight gain? That is, what is the root cause of weight gain and obesity?
The reason we never think about this crucial question is that we think
we already know the answer. We think that eating too many calories
causes obesity. If this were true, then the solution to weight loss would
be simple: Eat fewer calories.
Figure 2: A More Effective Paradigm of Medical Treatment
But we’ve done that already. Ad nauseam. For the last forty years, the
only weight-loss advice has been to cut your calories and exercise more.
This is the highly ineffective strategy called Eat Less, Move More. We
have calorie counts on every food label. We have calorie-counting books.
We have calorie-counting apps. We have calorie counters on our exercise
machines. We’ve done everything humanly possible to count calories so
that we could cut them. Has it worked? Have those pounds melted like a
snowman in July? No. It sure sounds like it should work. But the empir-
ical evidence, plain as a mole on the tip of your nose, is that it does not
work.
From a human physiology standpoint, the entire calorie story col-
lapses like a house of cards when you look closely at it. The body does
not respond to “calories.” There are no calorie receptors on cell surfaces.
The body has no ability to know how many calories you are eating or
Obesity
Medical
Treatment
Metabolic Syndrome
Type 2 Diabetes
Heart Attacks
Stroke
Cancer
Kidney
