Category: Obesity

Evening eating: Are you a “light” eater?

An excerpt from Let Go of Emotional Overeating and Love Your Food: A Five-Point Plan for Success. Copyright © 2018 by Arlene B. Englander. Published by Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved.  Anyone who has ever tried to lose weight or keep weight off realizes that evening can be the make or break time of […]

Don’t sign off on fat acceptance. Don’t normalize obesity.

I cannot get behind fat acceptance, or better stated in medical lingo as “normalizing obesity.” As a physician and as someone who has been obese or morbidly obese my adult life, I know first hand what it’s like to hate my body and feel ashamed of it. I still do this very moment as I […]

A new way to reduce sugary beverage consumption

The beverage industry derailed the movement for soda taxes in California by convincing state elected officials to pre-empt local taxing authority in exchange for cancelling a ballot initiative that would have made all new taxes difficult to pass. But taxes are not the only way to reduce sugary beverage consumption in California or the U.S. as a whole. […]

Why do we think obesity is caused by lack of exercise and not junk food?

There are now more than 700 million obese people worldwide, 108 million of them children, reported the New York Times in 2017. In Brazil, food giant Nestle sends vendors door-to-door hawking its high-calorie junk food and giving customers a full month to pay for their purchases. Nestle calls the junk food hawkers, who are themselves […]

MKSAP: 49-year-old woman with obesity, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes mellitus

Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 49-year-old woman is evaluated during a follow-up visit. She is overweight and has hypertension and type 2 diabetes mellitus, both of which are well controlled. For several years, she has attempted to lose weight through various commercial diets; dietician-monitored, calorie-restricted […]

When someone claims something is healthy, be skeptical

I stood in line at the grocery store waiting to pay for my items. The woman behind me, who would be categorized as obese, was eyeing some of the snacks so conveniently placed in the checkout aisle. She grabbed a meal bar and analyzed it for a few seconds, then said aloud to me: “You […]

A physician’s warning on the keto diet

The keto diet has recently garnered much fame for its apparent ability to improve diabetes and obesity – results so impressive the Journal of the American Medical Association recently highlighted the diet and thereby christened it as something more than a low-carb craze. However, not all the evidence supports such a positive outlook, leading the […]