In Weight Gain: When It's Not Your Fault, Dr. Lance Dean Ashworth reveals that the struggle with weight is, in most cases, caused by a number of surprisingly common medical conditions. He explains how your symptoms, the lab values, the condition, and the cure all come together to help you lose weight. Some of the medical conditions that he sites are an underactive thyroid gland (hypothyroidism), anemia, post-menopausal hormone deficiencies in women, and psychological issues, among other conditions. Dr. Ashworth explains that physicians focus their attention on the individual diseases that result from being overweight or obese while ignoring the potential cure-weight loss itself. Instead of the "Band-Aid approach" to such diseases as diabetes and high blood pressure, physicians must focus on the cause of these conditions in their overweight patients, which is fatty tissue! He contends that a paradigm shift in the treatment of obesity is long overdue-a shift from the reactionary mentality of the current medical environment to a proactive, cure-driven focus on the conditions associated with obesity. Weight Gain: When It's Not Your Fault provides the knowledge you need to ask your physician the right medically-relevant questions. These questions will guide you and your physician to determine how and why you gained weight in the first place.
Weight Gain: When It's Not Your Fault
Six Common Medical Conditions Causing Weight Gain and Getting Doctors to Pay Attention!
By Lance Dean AshworthiUniverse LLC
Copyright © 2013 Dr. Lance Dean Ashworth
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-1635-9Contents
Introduction, vii,
Chapter 1. What to Look for in a Weight Management Doctor, 1,
Chapter 2. What to Look for at your First Visit, 5,
Chapter 3. Are your Medications causing your Weight Gain?, 16,
Chapter 4. Diabetes: The most pervasive of these disorders, 20,
Chapter 5. Our Sex Hormones: Deficiencies and how to correct them, 39,
Chapter 6. Are you suffering from Adrenal Fatigue?, 65,
Chapter 7. Is there a problem with your Thyroid?, 77,
Chapter 8. Ever been told you were Anemic?, 91,
Chapter 9. Having irregular periods and hair growing in odd places?, 100,
Chapter 10. Are our Children becoming Obese?, 108,
Chapter 11. Is it all in My Head or Society's Fault?, 112,
Chapter 12. I am Inflamed and Allergic to Food, 150,
Chapter 13. Tell the Truth; Are you Calorie Dense or Nutrient Dense?, 155,
Chapter 14. Do not go Overboard with over the Counter Diet Pills, 161,
Chapter 15. Is it Safe to use Appetite Suppressants?, 168,
Chapter 16. Is there anything I can actually eat?, 173,
Chapter 17. Vitamins: Should I even bother?, 187,
Chapter 18. Do I really have to exercise?, 194,
Chapter 19. How to Measure Success, 204,
Chapter 20. How to put it all together, 212,
Bonus Material Appendix A, 215,
Bonus Material Appendix B, 229,
Bonus Material Appendix C, 233,
Bonus Material Appendix D, 239,
Bonus Material Appendix E, 241,
References, 243,
CHAPTER 1
What to Look for in a Weight Management Doctor
I wrote this section to primarily make the reader aware of what to look for when attempting to find a weight management medicine doctor. When I was in my residency, more than a couple of my supervisors told me I was crazy to open up a clinic dedicated 100 percent to weight management medicine. One or two of them had tried to add weight management to their clinics and were unsuccessful. Of course, upon further questioning it became evident that the "weight loss clinics" they had opened were little more than giving the patient a reduced calorie program and an appetite suppressant. If the patient was experiencing low and slow weight loss the answer was to exercise more and eat less. Did these doctors attempt to find an underlying cause for the weight gain? If they had I would not have felt the need to write this book, and they might have actually had a successful weight management clinic.
Their prediction was that I would be out of business in less than two years. They said I was competing against the commercial weight management centers that had deep pockets for advertising. I told them I had no competition because there was only one "me" out there. Unless those commercial weight management centers were planning on cloning me, I felt as though no one was doing weight management the way I felt it should be done. After over a decade, I have proved all of them wrong. Not to say there have not been ups and downs. But in my community I have always been the physician to come see for fast, safe weight management as well as Bio-Identical Hormone Replacement Therapy.
In Florida, I spent most of my career on the East coast of the state and after around five years I felt as though if I could make it work there I could make it work in other places. I opened up additional clinics in the state. I hired and trained Nurse Practitioners that could render the type of care that needed to be given. I basically duplicated the program I created on the east coast of Florida. The only difference was that it was not going to be me that the patient would see each time they came in. The majority of the time it would be a nurse practitioner that the patient would see. After a year and a half I decided to close these clinics. The patients just did not seem to do as well as they had in the past. The patient and doctor referrals for the programs were not what they should have been as compared to the original east coast location; where I was seeing patients on a regular basis using the same programs that were being offered at the other clinics. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to make those other clinics work.
It became apparent that what I did when I was the one seeing my patients was intangible and difficult, if not impossible to duplicate. Not to mention the fact that when the patient reads the clinic is owned by Dr. Lance Ashworth they wanted to see Dr. Ashworth, not a different doctor, a nurse practitioner, or a physician's assistant. This is not to say that these types of practitioners could not be successful. What it does say is that doing weight management part-time or allocating the patient contact to someone else may be what prevents the patients from being successful. There is an element of expectation present when a person walks in the door of a weight management medicine clinic.
If a clinic is not successful it may be that the doctor is attempting to see the weight management patients in the same way they see their regular internal medicine or family practice patients. The name of the game these days in a managed care environment and a tough economy is how many patients can the doctor see in an hour? This will not work in weight management medicine. Patients in a weight management program need extra time to simply talk about how they felt that week. This may be how they felt mentally instead of strictly physically. There may be nothing to actually treat in the strict sense of the word at that particular visit. The patient may simply need a motivational, hunger, or exercise tip.
Patients who are seeing someone for weight management expect to be motivated long after any diagnoses related to gaining weight have been diagnosed and treatment began. It seems that patients can feel when a doctor really cares about them and why that doctor is sitting in front of them. Attempting to cram these patients through the door and see as many as possible will not be successful for very long. My patients get to know me as well as I know them. I became acutely aware of this when patients would ask me what was wrong or why I looked so stressed out. A strong relationship of trust and mutual respect needs to be developed. It is as if the patient should want to lose weight for all the correct medical and personal reasons, but also for the doctor. Being capable of fostering this type of relationship is difficult to teach a doctor, they either can do it or they cannot. Motivating patients, putting them at ease, or relieving their stress is something that comes natural to a physician or it does not.
The amazing part of all of this is that the patients can feel it. I believe it is because they have usually been through a lot. By that I mean everything from multiple programs and treatment styles, to straight out abuse from the people around them. Sadly, the worst abuse is often from those closest to them, like their husband, wife, or parents. They have been ignored, thought of as lazy, physically abused, and in the process have had their self-confidence destroyed. It takes a certain type of doctor to be able to relate to these patients and earn their trust. That is what I tell every patient. I am their personal weight management doctor and we are a team.
I put this in the book for you, the reader, to help you find a...
