Episode 86: Real Stories From A Weight Loss Clinic

Episode 86: Real Stories From A Weight Loss Clinic

Obesity is a complex disease and people with obesity all have their unique experiences with obesity, how they dealt with it, and if they have lost weight, how they have managed to keep it off.

We’ve had a number of patients who shared their own weight loss journey but this time, I wanted to bring in a perspective of a physician to also speak about how treating obesity is not a cookie-cutter approach for every patient.

Dr. Beverly Tchang is an endocrinologist and an obesity specialist. She works as an assistant professor at the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Hospital. Dr. Tchang is board-certified in Internal Medicine, Obesity Medicine, and Endocrinology.

Key Highlights: 

Tune in to my conversation with Dr. Beverly Tchang and learn:

• Obesity is not a lifestyle choice 
• Sometimes people with obesity are making healthy life choices but their physiology is just not working in their favor
• Why one of Dr. Beverly’s patients wasn’t losing weight despite being physically active and following intermittent fasting and what ended up working for him
• A patient who had some psychiatric illness and how that played into her weight loss journey and how switching the medications around helped
• Metformin helps with weight loss as well
• The benefits of meeting with an obesity medicine specialist and how you can contact them

Quotes:

“Lifestyle is so important. It still remains the foundation of our obesity management. So it is something that we try to focus on and make sure it’s optimized before we go to any further steps.” – Dr. Beverly Tchang

“We do recognize that obesity is a disease. Just like high blood pressure is a disease, high cholesterol is a disease, cancer is a disease.” – Dr. Beverly Tchang

“People should also realize that weight in itself does not define their health. Yeah, it is a component of your health.” – Dr. Beverly Tchang

Conclusion:

It’s very critical that people who have this disease of obesity don’t feel that it’s their own fault. It’s time for them to move to have that discussion with their physicians about what can they do about it, and how their physicians can help them move in the right direction. 

This episode really highlights such a wide spectrum of different choices that we have and a wide spectrum of diseases that we see that can cause obesity, a wide spectrum of potential causes of obesity, and basically how different each individual is and how different each individual’s story is going to be.

Links:

• Dr. Beverly Tchang

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