Tag Archives: pills

Is Obesity Acceptable?

Posted on September 19, 2016 | 3 comments

obesityaction_friendsandfamily_-374-6-47-59-pm
© OBESITY ACTION COALITION.
(First published in The Huffington Post)

Last week, an article in the Washington Post announced a new program of the Obesity Action Coalition (OAC) to fight obesity bias. They want the media to change from portraying obesity in a negative unflattering light, which they are known to do. They want the media to use more positive images when portraying obese people and the OAC is providing them with free stock images to use when showing obese people. The photo with this article is an example of one of these images. As OAC’s James Zervios points out, the headless bodies with plates of junk food often used in the media promote a false stereotype about overweight people that is abusive as well as untrue. Many overweight people are hard-working citizens who eat healthy foods and are attentive to their health needs. They are not fat, lazy and stupid, an image the media is used to promoting.

At the same time there is a fat-acceptance movement you may have heard of that also fights bias and discrimination against overweight people and promotes acceptance of the condition as well as the people who have it.

In the Washington Post article, Zervios maintains that “Obesity is a disease whose sufferers are no different from those afflicted with breast cancer or asthma”. This leads many to take the position that there is nothing that can be done about it, and that people who are overweight should accept it.

Is Obesity Something we should Accept?

I am a clinical member of both the Obesity Action Coalition and The Obesity Society, an association of health professionals that treat obesity and its related medical conditions. I am also a behavioral therapist who solved my own 25-year obesity problem and helps others to do the same.

While I am a staunch supporter of efforts to fight obesity bias and discrimination, I disagree completely with Zervios’s position that obesity is a disease no different from breast cancer and asthma. Obesity can be reversed. By adopting habits of eating less, obese people lose weight and lose the medical problems they have because of it. It is not a matter of “perhaps” it can change. It will change, no if’s and’s or but’s. Cancer and asthma have no similar guaranteed way to get rid of the condition.

While creating change in habitual and addictive behavior can be difficult and complex, it can be done. There is no guarantee that the person can easily change, but it can be done. Like it is with alcohol and drug abuse, when the behavior changes, the problems caused by the behavior resolve. In 30 years, I have never had a patient not lose weight when they are able to eat less.

I and thousands of my patients, clients and readers have reversed our obesity and the medical complications of it. Please don’t let people think that being overweight and sick with it is acceptable. Don’t let them think that getting better is beyond their control. They need not be ashamed or abused because of it, but they need not stay overweight either. There is a sure-fire way to reverse the condition, unlike cancer and asthma.

William Anderson is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who specializes in weight loss, eating disorders and addictions. He solved his own long-time weight problem, losing 140 pounds 30 years ago and has kept it off since. He is the author of The Anderson Method.

3 Comments

Posted in Is Obesity Acceptable?, Weight Loss Articles Published on The Huffington Post

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Why are women losing the battle of the bulge?

Posted on August 16, 2016 | Leave a comment

BY ALLIE SHAH
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Frances Traphagan has been battling weight issues her whole life.

For years, the south Minneapolis mom struggled to balance work demands and motherhood. After every pregnancy, her weight problem grew. Her habit of eating on the run also tipped the scales in the wrong direction.

Finally, at 240 pounds, the 5-foot-3 Traphagan chose to have bariatric surgery at the Hennepin Bariatric Center and Obesity Program at Hennepin County Medical Center in downtown Minneapolis.

“It was my very last effort to try to lose weight,” she said.

She’d tried everything before that – from Weight Watchers to the Atkins diet to the grapefruit diet.

“I did have some success, but nothing was ever permanent,” she said.

After a national report this summer showed that women have surpassed men in obesity rates, doctors and obesity researchers are searching for answers to why women are struggling more than men.

For the first time, more than 40 percent of U.S. women are obese, according to the latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The nation as a whole continues to struggle with obesity, with 35 percent of men considered obese. But while men’s obesity rates appear to have stabilized, women’s are still rising, the CDC report shows.

Dr. Maria Collazo-Clavell, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic who works with overweight and obese patients, has been working in the obesity research field for 20 years. She said the recent findings give her pause about whether public health officials are taking the right approach to tackling obesity.

“All of that makes you question: Are you on the right track?” she said. “The data would say no.”

That so many women are obese is cause for alarm not only because of the increased health risks for them but also for those around them, Collazo-Clavell said.

“That’s kind of the tip of the iceberg,” she said. Women are often the primary caregivers in a family, and their eating and activity habits can influence their children and others in their family.

An example of that ripple effect: Collazo-Clavell is starting to see some of her previous patients’ children and is working with them to help manage their obesity.

It’s difficult to pinpoint what is causing women to struggle more with obesity than men, but doctors say there likely are many factors at play.

Women typically have two times in their lives when they are at risk of gaining significant amounts of weight: childbearing (during pregnancy and after giving birth) and menopause.

Collazo-Clavell hears from many new mothers that they find meal planning and preparation tough after giving birth. Also of concern, she notes that women as a group are going into pregnancy heavier than they were 20 years ago.

It makes it harder to manage a healthy pregnancy weight if they’re already overweight, she said.

An epidemic

One of the country’s leading health problems, obesity can lead to serious diseases, including diabetes and heart disease.

Body mass index (BMI) is calculated by dividing weight (in kilograms) by height squared (in centimeters). Anyone with a BMI of 25 or more is considered overweight, while those with a BMI of 30 or more are obese.

For example, a woman of average height in the U.S. (5 feet 4) would be classified as obese if she weighs at least 175 pounds. An average height American man (5 feet 9) who weighs 203 pounds or more would be considered obese.

Dr. Guilford Hartley is medical director of the Hennepin Bariatric Center and Obesity Program, where 100 surgeries for weight management are performed each year.

He sees many more female patients than men. Part of the reason, he said, is that women are more likely to seek medical treatment for a weight issue than men.

“In our culture, when a man’s overweight, nobody pays too much attention,” he said. “But we have such an emphasis on being thin for women that we’re culturally forcing women to be more concerned about their weight than men. The social pressure if you’re overweight and a woman is higher.”

Those seeking surgery often have struggled with a weight problem for a long time.

“Usually by the time I see them, most of them get here saying, ‘I’ve done this all my life. This is my sixth yo-yo,’” he said.

He found the recent CDC report on obesity rates concerning. “Up until these reports, it was looking as if the so-called obesity epidemic was kind of plateauing.”

In analyzing the new data, Hartley and Collazo-Clavell point to societal changes that have led people to become more sedentary.

“If you were a clerical person, 20 years ago you’d have to get up and put the piece of paper in the file cabinet. Now you never have to get up off your chair,” Hartley said. “We have engineered … physical activity out of our workplace and out of our home place.”

The prescription of “eat less and exercise more” does not address the kind of vigorous activity needed to tip the scales.

“When we tell them to exercise more, we mean get on a treadmill for an hour, three days a week,” he said. “And the kind of exercise that it takes to have a significant impact on weight is more like if you’re a hardscrabble farmer and you’re working up a sweat for eight hours a day just to put food on the table.”

Constant fight

It’s been 10 years since Traphagan had a surgical band wrapped around her stomach to make it smaller. The band makes it possible to consume only 1.5 cups of food at a time. But it’s still possible to overeat, she said, which is why she had to learn how to eat healthfully to control her weight.

Today, she has poached eggs instead of doughnuts for breakfast and drinks plenty of ice water throughout the day. She has maintained a healthy weight.

“It’s been real hard, though. It’s not easy,” she said.

“I got down to 155 pounds. My goal weight is 124. I’m still working on that, and I hope to achieve that this year.”

(This article first appeared in: http://www.bradenton.com/news/local/health-care/article95803902.html)

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Can a Drug or Surgery Solve Your Weight Problem?

Posted on June 10, 2015 | 2 comments

Successful Weight Loss
(Published first in The Huffington Post)

In a word, no. Can they help? Perhaps.

Last month I wrote an article that spoke somewhat favorably of the new weight loss drug, Saxenda. I said it was perhaps the most important weight loss medication ever developed.

Wow! Did I get lambasted! I got all sorts of email blasting me for going over to the dark side and becoming a drug pusher and lackey of Big Pharma. I even got an email from my favorite professor of counseling at the University of Massachusetts, now friend, Allen Ivey, Ph.D. Besides being a friend, he is a big shot in the counseling field, the father of Microcounseling and developer of “active listening”. He said he was “sad” to see that I seemed to be pushing drugs. He is the last person on earth that I would want to be mistaken about my views on the solution to obesity. We’ve since gotten that misunderstanding corrected, but I want to make sure it is clear with everyone who reads my blogs.

I am still the world’s staunchest advocate of the behavioral therapy I teach to reverse the condition of obesity. It works -like a miracle, some say. But not 100% of the time. For some, it is not enough.

After 30 years successfully helping people to lose weight permanently, I am convinced that a percentage of the population is dealing with a physiological condition that creates more persistent and intense degrees of craving and compulsion than the rest of us have to deal with. My approach teaches people how to overcome the habits and feelings that make them overweight but sometimes those cravings and compulsions are so strong that nothing on God’s natural earth will quiet them.

If you’ve ever had a blister on your foot or a pebble in your shoe, you’ll remember that your brain is getting the message loud and clear that you need to relieve that pressure and you need to relieve it right now. You will feel the drive to relieve it until you do. It won’t go away until you do whatever it takes. There is no “will-powering” it away. Something is going on in the body, physiologically and chemically, that is triggering a response in your brain that will bother you until you satisfy it. It isn’t exactly the same with the food cravings that some have, but it gives you an idea of what some people are dealing with. Hold your breath for as long as you can and see how powerful the urge to breathe becomes. This is the kind of relentless drive that a small percentage of the population is fighting in their attempts to stop eating too much.

For them, some sort of intervention or tool that would make it easier for them to eat less would be a Godsend. Then, perhaps what they learn in a good behavioral approach would be enough. Self-programming and cognitive techniques like I teach work like magic for many people, but they would be so much more productive for these folks with eating hyperdrive if we could reduce that drive, which the pharmaceuticals can do. Or in the case of surgery, an additional tool to use behaviorally.

Make no mistake about it, drugs or surgery will not by themselves solve your weight problem. To solve your weight problem, you need to make a permanent change in your behavior, made possible with behavioral therapy, taught in my book and by my therapists. Success comes with learning how to eat what you like in ways that keep you at your desired weight and it becoming habitual and a new “normal” for you. Now, with these new medical interventions, success may be possible even for those who have suffered from an abnormally intensive eating drive. Weight loss drugs or surgery may now enable them to overcome the obstacles that prevented them from being able to make those behavioral changes.

2 Comments

Posted in Weight Loss Articles Published on The Huffington Post

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What is Belviq, the New Weight Loss Drug?

Posted on June 14, 2013 | 2 comments

Belviq is a new weight loss drug that just became available by prescription this past week, one of only two new weight loss drugs approved by the FDA in the last 13 years. (The other is Qsymia, which I have already written about.) It is made by Arena Pharmaceuticals. Belviq is the trade name, Lorcaserin is the generic name, and it was called Lorqess during its development.

Belviq affects the serotonin receptors in the brain, changing the neurotransmitter action of serotonin, the brain chemical you hear about related to mood. SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors) are a group of drugs that are mainly used to treat depression, but it has been found that many of the drugs that affect neurotransmitters have lots of other affects, change in appetite among them. Drugs that change the action of the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine are used to treat many psychological conditions, even psychotic disorders, because they change the way we think and feel. They can create experience in the psyche like hallucinations, expansive thoughts or euphoria (good mood or feeling), or quell it, like reducing cravings and dark thoughts, or quieting hallucinations and mania. The antidepressant Wellbutrin was found to quiet the cravings of people trying to quit smoking and was then marketed also as Zyban. Some of these drugs were found to increase appetite, cravings, and drive to eat, and some have been found to reduce appetite and cravings. Pharmaceutical companies create new drugs, experiment with them, then market them for the effects that they produce. Belviq is sold as a weight loss drug, a drug to reduce appetite.

Does it work?

Reliable clinical studies have shown that people given the drug lost weight slightly more than people given a placebo, even without instruction in weight loss protocols. In studies where people were instructed in weight loss technique, people taking the drug did about twice as well as those taking the placebo. In all cases, the weight loss was slight, and the weight was regained after the trials. I have seen no reports that relate the subjective experience of appetite or craving suppression by the study subjects, which is the main thing I would like to know about. One would assume, based on the results of the clinical studies, that eating drive was reduced by the drug.

What value would any weight loss drug have?

Everyone familiar with my work knows that there is no mystical magic to successful weight loss. We must establish new behavior where we eat less, to the degree that we lose weight and keep it off. My method has been so successful because of the use of psychological techniques that are so effective in managing thoughts and feelings and so effective in changing habit –deleting damaging habits and installing healthy habits.

I know, from personal experience, as well as my work with clients and patients, that we are all different in many ways, and we have different psychological experience, like appetite, cravings and compulsion.

For those who experience uncontrollable drive that results in life threatening bingeing and uncontrollable compulsive eating, I pray that we find a drug that can mitigate outrageous eating drive without presenting unwanted and dangerous side effects. People would still have to manage their behavior with the methods I teach, but it would be so much easier if one were not tormented by the compulsion that I know some people experience. Is Belviq such a drug? I hope to find out.

Is Belviq safe?

There are so many bad side effects being reported that it is scary, even to a mental health counselor who has seen it all. Not only are psychological side effects being reported, but risk of medical problems seems high. Both the University  of California’s Wellness Letter and Consumer Reports have published critical reviews that would discourage just about anyone but the most desperate from taking it.

The Anderson Method recommendation:

To solve your weight problem, you will have to create new habits of behavior and thinking, no matter what. You will need to maintain them for the rest of your life. Many people have used The Anderson Method to do just that, some saying it was easy. If you can do that without drugs, that will be the best solution. After all, you don’t want to be taking these drugs for the rest of your life, even if they are safe.

If you are unable to manage compulsive eating and bingeing and the experience of craving is an absolute torment, drugs might help. There are a number of drugs that have helped people with unwanted eating drive, such as Wellbutrin, Lexapro and Topamax. And they have been around for a while. My advice, if you want to try a drug to help with weight control, is to find an expert in these drugs (Psychiatrists or Psychiatric Nurses) and try one that is known to be safe. Remember that no matter what, no drug is going to make you lose weight or solve your weight problem. The solution is in behavioral therapy science. A drug may make it easier to do the work, but you will still need to do the work. If you want to try a drug, try one that’s known to help some people and been around for a while. Let someone else be the guinea pig with Belviq.

 

2 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Qnexa, the New Weight Loss Pill

Posted on February 23, 2012 | 10 comments

From the New York Times: “A federal advisory panel on Wednesday overwhelmingly recommend approval of what could become the first new prescription drug to treat obesity in 13 years. The advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration voted 20 to 2 that the benefits from the weight loss provided by the drug, Qnexa, more than offset the potential risks of heart problems and birth defects.”

Qnexa is a combination of two existing drugs — the stimulant phentermine, which was the surviving part of the fen-phen combination, and the epilepsy and migraine drug topiramate, also known by the brand name Topamax. If you google around, you’ll get all sorts of details about the effectiveness in trials and the dangers.

I have had clients who have used these drugs. Sometimes they have helped, modestly. Sometimes they have done no good.  I’ve also had clients who have had the bariatric surgery, only with surgery, the dangers were greater, and the negatives were assured, not just possibilities.

As an obesity treatment expert, let me emphasize that weight loss cannot be achieved without behavior change, establishing habits that result in eating fewer calories than used. If a medication can help a person to do this, without adverse risk, I am all for it. The prospect of an effective medication that would make it easier to actualize healthy behavior is much better than surgery, though I encourage the surgery if it is the only way to sustain life, and time has run out.  

 As a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with a lifetime of treating mental disorders, let me make it clear that an array of thought and behavior disorders are affected by disorder in brain chemistry, and the effective treatment is medication. Good examples are depression and OCD, a relative of compulsive overeating. Treatment with medication alters the brain chemistry to relieve depression and OCD symptoms. We know that medications can reduce appetite and eating compulsions. Are drugs the solution to obesity? No. Behavior change is. But in some cases, drugs help, and in some cases, it seems behavior change is not possible without drugs. 

Let’s not forget that the solution to obesity is in behavior change. Sometimes, drugs can help, but drugs can only be a part of the answer. Most of the time, drugs play no part. Always, the answer is in Behavioral Medicine.

When I was young and obese, out of control and in the dark about how to solve my problem, I would have jumped at the chance of one of these miracle cures. I am so glad that I learned the real solution and lost not only the 140 pounds, but the risk and danger of these false promises. If you are overweight and hoping for a drug that will help with the problem, I am with you for that. But don’t wait to learn what you can do in regards to other Behavior Medicine technology to make the changes you’ll need to make. You’ll need to learn them anyway, even if a drug comes along that really works. Why not learn it now? You may find that you’ve solved the problem before a foolproof drug appears, which may or may not happen.

 

 

10 Comments

Posted in Qnexa - The New Weight Loss Pill

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,