In my last post, I touched on some factors other than diet and exercise that can impact your weight loss efforts.
Today I want to discuss three random studies. None of them have anything to do (at least not directly) with each other, and none of them represent “the” solution to weight loss. I highlight them rather to reinforce the point that, if you are paying attention to the ever expanding (no pun intended) science of obesity and weight loss, you should understand that eating more and moving less are only one part of the story.
One of my biggest interests – and one of the most common goals patients have – is weight loss. It’s also a common area of frustration. After all, it SHOULD be a simple thing. Change your diet and move more, right? What could be easier than that? And yet, millions of Americans try this approach every year, and most of the time it fails them. Why?
Tens of millions of Americans suffer from insulin resistance, and most of them don’t even know it. Left unchecked, insulin resistance can lead to heart disease, cancer, dementia, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and lots of other bad health outcomes. But before I can get into explaining how you can know if you have this condition, and what you can do about it if you do, I first need to explain what insulin resistance is.
I was a history major in college, and to this day one of my great interests outside of medicine is learning more about the past. Sometimes I even like to combine these interests by considering whether people of the past have anything to teach us about good health (they certainly have a lot to teach us about bad health in terms of death from things like infection, trauma, and childbirth, but that’s a fairly obvious point that you probably don’t need me to explain in detail).
Thus it was that about a year back, I was watching a documentary about the Roman empire and got to wondering: just how exactly did the Romans prepare their soldiers for combat?
This post will be extremely short. Back in October of 2023 – when I was still employed at my former practice – I was asked to give a lecture at a conference of physical therapists in Rhode Island. The theme of the conference was lifestyle (nutrition, exercise, sleep, etc.) and how it can positively impact joint health. The focus of my talk was on nutrition, with an emphasis on how proper nutrition can support better joint health and ease chronic pain, as well as on tips for losing weight. If you are interested, the folks who sponsored the conference have now posted a video recording of the talk on YouTube, embedded above.
Special bonus: if you forward to the 24:28 mark and watch just the last seven minutes of the video, you will hear my thoughts on what we can learn from the ancient Romans about how to have better health today – a topic that I will be returning to in another blog post soon.
