Integrative Approaches to Sustainable Weight Loss: The Mind Body Paradox

Beatriz R. Olson, M.D., FACP

Endocrinologist, Middlebury, CT

We now understand that weight gain or regain is not due to moral failure but rather a consequence about how we humans biologically and psychologically interact with a modern environment. Over millennia we have been evolutionarily programed to find foods and gain weight to survive periods of scarcity and famine, but now we have food abundance always. Our modern lifestyles and nutrition are vastly different from what our ancestral biology and psychology were evolved for. Current society is designed to persuade us to consume, and our ancestral brain is happy to comply. A life of constant stress and distraction undermines our ability to make conscious choices, so we often respond by selecting what we crave and not what we need. This mind-body mismatch causes illness in many domains of life. One of the toxic outcomes of this malalignment is the obesity and diabetes epidemic. While we have developed drugs that increasingly address weight gain and related illnesses, as a society we do not to address what causes the problem in the first place. We don’t prevent weight gain until it is too late. The medical profession has given up on the power of humans to make lifestyle changes. Patients have become progressively disempowered and dependent on someone to “fix” them. This session will discuss the paradox we face and the opportunities we have to integrate tools such as incretins, hormones, exercise, targeted-education, lifestyle changes, and mindfulness, for more empowered and sustainable outcomes for our patients. Duration: 42m 36s