How do I handle the holidays?

During the holidays, no matter what your ethnic background or religion, there is unhealthy food everywhere. You go to cocktail and dinner parties, restaurants, work events, and rich unhealthy food is served; every grocery store is pushing their latest fudge, cookie, or holiday dip. So what to do, how to lose weight?
First, set your goals. I consider the most difficult time for weight loss to be from Thanksgiving to New Years. If you maintain, or even lose a few pounds during this time, this is a very successful month.
In terms of how to handle the endless events and parties, the best advice I can give you, is to NEVER arrive at a party or restaurant feeling hungry. At a restaurant there is usually a 30 to 45 minute time lag from when you order to when your meal arrives, with nothing to eat but bread and wine; at a party, there is frequently lots of melted cheese dishes, creamy sauces, rich desserts. So your strategy is to ALWAYS eat something five to ten minutes before you arrive. You will then not feel ravenously hungry and spin out of control, you will enjoy the time with loved ones, the beautiful ambiance, and just the joyous time of year. So stay focused, thinks about this, and you will have a wonderful season.

My friend eats five slices of pizza and never gains a pound.

I know it is not earth shattering news to anyone who has struggled with their weight, that some people can seemingly eat anything they want. You may go out for pizza, and your best friend may scarf down three slices, laden with melted cheese and sausage, as well as five beers, and never seem to gain a pound. It feels enormously unfair. But what is really going on, why does this happen?
It turns out that you can feed the exact same foods to five different people, and each person will absorb a different number of calories. The reason for this, interestingly, begins in the intestines, where we each have different “micro biomes” In translation, this means that every person has slightly different bacteria in his or her gut, and right at this level, our individual differences begin: we each absorb different amounts of food. Then, once in the body, we each process food differently. The best way to think about this is that a diabetic processes food entirely differently from a non diabetic; furthermore, there is a huge variation within non diabetics and pre diabetics in terms of how food is processed.
Food metabolism is enormously complex, and our understanding of this science, called bariatric medicine, is changing rapidly. As a physician trained in bariatric medicine, I spend hundreds of hours annually reading and attending lectures by leading scientists in this field; I am always thinking about what is new, and how I can further help my patients.
If you have tried and either failed at losing weight, or regained all the weight you lost, it is because you have been on a diet that is “one size fits all.” Everyone who needs to lose thirty pounds cannot be on the same program, because that would mean every person burns food exactly the same way; which I have explained above, is absolutely incorrect.
If you are ready to join a program where you will learn how to eat real food which you will purchase in your local grocery store,eat three meals a day plus two optional snacks, and most importantly, have a food program designed specifically for you, we invite you to enter our Balance Medical Weight Loss program.

The timing of day that you eat matters. A lot.

Recently a patient asked me an interesting question. Why can’t I move food from my breakfast meal to my lunch meal?

The answer is actually more complex that he imagined. The answer comes in a recent article published from Mass General Hospital. They took a group of woman and fed them about 1400 calories of healthy food on a daily basis. In the first three months the women ate no breakfast, about 300 calories of food for lunch, and then the other 1100 calories for snacks and dinner. In three months they lost on average 7.9 lbs.