weight loss and safety

An overweight person's main motivation to lose weighjt is to become healthier. Many people in our program have been recently diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes mellitus, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, etc and they were told that weight loss will make these dangerous medical entities either resolve or be much better with weight loss.

It is unsafe to be overweight. Very unsafe. Aside from the diabetes/heart disease risk factors a number of cancers are more highly prevalent in overweight/obese people....breast, gastic, pancreatic and colon to name a few.

When I have new patients enter the program, much of the concern is about its' safety. Even more prominent are other physicians who, when they are approached by a patient about doing our program will tell them that "diet pills are unsafe and I dont know anything about that serotonin and it probbaly doesnt work."

I want to reassure everyone that after 8 years, 10,000-plus patient experience and being a board certified internal medicine doctor for 26 years, it is MUCH SAFER SHORT AND LONG TERM to be in a medically supervised program helping you lose weight than remaining overweight being administered multiple medications for the obesity co-morbidities. When people lose weight , their diabetes, blood pressure and cholesterol improve dramatically. Looking at the risk/benefit ration of a weight loss effort under supervision even with prescription anorectic medications, it is not even close...losing weight under these circumstances is MUCH safrer than allowing to remain overweight with the co-morbidities.

So when a physician or self-professed knowledgable friend (lots of them now with the advent of the internet....makes everyone an expert, right?) tries to tell you that a weight loss program is "unsafe", think twice about the veracity of this.