Weight loss is a topic that is consistently on the minds of most people, even if they have little to no weight to lose. Most people either want to lose weight, stay at their current weight, or not gain weight as they age.

Medicine has been studying the science of weight loss for close to a century; and there is no shortage of opinions about the best way to do it. If losing weight is a goal for you, there are many diets, plans, and foods to eat or avoid out there. Most of you reading this have been up in the middle of the night and seen the plethora of infomercials touting the latest fad in how to get off those pesky pounds. Unfortunately, the reason most of these approaches fail is they do not take into account that losing weight is something that does not come easy to the body, and there is a good reason for it.

Our genes are programmed to store calories, not knowing when the next meal is, not engorge on fast food with more calories in one meal, than some people need all day. If you go back into history one will note that food in general was less abundant than currently, and most people ate fewer calories per day; but the one trade off was their diets were less processed, and contained less calories per gram. Today our foods are chock full of sugar, processed grains, unhealthy fats, and lots of empty calories; all thanks to modern food processing. The fact is that our genes were never created to handle this type of food and the quantities that occur in society today. Advertisers have told us what a portion is via the size of the plate, and all of us were encouraged to clean our plate by parents whose intentions were good, but more is definitely not better all the time.

The human body is very complex in the way it processes, burns, and unfortunately stores the calories we consume; and each part of the digestive system has to work in harmony for body weight to stay constant. The solution of just eat less and exercise more in real life does not work, because your body is smarter than you think. When the body isn't taking in adequate calories to meet its needs, then at some point after about 30 days or so, it starts to blunt weight loss in an effort to make sure the body can survive. Metabolism slows down, fat stores increase, and overall fatigue sets in.

The body stores fat because fat contains per gram more calories than any other food source; and the body can break fat down in times of stress and use it for fuel to keep the brain and other vital organs working. The brain is a very picky organ, it needs an almost continuous supply of sugar to function, and will not tolerate anything else but that. If blood sugar gets too low for too long, the lungs and colon are fine, but the brain will shut down into a coma and death will ensue quickly. DIETS DO NOT WORK, because fooling the body is impossible long term.

In mentioning that DIETS DO NOT WORK, my intention is to educate you that what really constitutes weight loss long term is keeping it off, not just losing it initially. Most diet plans include cutting calories, eating only their packaged processed food, exercising like Lance Armstrong and cutting calories, or just drinking some quasi health juice that is supposed to burn fat. None of these approaches are realistic long term in terms of how the body works, cost, or time to exercise excessively. At some point something will give; what is needed is weight loss that is attainable long term. A little known secret is any weight you lose will be a combination of fat, lean muscle, and water; and how much of each will determine if the weight stays off. Take a typical person, in a month they lose 15 lbs, not bad but let's look a little deeper. Average healthy weight loss as recommended by many government agencies and health gurus is 1-2 lbs per week. So if we lose 2 lbs a week on the high side, then that is 8 pounds per month; but our patient lost more than the recommended weight, so what is going on? The answer is less of the weight lost was fat, and more was lean muscle and water. Fat is needed by the body to function, hence it is essential to life; unfortunately fat does not need energy to function like other tissues in the body like muscle.

Muscles are active tissues that need a supply of energy to function, fat just sits there. There are also recent studies that suggest the more fat you have, it is even harder to lose it, as fat tissue releases chemicals that signal other hormones like insulin and make it harder to stabilize blood sugar. So essentially if you lose lean tissue during weight loss you are sabotaging yourself; you're losing the very tissue that will help you lose weight and keep it off. These sets of facts I guarantee are not told to you on a 60 second commercial.

Science has found that lean muscle is lost by the body at a steady rate as we age, which is why people continue to gain weight even with the same diet. You lose the tissue that helps burn calories, so the solution is any weight loss plan needs to be a lifestyle change that focuses on preserving lean muscle, eating smarter and keeping exercise in. I have seen many diet fads come and go, so when I decided to incorporate a system to help my patients lose weight, I was very selective. I needed to find a system that was grounded in science, easy to follow, used real food, affordable, and helped keep hunger cravings down. I found all of this in the Cornerstone program that we recently started in our office. Click here for more information on the Cornerstone program.

In eleven years of practice I have performed close to 60,000 adjustments; but in the back of my mind I have always wanted to help patients with more aspects of their health. To that end, I am currently finishing up my Masters degree in Nutrition, which will enable me to address a larger array of health concerns, obesity is one of them. By government estimates 50% of the U.S. is obese, and the numbers keep climbing unfortunately. My goal is to provide patients with a safe way to lose weight and keep it off. The only way weight loss occurs besides what was mentioned above, is a new lifestyle must be created by the patient in the way they view food.