Why this blog?

I guess it’s part excitement and part frustration behind my decision to start communicating much more directly with real people interested in obesity and weight loss, and not just other academics and media. Let’s start with the frustration and then round off with the happy bits.

The lack of progress in both prevention and treatment outcomes is quite frankly staggering. Sure, the epidemic appears to be slowing down in more affluent segments of the population, but it is still more or less a runaway train in poorer areas of the US and Europe, and this also goes for countries in the middle of the nutrition transition, such as China and India. There are in fact very few places in the world where the epidemic is not doing very well. This is a public health failure of monumental proportions.

Despite this, most of the obesity experts continue to advocate more of the same tired old strategies, i.e. increased dietary control and exercise, and the outcomes are very predictable: more failure.

Then the experts seemingly got desperate and started to drastically scale up the use of bariatric surgery with minimal follow-up afterwards, as a kind of advanced quick fix. This very large increase in bariatric surgery volumes is a bomb waiting to explode if you ask me, since the safety of such drastic procedures are far from fully understood. A review I am working on with former student Filippa Juul has so far identified 32 separate nutritional deficiencies after bariatric surgery, some of them quite serious. And this is just one type of safety concern.

Another major source of frustration is the almost total lack of balance in the media. Every day they keep pumping out the same tired fad diets, or similarly ineffective measures. And on the next page you can read up on recipes for all kinds cakes and sweets, complete with glossy photographs and smiling photoshopped models. It’s quite absurd, but we apparently fall for it, and so they keep doing it.

The media is nothing if not cynical when it comes to weight loss, and it has now basically gotten to the point where public health nutrition and lifestyle advice is largely controlled by the media. These are some of the biggest frustrations for me as an obesity academic.

So, what are the happy bits? Well, just over a year ago, I started to become very interested in some of the deeper underlying psychological and emotional reasons behind overweight and obesity. And what I have discovered so far has got me pretty excited. I guess I feel a little like Howard Carter when he was exploring the unknown parts of the pyramids.

If you are anxious to read more in-depth information right now you can read a conceptual review paper I just published (Hemmingsson E. A new model of the role of psychological and emotional distress in promoting obesity: conceptual review with implications for treatment and prevention. Obesity Reviews, 2014, epub 16 June).

I am expecting to publish many posts on the topics covered in the review, for example how the very earliest years of our lives continue to affect our health as adults. I genuinely think that this type of information can be a concrete help for anyone wanting to lose weight permanently.

I actually think we are getting close to a genuine breakthrough in how we help people lose weight that actually works long term, and also in terms of preventing new cases of overweight and obesity. Sure, much more research needs to happen before the epidemic is confined to the history books. And that is why I go to work each day. Stay tuned of you want to find out more.

 

Sincerely,

Erik Hemmingsson