On March 10, 2010, the Medical Wellness Association sponsored a Medical Wellness and Nutrition forum as part of the IHRSA convention in San Diego. As an aside, Sunny San Diego? Are you kidding me? It was sunny, but, man, was it cold! The wind was blowing. Hard. Felt it to my bones. Probably not cold to someone from Minnesota, but to a Texas boy it was. And can you do something about the homeless people? The only place I’ve been where it was worse was downtown Baltimore.
So back to the forum. There were four speakers (including me), each presenting on a topic related to nutrition and wellness. I think the forum was well-received. I listened to all presentations and only one other excited me. Amy Blansit works with obese people in Missouri and she gets it. Her presentation was excellent and she’s doing a bang-up job. The other talks seemed rather fluffy.
In order to gain more attention, I badly titled my talk: “How to increase revenue with weight loss programs.” IHRSA is not the most scientifically rigorous organization. A more appropriate, but boring, title would have been: “Misapplication of the energy balance equation.” That was the focus of my talk, but no one would have attended. I spent nearly half of the two hours building this up and why weight loss programs fail (or, the misapplication idea).
For more on this, check out Dr. Eades’ blog, Protein Power, more specifically, this recent post. You can also read this post by Robert McLeod on energy balance, it’s at the bottom of the post.
The gist of the talk centered on the pervasive notion of eat less, exercise more. For overweight and obese, hyperinsulinemia equals metabolic domination, efficiency at fat storage and feeble efforts in fat mobilization. Simply eating less does not fix this and leads to failure.
Oh, and before you chime in with ASP, leptin and all the others, don’t bother. ASP is a toothpick to the bat of insulin. While the research on leptin and leptin resistance is fascinating, I have yet to work with someone where it was a problem. I know it’s there, somewhere, and I know it exists. Just haven’t run across it in my day-to-day business.
You can also view the presentation at slideshare.net. Don’t know why, but the embed code has jacked up the first slide. It’s normal at slideshare. Below the presentation are links to a reference list and white paper.
Click here to download the references.
Click here to download the white paper. Note: I can’t find my white paper. It’s somewhere on my laptop. I’ll hunt it down and post the link in the next day or so.
Related posts:
[...] in San Diego last week, the biggest highlight for me (other than my talk, of course) was the keynote, Malcolm Gladwell. Chris Berman of espn also gave a keynote, which I did not [...]
Posted by Dr. Sekula on weight loss, fitness and nutrition » Blog Archive » Learning from Malcolm Gladwell on March 17th, 2010.