Weight loss documentary – The Obesity Tapes (part 3)

Weight loss documentary – The Obesity Tapes (part 3)

During medical school at the University of Michigan, I took two fellowships in clinical nutrition. The first fellowship was with the dieticians as the hospital, or the fat ladies as we called them, who taught me that a calorie is a calorie, and that if you want to lose weight, it doesn’t matter what you eat. As far as the fat ladies were concerned, there’s no difference between the calories in a plate of salmon or a box of chocolate eclairs. If you want to lose weight, you have to cut down on both. My other fellowship was with doctor Frank Catchpool in Sausalito, who did his fellowship with doctor Albert Schweitzer in Africa. Frank taught me that not all calories are alike. And that if you want to lose weight, it matters a great deal what you eat. Frank said to go ahead and eat that plate of salmon, not the chocolate eclairs, even if that plate of salmon has twice as many calories. Frank also said that most of the time, if I bothered ask, patients would tell me what their problem was. In the jungle, CAT scans and MRI’s are hard to come by. But with a stethoscope and enquiring mind, you can always ask the next question. If Frank couldn’t get what he was looking for one way, he got it another. That turned me into a physician.