A Note From Dr. Ray Powell, MD "Stress Affects Your Body Weight"

I looked at myself when I was 38 years old and I was amazed, I was 250 pounds. I was at least 75 overweight, I hated myself. I looked at my wife and wondered how she could have been attracted to me. My back was always killing me and I could not even keep up with my 5 kids. I was in my second year of my Emergency Medicine Residency. Yes, a doctor who is morbidly obese. How can that happen? Aren’t doctors supposed to know how to stay healthy? Aren’t they taught everything there is about nutrition? The reality of it is that I, like most of us, had been hit with multiple stressors over several years. But life as we all live it is never stress free. When we are stressed two things immediately get pushed aside, how we eat and how we move our bodies (exercise). As I looked at myself in the mirror one day and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore’. I realized after 6 years of medical training I had no clue what to do about my nutrition. Should I do a ‘Low-Carb Diet’? ‘Low-Fat Diet’? ‘High-Protein Diet’? Most doctors, according to a recent Congressional hearing, get less than 3 hours of nutritional education in their entire medical training. So I tried Atkins (Low Carb), Sugar-Busters, Slim Fast, and essentially lost a little bit of weight but then put it right back on. I started to research everything I could find about nutrition and the science of Obesity and how to treat it. Obesity has been defined by just about every medical organization including the World Health Organization as a Chronic Relapsing Medical Disease and I have it. I have learned about treating myself and thousands of patients for Obesity. The science of nutrition, what is the right combination of Protein, Carbohydrates and Fats, and how much and when it should be eaten. It is not as easy as many people think. If it were we would not have a world that has become obese. After I realized how little I knew about my own nutrition and treating patients for Obesity for several years, I realized that all these patients had one thing in common: they needed to be shown what, when, and how to eat.