Diets work, but what good are they if the weight returns? Statistics show that 80 to 90 percent of dieters regain every lost pound. This fact represents the largest and least addressed problem in obesity management. The recidivism of dieters fuels a $30 billion weight-loss industry, an industry that would shrink like Al Roker’s waistline if the newly-thin could only make weight loss stick. But here is the problem: The skills needed to maintain a new, smaller body size are not obvious or intuitive; they must be taught. Inexplicably, books that deal successfully with ways to prevent regain have gone unwritten. Refuse to Regain, by longtime weight-management authority Barbara Berkeley, MD, fills this void. Berkeley, former medical director for the Optifast program and founder of Weight Management Partners, is a board-certified internist. She continues to have close ties to Novartis Medical Nutrition (recently acquired by Nestlé), producer of the weight-loss supplement Optifast, which has 300 weight-loss centers nationwide.
When Barbara Berkeley was offered the job of directing a large hospital weight loss program back in 1988, she took it---mainly to have more time to spend with her young daughters. Little did she know that working with overweight patients would become her lifelong passion.
In the past 24 years as an internist and obesity specialist, she has developed a strong interest in primal diet, a form of eating that conforms to what humans ate during their long evolutionary experience as hunter-gatherers. Dr. Berkeley has found this diet highly effective for weight loss and weight maintenance. Her book discusses the particular form of primal diet she uses in treatment which she calls a Primarian diet.
Dr. Berkeley continues to update her book and to communicate with those who are confronting weight issues on her blog at www.refusetoregain.com. She also invites dieters and maintainers to join her on Facebook at Refuse to Regain: Barbara's World.
Dr. Berkeley has a B.A. from Barnard College, a Master's from Columbia University and an MD from the State University of New York/Stony Brook. She completed her medical residency at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital. She is board certified in both internal medicine and obesity medicine. Today, she is Medical Director of Weight Management Services for Lake Hospital System in Cleveland and also maintains a busy private practice. The kids are grown now, but she and her husband--both primarily Primarians--- continue to live on their small farm along with chickens, goats, donkeys and an assortment of other living things.
