A few months ago I saw a new patient and she had a good deal in common with many other new patients I see. Even though she knew that her excess weight was doing her no good, and that it raised her risk of many chronic diseases, like breast cancer, for example, and diabetes and high blood pressure and colon cancer, she was unable to do anything about it. She was also really tired of doctors telling her that she should lose weight. Really, really tired. “Tell me something I don’t know,” she said to me. So I did.

I said, “You seem like a really smart person.” Smart people solve their problems. Once you identify a problem, you look it up and down, left and right. You think about it from all the angles, and then you get to work. You might try something that seems obvious, or something a bit more obscure. And then, if those don’t work, you come back around, and try something new.

She said, “I’ve already tried everything I can think of.”

And I said, “I’m sure you have.” Does it make any sense to you that you’ve already tried absolutely everything you can think of, and nothing is working? Does it make any sense that you’ve just given up? What else is like that for you?

I told her that when this happens to me, I think to myself that “it’s time to reexamine the fundamentals.” In other words, there may be something here that I’m missing. Maybe I believe something is true that actually is not. Like thinking that diets work. The tragedy of this, in my mind, is that when people try to lose weight only to discover, once again, that they are unsuccessful, they always think there’s something wrong with THEM. And not the diet. That is the part that upsets me most. There’s nothing wrong with them. First, diets don’t work. And second, failure makes you feel bad, which interferes with your efforts and perspective even more.

This was something of a relief for my patient. At least she knew I wasn’t going to tell her to try to lose weight. That’s because weight is not the problem. That’s right. Weight is a symptom of the problem. And when you figure out how to fix the problem, your weight begins to change on its own. What is the problem, then? The problem is that we are eating enormous amounts of products that do not really nourish us. And your brain knows the difference. So if you fill your belly with bankrupt calories (even ones that you have been told are good for you, like, for instance, commercial salad dressings and Raisin Bran (R)), you stay hungry.

At this point, she began to nod. She saw it. She said “I never thought about it like that before.” Then it was time for us to start to talk about the difference between real food and manufactured calories, Real food nourishes; manufactured calories entertain. Don’t let the processed edibles industry tell you what nourishes you. Next time I see her we can talk for a few minutes about small steps.