When the obesity epidemic started more than 40 years ago, physicians thought they could eradicate it simply by telling people to eat less. Today, only one to two percent of obese people who lose excess weight keep it off. 

My medical team and I started studying the treatment of diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol 17 years ago. Our aim was to try and correct these metabolic disorders without drugs, instead using only nutrition, exercise and lifestyle changes. I thought we could complete the research in three to five years, but it became obvious to us that obesity was causing most of the disorders we were trying to wipe out—a groundbreaking discovery at the time. (In the last few years, we have broadened our study of metabolic disorders to include depression, fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis.)

For me, the war on obesity is personal. I was a normal weight throughout high school (about 185 pounds; I'm 6 foot 1 inch tall). In college and medical school, my weight slowly started to rise. By the time I became a fellow in cardiovascular surgery, I was tipping the scales at 250 pounds; my peak was 275 pounds.

Like many of you, I turned to every diet I thought could get me back down to that high school weight. I had some short successes, but mostly failures, ultimately leading me to buy my clothes in the big-and-tall men's shops. Unfortunately, I wasn't tall, just BIG. About this time I found out I had high cholesterol, high blood pressure and pre-diabetes. These are the disorders that lead to heart disease, and that knowledge motivated me to seek help from a dietitian and a psychologist who was a close friend.

Over the next several years, I found that carbohydrates like sugar and grains (such as breads, pancakes, and rice) would make me hungry to the point that food was always in my thoughts except when I was working. Armed with this knowledge, plus after making many lifestyle changes with the help of my psychologist friend, I dropped down to 210 pounds. I stayed at that weight until I was in my 60s, when I decided I really wanted to live another 30 or 40 years. I achieved a body fat level of 10 percent and lost an additional 12 pounds, and have maintained that weight loss.

My colleagues and I at the 20/20 Lifestyles program knew we would have to cure obesity to cure the metabolic disorders, so we began to study how to set up a program to treat obesity in both the short and long term. Now we have one of the most successful weight loss programs in the country, centering our treatment on nutrition education, exercise training, counseling sessions and attentive physician care. Today, 48 percent of our clients have kept the weight off after three years.

I plan to use this blog to help you find the information you need to correct your obesity and/or metabolic disorders so that you can better manage your health and be an active, youthful, fun person who loves yourself and your life. Finally, I hope you will use the comments section to share what has worked well or not so well for you.