Lose it your way
Once 326 pounds, obesity expert offers sound advice in her new book
If you want to drive Ali Zentner crazy, say “they say” to her when discussing diet and weight loss.
“‘They say drink eight glasses of water, they say stay away from carbs, they say watch the gluten.’ First of all, who are ‘they’ and where is the science to prove it all?” the gregarious Zentner said in a recent interview.
“It’s this one-size-fits-all phenomenon that really bothers me.”
The Vancouver-based Zentner knows a thing or two about weight loss. She practises internal medicine and is a specialist in cardiac risk management. She is also an obesity expert who has helped thousands of obese and overweight patients achieve a healthier lifestyle.
Something that perhaps gives her more street credibility, though, is that she once weighed 326 pounds.
She has lived it. And she made the changes neces- sary to live a healthier life.
Zentner has written a new book, The Weight-Loss Prescription: A Doctor’s Plan for Permanent Weight Reduction and Better Health for Life, published by Penguin Books. Part personal story, part science, part stories from some of her patients, it really is a must-read for anyone who struggles with weight.
There are a lot of books about weight loss and lifestyle change, and maybe you have found one that works. Somehow Zentner’s approach — which touches on the physical and emotional aspects of being overweight and the practical advice she provides — makes her book the best I have ever read on the subject.
Zentner said she wrote it more from a doctor’s perspective than her personal journey. “I’ll argue that it’s science, instruction and five per cent my own story.”
Obesity is an illness, she said. “Cancer gets respect, but obesity doesn’t.” There is so much finger pointing when it comes to weight loss, she said.
“There is a serious lack of appreciation in mainstream society on how hard it is to lose weight,” she added. “People are told it’s about lifestyle change, to find a new way of doing things, but how do you go about that, really?”
Zentner was one of those people who struggled. She remembers seeing her first nutritionist (one of many) at the age of nine.
Her whole life had been about dieting, deprivation and following one diet or another, she writes in the book.
“Diets don’t work. By their nature, they are only for a fixed period of time. Diets offer a beginning, middle and an end.”
Until the day she stopped all of it.
She writes in the book that she didn’t wake up and say, “Today is the day,” as she had done many times before. But she realized she had a feeling that she could do something about it.
“I began to spend my time learning all I could about the physiology of obesity and nutrition. In medicine, we learn from each patient because each patient teaches us something new about a disease. I was my first obesity patient.”
Zentner writes that “obesity implies a host of judgments against one’s character and personality.” But it’s far more than that.
There’s internal wiring and genetics at work, she said. “The brain of an obese person really is different.”
In her book, she outlines different personality types which relate, in essence, to how we eat. Are we emotional eaters? Do we drink our calories? Fast food junkie? All or nothing dieter? Portion distortion? Sometimes, we fall into more than one type.
But what makes her book different is that she offers outlines of how to map out our own route to change.
“We all have to navigate our own path, my book just helps with directions,” she said. And we can learn by our mistakes.
“We need to hear the positive voice, any healthy change we make is a good one,” she said.
“And changing habits, some of which we have done over a lifetime, is going to take a concerted effort — and time.”
Tenacity is important. Giving up in not an option.
“I want you to celebrate your discovery of the imperfection in your behaviour,” she writes in the book. “Once you know where the errors are, you can use them to create a blueprint for the changes you want to make.”
Zentner certainly has made the changes.
She has gone from being an obese woman sitting on the sofa eating a pot of macaroni and cheese to one who cycles to work every day and runs marathons.
She’s proof we can rewire our brains.
We just have to set about creating a new, healthier set of positive rules for our relationship with food. And her book helps us do just that.