Dr. Rick Tague explains why willpower alone doesn't work for weight loss. Brain appetite regulation, metabolic changes, fat-cell biology, nutritional deficiencies, and medications drive weight gain. Disciplined patients still struggle because weight is a medical problem requiring root-cause analysis, not just diet and exercise.
Chapters
After patients meet with Dr. Tagg, they understand that this isn't their fault, that being overweight isn't a character issue, that it's a metabolism issue, it's an appetite issue, it's a nutritional issue. It's not a just push yourself away from the table and eat less and exercise more. It's a medical condition.
And these are typically individuals that are very capable, goal oriented, disciplined people, successful in their careers, successful in their family lives. And yet weight gain has happened regardless of what they've tried on their own. And there's always explanations that make sense once we analyze it with the proper tools.
So patients realize that their appetite is a physiological response in their brain. It's not just, oh, I'm hungry all the time and I just need to eat less.
Weight gain is very complicated in how it occurs inside the human body with the fat cells enlarging and then fat cells multiplying, but then trying to manage that and get the weight back down to a healthy and normal range is very complicated. And it is a medical situation that requires medical strategies and solutions to really be successful.
All these years they have been trying the wrong strategies and it needs to be treated at a metabolism and chemical and biolog level. I mean, our patients are very motivated. They will come in and they'll tell me, I work out two hours a day. I've been watching my calories, I've followed every other diet, I followed keto, Paleo, you name the diet, they've tried it. And they come in feeling defeated and broken and discouraged. And they come in and meet with Dr. Tagg and they realize that they've been trying all the wrong solutions. And what they need is somebody to get to the root of the problem.
Problem.
Because there's lots of different reasons why people struggle with being overweight.
I had done a lot of different diet programs and I usually was able to lose the weight, but I could never keep it off. And I just was like, gosh, what is wrong that I can. I just as hard as I try, I just can't seem to do this on my own. And you can't explain it. You don't understand why when everybody else is eating worse than you and you're doing everything right, you're exercising, you're eating what you're supposed to eat and nothing moves. The scale does not move. You give up, you give up hope, your self esteem is gone. And Dr. Tague, he shows you that that's not the case at all, that's not it, that there is a medical reason behind what you're going through. I felt like I needed some other tools, I needed some other information, and I was just hoping that Dr. Tague and his staff could give me that. They filled in a lot of the blanks for the medical piece that a lot of the different diet programs don't. Once he was able to get my lab work balanced out, I just. The difference is just amazing.
One of the things I do with each and every patient is do an assessment of what has caused their unwanted weight gain. For each of my patients, they never wanted to gain a single extra pound, and yet often they've gained 20 pounds, 40 pounds, 80 pounds, 100 pounds of unwanted weight against their will. Sometimes it's illnesses, injuries, stress of divorce, or losing a loved one. There oftentimes are appetite disorders that occur in our patients where they don't know when they're full. So people keep eating beyond the point of fullness, and that can trigger weight gain. For many of my patients, there are metabolism disorders that occur. Nutritional deficiencies are epidemic in America right now. So vitamin deficiencies, mineral deficiencies, even protein deficiency can slow the metabolism down to the point of causing fat gain in the body. There are many medications that cause unwanted weight gain, either by triggering an increase in the appetite, cravings for carbohydrates, or by changing the metabolism and how the body manages calories, and that can end up causing unwanted weight gain.
There's lots of different underlying issues, why people have a tendency to be overweight. And you can eat right and exercise all day long, but if you don't address those underlying issues, you're not going to be successful at losing the weight and definitely not successful at keeping it off.
