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The progression could have been prevented had the patient been able to lose weight.
As an attending surgeon, I continued to find myself confronting problems of weight in my surgical patients on a daily basis. I was constantly telling my overweight patients to lose weight.
My patients would ask me how to do it. Unfortunately the diets that were out there, Atkins, Ornish, and the like, weren’t working for them. Patients would lose weight, and in 6 months time they would gain all the weight back. So I developed the Golden Gate Diet.
A lot of people ask me if I have ever been very overweight and if developing the diet was some sort of personal odyssey. The truth is, I’ve always been thin. I am a trained scientist. Though I have never been heavy personally, I have figured out what causes people to gain weight. (You do wonder though when you hear that Dr. Atkins weighed 258 pounds.13)
The only time I gained some weight was during residency. During the early part of residency I weighed 150 pounds. I am 5’8”, so my body mass index—a measure of how heavy you are that will be discussed later—was 23—in the middle of the normal range. I went to the Elmhurst City Hospital in Queens, New York to do a trauma rotation. To my amazement, Elmhurst City Hospital—which is responsible for the health and welfare of lower-income New Yorkers—closed the hospital cafeteria and rented out the space to McDonald’s®. In those days we residents slept in the hospital and put in 120 hours a week, and we had little time to eat outside of the hospital—other than going to the Mexican burrito stand down the street.
After a few months of McDonald’s® and burritos my weight climbed steadily to 158 pounds. My body mass index was 24—getting towards the upper edge of normal.
Today, as an attending surgeon in California I weigh 140 pounds, and my weight is right where I want it to be. This is thanks to the Golden Gate Diet which is described in this book.
In my practice today I treat both surgical patients I operate on and non-surgical patients who come to me for help losing weight (and who don’t want to become surgical patients). I have had an excellent success rate in getting patients to lose weight with the Golden Gate Diet.
The scope of the weight problem in America is vast. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey estimated that 64% of U.S. adults are overweight or obese.14 In addition, 15% of children and adolescents are overweight or obese. The percentage of Americans who are very overweight has increased dramatically over the last 20 years.
The national weight problem is one of the leading public health problems in America, and many weight loss books are published every year. Many of the most popular diets do not work or are outright dangerous. A lot of people have made a lot of money feeding lies to the American public.
 
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