[...]... Byram Karasu, also morbidly obese, died at the age of 56 This tale of two fathers is in the background of the volume as the authors seek to assess the many factors that contribute to obesity and its control The Gravity of Weight is a model of scholarly inquiry that describes and analyzes, in a critical manner, an enormous amount of information With the possible exception of a few references that may... know about the complex subject of weight Statistics can never account for everyone Nevertheless, our book, The Gravity of Weight: A Clinical Guide to Weight Loss and Maintenance, is our attempt to explain some of these discrepancies and explore particularly why, for most people, it is so difficult to lose weight and maintain that loss No one has all the answers, but an understanding of the science, of. .. can actually achieve and maintain is probably within a fairly limited range, but even a 5% to 10% loss of weight can have substantial health benefits Nevertheless, many people cannot lose even the 10% that can be an achievable and reasonable goal and keep it off indefinitely And many people have every wish to remain a certain weight yet find themselves overeating, often with considerable guilt before and. .. control, and weight maintenance seem to apply better to animals that do not have the advanced cortical brains we have We can limit an animal’s food intake, for example, and give it regular exercise, and the animal will lose weight and maintain that loss, assuming its food and exercise regimens continue to be regulated Human beings, however, are different We are not only beneficiaries of our remarkable evolution... endemic rather than epidemic, and she notes that although there has been a rise in the prevalence of obesity over the past twenty or so years, a survey done in the early 1960s actually found that 45% of the U.S population was overweight at that time In fact, back in the 1950s Breslow (1952) was already warning of the dangers of overweight and its relationship to increased mortality He said, The American... dyslipidemia), hypertension, adult-onset diabetes, and even gout, all symptoms of metabolic abnormalities His own father had died at the age of 62 from a sudden myocardial infarction, so my father had a strong genetic risk factor as well What was in my father’s favor, though, was that he had always believed in the importance of exercise, particularly walking and weight lifting, well before it was fashionable... and to explain why the control of body weight and its maintenance are “so daunting for so many people.” The problems that they raise and the analyses that they conduct go far to realize this goal Early in the book, I was struck by the discussion of two problems in the understanding of obesity The first problem is the alteration of the largely linear correlation between increasing body fat and mortality... counting, which leads to weight gain xx THE GRAVITY OF WEIGHT The section on pharmacotherapy for obesity describes the many medications that are currently available The Gravity of Weight concisely describes their characteristics and problems Only two, sibutramine and orlistat, have been well studied, and they have been shown to be modestly effective and safe The description of a large number of less frequently... in sabotaging our best efforts at weight control, and the importance of exercise and sleep, as well as the complex circadian rhythms involved Furthermore, we explain the principles behind various diets and explore the complications involved in starvation, and we also present some of the psychological approaches utilized for weight loss and maintenance Weight, a measure of the earth’s gravitational pull,... Stanley M Katz Dean of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, whose earlier work as an endocrinologist at the National Institutes of Health led us to appreciate the important relationship of obesity to the brain; Robert Michels, M.D., former Dean and Chairman of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, a longtime mentor and friend; Jack D Barchas, M.D., Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at . England e Gravity of Weight A CLINICAL GUIDE TO Weight Loss and Maintenance Sylvia R. Karasu, M.D. Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry,. to the age of 91. e father of Byram Karasu, also morbidly obese, died at the age of 56. is tale of two fathers is in the background of the volume as