GFM Direct Primary Care

May is Mental Health Month, a subject of heightened importance in the past year and a half because of the stresses of Covid on people’s finances, lives, and interaction with other human beings. As a family physician, I treat a lot of mental health issues. The most common and, interestingly, most accepted diagnoses are depression and anxiety. The stigma that used to accompany a nervous breakdown has greatly lessened. Perhaps it is because it has gotten easier to treat th...Continue reading

Anorexigenic Hormones (Hormones What Make You Stop Eating) So, let’s look at all of those inhibitory hormones that come from the gut. In the upper gut, just past the stomach, we have the jejunum and duodenum where secretion of cholecystokinin takes place. It is secreted in response to a high fat or high protein meal or when the stomach is stretched (which is what happens when you eat). It makes your gallbladder contract to secrete bile to deal with fat and protein, and i...Continue reading

What the Heck is Ghrelin (And How Do You Pronounce It)? I would like you to meditate on the following statement: The body resists weight loss strongly, and resists weight gain weakly. Or to put it more bluntly: your body does not want you to lose weight and makes it daggoned hard to do so, but it easily puts on the pounds the moment that you relax your diet. Essentially, those programs advertising a 14-day Fat Furnace or 21-day rapid fat loss program are empty promis...Continue reading

What Is the Basal Metabolic Rate (and Who Cares)? In my last blog on calories, I described how calorie-restricted diets work (or don’t work as the case may be). Basically, the advice to Eat Less and Move More is a cruel joke. It doesn’t work. People are trying and, as I said in my last blog, they lose weight for six months, then the weight loss plateaus and, in some cases, the weight even starts going up . . . on the same calorie-restricted diet. Some will cut their calor...Continue reading

HOOPLAH! HOORAY!! I have finally received the results of my certification exam, and I am now BOARD CERTIFIED (not just trained, but certified) in Obesity Medicine!!! Call us about our Weight Management Program!