About Me

Hi. I’m Dr Barbara Schibly and I am a board certified preventive and anti-aging medicine physician. I am also the author of Stop the Diet Rollercoaster Blog which is destined to “morph” into a book by the same name in the near future.

As you know, obesity and overweight are major problems in our society. As a result, weight loss advice is everywhere - there are a lot of self-proclaimed diet gurus out there! So you’re undoubtedly wondering what’s different about the advice I will be sharing on this blog and why should you trust me?

Let me answer that question by explaining how this blog - or should I say “blook” - came to be and where the information I will be sharing with you comes from.

The Birth of a Book

In 2003 I was working as a weight loss counselor for a large national organization. Like most nutritionists, this organization based their dietary selections on the US government’s famous food pyramid which, at the time, included the recommendation that everyone eat 6 to 11 servings of grain a day.

Although that seemed like an awful lot of grain to me, the total number of calories on the recommended diet was low and my clients would also be exercising and following all the other standard weight loss advice like measuring their food, keeping a food journal and drinking lots of water. So I thought the diet would work and they would lose weight.

But they didn’t.

Now, understand that my clients were very intelligent and highly motivated people. They paid for my advice and they were determined to follow it to the letter. They did everything they were told to do and more.

They measured their food as carefully as a tailor measures a thousand dollar suit. They filled out food journals until they got writer’s cramps. They drank oceans of water. They exercised to near exhaustion.

But they didn’t lose weight.

So, I tweaked the pyramid a little. I told my clients to reduce the number of grain servings they ate each day and to eat mostly whole grains rather than refined grain products.

They reduced their intake of grains. But they didn’t reduce their weight.

Next I tried lowering their total caloric intake by having them cut their food portions in half.

They cut their food portions in half, but they still didn’t lose weight. Their bulges simply refused to budge!

I had more than 20 highly motivated clients who were following all the standard weight loss advice, and yet they hadn’t managed to lose 10 pounds among them! I felt like a general without a battle plan. My troops were losing the war and I didn’t know what to do.

Thank You, Mr. Wizard

In desperation, I turned to the scientific literature. Scientists, after all, have been studying human nutrition for decades. Surely, I thought, the “secret” to successful weight loss was lurking somewhere in the medical library. I just had to dig it up!

At the time, I thought the ideal diet would turn out to be pretty much like ones that various government agencies were recommending - low fat and low calorie with plenty of “healthful” whole grains and minimal animal protein.

I thought that fad was bad, and that the authors of popular diet books and those radical scientists who challenged government recommendations were completely off-base. I also thought it would take about a year to finish researching and writing up my findings.

What I Didn’t Know Then...

That was almost five years ago.

What I have learned during that time has turned my thinking about nutrition, weight loss, and obesity as well as other chronic diseases on its head. It has shaken my faith in the medical establishment and opened a new career for me in the emerging field of anti-aging medicine.

I have learned that foods I thought were good are bad and vice versa. I have learned that what you eat and when you eat it is as important as how much you eat. I have learned that many of the concepts those “fad” diet authors and “renegade” scientists were telling us are now being upheld by valid scientific studies.

I have learned that obesity is a complex phenomenon involving a number of hormones and that those hormones usually need to be rebalanced before successful weight loss can occur. And I have learned that most of the chronic diseases that currently plague our society including heart disease, diabetes and cancer can be reversed the same way that obesity is reversed.

But above all, I have learned that low calorie dieting simply does not work.

Getting Off the Diet Rollercoaster

Low calorie dieting an ineffective (not to mention very difficult) method of weight loss, that simply doesn’t work for most people. But that’s not the worst news.

The worst news is that, even when weight loss does occur with low calorie dieting, much of the weight that is lost comes from lean tissue, that is, muscle and bone, rather than from stored body fat.

Maintaining muscle mass is important to retain our strength as we age. But it’s also important for weight loss because muscle is a very metabolically active tissue.

Because we lose muscle when we follow a low calorie diet, when we “go off” such a diet - as we invariably do either because the diet was too restrictive, too unhealthy or because we have achieved our weight loss “goal” – our metabolism slows down. As a result, we end up not only regaining the weight we lost but regaining that weight as fat. So now we’ve lost muscle and actually added fat.

This, of course, leads to another cycle of dieting, resulting in more lean tissue loss and recurrent weight gain.

This is the diet rollercoaster, and being on it is as disastrous to our health as it is frustrating. To achieve lasting weight loss and to maintain our good health we need to stop dieting - and get off the diet rollercoaster!

Now I Need Your Help

Over the next several weeks I will share the information I learned from my 5 years of diet and weight loss research with you. In return, I need your help.

I need your feedback on the chapters that I post on this blog. I need you to tell me if the information is clearly presented, if it is helpful, if there are things that are important to you that I have left out, and if there is anything I can do to improve these chapters for the upcoming book.

But most of all I need you to try this method of weight loss; that is, to follow the recommendations given in these chapters and let me know how they are working for you. Just e-mail me at juje3771@hotmail.com

If you do that, I will not only give you the knowledge you need to get off the diet rollercoaster – once and for all – but I will also give you a free copy of the book when it is published electronically as well as a month’s free access to my future members only site and discussion group.

Fair enough?

Then let’s get started! You can see my first post on how to exercise to lose weight by clicking on exercise under “categories” on the sidebar.