Emily Cooper, M.D., is a board-certified practitioner of family and sports medicine, and the founder and medical director of Seattle Performance Medicine (SPM), located in Washington State. SPM offers family medicine, sports medicine, nutrition and exercise physiology services and merges the latest exercise science and physiology research with clinical medicine to provide comprehensive, safe and effective treatment and recommendations.
Dr. Cooper is also an expert in weight-loss and weight management. Over the past 20 years, she has compiled considerable data that suggests that many Americans are struggling with their weight not because they need to push back from the potato chips or spend more time on the Stairmaster, but because they have undiagnosed hormonal imbalances that make it physiologically impossible to maintain their weight, much less shed pounds. In the meantime the media, society and their skinny friends and coworkers shame them into thinking that they're failures or they're lazy.
But recently articles, including a magazine cover story, in the New York Times and other major media have begun to suggest that the scientific community is slowly awakening to the fact that there's more going on metabolically than meets the eye. But their understandings are incomplete, they are not offering solutions and this information hasn't permeated the medical community. If you struggle with weight, your doctor is still likely to tell you to go to the gym and go on a diet, which you have no doubt done countless times. And some research now suggests that dieting may have created the imbalance in the first place.
I am helping Dr. Cooper to write a book that will help people struggling with their weight better understand what is happening to their body and that will offer non-diet related approaches to dealing with excess weight.
Dr. Cooper expects to publish her book at the end of 2012.