Understanding Obesity: The Five Medical Causes (Your Personal Health)

He offers excellent insights and suggestions on ways to regain your communication with your body so that you can learn to pay attention to the most knowledgeable person of all when it comes to deciding what and when you should eat-- yourself.

No one asks the person with a fever to "just stop that elevated temperature" and yet most diet and weight control "experts" repeatedly tell people with elevated weight to "just lose that weight." I sometimes fantasize about smashing a cheesecake in their faces.


Truly helps understand the mind body disconnect.   September 27, 2005
Lisa M. Kucharski (Chicago, IL USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

Dr. Levy provides a great wealth of information regarding the struggle with obesity. I would say that if you are not obese, but have been struggling with trying to lose weight over and over this book would be a great help.

Having worked with people who are trying to lose just a small amount of weight, just saying eat right and exercise fail for the same reasons they do for someone obese. Many people say that want to lose weight, but have not truly discovered a meaningful reason for change. Many of the other aspects of disordered eating and FEAR of change apply to the slightly overweight as well.

A truly insightful book about the struggle with weight. The insight Dr. Levy provides is spot on. If only more people would hear this information and not all the "weight-loss" rip offs. Highly recommend, easy to read, case studies provided illustrate perfectly.


worth more than any other hundred books on obesity   November 3, 2001
K. Marotta (Massachusetts)
10 out of 14 found this review helpful

The author of this small book has really listened to overweight patients and has an analysis of obesity I have never heard of before: that it is not a single disorder, but a SYMPTOM of many different problems and health considerations unique to each obese individual.

Dr Levy, a Canadian, is far more intelligent, realistic, and interested in his patients than any American MD of my experience, far more sensitive and sympathetic than American shrinks. He does not seem to have his time squeezed into teeny, pressurized encounters that prevent him from communicating with and coming to understand his patients. Over a long period -- years -- of trial-and-error explorations, he and his patient gradually discover what problems prevent the patient from eating self-responsively, and address them one by one as they show up.

Just reading this book is extraordinary. You get a glimpse of what medicine might have been, had it not been hijacked by the forces that want to force everything into a business mold, however bad the fit, however horrible the resulting nightmare, and however much MORE rather than LESS expensive the results.

But even if all U.S. MDs WERE forced to read this book, it would not help, since they are no longer free to practice medicine. Patients, however, can benefit enormously from studying the book, working up their OWN case histories, and sorting out, as Dr Levy indicates is necessary in such cases, one by one, the problems like sleep apnea or other sleep disorders, mood disorders, predatory families, etc., which result in the disordered eating of which obesity is symptomatic. Unlike the cruel diet clubs that put overweight people through a weight loss process they know is bogus and will only revert to a heavier weight in time, this very methodic and gradual approach respects the obese individual, sticks to reality, and really helps. No other book is like it. Nowadays, it is rare to find a doctor even BOTHERING with obesity. People prefer to write about anorexia and bulimia. This is a terrific book by an impressive medical doctor.


Excellent   May 2, 2001
henryraddick@hotmail.com (London)
I bought Dr Levy's book after I had shaken myself out of the denial I was in after I crossed the 400 lb mark. It is a well-written and rigorously researched guide to the 5 major causes of obesity. As a sufferer myself I can vouch for his findings - genes are 5th place behind pizza, cookie dough, daytime tv and hamburgers.