Oz Mehmet - Down size: 12 truths for turning pants-splitting frustration into pants-fitting success

I ve worked with Ted Spiker for a decade. As one of the coauthors of the YOU: The Owners Manual series that Michael Roizen and I created, Ted served as the primary writer of books about dieting, aging, beauty, parenting, and more. His job: make health not only informative but also entertaining. Our mission in those books was to help people learn how the body works and figure out the strategies they can use to live a healthier life. What we found was that people like getting their health information this waythey like to learn, and they like to laugh. (Id say its like a spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down, but nobody needs any more sugar.)

Thats a primary reason Teds book Down Size is one that anybody who has struggled with weight can relate to. Its fun. Its real. And it will help you think about the entire issue of being overweight or obese in a way you never have before. Too often, we all may be guilty of simplifying dieting and weight loss as we desperately search for magic bullets that will make fat melt away. But the reality isand I know this not only from the science perspective, but also from having worked with thousands of people struggling to lose weightthe battle is nuanced. Dont think of weight loss as a series of steps, but more as a set of overlapping circles. You need to know about nutrition and exercise, yes, but you also need to know about psychological aspects such as motivation and connecting with the people around you. And thats what Teds book is aboutfinding the twelve truths that will help anyone in their quest for a better, healthier body.

You know whats funny? Even though weve spent hours and hours on the phone together, exchanged countless e-mails, and worked together on hundreds of files, I didnt know much about Teds personal struggles. (Its not as if he got on the phone every week and confessed, Hey, Mehmet, that cheesy beef burrito was out of this world.) But I could sense them. Case in point: Ted and I once played one-on-one basketball together. (He details our game in chapter 6.) During the game, he joked around about his physical abilities, and I joked right backcomplimenting his use of his ample gluteus maximus to make some room for himself on the court. (Thats what we guys do, after all.) Though Ill let him tell you the outcome of our game, I will tell you one thing I noticed about Ted: His determination is a quiet one. Thats evidenced by his many attempts to take on challenges in his lifeincluding his attempt to finish an Ironman, an amazing endurance event thats a test of both physical and mental strength. Its that determination that helped him lose the weight he wanted to and it can help you, too.

In Down Size, Ted details his story to take you through the arc of weight gain and weight loss, but the book isnt about just him. He also tells the stories of many other people, and gets advice from some of the worlds leading experts when it comes to helping people understand how to formulate a plan for getting a healthier body. He doesnt present just one point of view, but manyfrom a variety of experts, from men and women, from those who have succeeded, and from those still trying their darnedest to lose the weight. What I most like about Teds truths are that they work togethertaking into consideration that people arent robotic followers of a do this, do that mentality but, rather, three-dimensional creatures with back stories, and personal preferences, and obstacles that always seem to get in the way. When you read what Ted says about motivation, youll not only find tricks that can help spark desire, but youll also discover that motivation is closely related to other ideas, such as the best way to make goals and the best way to use competition to your advantage. Thats the way it works in real life: Everything is connected.

Having operated on thousands of people and having hosted The Dr. Oz Show, Ive seen whats inside peoples chestsliterally and metaphorically. And I can tell you that perhaps the greatest challenge we have in health care is this: finding ways to get people from knowledge to action. Nobody knew this better than Ted. Here he was, writing diet books, and he had gained a lot of weight. In fact, the most he ever weighed was when he was in the midst of writing about diets and health. There are, of course, many reasons for that. Maybe it was the stress of deadlines, or the pressure to produce, or the fact that his butt had to be tied to his chair for so long every day, or any other number of factors. But the fact that Ted weighed as much as an offensive lineman while spending so much time with diet information points to the very conflict that so many of us have: Even if you know what to do, that doesnt guarantee that you can do it. So there has to be something that bridges the areas of knowledge and action; thats exactly what many of us in health care are after.