Obesity 69burned up quickly. At the end of three months Cheryl had lost twenty
pounds. This weight loss seems insignifi cant in relation to Cheryl’s
total weight, but it reduced the swelling in her ankles and feet.
To further raise Cheryl’s energy level, with her doctor’s approval I had
her take some thyroid extract even though her thyroid function tested
normal. The thyroid supplement raised her body temperature slightly
above the normal 98.6 degrees. This caused her body to produce more
energy than normal, and she burned off twenty more pounds of fat.
A n increase in the production of energ y is not much benefi t if it isn’t
transported to wherever it is needed in the body, so Cheryl took 50 mg
of CoQ-10 twice a day. But CoQ-10 did not cause further weight loss,
probably because Cheryl’s energy distribution system was normal.
Cheryl melted away another fi fteen pounds after she started playing
badminton with her father for two hours, three times a week.
The weight that Cheryl lost as a result of these measures alleviated
most of her health problems. While she still has migraine headaches, she
no longer gets a blind spot in the center of her visual fi eld during an attack,
and her depressed moods occur less often. Cheryl’s weight stabilized
around 220 pounds—not enough weight loss for her to leave the morbidly
obese category behind, but enough to make her feel—and look—much
better. That was two years ago. Cheryl has maintained her weight loss.A Scientifi cally Proven Way to Lose Weight
Most people aren’t aware that there is such a thing as brown fat. Brown
fat differs from white fat, the fat we are familiar with. While white fat is
stored in fat cells, brown fat is burned off by heat. Thus while white fat,
in excess, makes us overweight, brown fat, being burned up, would make
us slim—if we only had some in our bodies! Since babies have a lot of
brown fat, it was assumed that its purpose was to keep their bodies warm.
For this reason, medical scientists had assumed adults had no brown fat.
Then in April of 2009, Dr. Enerback at the University of Goteburg in
Sweden reported that he had found some brown fat tissue in adults.
In the meantime, Dr. Bruce M. Spiegelman of Harvard Medical
School discovered the key element in the production of brown fat cells
in the body: a protein called zinc fi ngers.^4 Spiegelman reasoned that if
he inactivated this protein in the brown fat cells, they should turn back
into what they were before they became brown fat cells—white fat cells.
But he had made the wrong assumption, for the brown fat cells didn’t