Gaining ground in the battle agaihst weight loss ood and our relationship to it, according to Dr. Louis]. Aronne "Getting Healthy PLAN fOR '77, touch every area of our lives. We PUM~NlHl WEIGH! tOMTROl celebrate with food, confront feelings of loneliness with it, and use it as a drug to relieve anxiery, he says. "Food is everything," contends Aronne, a leading researcher and successful weight-control practitioner in New York Ciry. "Depending upon the ·pes • Simple menus • Easyrect person, it can be sustenance, love, or • Exciting food ideas. anything in between." • Calorie-burning exerctses Since 1986, Aronne has been the LOUIS J. A.RO~.~~~J. ~,.;.~:- director of New York Hospital's ''""" ..w't:r.,Cil'... Comprehensive Weight Control Center, where he has helped th<;msands of people achieve a healthier lifesryle and trimmer body. He also serves as associate professor of clinical medicine at Cornell University Medical College and is a visiting associate professor in medicine at the Laboratory of Human Behavior and Metabolism of Rockefeller University, where his research focuses on determining the response of the nervous system to weight loss and weight gain in an effort to understand how the body regulates energy intal<:e and metabolism. And he is known to television viewers nationwide through his frequent guest appearances on such programs as Today, Good Morning America, and The Late Show with David Letterman, where he is also the staff physician.
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Aronne is personally acquainted with now a person's relationship with food can become unhealthy. Aronne remembers that, when he was a child growing up in New York, his overprotective mother would telephone a particular restaurant in advance of his arrival so that an order of spare ribs would be waiting for him. As a teenager, he worked in the local sweet shop, where he rook advantage of one of the job's benefits free ice cream sundaes drenched in syrup and whipped cream. He describes his own battle with his weight and explains the physiological and psychological factors involved in talcing weight off in his popular book entitled Weigh Less, Live Longer, written with Fred Graver, the husband ofTrinity alumna Elizabeth Steyer '76. By the time he enrolled at Triniry, Aronne says he was "rather portly," and he prepared to join the lacrosse team by going on a high-protein diet. He succeeded in losing 15 pounds within a week. "I felt terrible," he recalled in his book. "I could not concentrate on my schoolwork and my body ached ferociously. "I decided that if I had to deprive myself of so much pleasure in order to get thin, I would just remain fat my whole life." At Triniry, Aronne began to lay the groundwork for a career in medicine and excelled in his biochemistry major. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors in biochemistry and honors in general scholarship. To acknowledge the importance of the study of biochemistry, Aronne and his family established The Louis .A ronne Prize in Biochemistry, which is awarded annually to an outstanding junior or senior biochemistry major at the College. After graduation, he began to develop a more in-depth knowledge of weight control and began to eat more healthfully while studying at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He earned a medical degree in 1981 and then returned to New York, where he served as the
Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Fellow in Medicine at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center from 1984 to 1986. He spent a year as an internist treating people, many of whom were overweight, suffering from chronic ailments including diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis and coronary disease, afflictions often caused by obesiry. He then proposed the creation of a comprehensive weight control and health care program and the Weight Control Center was born. One of the people who has reaped the rewards of Aronne's expertise is Lucy D.L. Curtis, a victim of a chronic metabolic disorder, who once weighed 663 pounds. Curtis consulted almost a dozen doctors in an effort to bring her weight under control and credits Aronne with helping her to shed 280 pounds. "Lou knows the research and science behind weight control and processes information so quickly," she says. "Many doctors are authoritarian and dictatorial; he's more human than most doctors. He doesn't judge." Since he became involved in the field of weight control, Aronne notes that enormous scientific strides have been made, including the identification of several of the genes associated with obesity in animal models a"nd the discovery of leptin, a hormone that seems to play a central role in weight regulation by reporting body fat levels to the brain. He hails the development of new prescription drugs like Meridia, which amplifies the message of fullness in the brain, as an extremely useful adjunct to diet and exercise. He looks forward to the Food and Drug Administration's approval of other drugs like Xenical, which inhibits the absorption of fat from the intestine by binding to the enzymes, as another weapon in the weight loss arsenal. Today; Aronne, who has used diet medications himself, still carefully monitors his own diet and lifesryle and his wife Jane's, aware that a genetic predisposition may put his children Allison, 12, and Louis, 10, at greater risk for becoming overweight. Obesity, he says, can be compared with hypertension, which 40 years ago frustrated doctors in their attempts to bring it under control with only one or two drugs. "Now that we have 100 drugs, it's very easy to treat hypertension in all but the toughest cases. I think that the same thing is going to be true of obesity." -Suzanne Zack