Dr. Ashley Koff: Weight Health in the GLP-1 Era | Ep. 13

Okay, perfect.

So today I want to discuss this concept of weight health that you kind of alluded to a little bit.

And I know you like to call yourself a weight health expert rather than a weight loss expert.

So I kind of want to delve a little bit into that and just talk about how, you know, GLP-1 therapies are reshaping the care of obesity and why nutrition matters more than ever now during treatment, and also how clinicians can help their patients achieve healthier, more sustainable outcomes with the use of these drugs.

So to start off, we'll keep it simple.

What does this term weight health mean to you? And how has this GLP-1 era kind of changed how you think or view obesity, both as a researcher, but also as a clinician? Yeah,

thank you.

Weight, I think through dieting and just through judging ourselves as it relates to our...

We're judged by and we judge ourselves based on our weight.

I think I hit a point where I wanted to break up with the concept of weight.

I was just like, why don't I just help people focus on being healthy, right? I wanted to change weight loss surgery to health gain surgery.

And I kept wanting to get rid of weight because I saw our focus on total weight as a problem, not just because it makes people feel badly or it misses what's going on in somebody who maybe doesn't have a weight issue, but because total weight actually doesn't tell us about our health.

And total weight for height actually doesn't tell us about our health.

It may give us population data input, but it doesn't give us information about the person in front of me.

So what I realized, though, is that our bone, muscle, fat, and water, so what our weight is comprised of, our weight composition, it does tell us about our fat.

excuse me, about our health.

So it's actually the most important signal for our health when we are looking at weight.

So I really needed a way to talk about this.

So when you talk about weight health, it's that your weight composition, the type, the amount, and the location of bone, muscle, fat, and water actually is a signal about our health, just like our blood sugar, just like our cholesterol, just like, et cetera, et cetera.

And so helping people understand, and we see this in other places, total cholesterol, we don't look at that anymore.

We look at LDL, ApoB, lipoprotein A, we even look at HDL and don't just assume it's good cholesterol, right? When we look at things like our iron or our thyroid, we look at the components of those.

We don't just look at the total number.

So we should be doing the same as it relates to our weight.

Yeah, I do agree that I think many people tend to focus on the number of this scale.

And I know BMI is sort of outdated now because it doesn't account for all the other components of weight like muscle.