Sold Out House At the Premiere of the Dr Sharma Show
This morning just a quick vote of thanks to all who came out for the show last night in St. Albert – it was a sold out crowd and I certainly had a lot of fun (after some initial nervousness, given the unusual format). Thanks also to all who helped organise and support the event. Here is what one viewer (a colleague) had to say about it in her blog right after the show: “I just attended a fantastic talk by Dr. Arya Sharma….which emphasized finding out why you are gaining weight or eating too much and not the useless “just stop eating so much and exercise more” advice people usually get. Some great points included: focusing on changing your “life not your style” as he says. In other words there are no quick fixes but there are real things you can do to manage your weight. Things like getting more sleep . And everything he talks about is based on legitimate research. He debunked the old myth of “energy in, energy out” and emphasized and explained why our biology is not so simple . He also spent time talking about how important it is to take care of your mind and mental health. He champions this area of obesity management.” I certainly look forward to the next event on November 14 in MIll Woods – see you there, AMS Edmonton, AB
Tonight: Premiere of the Dr. Sharma Show
Regular readers will recall that I have been planning a series of public speaking events to raise funds for the Canadian Obesity Network. The first event ‘Stop being a Yo-Yo: a Light-Hearted Look at the Ups and Downs of Weight Loss‘ takes place this evening at 7.00 pm in St. Albert. Online sales have been brisk and I expect a sold-out house, which should be a lot of fun. As I will say in my opening piece, this is not my clinic and please don’t expect to be any lighter after the show – but I do hope that those who come out will have a good time and perhaps a good laugh or two. Thanks to all in St. Albert, who have supported the event and helped promote it – I look forward to seeing many of you tonight. The next event is scheduled for Wednesday, Nov 14 in Mill Woods, Edmonton – still time to book your tickets now. AMS Edmonton, AB
Weekend Roundup, Nov 3, 2012
As not everyone may have a chance during the week to read every post, here’s a roundup of last week’s posts: Help Sustain the Canadian Obesity Network How Will Obesity Affect the Sustainability of the Health Care System? Obesity Network Joins the Arthritis Alliance of Canada 3rd Annual Obesity Learning Retreat for Dietitians American Endocrinologists Declare Obesity a Disease Incidentally, pre-sales of tickets for the “Stop Being a Yo-Yo: a Lighter Look at the Ups and Downs of Weight Loss” events in St. Alberts (Nov 5) and Mill Woods (Nov 14) are remarkably brisk – just over 80% of tickets are already sold – so reserve your tickets before they are gone! Have a great Sunday! (or what is left of it) AMS Edmonton, AB
OBESITY+ A Service of the Canadian Obesity Network
As we continue with this month’s campaign to raise funds for the Canadian Obesity Network, I thought it may be a good idea to review some of the many services and activities that the Network has been providing its members. – one of them is OBESITY+ – a partnership between the Network and McMaster University’s. OBESITY+ provides its clinician members (and anyone else who may be interested) with an automatic e-mail alert and link every time a “high quality” article on obesity prevention or management is published in the medical literature. This service is called OBESITY+ (which stands for Online Best Evidence Service in Tackling obesitY PLUS) and is available online for free. The engine behind this extraordinary service (that cuts through and eliminates about 98% of all published literature on obesity) is McMaster University’s Health Knowledge Refinery. The features of OBESITY+ include: A systematic review of over 120 journals (including quarterly updates of the Cochrane Library) with selection of articles by expert research staff concerning the cause, course, diagnosis, prediction, prevention, treatment, and economics of obesity, according to explicit criteria, with high reproducibility and periodic quality assurance checks. Ratings of each eligible article for clinical relevance and newsworthiness by at least 3 practitioners with an interest in obesity. E-mail alerts about new evidence, adjusted to the user’s preset levels of relevance, newsworthiness, and frequency. Each alert includes clinical ratings and comments, and electronic links to the article’s abstract on PubMed (if available) and to the fulltext article on PubMed or the publisher’s site (if available for free). A cumulative searchable bibliographic database of the alerts that is continuously updated. A user interface allowing each user to register for a subset of the accumulating database by practitioner type. A link to EvidenceUpdates, a service from the BMJ Group and McMaster University’s Health Information Research Unit that provides access to current best evidence from research, tailored to the user’s health care interests, to support evidence-based clinical decisions. This service, now used by thousands of obesity professionals around the world, is available to all members of the Canadian Obesity Network but does require a separate registration and log-in to set your personal alerting threshold and frequency. As a clinician, you can even opt in as a rater for new articles. If there is only one place where you have time to go for the best in obesity research – it is certainly OBESITY+ I always find it interesting to see how practitioners rate these… Read More »
Help Sustain the Canadian Obesity Network
Yesterday, the Canadian Obesity Network called on its members to help raise funds to sustain the Network. Here is what I said in my letter to our members: Dear Friends, The Obesity Network urgently requires financial support! I think you will agree that over the past five years CON-RCO has substantially changed the landscape of obesity research and management in Canada. In this short time, CON-RCO has created and fostered an ‘obesity research and practice community’ that has truly changed the landscape of obesity. We have broken down silos and have encouraged dialogue. CON-RCO has helped build capacity – there are now 170 Boot Camp graduates, and 1,000s of trainees have self-organized in CON-RCO’s Student and New Professional (SNP) chapters across Canada. CON-RCO has launched important initiatives such as TROPIC, which has produced childhood obesity guidelines and tools that are now being used as models throughout the country. CON-RCO has spearheaded efforts to address weight-bias and discrimination, promote access to obesity prevention and management and draw attention to the needs for accommodation and rehabilitation of the many Canadian kids, youth and adults living with severe obesity. All of these achievements (and many more) were realized with minimal funding (the network’s initial NCE grant of $400,000 a year ran out two years ago). Today, CON-RCO has over 8,000 members and continues to grow faster than any other professional obesity organization in the world. But as you know, membership in CON-RCO is FREE, and I would like to keep it that way. CON-RCO needs your support to continue doing what it does. If you believe that CON-RCO is an organization that you would like to see continue to grow and progress, then now is the time to put your money where your mouth is. Over the coming weeks, we ask you, your colleagues, your friends, your family, your patients or complete strangers to contribute what they can to CON-RCO. I know that CON-RCO members already support countless other important causes – this is great! But if you believe that obesity and CON-RCO also deserve support, here is your chance to set an example. Over 20,000,000 Canadians who are currently overweight or obese need our help – you can help them get it. Please donate now, and please forward this mail to anyone who you think may care. Your support will ensure that CON-RCO can continue its important work. On behalf of all here at CON-RCO, THANK YOU! Not surprisingly,… Read More »
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