Dr. Fisher

I thought I’d write about the man who discovered this weight loss program. His name is Dr.Garth Fisher. He was a professor at BYU and researched why some thin people can eat anything they want and never gain weight and why some over weight people can eat very little and stay heavy. He discovered that the body has a weight regulating mechanism in the brain in the hypothalamus. It sets where the body needs to be to have the right weight. So if you are under a lot of stress, exercizing little, eating the wrong kinds of foods, it thinks that the thermostat needs to be high and will keep it there. When we make healthy eating choices, exersize, and decrease our stress we actually get that hypothalamus to put our body at a lower setting. But this is about Garth Fischer.

I heard him lecture once when I was a young adult living in Provo. He and his skinny wife had raised a family and then through a tragic accident had gained custody of a siblings children and raised them too. He was ridiculed as a professor at BYU for exersizing during lunch and then coming to a meeting. The other people would pretend he smelled bad. They were probably jealous. He wrote an article about fitness, weight loss, eating for years for the Deseret News. He was a Stake President over a BYU stake. I often thought that he stopped writing for the newspaper when he got so disgusted with us as a community. Over and over he had lectured and written about how weight is truly affected: yet we all continued to ohh and ahh over any new theory such as the Atkins Diet or stubbornly think that x amount of calories meant x amount of fat. He said in his lecture that young people are amazing because they can change so fast their habits.He also would help people eat healthy by lecturing them on a cruise. I understand he was a pain in the neck at restaurants as he would meticulously ask about each dish and request no butter, no frying etc. I am grateful to him for discovering how to lose weight and then with great patience try to teach us how to do it.

He has one book out published in the 1970's called How to Lower Your Fat Thermostat co authored with Drs Dennis Remington and Edward Parent. At least 2 cookbooks came about to support this book one Recipes to Lower Your Fat Thermostat and two Set For Life. Many in our family have used these cookbooks. I don’t even know how many professional articles he published. Once a young man came up to him and asked him if he remembered him. Dr. Fisher apologized and said, "I usually remember faces." The young man then said he had heard Dr. Fisher a year before, had gone on the weight loss program, and had lost 100 pounds.

The setpoint score for this week:

Rhonda: (S) 100 [Thanks Karen and Lori] (S) 100 (M) 93 (T) 100 (W) 100 (T) 96 (F) 97

Bill: (S) 100 [Thanks Karen and Lori] (S) 100 (M) 93 (T) 85 (Bill was on track to get 100 this day but then fell victim to peer pressure and ate apple pie and ice cream with the stake presidency!) (W) 100 (T) 100 (F) 100

And the results: Rhonda lost one pound and is down to 235 pound. Bill lost two pounds and is down to 241 pounds.