Hello, I’m Declan Green, an Australian doctor and the founder of 6M life. I am an active guy who hits the gym and pavement, loves hiking in daggy hats and reaching mountain tops. I’m fit, middle aged and in great health. I’m also obese.

For years, patients would come to me and ask me how to lose weight and I’d look and grin at them and tell them, “Look, I’m a doctor, I know what to do to lose weight yet I’m obese—what does that tell you?” The answer is that there is no easy way to lose weight and keep it off. Our genes by and large determine our weight and our bodies will always try to regain the weight we lose. Our bodies have a weight “set point” that it will always defend. Obesity is at least 70% genetic and like many people with obesity, my family are more spherical than stick, and many have had bariatric surgery.

As a doctor with obesity, I have dieted and exercised and lost a substantial amount of weight only to see it creep up the following year. This is demoralising to experience, and like everyone else, I’d blame myself. A turning point for me was watching a documentary about people with significant obesity preparing for bariatric surgery. Prior to surgery, they attended a hospital clinic in a bid to lose weight through very low calorie diets (shakes) to reduce the risk of surgery. The doctors would get their calculators out and calculate calories in vs calories out and then scratch their heads when the patients didn’t lose the expected amount of weight. To me the answer was obvious! None of the doctors had experienced obesity and tried following a very low calorie diet. It’s damn hard and not sustainable. The doctors didn’t get it. Eating is pleasurable; continuous hunger and tasteless shakes are not.

As a medical profession, we are very poor at treating people with obesity. I receive many letters from specialists saying they advised unwell patients to “lose weight” to improve their symptoms. How did they advise them? Most likely by simply saying “you need to lose weight.” That’s not advice. It’s an insult. The reality is, obesity is not treated as disease and not part of any medical curriculum.

Yet the research is there and is clear on what must be done–use a multi-disciplinary approach acknowledging that obesity is a multi-factorial problem. But who is going to coordinate the team required to support a person with obesity looking to lose weight?

6M Life of course!