Let’s face it, losing fat is difficult. It is relatively easy to know what we should eat, more vegetables and lean meats. And we know what we are not supposed to eat, processed starches, junk food, and alcohol. It can also be easy to maintain your weight. But when we try to lose, we are in a constant state of hunger which can actually develop into food obsession and increased cravings!
But don't despair! Dr. Michelle Parsons can assist you with your endeavor to lose body fat and develop increased lean muscle mass and give you the tools to know which diet approach is best for you as an individual. The latest fad diet, whether it be the Paleo diet, the Bulletproof diet, or the Grapefruit diet, though one of these plans might work well for some of us, especially the authors of the plans, they might not work as well for you.
Our Weight Loss Services
Reclaim Your Life
We understand that achieving and maintaining a healthy weight is a multifaceted journey. That's why we offer a range of effective weight loss solutions tailored to meet your unique needs. Whether you're interested in the latest FDA-approved medications like Wegovy, Saxenda, and Mounjaro, or other personalized weight loss services, our expert team is here to guide you every step of the way. Explore our programs and discover how we can help you achieve your health and wellness goals.
Liraglutide
(Saxenda)
Liraglutide (Saxenda) is a daily injectable medication that helps with weight loss and maintenance. It is suitable for adults with a BMI of 30 or higher, or 27 or higher with at least one weight-related medical condition.
Semaglutide
(Wegovy)
Semaglutide (Wegovy) is a once-weekly injectable medication designed to help control appetite and manage weight. It's FDA-approved for weight loss in adults with a BMI of 30 or higher, or 27 or higher with at least one weight-related condition.
Tirzepatide
(Mounjaro)
Tirzepatide (Mounjaro) is the latest addition to our weight loss medication options, available through Saveway Compounding Pharmacy in Newark, Delaware. Mounjaro has shown exceptional results in aiding weight loss and improving metabolic health.
Phentermine
Amphetamine and Phenethylamine class
Phentermine is a prescription appetite suppressant belonging to the amphetamine and phenethylamine class. It functions by acting on the hypothalamus portion of the brain to release norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that triggers the fight or flight response, thereby reducing hunger. Additionally, phentermine releases epinephrine (adrenaline) outside the brain, causing fat cells to break down stored fat. However, its primary effectiveness is attributed to its hunger-reduction properties.
HCG Program
Human Chorionic Gonadotropin
The HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotropin) Program combines a low-calorie diet with HCG injections to promote rapid weight loss. This program is designed for individuals looking for a structured and effective weight loss plan. How it Works HCG injections help to mobilize fat stores, allowing your body to use fat for energy while maintaining muscle mass. This leads to rapid weight loss and improved body composition.
Vitamin B12 & MTFHR Treatment
Lipotropic Injections
Vitamin B12, also known as cobalamin, is an essential nutrient vital for DNA synthesis and red blood cell formation, earning its reputation as the "energy vitamin" due to its remarkable ability to combat fatigue and boost metabolism. Lipotropic injections, which combine Vitamin B12 with other fat-metabolizing compounds, further enhance weight loss efforts by accelerating fat breakdown and reducing appetite. For individuals with MTHFR genetic variants, specialized treatments involving methylated B12 and tailored supplements are available to address potential deficiencies and optimize overall health.
Thyroid Testing
Body's Metabolism
Thyroid testing is crucial for effective weight loss because the thyroid gland significantly impacts our metabolism, which determines how efficiently our bodies convert food into energy. Imbalances in thyroid hormone levels can lead to symptoms such as fatigue, weight gain, and reduced metabolic rate, making it challenging to lose weight. By identifying and addressing thyroid issues through testing, individuals can better manage their metabolism, optimize their weight loss efforts, and improve their overall health.
Personalized Weight Loss Plans
Our personalized weight loss plans are designed to meet your specific health goals and lifestyle needs. Whether you need nutritional guidance, exercise plans, or medical support, we create a comprehensive program just for you. Our team of experts works closely with you to develop a customized plan that includes dietary recommendations, physical activity guidelines, and medical interventions if needed. This personalized approach ensures maximum effectiveness, supportive and comprehensive care, and sustainable, long-term weight loss success.
At Renove Medical Spa, we're committed to helping you achieve your weight loss and health goals through a variety of effective and personalized programs. Our team of experts is here to support you every step of the way, ensuring you receive the best care and guidance possible. Explore our weight loss services and start your journey to a healthier, happier you today.
Dr. Parsons’ Dietary Recommendations
I recommend booking a free consultation to discuss the many weight loss options available and choose an appetite suppressant to initiate a healthy and appropriate calorie diet. Our goal is for you to maintain this diet throughout your journey, ensuring sustained fat loss until you reach your weight loss and health goals.
I have studied and personally followed diets such as Weight Watchers and the Zone Diet. These two diets, in particular, have been proven in clinical trials to be among the most effective for weight loss. Any diet plan that includes a wide variety of foods, including a healthy intake of fruits and vegetables, while avoiding heavily processed foods and limiting excess calories, is appropriate for long-term health and weight maintenance.
If you are interested in higher fat diets such as the Atkins diet or the Bulletproof diet, I highly recommend obtaining your Apolipoprotein genotype testing, a simple blood test, to ensure you won’t be causing more harm than good to your body by following such an approach.
"Include protein in every meal. Protein will make you feel fuller and more satisfied longer than fats or carbohydrates. It also requires your body to use more energy to digest protein."
- Dr. Michelle Parsons
Helpful Tips
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Fiber: Consume 30 grams of fiber daily for longer satiation and increased energy expenditure during digestion.
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Water: Drink a glass of water before eating, as thirst pangs are often mistaken for hunger.
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Weighing: Weigh yourself every morning after urinating. If you gain weight, skip breakfast and lunch that day. Short periods of fasting can help maintain a normal weight.
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Spicy Foods: Include spicy foods in your diet. UCLA research shows capsaicin, found in hot peppers, can boost metabolism and burn calories for several hours after a meal.
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Exercise: Exercise is crucial for weight loss, but it's important to find the right type. With APO Genotyping, we can identify whether short bursts of high-intensity exercise or longer, sustained aerobic workouts benefit you most. Strength training is beneficial for most people, as muscle burns more calories at rest than fat.
Exercising before breakfast can also help control weight more effectively. A study published in The Journal of Physiology found that participants who exercised in a fasted state gained virtually no weight, while those who exercised after eating gained an average of 3 pounds. This highlights the potential benefits of morning workouts for weight management.
Clean Eating
Clean eating involves avoiding processed foods, chemicals, preservatives, and artificial ingredients, focusing instead on natural foods in their most unaltered form. This includes fresh vegetables, whole grains like rice and quinoa, root vegetables such as sweet potatoes and yams, and high-quality protein sources like eggs, wild-caught fish, and pastured chickens. The goal is to promote health by minimizing exposure to additives and maximizing nutrient intake.
Pistachios are high in monounsaturated fat, which protects against heart attacks, and they contain immune-boosting copper, magnesium, and B vitamins. With a lower calorie count than many other nuts and the added benefit of being time-consuming to open, they are an excellent snack choice. Recommended serving: 30 nuts.
Cloudy apple cider from farmers' markets is healthier than clear apple juice, containing more antioxidants. The filtration process strips away nutrients and flavor, making cider the better choice for health benefits.
Accountability
To improve anything, it must be measured. Track everything related to your nutrition, training, and lifestyle (e.g., hours and quality of sleep) in writing or electronically. My Fitness Pal is great for logging food intake, and Sleep Cycle helps monitor sleep quality.
Accountability is crucial for success, whether in business or fitness, and it starts with yourself. Self-accountability means setting goals, making a plan, committing to it, and keeping score.
Be accountable to yourself by:
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Setting written goals
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Weighing yourself
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Measuring body composition
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Taking body measurements
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Tracking progress weekly
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Taking photographs
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Planning menus or tracking nutrition in a journal
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Creating workout schedules and tracking training in a journal
Change Bad Habits
"I eat because I am lonely or bored” – Take a class (like art or theatre), go to the gym, take up a hobby or learn a new language. Do volunteer work. Place yourself in positive situations to meet new friends and expand your horizons.
“I eat when I am stressed. Food comforts me” – Write in your journal what stresses you and where you eat when you’re stressed. Talk with someone who cares about you, about what made you stressed, and ways to deal with it next time. You will be amazed at how your hunger disappears when you deal with the real issue.
But do you feel better, less stressed out or lonely after you’ve binged or consumed junk food? Or do you feel worse? Food will not comfort you. You can replace stressful eating with new healthy habits that will make a positive difference in your life.
Vitamins and Weight Loss Benefits
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Vitamin K - Poor vitamin K status linked to excess fat tissue; Vitamin K helps metabolize sugars.
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Biotin Boosts metabolism by improving glycemic control (stabilizes blood sugar) and lowering insulin, a hormone that promotes fat formation.
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Vitamin A Enhances expression of genes that reduce a person’s tendency to store food as fat; Reduces the size of fat cells.
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Vitamin E Inhibits pre-fat cells from changing into mature fat cells, thus reducing body fat.
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Asparagine – This amino acid increases insulin sensitivity which helps the body store energy in muscle instead of storing it as body fat. Glutamine reduces fat mass by improving glucose uptake into muscle.
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Vitamin B5 – Taking B5 lowers body weight by activating lipoprotein lipase, an enzyme that burns fat cells. One study linked B5 supplementation to less hunger when dieting.
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Vitamin B3 (niacin) – Treatment with B3 increases adiponectin, a weight-loss hormone secreted by fat cells; niacin-bound chromium supplements helped reduced body weight in clinical trials. Chromium makes the body more sensitive to insulin, helping to reduce body fat and increase lean muscle.
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Carnitine Carries fatty acids into cell so they can be burned for fuel; Helps reduce visceral adiposity (belly fat).
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Vitamin D Deficiency strongly linked to poor metabolism of carbohydrates; Genes that are regulated by vitamin D may alter the way fat cells form in some people.
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Magnesium – Low magnesium in cells impairs a person’s ability to use glucose for fuel, instead of storing it as fat; Correcting a magnesium deficiency stimulates metabolism by increasing insulin sensitivity. Magnesium may also inhibit fat absorption. Calcium Inhibits the formation of fat cells; Also helps oxidize (burn) fat cells.
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Inositol Supplementation may increase adiponectin levels.
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Lipoic Acid improves glucose uptake into cells, which helps a person burn carbohydrates more efficiently.
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Cysteine – Supplementation with this antioxidant reduced body fat in obese patients.
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Zinc – Deficiency of zinc reduces leptin, a beneficial hormone that regulates appetite, which is reversed by zinc repletion.
WOMEN:
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Competition Shape (“ripped”):
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8-12%Very Lean (excellent): <15%
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Lean (good): 16-20%
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Satisfactory (fair): 21-25%
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Improvement needed (poor): 26-30%
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Major improvement needed
(Very poor): 31-40%+
MEN:
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Competition Shape (“ripped”): 3-6%
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Very Lean (excellent): < 9%
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Lean (good): 10-14%
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Satisfactory (fair): 15-19%
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Improvement needed (poor): 20-25%
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Major improvement needed
(Very poor): 26-30%+
BODY FAT COMPOSITION
Body Fat Levels and Aging
Just a quick note: You’re not destined to get fatter as you get older, but in the general population (not fitness and bodybuilding folks), the average older person has more body fat. What I did to accommodate this was to include a body fat range instead of one number, so younger people can use the low end of the range and older people can use the higher number. Also, single-digit body fat for women and low single digits for men is far beyond lean – it’s RIPPED – and that’s usually solely the domain of competitive physique athletes. Competition body fat levels were not meant to be maintained all year round. It’s not realistic and it may not be healthy, particularly for women (when a female’s body fat gets too low and she tries to maintain it too low, it can affect her monthly cycle or have other health implications).
The average guy or gal should probably aim for the “lean” category as a realistic year-round goal, or if you’re ambitious and dedicated, the “very lean category.” You’ll probably have to hit the “very lean” category for six-pack abs. However, the bottom line is that there’s no “perfect” body fat percentage where you’re assured of seeing your abs.
Weight Loss Myth Busters
Is It Possible To Not Lose Body Fat Because You're Eating Too Little?
Part one of my answer:
NO, because if you are in a calorie deficit you WILL lose weight.
Most people have heard anecdotes of the dieter who claims to be eating 800 calories a day or some starvation diet level of intake that is clearly in a deficit and yet is not losing fat. Like the mythical unicorn, such an animal does not exist.
Every time you take a person like that and put them in a hospital research center or metabolic ward where their food can be counted, weighed, measured, and almost literally “spoon-fed” to them, a calorie deficit always produces weight loss. There are no exceptions, except possibly in rare diseases or mutations. Even then metabolic or hormonal defects or diseases merely lead to energy imbalance via increases in appetite, decreases in energy expenditure or changes in energy partitioning. So at the end of the day, it’s STILL calories in versus calories out.
In other words, NO – it’s NOT your thyroid (unless you’ve got a confirmed diagnosis as such…and then guess what… it’s STILL calories in vs calories out, you’re just not burning as many as someone should at your height and weight).
One famous study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine years ago proved this point rather dramatically. After studying obese people – selected specifically because they swore they were eating less than 1200 calories but could not lose weight – Steven Lichtman and his colleagues at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in New York came to the following conclusion: “The failure of some obese subjects to lose weight while eating a diet they report as low in calories is due to an energy intake substantially higher than reported and an overestimation of physical activity, not to an abnormality in thermogenesis.”
That’s right – the so-called “diet-resistant” subjects were eating more than they thought and moving less than they thought. This was probably the single best study ever published that debunks the “I’m in a calorie deficit but I can’t lose weight” myth:
Part two of my answer:
YES, because:
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Energy intake increases. Eating too little causes major increases in appetite. With hunger raging out of control, you lose your deficit by overeating. This happens in many ways, such as giving in to cravings, binge eating, eating more on weekends, or simply being inconsistent, so some days you’re on your prescribed 1600 calories a day or whatever is your target amount, but on others, you’re taking in 2200, 2500, 3000, etc and you don’t realize it or remember it. The overeating days wipe out the deficit days.
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Metabolism decreases due to smaller body mass. Any time at all when you’re losing weight, your metabolism is slowly decreasing due to your reduced body mass. The smaller and lighter you get, especially if there’s a large drop in skeletal muscle mass, the fewer calories you need. So your calorie deficit slowly shrinks over time as your diet progresses. As a result, your progress slows down even though you haven’t changed how much you eat.
With starvation, you always lose weight, but eventually, you lose so much weight/body mass that you can reach energy balance at the same caloric intake you used to lose weight on. You might translate that as “I went into starvation mode” which wouldn’t be incorrect, but it would be more accurate to say that your calorie needs to be decreased.
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Metabolism decreases due to adaptive thermogenesis. Eating too little also causes a starvation response (adaptive thermogenesis) where the metabolic rate can decrease above and beyond what can be accounted for from the change in body mass (#2 above). This is “starvation response” in the truest sense. It does exist and it is well documented. However, the latest research says that the vast majority of the decrease in metabolism comes from reduced body mass. The adaptive component of the reduced metabolic rate is fairly small, perhaps 10% (ie, 220 calories for an average female with a 2200 TDEE). The result is when you don’t eat enough, your actual weight loss is less than predicted on paper, but weight loss doesn’t stop completely.
There is a BIG myth about starvation mode (adaptive thermogenesis) that implies that if you don’t eat enough, your metabolism will slow down so much that you stop losing weight. That can’t happen, it only appears that way because weight loss stops for other reasons. What happens is the math equation changes!
Here are 5 tips to stop metabolic slowdown caused by low-calorie dieting and the dreaded fat loss plateau that follows?
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Lose the pounds slowly. Slow and steady wins in long-term fat loss and maintenance every time. Rapid weight loss correlates strongly with weight relapse and loss of lean body mass. Aim for one to two pounds per week, or no more than 1% of total body weight (ie, 3 lbs per week if you weigh 300 lbs).
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Use a higher energy flux program. If you are physically capable of exercise, then use weight training AND cardio to increase your calorie expenditure, so you can still have a calorie deficit, but at a higher food intake (also known as a “high energy flux” program, or “eat more, burn more.”)
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Use a conservative calorie deficit. You must have a calorie deficit to lose fat, but your best bet is to keep the deficit small. This helps you avoid triggering the starvation response, which includes the increased appetite and potential to binge that comes along with starvation diets. I recommend a 20% deficit below your maintenance calories (TDEE), a 30% deficit at most for those with high body fat.
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Refeed. Increase your calories (refeed) for a full day periodically (once a week or so if you are heavy, twice a week if you are already lean), to stimulate metabolism. On the higher calorie day, take your calories to maintenance or even 10, 15, 20% above maintenance and add the extra calories in the form of carbs (carb cycling). The leaner you get, and the longer you’ve been on reduced calories, the more important the re-feeds will be.
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Take periodic diet breaks. Take 1 week off your calorie-restricted diet approximately every 12 weeks or so. During this period, take your calories back up to maintenance, but continue to eat healthy, “clean” foods. Alternately, go into a muscle-building phase if increasing your lean mass is one of your goals. This will bring metabolism and regulatory hormones back up to normal and keep lean body mass stable.
There is much confusion about how your metabolism, hormones, and appetite mechanisms are affected when you’re dieting, so this was one of the most important questions anyone could have asked.
If this didn’t click – then you may want to save this and read this again because misunderstanding this stuff leads more people to remain frustrated and stuck at plateaus than anything else I can think of.
To Detox or Not To Detox
According to Dr. Parsons, while our bodies are amazingly designed to get rid of toxins, they cannot always handle the overload present in today’s environment. Thus, a proper detoxication program is needed, one that includes assessment, minimizing exposure, foods to avoid, foods that protect, and nutrients to support detoxification.
A carefully planned detoxification program can offer: anti-aging effects, increased productivity, weight loss, clearer skin and eyes, greater motivation and creativity, reduction of allergic symptoms.
Here is a basic outline of the detoxification program:
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NO WHEAT, NO SWEET, NO RED MEAT, NO DAIRY
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Use organic and free-range products to reduce exogenous toxins and hormones.
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Drink 1 cup of hot water with 1/4 lemon and 2 pinches of cayenne pepper first thing upon waking (on an empty stomach).
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Drink 1/2 your weight in filtered water (i.e. you weigh 130 lbs drink 65 oz. per day; more if increased exercise or sauna use).
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Water should be consumed up to 20 minutes and resumed 1-2 hours after meals so that your stomach acid can digest your food. (Too much fluid dilutes the acid).
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Walk 20 minutes each day.
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Do not eat after 8 pm
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Buy organic fruits, vegetables, and meats.
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Eliminate coffee, alcohol, wine, and refined sugars.
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Stopping antacids: drink 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar each day. Can us in a.m. or with meals.
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If constipation or diarrhea, add a probiotic and extra fiber. You should have at least 2 bowel movements per day.
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Remember: “Enjoy breakfast like a king, lunch like a nobleman, and dinner like a pauper.”
Wow! What a reset. I’ve lost 9 lbs in the first month on Dr. Parsons weight loss program and have increased my energy levels and my appetite has also decreased. This initial weight loss has motivated me to continue to exercise and monitor my daily caloric intake. I would recommend Dr. Parsons weight loss plan to anyone who is in need of a jump start to get rid of stubborn excess weight.