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Siegal, a Miami M.D. who runs weight-loss
clinics in South Florida, disagrees.
"For years, I'd look with a jaundiced
eye at patients who claimed they didn't overeat," says Siegal, "but
then I began to realize they can't all be lying to me -- some of them
must be telling the truth."
Once Siegal realized his patients weren't
secretly hogging the Haagen-Dazs, he took a closer look at the standard
thyroid tests he and other doctors had administered -- and concluded
those tests weren't worth doing.
"I got suspicious with the testing when
I'd test levels three days in a row and was amazed to get varying figures,"
he says.
So he came up with his own test: Since
one of the signs of hypothyroidism is a sluggish metabolism, he put
his patients on a Spartan, 1,000-calorie a day diet.
If, after 28 days, they lost very little
weight or none at all, he concluded they had a thyroid problem, lab
tests be damned.
To help them lose weight, he then put
patients on a combination of diet and thyroid supplements -- then watched
them peel off the pounds, he claims. Inspired and vindicated, Siegal
decided to write "Is Your Thyroid Making You Fat?"
Published earlier this month, the book's
already causing a stir.
"It doesn't follow that most weight gain
is due to hypothyroidism," says Dr. Manfred Blum, an endocrinologist
and professor of clinical medicine at NYU Medical Center in Manhattan.
"There are factors other than the thyroid
that are responsible for obesity, some of which we're just beginning
to unravel."
As for Siegal's dismissal of lab tests,
Blum says, "In the hands of a good lab, the [thyroid] tests are very
effective."
More pointed was the criticism leveled
by Dr. Lawrence Wood, medical director of the Boston-based Thyroid Foundation
of America, which estimates that 10 million Americans suffer from hypothyroidism.
Not only is Wood wary of Siegal's dismissal
of the standard thyroid blood tests, but he's concerned about the diet
doc's reliance on "natural" hormone supplements as opposed to synthetic
ones. Siegal contends that natural hormones, taken from cows, are more
effective.
The natural product, says Wood, "varies
from cow to cow, depending on how healthy the cow is. That's why we
went to synthetic hormones." And Dr. Richard Dickey, president of the
American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, in an online interview
with eDiets.com, flatly maintained that a thyroid condition can't make
you fat -- that, at most, an underactive gland can cause only modest
weight gain.
"I've been hearing this for years and
years," Siegal responds, "and I absolutely disagree. I've seen and managed
the care of perhaps half a million patients in the last 40 years, and
yet that's the sort of party line my patients are given."
One of those patients is Virginia Brunson.
After 20 years of yo-yo dieting, the 5-foot-2 South Florida woman weighed
184 pounds. Then she went to Siegal.
"Doctors had done different tests on
me, but everything was in the normal range," she told The Post. "Still,
I couldn't lose weight unless I absolutely starved myself." "He put
me on thyroid pills and the diet, and the weight just came off," claims
Brunson, who after six months was down to 122 pounds -- a weight she's
managed to maintain, give or take a few more pounds, for two years.
When South Florida homemaker Anna Rodriguez
saw Siegal last year, she was about 60 pounds overweight -- her 5-foot-5
frame toting a hefty 184 pounds.
And while she'd tried dieting "several
times before" -- and was already taking supplements for a hypoactive
thyroid -- Siegal's tests persuaded her that a blend of dieting and
a different dosage might do the trick.
And so, with her internist husband's
approval, she upped her dosage and tried the diet. She says she subsequently
lost 60 pounds in six months -- at which point she went to an Ann Taylor
store and climbed into a size 2.
"I cried," she told The Post. "I'm an
example that it works if you do it right."
But doing it right requires commitment.
Many people may balk at Siegal's meal plans, in which a "salad" consists
of five leaves of Romaine lettuce and diet dressing, and the breakfasts
are heavy on the bran.
Siegal also advises you to dispense with
the niceties -- the dinner music and good china that seem to signal
"an eating orgy" rather than a weight-loss meal.
"Eat what you're supposed to and get
it over with," he says, with the bluntness typical of this tome. "Let's
save the fine dining for some future time."
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