Thursday, September 30, 2010

Best Weight: A practical guide to office-based obesity management


This week the book that I coauthored with my friend, colleague and fellow blogger Dr. Arya Sharma was published by the Canadian Obesity Network.

Arya and I first met 5 years ago at an Obesity Society conference where we had the chance to sit and chat for a while. We kept in touch periodically via email and I think it was at the next year's conference when Arya asked me if I wanted to help him to finish a book he'd already begun to write (for those of you who don't know Arya, he's a dynamo, doing more in a month than most do in a year and he had found that his book had hit his back burners). I was only too happy to help and slowly but surely together we finished it up and I want to take the time here to sincerely thank Arya for involving me in something that was such a joy to work on.

The book isn't geared to the general public (though certainly it's not written in a manner that would make it inaccessible to them), rather it's geared towards allied health professionals who want to improve their skills and knowledge in dealing with their obese patients.

The book's fairly short and I think an easy read. It's not meant to be an exhaustive tome that slowly takes you step by step through the pathophysiology of obesity and dryly explores the usual party lines of treatment. Instead it's the culmination of both Arya and my experiences with this terribly under serviced patient population and put plainly, it's the book I wish I had when I first opened my doors.

We didn't write the book to make money, we wrote it to try to help and I'm thrilled that by the good graces and generosity of our publisher, the Canadian Obesity Network, that our book is freely available for download in PDF format (the only catch there is you've got to join the network - membership however is free).

[Of course if you want to buy your own hard copy you can. It's being sold right now by Amazon.ca (for 12.05), Amazon.com (for $10.39) and Barnes and Nobles (for just $9.35)]