Recent comments:

Terry Richardson said: An irony of America’s obesity epidemic is that at a time when Americans arguably know more about food and nutrition than at any time in their history, they are gaining more weight. As Albert Einstein once observed, the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. That we’d have to shift to a new level, a deeper level of thinking, to solve them. LabU provides a different --- and much needed --- perspective for thinking about and addressing the obesity problem: a Systems Thinking perspective.

Sherif El Guidy said: LabU: Understanding Weight Management, can help people be more intelligent consumers of information/advice on managing health and attaining healthy weight. To do that, people need to better understand how the human energy and weight regulation system works, why it works that way, and how to better manage it. Which is what LabU--- in conjunction with Thinking in Circles about Obesity --- nicely does.

kelly nadim said: LabU applies Systems Thinking to personal health in a form that’s accessible to the general public. I am hopeful it will indeed have a profound influence on how ordinary people think about and manage their weight and health.

Alicia Alvarez said: A great tool to help people better understand how the human energy and weight regulation system works

Nadia Mansour said: LabU helps demo that to think “straight” about complex systems (and our body surely is) “is to think in circles”… that is, using the feedback lens of Systems Thinking. Bravo!

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LabU: Understanding Weight-Management ( Systems Thinking in Health Series )

By Tarek Hamid
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Effective weight-management requires more than motivation. As with managing any complex system—and our body surely is one—it requires two essential skills: (1) Understanding and (2) Prediction.

Lab U focuses on UNDERSTANDING… to help you better understand how the human energy and weight regulation system works, why it works that way, & how to better manage it. (LabP tackles Prediction.)

The Lab has four sections: (1) Taking Stock… Insights into a "ritual" many of us dread—"Packing" those Holiday Pounds. (2) Scrambled Eggs… Understanding an important “Biological Trap:” When excessive weight is gained, some anatomic and physiological changes occur that can be difficult to totally reverse. “We can’t Unscramble an Egg!” (3) Goals that Work… Understand the psycho-biological drivers of the dreaded Yo-Yo phenomenon, & why setting unrealistic weight-loss goals may be a major culprit. (4) The Energy Balance Equation… Understand the limitations of the ubiquitous Energy Balance Equation. Why it is a poor (simplistic) model of human energy regulation that can lead us astray.

LabU is the first in a series of Labs to apply Systems Thinking to personal health management in a form that’s accessible to the general public with the hope that it would have a profound influence on how ordinary people th/ink about and manage their health and well being.

About the author

Tarek K. A. Hamid has been a Professor of System Dynamics at the Naval Postgraduate School since 1986. Dr. Hamid received his Ph.D. in System Dynamics at MIT, and the Master's in EES&OR at Stanford. Prior to joining NPS, he spent two and a half years at the Stanford Research Institute. In 1999/2000 he was an affiliate at Stanford’s Medical Informatics Department (part of Stanford’s Medical School), where he worked on developing system dynamics models of human physiology and metabolism. Dr. Hamid has authored two books and more than 50 papers on System Dynamics and its applications. Together with Prof. Stuart Madnick (of MIT), he was awarded the 1994 Jay Wright Forrester Award (presented annually by the System Dynamics Society to recognize the best contribution to the field).

Dr. Hamid's latest book, Thinking in Circles about Obesity: Applying Systems Thinking to Weight Management, (Springer, 2009) was “Highly Commended” in the British Medical Association’s 2010 BMA Book Awards.