Doctors know a lot less about weight loss than we expect them to know - it's not something they can specialize in. My GYN was asking me about changes in my health, and I finally pointed out that I had lost a bunch of weight. She looked at the sheet I filled out and said "oh - you started exercising." As if that was all I'd been doing....

As others have said, you know how hard you've been working & how much you've accomplished and that's what counts!!!

i go to the obgyn tomorrow and i put it off as long as possible so i could lose weight for my medical records....

I stopped going to my OB/GYN because of this issue. I understand that I'm fat, I own a mirror and I buy my own clothes.

Luckily, my GP and my endocrinologist are both amazing and direct without being harsh. Sometimes, I think its a trial and error process of finding someone whose style fits with your own.

Update!!

It went pretty well, aside from the pap smear (really, isn't there a better way...).

When she was asking me about any problems, weight loss, loss of appetite, etc, I was like, well, I lost 30 lbs but that was on purpose and she was like yes I see that from your weight! Good job! And she was asking me questions and being really encouraging, telling me that going slow was the way to do it, etc. etc. We're going to re-run my blood tests to see if they've improved. Yay.

Yay! Congrats! It's so nice to get some validation from people in that kind of a position sometimes. I hope your blood test comes back great too, when do you find out?

excellent news! Shes a keeper :lol:

I'm so glad that your doctor visit went well!!

I'm a doctor, so I have to say, I was a bit offended when we were all categorized as cold people. :( Yeah, there's definitely some bad apples in the bunch, but we're not all that way!

Unfortunately, in medical school, we get very little education in weight loss, nutrition, and pretty much none in exercise. Sad, but true. I feel like most of my weight loss knowledge is from my own research and personal experience. I remember having a couple lectures on vitamins and minerals, but not much beyond that. But we certainly are educated in all the detrimental effects of obesity.

Also, a difficult aspect for most primary care doctors, is that usually appointments are limited to 15 minutes and there's a lot of pressure from administration to pack the schedule. So it's hard to address multiple issues and really have the patient-doctor relationship that most went into medicine for. And all this in turn leads to a stressed out doctor. No excuse by any means, but it definitely happens.

Thanks to everyone who stuck up for doctors! If you're not happy with your primary care doctor, switch to another. We're not so scary! :)

April - I didn't mean for it to come off that I think doctors are cold people - I think the opposite, I've worked with them since I was 15 and I know doctors are just people, they have different personalities.

I didn't get the blood drawn yet, I'll probably do that next week when I get back to MD from Thanksgiving in Jersey.

Okay so further update.

I didn't go for my blood work until last Thursday (busy with finals and all that) but I got my results today -

My liver function and thyroid tests are now normal, and /drumroll, my cholesterol went from 220 to 160. I was like shut up...

Apparently anything below 200 is normal, so if I keep on the way I'm going, I can keep it in that range :)

The pap came back slightly abnormal - no HPV, but there were "a small number" of abnormal cells, but there's nothing we can do except wait a year to see if it happens again. She said there's no reason to be concerned, especially if there's no HPV present. So...yeah. Just waiting that out, but at least I'm not going to die of a heart attack in the mean time.

Congrats on the fantastic news!!!

And don't worry about the pap. Especially since there's nothing you can change about it.

Congrats! Glad your cholesterol went down!