Outside A Dog

Another book I’ve been asked to review is What Does Your Doctor Look Like Naked?: Your Guide to Optimum Health By Dr. J. Warren Willey II. Dr. Willey is an osteopathic physician and competitive bodybuilder who promotes education and understanding of your body’s own needs in order to maintain optimal health.

Dr. Willey believes in the idea that the food we eat every day can be used as a type of drug to impact the way the body behaves. As Dr. Willey explains it:

“Our goal together and your goal long term should always be to increase lean mass. … I found that when we focus on lean mass and overall health, fat loss is a side effect. It always happens, because our bodies have a place where they like to be, but we are survivalists by nature. Thinking in terms of our ancestors… who used to roam the plains out there hunting and gathering, would eat a large meal and then they wouldn’t get to eat for a long time. Their bodies knew that, so they stored fat. So the first thing that your body does when you are on a calorie deficit is save the fat and burn the muscle. …We have to pull what I call metabolic trickery. We have to teach the body that muscle should be left alone.”

Dr. Willey also advocates what he calls ‘true health care’: in making the right food and exercise choices, a healthy, long-term lifestyle can be developed and maintained so that common diseases usually associated with poor self-care and old age can be avoided. He believes that most modern health care focuses mainly on treating diseases and their symptoms instead of promoting better overall health that will instead prevent ailments such as diabetes. In What Does Your Doctor Look Like Naked?, Dr. Willey discusses age-management medicine (heavily reliant on nutrition and exercise), hormone replacement therapies, body composition, and the impact of food choice on the human body.

I was a chemistry major in my former life as a college student, and I can appreciate that Dr. Willey presents his information very well. Nutrition and information about body processes can be complex and overwhelming subjects, but here it is explained simply. And I do agree with the idea that a lot of what ails our population today could be reduced simply by re-evaluating our lifestyle choices and more importantly, our eating habits. If nothing else, the first third of this book is worth looking through simply for the information it presents about different kinds of food and the effects they have on the body’s systems. (The latter two-thirds of the book are devoted to appendices: eating plans, exercise routines, supplement recommendations, and food lists.) This book may prove to be a good resource to discuss with your own physician if you are interested in changing your nutritional habits in order to prevent disease.