Show Notes
Willpower Is B.S.: Food Noise, Healthspan, and What Actually Changed My Life For decades, I started every New Year the same way. In January, I promised myself this would be the year. By February, I tried harder. Every spring, I adjusted the plan. And by summer or fall, the weight crept back. That cycle repeated not because I lacked knowledge, discipline, or effort. Instead, it repeated because I misunderstood biology — at least when it came to myself. This year is different. For the first time since Ronald Reagan was first elected, weight loss is not at the top of my New Year’s resolution list. Not because I stopped caring, but because I lost 45 pounds with the help of Zepbound over the last year. More importantly, however, I learned something that reshaped how I think about obesity, healthspan, and shame. Before anything else, let me be clear: this is not medical advice. This is a story. Anecdotes are not evidence, even when the anecdote is from a physician. Nevertheless, stories help us understand science when data alone fails to move us. And this story matters.
I Had Willpower. That Wasn’t the Problem. For years, people told me — and millions of others — the same thing: move more and eat less. At first glance, that advice sounds logical. After all, calories matter. Energy balance matters. However, reality is more complicated. To begin with, I am a surgeon. Surgical training requires extraordinary willpower. Moreover, I’ve logged food meticulously, cooked Mediterranean-style meals, exercised consistently, and followed every evidence-based recommendation I’ve ever given patients. Meanwhile, Oprah has willpower. Olympic athletes have willpower. Yet obesity persists. Sure, willpower works briefly. In fact, go on a liquid protein diet, and the weight will fall off quickly. Unfortunately, the food noise remains. Eventually, biology wins. Always. In the same way you cannot positive-think your way out of hypertension, cholesterol, diabetes, cancer, or heart disease, you cannot willpower your way out of obesity. Obesity is a disease. It is not a moral failure. Ironically, I knew this intellectually. Nevertheless, I failed to apply it to myself. We have a name for that: cognitive dissonance.
Food Noise Was the Missing Concept The real turning point did not come from reading another study. Instead, it came from listening to people I trusted. One colleague quietly lost weight on a GLP-1. Another friend told me something more striking: the food noise stopped. Alcohol lost its appeal. Smoking no longer called. That phrase — food noise — suddenly explained decades of struggle. To illustrate, think of sleeping near Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. At first, traffic noise dominates your awareness. Eventually, it fades into the background. Only when you leave the city do you realize how loud it was. Food noise works the same way. When GLP-1 therapy quieted that background signal, eating slowed naturally. Meals ended without effort. Desire changed without rules. Biology shifted. Notably, calories did not lower my stress. Calories did not improve my sleep. Calories did not stop snoring. Biology did.
The Unexpected Early Benefits Interestingly, weight loss was not the first change I noticed. Sleep improved almost immediately. Stress dropped dramatically. Commutes that once registered hours of physiologic stress now barely registered minutes. Appetite normalized. Eating slowed. These changes matter because sleep and stress directly affect inflammation, metabolic health, appetite signaling, and long-term disease risk. In other words, healthspan improved before the scale reflected anything meaningful. That observation alone reframed the entire experience.
Why Support Groups Matter More Than Diet Rules Along the way, something else happened. Friends noticed. Predictably, they asked the same question everyone asks: What diet is working? After I answered honestly, several started their own journeys. Soon enough, we formed an informal support group. P
More from Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson
With all the spices we have access to, it is amazing how bland recipes have become. I have many cookbooks, some from great chefs, television personalities, and friends. What I am always surprised by is how bland the food has become. People seem to think a bit of salt, pepper, maybe onions, and garlic provide the spices one needs. Perhaps it is because some associate spice with heat. Mostly because many have never experimented with some of those great warm spices available. A pinch of coriander, some freshly ground cumin, a little cardamom, or a touch of cinnamon can turn an ordinary dish into something remarkable. And the most astonishing part is that these spices financed voyages around the world, built cities, created fortunes, and caused people to kill one another. Without the spice trade, it is safe to say that the United States, as we know it, would be vastly different from what it is now. The money loaned to the United States, when we were a fledgling country, came from the wealthy spice merchants from what was considered one of the great hyperempires of the world, based in Amsterdam. But before we go to the birth of the United States, let me take you to the meatball.
Tea: The Drink That Built an Empire—and Helped Break One China had the tea. Britain had the appetite. John Hancock had a business to protect.
MesoAmerica and Chocolate In our series looking at foods that built civilizations, today we are going to stay in the Americas with chocolate. Chocolate has been used as currency, consumed by kings, incorporated into religious ceremonies, and prescribed as medicine. Today, it is a multibillion-dollar industry that wants you to believe that eating chocolate is an act of preventive cardiology. I mean, why not? They convinced us to give chocolate to people we love, eat it when we are happy, when we are sad, when only the dog understands us. Don’t feed chocolate to your dog. And we have done all this with a bitter seed that most of us would probably spit out if we tasted it straight from the tree.
I’ve been doing a series about foods that built civilizations. In this episode, we are talking about the potato. It is difficult to imagine that thousands of years ago, people constructed large buildings, managed rivers, built monuments, and created art. We have glimpses of these civilizations through stories, archaeology, and the structures they left behind, but much of their history has been lost. Imagine, we don’t even know where Cleopatra or Alexander the Great are buried, yet we know their stories. As European powers conquered Indigenous peoples, their languages, cultures, and oral traditions were suppressed. When a language disappears, so are the stories preserved within it. Our clues come from archaeology when we uncover a monument, a building, or an ancient settlement. In the Andes, the potatoes they cultivated were not the Russets, Yukon Golds, or fingerlings you find in the store today. Different colors, shapes, and textures. Adapted to survive the elevations, temperatures, and growing conditions. Biodiversity protected their food supply against frost, disease, and changing environmental conditions. If one variety failed, another might survive. The ancient wisdom of diversity that Andean farmers developed over thousands of years was lost when the potato eventually reached Ireland.
In our series about foods that built civilization, we talked a lot about grains, from wheat to corn to rice. Today, we are taking you to the ocean, with the civilizations that salmon built. From California to the interior of Alaska, salmon, a staple, allowed people to settle into villages, develop complex social networks, art, and trade routes. Those trade routes are as large as the ones in the Mediterranean. Some tribes built communal homes and developed complex art and language. Some were Seafaring tribes with canoes up to 60 feet long that traveled across oceans. All because there was a fish that would return in large numbers to streams and rivers, reliably, predictably. So predictable, the people could build their lives around salmon runs. So much so that some built a calendar not only with lunar cycles, but also with the return of the salmon. Civilizations have always gathered around food and water. The Mediterranean connected people who grew wheat and olives, giving people time to make wine, mine copper, build ships, trade with their neighbors, and occasionally go to war with them. Asia had rice and grain near the great river systems. The reliable calories from rice and grains allowed villages to become cities and to travel by water to trade. Today we are going to my home, from the Ventura River in California to my home state of Alaska.