Rather than taking you out of your life to follow our diet, we fit the One Life concepts to your lifestyle. The whole idea of One Life – our entire goal – is to teach you how to lose weight while you’re living your life. The problem with temporary diets is they create temporary results. You do something different for a little while and you lose weight, but then you go back to your normal life and you gain it back again. What we do is teach you how to lose weight while you’re still living life in your world: going out to eat, socializing, having a drink, traveling … whatever it is you do – because losing weight while you’re living normal life, is the only way it’s going to stop being a temporary “diet” and become a permanent lifestyle.

The goal of One Life is to teach you how to lose weight eating real food and living your normal life. With that in mind every food is allowed on the diet. We simply teach you how to eat the foods you like in a way that allows you to still lose weight.

None.

Yes. The intent of the diet is to be real, so you’re more than welcome to have a glass of wine every night if you want, you just have to count it towards your daily Blocks.

No, because what we do works, we don’t need contracts. You simply pay for each visit as you go along until you reach your goal.

One Life works for everyone so our patients truly cover the entire spectrum. We treat both men and women, 18 to 80 year olds, and those with as little as ten pounds to lose as well as those with more than a hundred.

Everyone’s different but most of our patients lose between 4-6 pounds their first week, and then most women can expect to lose 2-4 pounds and men around 3-5 pounds a week if they follow the diet closely – although those with more than forty pounds to lose will typically lose significantly more.

How fast you lose weight has nothing to do with the risk of gaining it back. The probability of regaining your weight has everything to do with whether you make permanent changes to your lifestyle. The people who gain their weight back are the ones who make temporary changes and then return to their old habits after they reach their goal.

Studies do show, however, that those who follow weight loss diets that create fast weight loss have a significantly greater chance of reaching their goal weight than those who follow a slower weight loss approach.

Absolutely, but don’t take our word for it, click here to see what our patients have to say.

You certainly can but hiring a weight loss expert to help you lose weight is no different than hiring a personal trainer to help you get in shape. Everyone can obviously exercise on their own but hiring a trainer helps to maximize your success by providing you with expert guidance, accountability, motivation, knowledge, etc. And given the fact that weight loss has a 95% failure rate, it certainly merits the help of experts to make sure you achieve your goal. And if hiring an expert increases your chances of reaching your goal weight and keeping the weight off – why wouldn’t you?

No, much like I wouldn’t recommend going to a weight loss clinic for exercise advice. Your personal trainer is an expert in fitness and exercise physiology, which makes them the perfect choice for helping you to get fit. Excluding the rare exception, personal trainers are simply not experts in weight loss nutrition – although a lot of them think they are.

Sure, but the problem with that plan is it’s hard to eat less if you’re hungry all the time. One Life teaches you how to control your hunger so you don’t end up struggling and requiring huge amounts of willpower.

And the problem with trying to lose weight by exercising is that it simply doesn’t work. Despite “common knowledge” studies consistently show that exercise is simply not effective for weight loss. Now don’t get me wrong, exercise is great for all kinds of things – fitness, health, stress, etc. – it’s just not effective at creating weight loss through burning calories.

Fitness is about Exercise – Weight loss is about Food.

Our goal isn’t just to help you to lose weight but to show you how to do it without having to struggle and sacrifice the whole time. More importantly though, we want to do it in a way that will help ensure you keep it off – because what’s the point in losing weight if you end up gaining it back.

While exercise is great for fitness, for health, for stress … for all kinds of good things, it’s a very small player when it comes to weight loss. So while we love exercise, you’ll do perfectly well with your weight loss no matter what your level of exercise is … or isn’t.

While dining out can make weight loss more challenging, the reality is if your weight loss plan is simply based on the idea of avoiding what you usually do, you’re going to end up regaining your weight when you go back to your normal life. If you want to keep the weight off, you have to learn how to eat in the real world. So yes, not only can you lose weight while still dining out, but the truth is you have to learn how to lose weight while dining out. It’s the only way you are going to be able to gain the knowledge you’ll need in order to keep your weight off after you reach your goal and return to real life.

Yes. The whole point of One Life is to teach you how to lose weight living your normal life. Rather than taking you out of your life to follow our diet, we want to fit our concepts to your lifestyle. So it doesn’t matter if you’re an organic vegan, if you’re a fast food junky, if you entertain regularly, or … whatever your challenge is, our goal is to teach you how to lose weight while living your life – because that’s the only way you are going to know how to keep it off when you get to your goal.

Confusing eating healthy with eating low-calorie is one of the most common misconceptions about weight loss. The reality is there are healthy foods and there are low calorie foods – but they are two completely different subjects. Olive oil, salmon, almonds, quinoa are all healthy foods but they’re also all very high in calories. If you’re eating a lot of high-calorie, healthy foods you’re going to end up consuming too many calories and aren’t going to be able to lose weight.

Yes. The problem is the old belief that “a calorie is a calorie” is wrong and if you try and treat all calories as equal, your weight loss is often not going to make any sense – because your expectations are based on incorrect information. Once you learn how to correctly assess the true impact of a food on your weight, weight loss will stop feeling like a mystery and will finally start to make sense.

Since you’re eating real food and living your normal lifestyle most people won’t have any idea that you’re on a “diet,” and hopefully it won’t feel like you’re on one either.

Everyone’s weight is their own. While some patients want to be a size 2, others are happy being a size 10. Our goal is to get you to a healthy weight, after that the final goal is simply where you feel good.

Each One Life clinic has two counselors. We purposefully keep our staff small so you’re able to build a personal relationship with your team.

Each week you sit down one-on-one with your counselor and go over your week to see if there’s anything you’re struggling with, so we can help you come up with solutions. We also go over a lesson each week which are designed to teach you as you go along, so by the time you get to your goal you’ll have the tools and knowledge you need to keep your weight off. Each week we weigh you to monitor your progress, as well as to hold you accountable, and we give you your weekly vitamin injection and appetite suppressants.

The One Life vitamin injection is made up of three different parts:

• Vitamin B12: which increases your energy levels and improves mental focus.
• B-Complex: which is great for decreasing stress, anxiety, depression, and PMS symptoms.
• Methionine + Inositol + Choline: two vitamins and an amino acid which helps boosts your body’s metabolism in order to help you lose weight faster.

We use appetite suppressants to help control your hunger. We use them much in the same way that people use nicotine patches to help curb their cravings while they’re quitting smoking. If you’re not struggling with hunger, you can work on changing habits without having to battle your willpower the whole time.

Now some people try to argue that using appetite suppressants to help with weight loss is somehow cheating, that using a crutch makes your weight loss less “real.” Try applying that same logic to nicotine patches. Who cares how you quit smoking, as long as you quit, right?Who cares if someone used nicotine patches to help with their cravings? And if nicotine patches makes it easier and more likely to succeed, why wouldn’t you use them?

The truth is, studies show using appetite suppressants improves weight loss, increases the odds of reaching your goal, and without a doubt makes the process a whole lot easier. So really, the question should be, “why wouldn’t you use them”?

The whole goal of One Life is to make the appetite suppressants unnecessary as we teach you how to control your hunger and your weight, not with medication but with changes to your diet. We simply use the appetite suppressants as a crutch or training wheels until you are to the point that you no longer need them.

Absolutely. About 15% of our patients do One Life using our natural appetite suppressants. The One Life diet works great whether you use the prescription appetite suppressants or our natural supplements.

Our philosophy is for people to take as little of the appetite suppressants as necessary but as much as they need. Ultimately our goal is to make the suppressants unnecessary by teaching you how to control your hunger by the way you eat.

Most people take them until they cross the finish line, although as they learn more and as they get better and better at controlling their hunger with changes to their diet and lifestyle, most of our patients begin to take their pills on a more sporadic, as needed basis.

Phendimetrazine and Phentermine.

Given the history of problems caused by weight loss medications it’s wise to be cautious and it’s the reason why One Life only uses phendimetrazine and phentermine—because of their proven track record. Both of these appetite suppressants have been in use since the 1950’s and over the last 60 years they have been used by millions and millions of people without causing health concerns and are considered extremely safe. They are both FDA approved and carry no restrictions or warnings. They are actually in the same category of medications as the ADHD medications (e.g. Ritalin, Adderall, etc.) that millions of children take every day.

The appetite suppressants we use are related to Fen-Phen but they aren’t the same. Fen-Phen was a combination of two separate medications, Fenfluramine and Phentermine. Fenfluramine is the half of the medication that caused heart problems and is now banned worldwide. Phentermine walked away without any restrictions or warnings and is still considered safe.

It is similar to what happened to the cholesterol drug Baycol that was banned because it caused liver failure and death while the other cholesterol drugs in the same category (Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor, etc.) are all still considered safe. There are numerous other examples of this happening in medicine including Vioxx which had to be pulled from the market for health concerns while Celebrex the other drug in that category is still safely used by millions of people.

Of note, Qsymia the appetite suppressant approved by the FDA in 2012 is comprised of phentermine, which means that phentermine essentially received re-approval by the FDA 60 years after it’s initial approval in the1950’s.

The appetite suppressants are stimulants so it can take your body a day or two to get used to the medication. The first couple of days some people can feel a little bit “jazzy,” kind of a “zoom, zoom” like feeling, but you shouldn’t feel jittery or agitated. By day three or four the stimulation the medication provides starts to feel about as strong as a cup of coffee. Most people actually like the little pick me up that the medication provides.

Among those with anxiety issues this is a very common fear but it is rarely, if ever, an issue.

On the first day or two, as the body is getting used to the medication, there can be some sleep disturbance. After those first couple of days, sleep issues usually aren’t a problem as long as the medication is taken early enough in the day.

Studies show that the appetite suppressants on average actually lower blood pressure by a few points and only minimally increase the heart rate by a beat or two. In the real world, because of our patients’ weight loss, almost everyone’s blood pressure and heart rates improve.

In our experience, less than 0.2% of our patients have experienced any significant change in blood pressure or heart rate, and then it has only been to a minor degree. And for those whose blood pressure is already controlled with medication we have never had any issue with their blood pressure because of the appetite suppressants.

The appetite suppressants are in the same amphetamine-based category of medication as Ritalin and Adderall, which are used by millions of children everyday. Comparing phentermine to “meth” would be the equivalent of comparing codeine to opium because both compounds are opiate-based.

From a physical standpoint the appetite suppressants create no physiological dependence. The National Institute on Drug Abuse ranks phentermine 148th and represents less than 0.03% of all drugs with abuse potential.

Yes. For those who don’t live in San Diego we have a long-distance program available. The program is the same as it is for our local patients, but rather than meeting face-to-face in the clinic, the weekly visits are done via email. To be able to do this option, it is required that the initial consultation be done in person.

For those patients who live in California but don’t live close to our clinics to come every week we can do a combination of in-clinic and email visits that fits your needs and schedule.

To find out more about the One Life Long-Distance Program click here.

Yes. Patients who travel or are who are unable to come into the clinic every week for other reasons are still able to do the One Life program. Rather than being seen every week in the clinic we do a combination of face-to-face visits with email visits that fit your needs and schedule, similar to what we do with our long-distance patients.

There are currently two One Life clinics; one in Solana Beach and one in Encinitas/Carlsbad.

Click here for their addresses and directions.

We accept Health Savings Accounts (HSA) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA). While there are some insurance companies that cover weight loss programs, they are in the minority. You can determine if your insurance covers medical weight loss programs by checking the exclusions section of your policy.

Just give us a call to schedule a free initial consultation.

• Encinitas/Carlsbad Clinic: 760-274-6920
• Solana Beach Clinic: 858-793-9500

Or feel free to stop by if you’d rather talk to us in person or simply want to check us out.