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leaders in health: dr. sasha high and teaching people why weight loss isn’t about food
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when dr. sasha high is not busy changing the way we view and treat obesity, she's at her cottage on georgian bay where the family spends much of the summer boating and participating in a variety of watersports.
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dr. sasha high is a recognized obesity physician and weight loss coach, helping people eat better, regulate their hunger and cravings, and achieve a healthy weight. she turned her treatment program at high metabolic clinic in port credit, ont. into a telemedicine service during the pandemic which now reaches patients in remote communities to promote access to care. she then founded her best weight online coaching program in 2021 to help women everywhere build the skill set to feel in control around food.
catch her in her spare time, though, and she’s out on the water being pulled up to 60km per hour by the wind as part of the extreme sport of kiteboarding.
“it’s the greatest thrill just to be out on the water,” says sasha, who lives in mississauga and gets away with her family every winter for watersports. “it’s the freedom of the wind carrying you and you’re in the ocean. there’s nothing better.” she did barefoot waterskiing as a kid and competitive swimming, so her love of water runs deep. in fact, she met her husband, now a gastroenterologist at credit valley hospital, through their mutual passion for kiteboarding.
her professional and leisure pursuits are more similar than you might think. kiteboarding is as much mental focus as it is physical endurance as you navigate the wind and the waves. and it turns out that weight management is as much a mindset as it is about consumption.
“what i’m most passionate about is understanding how do we shift human behaviour through psychology in a really empowering way? and that’s the work that i do with women inside my coaching program. it’s a lot about our emotional regulation skills and the psychology of habits. all of that is what i love about what i do now,” says sasha, whose high on life podcast offers her take on topics like the wegovy injectable prescription used to lose weight, and tips to keep kids eating well by modeling and teaching.
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“obesity medicine is an interesting field because there is the whole medical treatment side that is gaining much more attention and is important. but the way i always frame it to people is, it’s treating physiology and psychology. and one without the other is often not enough.”
“i love fitness. i think that our bodies are designed to move and that fitness is such an opportunity to create better mental health and better emotional resilience,” says dr. sasha high, who is an active kiteboarder.
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her approach to weight management has nothing to do with counting calories, following a standardized diet or finding a quick fix to drop pounds (forget those celebrity-endorsed liquid formulas and fasting). she also says people don’t need more nutrition information or healthy pinterest recipes. her program is about changing your relationship to food, using cognitive and behavioural therapy to develop skills to overcome emotional eating – so you’re not turning to food to self-sooth or fill the void. she also has a free course on stopping night-time snacking (adults on average snack before bed three nights a week, according to a sleep foundation survey).
sasha has embraced this holistic-style treatment after more than a decade of learning and seeing the science of obesity medicine evolve.
“when i first got started back in 2012, i started in obesity medicine because i was passionate about fitness and nutrition and lifestyle. back then, it was all about trying to encourage people to eat less, count their calories, and move their bodies more. we didn’t have a whole lot else,” she explains. “we’re now understanding that obesity is due to changes within the brain, and how the brain controls appetite and feeding behaviour and weight regulation. at one stage i was very interested in the nutrition component and nutritional regimens. more recently i’ve really become more interested in the psychology of behaviour and that’s where i’ve landed now.”
she’s publicly shared some of her own struggles with binge eating through med school and residency, and helping women with eating disorders is another part of her services to delve into what drives the destructive behaviour. the short answer is it comes down to coping with negative emotions. when we’re young, we’re told not to cry or not to feel bad, so we need to do everything we can to make those emotions go away. “then we become adults who, when we have an unpleasant or negative emotion, we need to make that go away quickly. and the easiest way that is socially acceptable is food. it’s like, ‘just go get an ice cream, you’ll feel better. or that mom culture of ‘have another glass of wine to get through the day.’ it’s just perpetuating this messaging that we need to pacify emotions with food or alcohol rather than actually learning how do we regulate emotions and how do we learn to cope with them.”
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distracting ourselves or rewarding ourselves with food is just leading to a whole lot of overeating and poor health.
this is the area of psychology and behaviour therapy that sasha is making available to people to build a foundation of powerful self-help tools.
not surprisingly, she’s also fiercely devoted to her own nutrition and fitness, which has been a focus from childhood. she grew up in ottawa with an active family who celebrated her achievements in sports and academics, planting the seeds for her success later in life. in high school, she excelled at cross-country running and got her black belt in karate. but it was even earlier, at age 12, that she decided to become a doctor and “fast-tracked” through her studies to get to medical school. “i had idealistic goals as a child of wanting to help people and wanting to heal,” she says.
“i’ve always been very dedicated and my parents definitely fostered a sense of hard work in my brother and i. something that i learned from a young age is you work hard and that facilitated my focus.”
her own experience cultivating habits that support 2022年世界杯名单猜测 steered her to bariatric medicine to help transform lives. if you read the testimonials on her website, you get the full picture of the difference it makes: as lisa m. writes, “the best weight programme helped me to think of my food choices as being the ones that will be part of demonstrating loving kindness to myself. for the first time, i have found freedom from feeling that it was not fair that i could not have certain foods because my mindset has shifted! i have started to take small but important steps to learn to accept and love myself as i am.”
sasha incorporates wisdom about self-love and self-worth into her program, along with fitness – although you don’t need to have a power kite to benefit.
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“i love fitness. i think that our bodies are designed to move and that fitness is such an opportunity to create better mental health and better emotional resilience. me and my kids know this, i’m a better mom when i exercise and i’m taking care of myself. i show up as a better version of myself. and it’s very true for the vast majority of people. i’ve never heard someone say my mood is worse because i exercise.”
she also keeps up to date on emerging research and talks about a shift for women’s workouts during perimenopause and menopause. instead of resistance training with low weight and high repetitions, women should be doing low repetitions with high weight, lifting much heavier than before. strength training has been shown to combat the weight gain that can happen with the menopause transition.
there’s so much more to wanting to heal and help people than seeing a patient for a quick clinic visit, and she’s proud of pivoting in her professional life to launch a business where she can be the practitioner that people need to feel informed and empowered:
“as a doctor, we prescribe medications to people, but that for me was dissatisfying because it missed such a big part of it. and that was, how do we facilitate and empower people to live their healthiest lifestyle? i can be a prescription machine, but at the end of the day, i also really believe that improving our health behaviours is ultimately so much more valuable than just going on medication.”
dr. sasha high’s program is about changing your relationship to food, using cognitive and behavioural therapy to develop skills to overcome emotional eating – so you’re not turning to food to self-sooth or fill the void.
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to get the message across, she’s been highly active on social media, but now feels her perspective on the various platforms has changed.
“i am very aware that [my daughter] is going to be a teenager before i know it. and i don’t want her using social media because of the vast body of evidence that’s coming out of the severe mental health problems for our young people as a result of social media. i realized i couldn’t very well be saying to her that she can’t use it if i’m on it.”
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so now she is focusing only on the longform messaging of her podcast instead of social media soundbites.
where’s her happy place? the cottage on georgian bay where the family spends much of the summer, boating, watersports and fun with the kids. what comes next for her medical practice is the development of online courses on insulin resistance and emotional eating. she’s also has a course that tackles polycystic ovary syndrome, or pcos, which is a common hormone problem for women, especially in childbearing years, that can lead to missed or irregular periods, cysts, infertility, excess hair growth and weight gain.
overall, though, she’s taking a step back from scaling the business to balancing work with her family life and more time in her cottage garden.
“i am determined to get my broccolis to grow bigger than the tiny little ones that i’ve been getting. we have lots of tomatoes. i just put in cherry trees and apple trees, and the island is covered in wild blueberries and wild raspberries and blackberries, so we’re pretty blessed. we have an abundance of really great stuff up there.”
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