I have spent my entire life fearing doctors. No matter what I went in for, an ear infection, the flu, a broken wrist, the conversation always circled back to my weight with the very strong implication that I just wasn’t trying hard enough and that everything would get better if I just lost weight.

Eventually, I stopped going to doctors altogether, because their advice was always the same…eat less, move more, here’s a new medication… I’ll see you next year. This is likely a familiar story to many of you, and one I hear every day now in my work with patients who come to Toward Health to escape that cycle.

A Lifetime of Being Blamed

One doctor once told me, quite seriously, to “take up an extreme sport. Like mountain climbing.” Never mind that I live in Manhattan, around a hundred miles from the nearest mountain range, and I weighed over 400 pounds at the time. Walking even a few blocks was excruciating.

I left that appointment with a prescription for Phen-fen and felt crushed beneath the weight of that doctor’s judgement and my own shame. As I waited for a cab, because I could not walk home, I thought, “If only I weren’t so lazy. What is wrong with me?”

That moment was not unique. It was representative of hundreds of other doctor visits.

By the time I was 30, I had tried nearly everything to lose weight. “Fat camps” as a child, dozens of doctors, nutritionists, trainers, therapists. I joined Weight Watchers over 35 times, starting at four or five years old. I counted calories, ate gloopy frozen diet meals, did Optifast, exercised, practiced yoga, and tried intuitive eating.

I followed every rule, and still, ended up in a body that felt like it was living a death row prison sentence for a crime it did not commit.

This Is What Gaslighting Looks Like in Medicine

What I experienced was not just bad advice, it was medical gaslighting. Over and over, I was told:

“Just have more willpower.”

“Practice moderation.”

“Have a little cake. It won’t kill you.”

When none of it worked, the conclusion was always the same: I wasn’t trying. I was non-compliant.

It took me nearly fifty years to learn that the advice I had been given over and over was the metabolic equivalent of telling someone to put out a fire by pouring just a little gasoline on it. For someone with food addiction, just a little bit does not calm the fire, it feeds it.

My inability to regulate my appetite was not a character flaw, nor was it laziness or a lack of discipline.

Doctors are supposed to be a gateway to healing, but for people with obesity and food addiction, they are often a source of lasting trauma. By the time we show up in a doctor’s office, we have already overcome enormous barriers. We face chairs, gowns, blood pressure cuffs, and exam tables that do not fit, scales that may not go high enough and the fear of being judged, blamed, or humiliated. And more often than not, we are.

Every doctor I saw for decades only ever saw obesity. They didn’t have anything helpful to offer, and what they did offer was wrapped in disapproval.

So, I stopped going, for nearly 20 years.

This was not because I did not care about my health. My mother, who also struggled with obesity and food addiction, died unexpectedly from congestive heart failure due to type 2 diabetes, and I knew this was going to be my trajectory if I didn’t change something. I went to sleep every night afraid my heart would give out, but still, I avoided doctors, because condemnation is not care.

The Role of Shame

Shame keeps us stuck. It reinforces hopelessness and fuels addiction. It has never led to healing, and what finally helped me was not more discipline or another lecture, it was being taken seriously and encountering clinicians who were curious instead of dismissive, who welcomed questions instead of feeling threatened by them, who understood that trust is built through transparency, not authority.

A critical part of that trust came from objective data. Not “because I said so,“ but because the evidence was visible, measurable, and explained.

Why Tests That Actually Matter Change the Conversation

One of the most powerful tools Toward Health now offers patients is Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) screening.

Why does this matter?

Because for decades, many patients have been told they are “high risk” or “low risk” for heart disease based solely on weight, cholesterol panels, or population averages, often without ever being shown what is actually happening inside their own bodies.

A CAC scan changes that.

It allows doctors and patients to see whether calcified plaque is present in the coronary arteries. It moves the conversation from fearmongering and assumptions to individualized risk assessment. So instead of, “You’re overweight, so you’re high risk,” the conversation becomes: “Here is what your arteries show right now. Let’s talk about what this means and what we can do next.”

This is what respectful, evidence-based care looks like. It does not default to adding medications unnecessarily or ignore lifestyle or nutrition, and it does not ask patients to blindly trust recommendations without understanding the why.

It invites patients into the decision-making process, rather than alienating us.

What Care Looks Like When Doctors “Get It”

There are clinicians who practice medicine differently: they do not gaslight you or reduce every symptom to your weight, and they do not assume noncompliance when something doesn’t work.

Instead, they collaborate. They listen and welcome research and thoughtful questions. They respect lived experience alongside medical training and run tests that actually inform care, not just check boxes.

This is the philosophy behind Toward Health.

Lifestyle and nutrition are treated as powerful medical interventions, not afterthoughts. Medications are used thoughtfully, not reflexively. Testing is used to clarify, not to scare. Most importantly, patients are treated as partners, not problems to be solved.

The Radical Act of Acceptance, and Why It Changes Everything

Healing does not come from self-loathing or judgement; it comes from acceptance of our humanity and complexity, and the acknowledgement that addiction is real.

And true care begins when clinicians stop asking, “What is wrong with you?” and start asking, “What is happening in your body, and how can we address it together?”

Because when patients feel respected, believed, and informed, they do not avoid care, they engage with it and become active participants in their own health. They take ownership and become self-motivated.

When medicine replaces gaslighting with data, curiosity, and collaboration, everything changes.

Doctors who get it do exist, and they are redefining medicine by making it clear, through evidence, transparency, and compassion, that good healthcare is not a privilege, but a right.