Prescriptions are Recipes

People have an auto-destruct button: it is their mouth. For years my job has been to provide an operation to assist them in weight loss, and then help them to adopt their lifestyle to maximize the effect of weight loss. Every patient who undergoes weight loss surgery from my office is required to sign off that they will eat differently after surgery, they will change their eating habits. The document they sign says that the food they currently eat, maybe even more than the excess weight, may be contributing to their ill health.

What is sad is when it becomes evident that after weight loss surgery they resume their previous eating habits. No matter what weight loss operation patients have, if they resume what they ate before they will regain weight.

So now I prescribe recipes. Simple recipes to help patients learn to cook, and have delicious food. My prescription pads have become recipe cards. It provides patients with better guidance of what they should be eating – and I give them a number of times a week they should be eating that food.

If they follow the plan they should be eating healthy and losing weight. What you won’t find on my prescription pads are fast foods, pizza, hamburgers, processed food. Because healthy food is what this doctor orders.

Dr. Terry Simpson

About the Author

You probably first saw Dr. Simpson on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. Dr. Terry Simpson received his undergraduate, graduate, and medical degrees from the University of Chicago, where he spent several years in the Kovler Viral Oncology laboratories doing genetic engineering. Until he found he liked people more than Petri dishes. After a career in surgery, his focus is to make sense of the madness, and bust myths. Dr. Simpson, an advocate of culinary medicine, believes in teaching people to improve their health through their food and in their kitchen. On the other side of the world, he has been a leading advocate of changing health care to make it more "relationship based," and his efforts awarded his team the Malcolm Baldrige award for healthcare in 2018 and 2011 for the NUKA system of care in Alaska and in 2013 Dr Simpson won the National Indian Health Board Area Impact Award. A frequent contributor to media outlets discussing health related topics and advances in medicine, he is also a proud dad, author, cook, and doctor “in that order.” For media inquiries, please visit www.terrysimpson.com.