When Dr. Emi Hosoda sees patients struggling to lose weight, she knows what they’re going through.
She herself has grappled with obesity, finally losing 100 pounds and keeping it off since about 2020. But it was a difficult road for many years, with a number of factors working against her.
Now 54 years old, Hosoda says she reached 235 pounds — her maximum weight — after having kids in her 30s. She was able to slim down, but not for long.
“It was fairly easy to lose most of the weight at about 37,” Hosoda, an internal medicine physician in Enumclaw, Washington, tells TODAY.com.
“But then perimenopause hit around 2010, and I started working nights in a hospital, then all bets were off. So I gained pretty much all of my weight back.”
Many women struggle with excess weight in the years leading up to menopause and then during menopause itself, with a lot of hormonal triggers going on, Hosoda told TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb when she appeared on the show on Jan. 9, 2023.
Younger personal trainers often will tell women to just eat less and exercise more, but they’re not seeing women in their 40s, 50s and 60s, she says.
Hosoda has a strong family history of Type 2 diabetes and says she’s had to take supplements to help with insulin resistance in order to lose weight. She has FTO, a genetic variant that predisposes a person to gain weight. She also had hard-to-diagnose thyroid disease, which made it difficult to slim down. On top of all of that, Hosoda had rheumatic fever as a child and was on antibiotics for years, so her gut health was devastated and took a long time to rebuild.
For all of those reasons, when she sees patients “who are eating hardly anything,” exercising constantly and still have trouble losing weight, she tries to discover hidden factors that may be at play.
“The thing that I look for is: Why is this person not losing weight? Because…
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