Hello, my name is Todd Weber, PhD, and I am the founder of The Science of Dieting and the co-founder of Lifestyle Reboot. I would like to tell you a little bit about myself and how I started my weight loss programs. At my core, the forces leading me to this point are a deep passion for nutrition, metabolism, and weight management, a hunger for the truth, and a desire to help people.
Everyone’s story is a bit incongruent but I’ll do my best to tell you mine. I first became aware that the health & wellness industry was severely broken and riddled with misinformation during my undergraduate studies. It was this realization, coupled with my quest for knowledge and desire to help people that I continued to pursue nutrition and metabolism to the highest level, gaining my PhD in Bioenergetics and Exercise Science.
Learning about nutrition and metabolism has been relatively easy for me, helping people has proven more difficult. The traditional route for a PhD is teaching or research. After my PhD, I knew what I needed to know to help people so research wasn’t interesting to me. I taught at several local universities in the Denver, CO metro but didn’t want to stay in the academic silo (and frankly couldn’t make it past the adjunct phase).
I started Energy Balance Nutrition Consulting (EBNC) fresh out of my PhD in 2014. EBNC was meant to be a part-time nutrition counseling business (before opening a gym with a friend) but never really materialized into too much outside of a blog. I wrote articles on topics of interest to me but did not have a specific target demographic nor did I have systematic programming. My offerings were much too piecemeal.
I didn’t think I was an academic, I wasn’t good at nutrition counseling, and I tried my hand at corporate wellness for a minute before realizing that maybe my role was to provide education to personal trainers, dietitians, and other medical professionals seeking information on weight management. So I created a research paper database (website) of 5000+ scientific papers on anything and everything weight management related called, somewhat uncreatively, The Paper Database.
Long story short, many health professionals think they already know everything they need to know. What use do they have for a paper databse? Turns out more than they know (you don’t know what you don’t know). I have a PhD and thought I understood weight management but now I know that I didn’t. It took compliling all of these papers to truly feel like I knew what I was talking about.
So I created this amazing resource that seemingly no one wanted to use or pay for. What now? Well, if no one else is going to use it, why don’t I? And this is where The Science of Dieting was born/rebranded.
I have always believed that I could help the most people/have the greatest impact by serving a research/support role for a large weight loss company. What I’ve found is that the large players in the weight loss industry just want to sell you their product and they’ll bend and twist the truth to fit their marketing needs. They’ll take whatever research, claim, statement, trend, or buzzword to sell their product. Everyone is selling a niche, myopic, hyper-focused product when what people really need is a comprehensive weight loss solution.
I’m not here to sell you stuff you don’t need or is minimally effective. I’ve spent thousands and thousands of hours trying to understand why the health & wellness industry is so terrible. I’ve offered a few condensed thoughts on fad diets and fad diet professionals but I don’t think I’ll ever figure it out. But I don’t need to. What I need is to find people who believe in facts, trust that I have their best interests in mind, believe that I can help them lose weight through a comprehensive, systematic sustainable approach to weight loss, and for them to take the weight loss journey together with me! Let’s go!!