In 1985, less than 15 percent of Americans were obese. By 2014, that number more than doubled to 38 percent of adults. What is happening in the US is happening worldwide, and it's affecting children as well as adults. These trends threaten our health and our well-being. They increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, and take away our ability to do the activities we enjoy most. If trends continue, children today could be the first generation in two centuries to live shorter, less healthy lives than their parents. What accounts for these trends? How can we take back control over our weight and our health? Solutions to the obesity epidemic have focused on balancing calories and on finding the optimal proportion of carbs, fat, and protein that best support weight loss. These are solutions that at best lead to short-term success. However, over the last three decades, scientists have made exponential progress in unraveling the root causes of obesity. The picture that is emerging, is that obesity is a complex whole body disease. One that involves our brain, gut, hormones, and emotions. Our solution needs to be equally comprehensive and needs to move beyond calories, macro nutrients, or exercise in isolation. For the first time, we're able to make unprecedented progress in finding sustainable and health promoting solutions to weight loss. At the forefront, where discovery answers to longstanding fundamental questions, such as, how much of obesity is due to a lack of willpower? How much is genetic? How much is due to our environment? Currently, most weight-loss plans focus on willpower. On how you can restrict your diet to lose weight. They fail to take into account the complexity of obesity in decision-making, or how our genes, hormones, and mind, and emotions respond to our environment to make us susceptible to becoming obese. They overlook the critical fact that many of our food decisions are made before they reach our awareness, and are influenced by emotions. The reward we anticipate from that food enqueues in our environment, such as seeing and smelling freshly cooked food. This course offers a weight-loss solution beyond simply restricting calories, blaming different macro nutrients, focusing on individual willpower, and stigmatizing obesity. I hope to share what we know about obesity. Problem solved together to create individualized weight loss plans and support each other in the challenge. I hope that you will join us on this journey. So, that you can better understand the biologic challenges to weight loss, find personal strategies that unlock the root causes of obesity, and find your path to sustainable health.