Obesity, Weight Management & Lifestyle Medicine

Obesity has become one of the defining health challenges of our time, yet it remains widely misunderstood — too often reduced to a simple matter of willpower when the reality involves a tangle of biological, behavioural, environmental, and societal forces. Obesity, Weight Management & Lifestyle Medicine approaches the subject with the seriousness and nuance it demands, treating obesity as the complex, chronic, multifactorial condition that current science recognises it to be.

At the heart of the discussion is energy balance and everything that complicates it: appetite-regulating hormones, metabolic adaptation, genetic predisposition, the obesogenic environment, and the psychological dimensions of eating. From this foundation, the session moves into the practical territory of weight management — evidence-based dietary strategies, the role of physical activity, behavioural and cognitive approaches, and the expanding landscape of pharmacological and surgical options. Lifestyle medicine threads through it all, emphasising sustainable, whole-person change over quick fixes that rarely last.

There is also an honest reckoning here with what makes weight management so difficult: the strong physiological drive to regain lost weight, the weight stigma that can deter people from seeking care, and the gap between short-term results and lasting outcomes. Endocrinologists, dietitians, lifestyle medicine practitioners, behavioural specialists, and researchers will all find common ground in this session, alongside those advancing approaches to weight management and metabolic health. For those joining the Nutrition Conference, it offers a clear-eyed, compassionate, and evidence-led look at one of nutrition's most consequential battlegrounds — where the aim is not just weight loss, but durable improvements in health and quality of life.