Weight Loss in Toronto, Ontario: A Naturopathic Doctor's Real Story on Hormones, Metabolism, and Diabetes Prevention

If you're in Toronto or the GTA and working through something similar, and could use some additional support, I'd be glad to help.

This kind of care is often covered by insurance and employee health benefits.

And if affordability is a concern regardless, just talk to me. We'll figure it out together.

Weight is often just one piece of a bigger pattern. If blood pressure, cholesterol, or blood sugar have been part of your story too, our Heart, Blood Sugar, Cholesterol & Weight guide looks at how they connect.

For years, losing weight has been hard for me.

That might sound strange coming from a naturopathic doctor practicing here in Toronto, Ontario. I've helped many patients across the GTA lose weight, sometimes with great success — but not always. My own body has always been the tougher case to crack.

I work with patients virtually across Ontario — Toronto, Vaughan, Mississauga, Hamilton, Ottawa, London, and everywhere in between — so distance from a clinic is never the barrier to getting this addressed properly.

I've written about this journey before, and shared my process and progress along the way. But since then, I hit a stall. What follows is what finally helped me break through it.

Here's some context.

I'm in my fifties now. Like most people, my hormones started shifting in my late thirties. By my mid-to-late forties, the weight gain had really picked up speed.

And life stress doesn't skip over naturopathic doctors just because we know the science. If anything, the years of building a Toronto-based practice brought their own share of stressors.

So I've spent a long time studying this problem, on myself as much as on my patients. What follows is what I've learned about hormones, metabolism, and sustainable weight loss.

I've never been willing to reach for extreme, high-restriction approaches to force weight off.

That means no ketogenic diets. No intermittent fasting. No carnivore diet. And I'd put GLP-1 weight-loss medications, like semaglutide, in the same category.

These approaches can produce fast results. But I don't think they're worth it.

For one, the weight tends to come back just as fast. A 2026 systematic review of the research on GLP-1 drugs found that once people stop taking them, they regain an average of roughly three-quarters of the weight they'd lost, with most of that regain happening within the first year off the medication (eClinicalMedicine / The Lancet).

Beyond that, these approaches put real stress on the body. They raise stress hormones. Over time, that suppresses metabolism rather than supporting it, and disrupted hormones make it that much harder to keep weight off long term.

The research backs this up.

A 2021 review in Frontiers in Nutrition concluded that for most people, the risks of ketogenic diets outweigh the benefits, linking them to elevated risk of colon cancer, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, liver disease, Alzheimer's disease, and diabetes.

A separate study on mice, published in the Journal of Physiology, found that a ketogenic diet caused liver-specific insulin resistance, a mechanism that raises long-term diabetes risk.

And a study published in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy found that ketogenic diets triggered cardiac fibrosis and blocked mitochondrial biogenesis, both in animal models and in human heart tissue. The authors concluded that healthy individuals should reconsider using a ketogenic diet for weight loss.

Intermittent fasting doesn't fare much better. A UCSF-led study found no meaningful weight loss benefit from time-restricted eating. Worse, the fasting group lost more lean muscle mass, saw no improvement in blood pressure, moved less throughout the day, and slept worse than the control group.

Carnivore diets show a similar pattern. A 2026 scoping review in the journal Nutrients found elevated LDL and total cholesterol, deficiencies in multiple micronutrients including vitamin C, vitamin D, calcium, magnesium, iodine, and thiamine, and dietary fiber intake far below recommended levels, along with kidney stone risk markers in documented cases. The review concluded that long-term adherence to a carnivore diet cannot be recommended.

Taken together, this is a steep price to pay for a smaller number on the scale, especially one that so often doesn't stay there. Balancing hormones and stabilizing blood sugar are two of the biggest levers for both sustainable weight loss and long-term diabetes prevention, and none of these extreme approaches do that well.

My approach has always been more balanced. Over the years, I've refined it into three frameworks that I've seen work, to different degrees, for different people.

1. The "croissant diet."

This isn't about matching calories. It's about matching weight, in grams, roughly equally across carbs, protein, and fat. The fat comes mostly from saturated sources: butter, coconut oil, beef.

The name comes from where the idea is loosely inspired: the way the French eat, and the way a croissant itself is built, layer upon layer of butter folded into dough.

2. The Kempner-based approach.

This is built on the work of Dr. Kempner. It's a very low-fat diet, with moderate protein and high carbohydrates.

This is the framework I personally followed for the longest stretch of time, and it did help me, up to a point.

I want to be clear about something here, because there's a lot of noise on social media claiming carbs are harmful. That framing is misleading.

Healthy, minimally processed carbohydrates are actually less problematic than fat as a fuel source. Used properly, they support the body rather than working against it.

Here's what matters first: under normal, healthy metabolic conditions, only a minimal amount of the carbohydrate you eat actually converts into fat. Carbs causing fat gain is a myth worth debunking.

That said, under certain metabolic conditions, a small portion of carbohydrate intake can convert to fat. It's still only a small amount. But even that small amount can be enough to stall weight loss.

3. The 40-40-20 diet.

This is the one that has moved the needle the most for me recently.

Fat stays low, around 20 percent of calories or less. Protein rises significantly, to about 40 percent. That leaves carbohydrates at the remaining 40 percent.

The higher protein intake is satiating. It naturally helps keep overall calorie intake in a healthy, reasonable range, without the deep caloric restriction that can suppress metabolism. It also tends to support steadier blood sugar, which matters for diabetes prevention.

One important caveat: this framework isn't suitable for anyone dealing with significant kidney disease. High protein intake is contraindicated in that situation, so this isn't a one-size-fits-all approach.

One of the best things about this approach is how little restriction it actually requires. For the most part, people can still enjoy most of their favorite foods.

The main things worth cutting out are fried foods and seed oils, along with heavily processed foods, unless you're dealing with a specific allergy or sensitivity.

One more piece matters here, regardless of which framework you use.

Any weight loss plan needs to provide enough micronutrients, especially minerals that a standard multivitamin often falls short on. Potassium and calcium are two big ones.

Having worked with people in all kinds of situations, I've seen this pattern again and again: some people eat very little, consume very few calories, and still struggle to lose weight.

That tells you something important. Supporting metabolism directly, and supporting the hormones behind it, is often just as necessary as getting the macronutrient balance right.

For women, this usually means some type of thyroid and/or progesterone support.

For mid-aged men, this often means some DHEA and/or pregnenolone support.

In my own case, I use pregnenolone to help me sleep more deeply, which would otherwise be harder with less food in the evening. I also use a multivitamin to cover the basics.

I've refined this approach over a long time. The science of it is fairly straightforward.

The tricky part is the implementation, especially at first. It takes some learning of your food choices and portions before the 40-40-20 framework starts to feel natural and sustainable.

But here's what I can tell you: after years of struggling with my own weight, including a stall along the way, I'm now losing it steadily again. If this approach could work through that for me, it's worth considering for you too.