AUTHOR’S PREFACE
The stage was set when Maria Krüger, a general practitioner and vice‑chair of the Danish Society for General Medicine, announced in Berlingske[15] that women in menopause, despite biological resistance, can lose weight with “ordinary lifestyle advice,” just like everyone else.
Opposed to this medical position stands the book An Unequal Fight (F), written by Maria Felding, a clinical dietitian with her own practice. In the book, she presents 281 pages of scientific research arguing that all the small cogs turning inside the body during weight loss make it impossible—or at the very least extremely difficult—to lose weight with “ordinary lifestyle advice.”
And following this, the pharmaceutical industry sees its opportunity to “commercially execute” weight‑loss medication, enabling millions of people with severe obesity to lose weight worldwide. A bandwagon many lifestyle experts have since jumped on, now that there is something that works.
As the CEO of Novo Nordisk said at a press conference in February 2025[1], the pharmaceutical company does not believe there is “something‑or‑other,” any method besides weight‑loss medication, that can alleviate severe obesity. Because if there were, “then severe obesity probably wouldn’t be a persistent problem.”
As someone with severe obesity, I was also offered weight‑loss medication at the hospital, but I declined. The question is why I could not lose weight with professional dietary counselling and a low‑calorie diet, when I later managed to lose more than 20% without weight‑loss medication.
My defiance could be interpreted as meaning that both Krüger and Felding are wrong, but nothing could be further from the truth. As Tune H. Pers, associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, stated, only “a small percentage … manage to fight against the body’s eagerness to return to its previous weight” by arranging “a life in which they constantly defeat the biological mechanisms”[24].
What I have done is derived from my own “clinical data,” collected over a five‑year measurement period. This has resulted in eight principles that give this book its own distinct legitimacy:
Principle no. 1: Calorie ceiling.
Principle no. 2: Long‑lasting satiety.
Principle no. 3: Weigh‑ins.
Principle no. 4: Long‑lasting satiety across dietary forms.
Principle no. 5: Overcome the weight plateau.
Principle no. 6: The principle of eating.
Principle no. 7: A daily walk.
Principle no. 8: A long life of 100 years.
In fact, I believe that if you implement the eight principled lifestyle changes I describe, you can lose weight comparable to the average results on weight‑loss medication and maintain a BMI of 27 or better—and I guarantee that your lifestyle changes will become an utterly insane, yet fantastic, journey.
Mikkel Skipper