Hello, my name is Todd Weber, PhD, and I am the founder of The Science of Dieting. I teamed up with Geof Shuford of Phoenix Fitness to create our Lifestyle Reboot program. I would like to tell you a little bit about myself and how Geof and I started our program together (to learn more about Geof, please check out his website). At my core, the forces leading me to this point are a deep passion for exercise, 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 it to you. 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 nutrition counseling business 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’ve know Geof Shuford since ~2016. We’ve become good friends over the years and have had many “brainstorming” happy hours together. In 2020, with the pandemic, we decided to finally work together (rather than just brainstorm) to create the This May Help You podcast. Due to a heath issue in my family we paused the podcast but didn’t stop the happy hours. I have always wanted to work with people who have a lot of weight to lose. My expertise is nutrtion. Geof works with individuals undergoing weight loss surgery and is an expert in exercise and mindset. Collectively, we finally said, duh, why are we not working together more closely. And hence Lifestyle Reboot was born.
Geof and I have been at this for a long time and we believe we’re in it for the right reasons. Too many people in the health & wellness industry are in it for the money. They see a trend or a market opportunity and want to sell you as many widgets or services as possible. Other practitioners are well intentioned but misinformed. You can count me among the latter when I founded EBNC.
If we really wanted to sell you something we would get into the pills, powders, and supplements game or create a digital health product that could be scaled indefinitely. We could also try to create a “new diet” or workout plan with a fancy theoretical narrative and supporting “evidence”. But that’s not what we’re about. We are truly guided by the science (as much as we can be) and we’ve put together a program that can give you the best chance at weight loss success. If you can trust that we have your best interests in mind, we’d be happy to have your business and start our weight loss journey together.
Todd & Geof