• It has nothing to do with willpower and it's not about being on a diet.

• It's about treating the part of the brain responsible for hunger and the feeling of fullness.

• Now local doctors say they can tell their patients, we don't have a diet plan, we have an answer for permanent weight loss and better health.

Both have been in practice between 17 to 19 years and have academic teaching appointments at Rush Presbyterian and Northwestern Medical School respectively.

They specialize in adult medicine and are board-certified in Internal Medicine. Their primary focus is to provide aggressive prevention of the development of medical diseases, as well as early detection and treatment of these problems. In addition, they medically treat patients with various eating disorders for which no other effective treatment is available.

At first Jonathan's family was thrilled. Not only was their son healthy, he wanted to eat right after surgery. They thought their prayers were answered, but Jonathan kept eating. Two weeks later he had gained 15 pounds and within 22 months he was 100 pounds overweight.

"They would just make fun of me. Call me names and stuff," Jonathan says.

The kids at school called him fat and doctors in his hometown in Omaha said there was nothing they could do.

"He could eat unlimited amounts of food, the only thing that stopped him was when we told him no because he never felt full until they found the medication that worked," says Terri Weitfeld, Jonathan's mother.

Drugs to tell his brain not to be hungry and Jonathan immediately started to lose weight.

"It's just so much easier for me to play. Like at school, at recess I can play with the other kids cause I can actually run, cause I lost all the weight," Jonathan says.

"My brain wanted to eat," she says.

Julie's hypothalamus was in place in her brain but there was some medical problem causing it to send her the wrong signals about eating.

"Obesity or being overweight is a medical disease. It needs medical treatment," Dr. Levy-Miller says.

Currently, people who are overweight end up on all sorts of treatments for high blood pressure, diabetes and muscle and joint problems. The diseases that stem from the weight.

Here, a combination of drugs is used to help the brain function properly while setting the hypothalamus right, suppressing appetite, impacting metabolic rates and absorbing fat.

"It literally will take away the thought of being hungry," Dr. Levy-Miller says.

It helped Julie Aguirre too.

"It wasn't like I didn't want to eat or I didn't want to be around food. I just didn't have the constant hunger that I always had," she says.

And soon she didn't have the extra pounds either. "Now 150 pounds lighter, I can't even believe that I looked like that," Julie says. "My back's great, my knees are great, but mentally, mentally it's the best thing in the world," she adds.

Doctors go through an overall health plan with each patient. In addition to medication, they learn proper caloric intake, how to keep their Body Mass Index at a healthful number and how to increase their metabolism.

The doctors look at overall health and use different combinations of medicine for each patient and they say there are virtually no side effects.