Chima Nwizu, M.D.
Dr. Chima Nwizu is a Diplomate of the American Board of Family Medicine, the American Board of Obesity Medicine and American Board of Clinical Lipidology. He offers a full spectrum of care that includes adult medicine, weight loss medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics, and in-office surgery.
After completing medical school at the University of Benin Nigeria, he completed two years of training in Surgery at Harlem Hospital Center (an affiliate of Columbia Presbyterian University) in New York City. He obtained his Family Medicine Residency training at Bronx Lebanon Hospital Center in Bronx, New York and a Fellowship in Obstetrics at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California.
He is currently board certified in Family Medicine, Clinical Lipidology and in Obesity Medicine. In addition to seeing patients at Dr. Nwizu’s Weight Loss Program, he provides the full spectrum of family medicine care at Family Physicians of Greeley. As a Clinical Lipidologist, Dr. Nwizu is an expert in cholesterol medicine. Dr. Nwizu is able to work with his patients, by improving their cardiovascular risks factors, to significantly cut down their risk of developing heart disease and stroke. As a consequence, he helps patients with both preventions of first heart attack and stroke, as well as in the prevention of recurrent heart attack and stroke.
Dr. Nwizu enjoys being a family physician because it gives him the opportunity to practice the full spectrum of medicine and to take care of different pathologies that afflict individuals, from pediatrics to geriatrics as well as unborn babies. It also gives him the opportunity to provide a medical home for patients and coordinate their care with other specialists.
With the understanding of the crucial role obesity plays in several conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, elevated cholesterol, obstructive sleep apnea, arthritis, back pain and a host of other medical conditions, Dr. Nwizu obtained a board certification in obesity medicine and consequently incorporated obesity medicine into his practice. Clinical research and observational studies have shown that a 5-10% weight loss can significantly improve obesity-associated health conditions including, but not limited to, type 2 diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), elevated cholesterol, and heart disease.
Dr. Nwizu enjoys helping people lose weight.  He understands that an individual does not just gain weight because of his or her habits.  Weight gain is almost always a culmination of factors – most of which are not even known by those affected by weight. In other words, weight gain is the result of interplay of various factors in the individual’s immediate environment. Sometimes predisposition to adult obesity starts in the womb, when conditions such as diabetes arise during the pregnancy (gestational diabetes), hypertensive disease of pregnancy (e.g. preeclampsia), poor maternal nutrition, and excessive weight gain in pregnancy, prematurity or pre-term delivery are present during that pregnancy. Other culprits that may be responsible for a person’s weight gain may include factors such as the stress that arises from the individual’s job, the stress of losing one’s job, stress of changing jobs or getting a new job, or of divorce, among other things. In addition, the onset of health problems that may promote weight gain include thyroid disease, depression, the vicious cycle of arthritis, sleep apnea, genetics, smoking cessation, the individual’s environment and numerous medications – including prescription medications and non-prescription medications. He provides individualized treatment unique to the patient’s circumstance, tailored towards addressing precipitating factors, in combination with evidenced based, scientifically proven methods and sometimes using FDA-approved weight loss medications as adjuvant therapy, in order to help the individual achieve meaningful and sustainable weight loss.
The health benefits of weight loss often start when the individual begins to lose weight and often becomes significantly appreciable with up to 5% weight loss. Consequently, Dr. Nwizu works with the individual’s other health care providers to reduce doses of medications, and in some cases get patients off medications that will no longer be needed as a result of the improvement of the person’s health condition following weight loss.
Given the role pregnancy may play in contributing to obesity, Dr. Nwizu ensures that his obstetric patients gain the right amount of weight during pregnancy through nutrition counseling, in order to prevent the gain of excess weight that will be difficult to lose following pregnancy. Since childhood obesity is a strong predictor of adult obesity, he also provides appropriate weight interventions and counseling to children, adolescents and teenagers who may be affected by weight.
Finally, in his structured and comprehensive weight loss program, Dr. Nwizu continues to work with his patients even after they have attained a mutually agreed goal weight, in order to continue the challenging task of weight loss maintenance to prevent weight regain and weight recycling.
