meet the doc behind The Shift

about dr. white

MD CCFP-EM MPH Diplomate of the American Board of Obesity Medicine.

Dr. Ashley White is a pioneering force in weight loss medicine. Certified in emergency and family medicine in Canada, and a diplomate of the American Board of Obesity Medicine, Dr. White brings a wealth of diverse clinical experience, courage and creativity to her practice.

Dr. White spent the first five years of her medical practice in very rural Ontario, doing emergency, family, addictions, palliative, aesthetic and hospitalist medicine. For the past two years, she has focused on emergency medicine at Hamilton Health Sciences while refining her cutting-edge yet evidence-based approach to "weight loss the right way". She has coined several key concepts that resonate deeply with patients, including appetite literacy and regulation over restraint.

At Clarity Health Burlington, Dr. White collaborates with naturopathic doctors to offer patients a truly integrative approach to weight management and overall wellness. Her practice stands at the intersection of conventional and complementary medicine, body and mind, innovation and evidence, leveraging diverse medical philosophies to help patients heal, grow and thrive.

Believing that patients are their own best guides, Dr. White developed The Shift Program, a signature system of transformation available worldwide online. The Shift Program is a companion to course takers as they work with their own doctors and NPs to lose weight the right way. This 3-month Program elegantly solves the dual problem of public misinformation about obesity and lack of capacity in family medicine to help patients lose weight without losing their vitality.

Dr. White's unique ability to zoom in and out of cases, coupled with her passion for helping patients make sense of themselves, sets her apart. While she utilizes the common clinical pillars of weight loss, such as behaviour change, medications, surgery and nutrition, she coaches patients to see their own capacity for change in the direction of their values. Her work exemplifies the power of breaking down traditional medical silos, fostering collaboration across disciplines, and continuously evolving practice methods to better serve patients.

Again, I want to thank you for helping me understand more about my appetite and my body.  Honestly, I feel like this program has changed my life in how I think and view things and now acknowledging that some things are just out of my control. Your leadership has helped guide me through this difficult time and I don’t think I can thank you enough. This experience really taught me how to understand my appetite and what my body needs.  If you are struggling with binge eating or feeling like you don’t have control over what you eat, I definitely recommend this program. It has changed my life.

- V, Past Participant

Hear more from dr. white.

You can hear more from Dr. White on the following podcasts:

“More than just novel obesity treatments” episode of the Canadian Medical Association Journal Podcast with Dr. Blair Bigham and Dr. Mojola Omole.

Period to pause: EP23: Demystifying PCOS, Diet Culture, and Healthcare Constraints with Dr. Ashley White.

Doctors+: No to Dieting and Yes to Appetite Literacy with Dr. Ashley White

the shift system:

The Shift System is a mental model I teach my patients in my clinical practice. I also offer it as an online Self-Study that accompanies this blog series. The Self-Study includes a workbook with 21 tools to use to build your own Shift System as well as a video tutorial for each tool.

The System follows this order:

  1. Creating a Personal Values Statement

  2. Understanding Stigma and Bias in Your Life

  3. Planning for Your Life Weight

  4. Understanding the Appetite

  5. Creating Your Eating Experiences: The Shift System

  6. Building Resilience

  7. Movement

In The Shift Clinic, we pair this cognitive approach with a large volume of personalized health data that we track over time so that we can meet the goals and attain the key results the patients set for themselves.

I designed The Shift System to help guide eating decisions in any environment: shift work, no groceries or time to get them, limited kitchen access, small kids, massive workloads, holidays, celebrations, dining out, conferences and traveling.  It needed to be easy, short and help give you more space in your brain for living your life, and less for fretting about diet rules and protocols. 

And it needed to actively acknowledge how diet culture continues to pressure our eating experiences but also let you decide the terms of your participation in that culture.

I created The Shift System because my patients needed a clear and simple framework to help them re-learn how to craft positive eating experiences after years of dieting so that they could spend their days thinking about their lives, and not their - often distorted - food and body stories.

My patients have dieted so many hours and days of their lives away.

The Shift System is my effort to give them that time back and sharing it with you is an honour. 

So far since I started working with you, you told me to stop tracking my food, drink wine and eat cheese, only move if it feels good and buy a bathing suit. And I have lost 20 pounds”

- A, Past Participant