About Take Shape For Life

Our Founder — A Leader in Optimal Nutritional Health

Dr. Wayne Andersen's Story

Dr. Wayne Andersen's passion for life and fascination with medicine began at an early age. As an Air Force child growing up in Spain, he placed mice under anesthesia and operated, removing their spleens and then observing how they responded to infections.

In high school, living in Japan, he observed the profound effect that the low-fat Asian diet had on creating much lower levels of obesity, cancer, and heart disease, than in Western cultures. He also recognized how important family, keeping life-long friends, and a life of meaning and purpose was to these people in grounding their health and longevity.

This desire for knowledge and understanding drove Dr. Andersen to become the first in his family to enter college and graduate with honors from the University of Florida with a degree in Science. Ultimately, he went to medical school at the University for the Health Sciences in Kansas City, where he was valedictorian of his graduating class.

Dr. Andersen did his internship at Grandview Hospital where he was selected as the Outstanding Intern of the Year. He was to become a leading internal medicine specialist in cardiology or pulmonology, but decided instead to enter the emerging subspecialty of critical care.

He insisted that to truly take care of an extremely sick person, you needed to be well-versed in all organ systems and how they relate to each other when a patient is sick as well as healthy.

He trained in open heart surgery at Cleveland Clinic and then went on to train for two years at Jackson Memorial Hospital at the University of Miami, considered to be the premier training program in the country in surgical intensive care.

Dr. Andersen became the tenth physician Board Certified in Critical Care and went back to the institution where he began his post graduate training, to set up the open heart program and surgical intensive care unit.

It was here that Dr. Andersen developed a profound understanding of the pivotal role that nutrition plays in disease and health.

For eighteen years, Dr. Andersen directed the Surgical Critical Care Program at Grandview and was Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology. In 2000, he made a monumental decision to leave his hospital-based practice to devote his full energy to helping people to become and to stay healthy.

Dr. Andersen is currently Medical Director of Medifast, Inc., an innovative leader in the production, distribution and sale of weight management and health management products marketed under the brand name Medifast. Involved with Johns Hopkins in collaborating studies to show the efficacy of meal replacements, Dr. Andersen's goal is to provide simple, convenient means for people to lose weight and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

As the chief architect of Take Shape for Life, Dr. Andersen has built an integrated support system that helps people make the necessary changes in their lifestyles to create optimal health. Using a team approach of health professionals working with Certified Health Advisors, Dr. Andersen says we can provide leading edge nutritional solutions, medical support and the support of caring individuals, to provide the necessary one-on-one interaction so vital in changing peoples' lives. This Take Shape for Life physician-led health network is gathering tremendous momentum.

"I am amazed by the power this group of people is having on society. We have a massive epidemic of overweight, unhealthy individuals and I smile every day as we expose more and more people to a real solution that actually works!

Dr. Andersen currently lives on the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Maryland, with his wife Lori, a Registered Nurse who provides nursing support for Take Shape for Life, and their two children, Savannah and Erica.