The Weight of the Nation: Surprising Lessons About Diets, Food, and Fat from the Extraordinary Series from HBO Documentary Films

By John Hoffman, Judith A. Salerno, M.D., M.S., Alexandra Moss and 2 more

People today work harder and take better care of their health than any previous generation. So how could two-thirds of us fail to measure up when it comes to eating right and exercising? HBO and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences have joined together to bring you the nation's foremost experts and definitive research on weight and weight loss. The Weight of the Nation explains how we got to this unhealthy place and how we can get to a healthy weight by overcoming the forces that drive us to eat too much and move too little.

Three years in the making, The Weight of the Nation answers crucial questions like:

--Is there such a thing as the right diet?

--Am I doomed to yo-yo for the rest of my life?

--How does stress affect my weight?

--Is my slow metabolism making me fat?

--How does carrying too much weight affect my health?

--Why do I eat junk food even though I know it's unhealthy?

--Is exercise enough to help most people maintain an ideal weight?

--How can I keep weight off forever?

Based on the rich research behind HBO's documentary series, The Weight of the Nation is the only book that tells it like it is: losing weight is hard, keeping it off is even harder, and there's no quick fix. Weight loss takes a lot of work and a lifetime commitment, but thousands have done it and this book will show you how.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781250014740

John Hoffman

JOHN HOFFMAN is Executive Producer of HBO’s  The Weight of the Nation.  He has won Emmy® awards for the documentary series The Alzheimer’s Project and Addiction, among others.

Book preview

Introduction

You’ve heard it a million times: America is fat. As a nation, we’re getting fatter every day, our kids are fat, it’s making us sick, and many of us may die earlier because of it.

No one is immune. If you’re not currently struggling with your weight, you know someone who is, most likely no farther away than your immediate family. The obesity problem in America affects our already strained health-care system, our national productivity and security, and our quality of life.

We spend more than $40 billion every year on diet products and services, trying not to be fat—that’s not a little concern, that’s more than the GDP of half the world’s nations. We really don’t want to be fat.

So why are we? Why is this problem only getting worse? What are the consequences of this seemingly inexorable weight gain? And can anything be done about it?

These are the questions HBO’s Emmy Award–winning documentary film division set out to answer in 2009, when they turned their lens to the obesity crisis. Their first step was to partner with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies, which has studied the obesity epidemic for more than ten years, to help them get to the heart of the issue.

New research is released all the time, shifting the blame from one product to another. The first villain was fat itself, so we looked for lower-fat products. That didn’t work. Then we tried blaming carbs, then eggs, then red meat, dairy, white flour, sugar, apple juice, soda, high-fructose corn syrup, and partially hydrogenated anything. One by one, we replaced the evil food du jour … and watched as our collective waistlines grew. And kept growing! If current trends continue, by 2018, experts predict that 75 percent of the American population will be overweight or obese.

If we couldn’t blame carbs or fat, what was left to blame but ourselves? You ate too much at the holidays: better join a weight-loss program. If you really wanted it bad enough, you’d lose those last ten pounds. You’d actually use that gym membership that hits your credit card bill every month. Unlike our hardworking grandparents, people today are less active, and we indulge at every meal. Could it really be that hard to just eat less and exercise more?

Far too many people look at weight problems and think it should be easy enough to eat less and move more. But if more than two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, it can’t be so simple. And the notion that we’re not strong or smart enough to stop overeating isn’t helping anyone. That kind of stigma only makes it more difficult for those of us who are struggling with our weight. It does, however, benefit the diet industry when it needs to sell its latest program, product, or book. In a world that places such a high value on being thin, and where thinness has come to connote a superior level of self-control, those who fail to achieve such an ideal take much of the blame. Popular culture and the media tell us it’s as easy as just saying no to unhealthy foods and large portions, and that not being able to do so is a mark of personal failure. That kind of blame game doesn’t set anyone up for success. Actually, it undermines many of our best efforts.

The notion that obesity is the result of a lack of willpower or self-control resonated with the HBO documentary film team. In The Addiction Project, they’d stared down the same prejudice against those struggling with addiction and successfully reframed it as a chronic, relapsing brain disease for which we have increasingly effective treatments. They cut through the misinformation and fear surrounding dementia and brought hope to a previously desperate diagnosis with The Alzheimer’s Project. Now, with their immersion into the world of obesity in The Weight of the Nation, they’ve come to understand the powerful mechanisms in our bodies and brains that cause us to gain weight and interfere with losing it. The forces within us that work in ways outside our awareness and beyond our control are so strong that they dwarf any argument that it is all about willpower. There has to be more going on with the obesity story.

HBO was aware that the IOM had already developed an extensive body of work on the prevention of childhood obesity and had a strong desire to raise awareness about this personal and public health problem. IOM’s obesity prevention reports consistently emphasized viewing obesity as an enormously complex problem that is much more than an issue of personal responsibility, and stressed that the environment in which children and families live often makes it very difficult to attain or maintain a healthy weight. The recommendations in its reports focused on the importance of change at every level and the need to motivate and empower individuals and communities to act to turn the tide of the obesity epidemic. The combination of the IOM’s in-depth background in obesity prevention research and its focus on solutions made it an excellent partner in helping to tell the obesity story.

Together, HBO and the IOM worked with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and Kaiser Permanente to gather the nation’s leading experts in every field from heart disease and diabetes to evolutionary biology, agriculture, food marketing, and behavioral economics. For more than two years, we examined and analyzed historical and groundbreaking studies. To put a human face on the problem, we interviewed hundreds of people who have struggled with their weight and chronicled their challenges.

The Weight of the Nation is more than a documentary series. It is an ambitious public health campaign consisting of four documentary films, a series of films for children, a video-rich Web site at hbo.com/theweightofthenation, the free distribution of forty thousand screening kits to organizations around the country, and action-oriented community-based outreach efforts. Together, all this adds up to a comprehensive campaign to reverse obesity in America—the latest word on the consequences of being fat, why we gain weight, how to lose it, and the best ways of keeping weight off.

PART I

Good News and Bad News

1

The Bad News: We Have a Big Problem

As much as we all wish there were one thing in the fight against fat we could point to and eliminate, there isn’t. Whether you look at individuals or at our society as a whole, the cause is complex. It’s the sum total of all our little daily decisions that results in us eating a little too much and moving too little—which over time adds up to a lot of pounds. For the nation, our obesity problem has been magnified by the actions of industry, agriculture, and government. These forces shape the environment in which we live, work, and play and, often unintentionally, make it harder for us to make healthy choices. Big decisions made by industry, agriculture, and government have a huge impact on the little decisions we make about what we reach for when we’re hungry and how long we sit at our desks and in our

Reviews for The Weight of the Nation

[marshapetry · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Same ol', same ol' ... interesting book but not "extraordinary". Just a no nonsense book about weight, weight in America, diets etc...