It's killing millions of people. It's disabling millions of people.
It's the biggest epidemic the world has ever seen.
I wouldn't want to have a child and then be gone
before they're 15, before they're 20.
Obesity is the most stigmatised disease that remains.
I feel that once again I have failed another diet.
One, two, three.
I am 100 percent anti-diet.
I eat what I want, when I want and I eat to satisfy and feel good.
Everyone's still saying
it's the simple formula of calories in, calories out.
But I don't think it is.
Governments just see it as a problem of lazy people
who eat too much and don't do enough exercise.
And that's just not the truth.
I'm Katrina. I was on The Biggest Loser in 2014.
It was wonderful to see Katrina step out of the shadows
and finally do something for herself. My favourite to win.
Yes! Ahh, yeah!
I actually didn't apply for the show myself.
My husband put my name forward.
But I thought "Well, maybe this will be the last time
"that I have to try and lose weight and my life will be perfect."
It's time to meet the new and improved contestants.
Katrina, on day one of the competition you weighed 131.1 kilos.
Your current weight is...
87.3 kilos! That's a loss of...
To think about how fabulous I felt on finale night,
I wish I could go back.
It was 40 plus kilos. And I feel like I failed
because I haven't been able to keep that off.
After being on The Biggest Loser,
my diet really didn't get out of control,
the exercise didn't stop, and yet weight was coming back.
It's like an old friend that doesn't want to leave you.
The stigma becomes almost tangible.
You can feel how people are looking at you or judging you.
I thought about it, and I thought
"I'm not doing that much differently, there must be more to it."
What we see is a feeling that obesity is their fault
and that they're to blame.
In fact, we as health professionals
have actually led them down that path.
We're part of the problem. We're not helping at all.
Most of those people in The Biggest Loser
put all their weight back on. Why?
Because the response to weight loss is weight regain.
That's normal, expected and going to happen.
They didn't feel it was their responsibility
to actually approach it from a healthy perspective
because that doesn't make good television. (Laughs)
So over the last four or five years
I've just slowly, just gone back up again.
That is a body defence mechanism.
The body has seen and perceived you as going through acute starvation,
so it puts the brakes on your metabolism,
it slows everything down to protect you so you don't die.
But the problem there is that not only do you stop losing weight
but when you stop that intense program,
the metabolic rate stays low and you regain all that weight.
People who are obese
can have a perfect diet, can exercise regularly,
and they stay the same weight.
I don't know where to go any more.
I feel like I'm just in a wilderness of what works and what doesn't work.
Your weight and how it's going to change throughout life
is set in the first thousand days after conception.
We've got no right, with our current knowledge,
to blame anyone who has a weight problem.
It's what happened, to some extent, in the genes they were given
and how they were programmed for the first thousand days of life.
That first thousand days is critical
to what you're going to do given that you're in our environment,
in Australia today.
We are an environment that we call obesogenic.
It's designed to make us obese given that our biology
was never meant to be in a land of plenty.
It is extremely difficult to lose weight.
And you need something significant to break that cycle.
My name's Amy.
I just turned 30 and for my 30th birthday
I purchased a vertical sleeve gastrectomy.
A vertical sleeve gastrectomy is where they remove
between 75 and 80 percent of your stomach.
I am six days out as of today.
I got this tattoo on my 30th birthday
and it's my farewell to all the things I loved.
I'm probably not going to be able to have them as much as I used to
but they're always going to be in my heart.
My dad...
Yeah, he was morbidly obese.
And I remember he was in hospital,
I think, for nine months when I was in Year 6.
After that he was around for about another two years.
And people say I'm a splitting image of him.
So... Yeah.
As I was approaching 30,
just thinking I'd already lived half my life,
I just wasn't ready to face that.
One, two, three.
My name's Danielle Galvin.
I'm 26 years old and I'm a body-positive activist
who mainly does work and activism on Instagram.
Ready, set, go.
I think it does take courage to do what I do.
Just living in a fat body
and taking a photo and being unapologetic about it
is radical enough for a lot of people.
Living in a larger body or a fat body
is like being part of a marginalised group.
Some of the comments are like
"She seems like a huge attention whore."
"I don't give a shit what your weight is
"but, Jesus, at least buy tops that fucking fit."
"Kill it with fire."
When I was about 11, my parents suggested maybe going to a gym
but as much weight as I lost, I always seem to gain it back.
When that happened,
I just found myself restricting more and exercising more
and before I knew it, it wasn't something I could control.
I was probably exercising like... six hours a day
and I wasn't really eating.
There was a few girls in my class
who found out about my eating disorder
and then would make jokes that I should throw up more or try harder.
Suicide crossed my mind a lot of the time.
Not because I wanted to die, but because I wanted it to stop.
I wanted my brain to stop.
After recovering from my eating disorder,
I slowly came to terms with the fact that perhaps if I wanted to be happy
and I wanted to have a fulfilling life,
I would perhaps be a fat person.
My life's not consumed with weight or numbers or calories, any more.
I eat what I want, when I want.
And this is what my body looks like when that happens.
I have seen fat-pride activists online, on Instagram.
While I'm completely supportive of them and their self-love,
I don't feel like they're supporting a healthy image.
There's the balance between being proud of your weight,
but there are the issues too
that are we sending a message that it's okay to be obese?
We know that being morbidly obese
reduces your life expectancy by about ten years.
Everyone has a right to make health choices in whatever way they see fit.
And you don't necessarily have to conform to the beauty standards
or the health standards that I think are quite biased.
The idea that fatness is always bad
is simply wrong.
A person who's got some excessive fat
and has a good diet, exercises regularly,
has far less risk of disease than someone who's normal weight
and has an unhealthy diet and in fact doesn't exercise.
So, the day's finally here.
And I'm about to be admitted for my vertical sleeve gastrectomy.
I'm recently married, and I want to be around for him.
Physically, I've always just loved her the way she is.
But, like, it's going to mean sort of a fresh start for her health.
I'm... a little bit nervous.
Nice big breaths and see you when you wake up, Amelia.
The patient is left behind with a very small stomach capacity
about the size of a small banana.
There is also a very strong chemical effect from the operation
where the hunger hormones are reduced.
And that's the great secret weapon of the surgery.
When we look at lifestyle interventions: diet, exercise,
one to four percent of weight loss is common.
People who have bariatric surgery
generally lose 20, 25 or 30 percent weight loss on average,
and the vast majority will lose more than ten percent.
And of course, it treats their weight-related diseases
such as diabetes, heart disease, etc.
We have this incredible inequity.
And while it's the best treatment, it's just not utilised
by the lower socioeconomic half of our community
that really can't afford to have it.
Weight-loss surgery is seen as the easy way out.
And even, interestingly,
a lot of medical colleagues still have that opinion.
It's part of the discrimination, stigmatisation, against obesity.
Well done, Amelia. It's all finished. Okay?
A year from now,
I'm hoping to do a blood test and let them tell me
"Oh, you know, your cholesterol has come down heaps
"and you're not on that cusp of life-ending disease."
The weight loss is a bonus.
- How're you going, darl? - Hello, Toni.
Hi.
Come on in.
Aww, that brings back some memories, doesn't it?
Shit.
Well, you were lucky enough to become a contestant, to enter the house...
Don't they look amazing? Well done, you guys.
You just hear that and you sort of go "Oh, well, we're failures, again."
There's not one person out of all 14 of us...
- No. Not one. - Not one person that has...
is maintaining it.
You would think to look at me
that I was sitting eating sugar and drinking soft drinks.
The people who love us, that know exactly how hard it's been for us...
and the people who... who are just judging us because they can,
I don't really care about what they think.
The government are saying we got a obesity epidemic,
but they don't do anything, they're not doing anything about it.
Unless we can change
that perception of personal blame, personal responsibility,
I don't think we're going to move forward
in either preventing or managing people
with this serious relapsing disease.