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Broadcast superstar Oprah Winfrey, who struggled with her weight for much of her life, and Dr. Ania Jastreboff of the Yale School of Medicine have teamed up to examine the biology of obesity, providing a new path forward.
Their new book is “Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It Means to Be Free” (to be published January 13 by Avid Reader Press).
Read an excerpt below and Don’t miss Jane Pauley’s interview with Winfrey and Jastreboff on “CBS Sunday Morning” on January 11!
“Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It Means to Be Free”
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Enough shame and blame
My patient Alice started blaming herself as a child. Her well-meaning mother put her on a diet when she was in her early teens. Even before that, she had begun to develop what she eventually called the “voice of self-hatred.” She vividly remembers the time when she was ten years old, sitting in the front yard with her legs bent, seeing the inner curvature of her leg and wishing it were smaller. “It’s the line where your muscle is, and inside is a curve. It’s the fat and excess skin. I thought, ‘Oh, if I could just cut that off, then my leg would be perfect.’ I had a pen and I drew the line where I thought my legs should be and where the fat should be cut off. I just knew I was bigger than I wanted to be.” Alice was living in Vermont at the time and her mother had a garden where she grew all kinds of vegetables: lettuce, carrots, cucumbers. “I just remember eating salad, so much salad!” Alice remembers. At thirteen, she would sit at the table, thinking, “Here’s a plate with three pieces of lettuce and a carrot,” and wondering how she was going to get through basketball or soccer practice without passing out or ruining the game for her teammates.
A few years later, her mother and Alice went on a no-carb diet. “Atkins was pretty big,” Alice said. His father and two younger brothers were exempt; it was only for the girls in the family. Which basically meant that Alice and her mother always ate everything from the garden, except no turnips, because turnips had “too many carbs.”
After three days, Alice revolts. She grabbed some crackers from the cupboard: “Mom, I just ate a whole sleeve of saltines!” Hearing this, her mother was not angry with her. Alice shared: “She too was desperate for carbs and ate three saltines herself. And then she dutifully returned to her no-carb diet.”
At sixteen, Alice began tracking her weight for sports. The voice of self-loathing in his mind began to be very specific and explicit. “The cupcake you just ate, how many calories are in it? How many carbs are in it?” She described how it wouldn’t stop, not even for a tiny bite. It was relentless.
Over thirty years later, Alice was almost fifty and had tried every diet and workout program possible: forty-seven to be exact. Atkins, keto, South Beach, The Zone, low carb, no carb, ultra low fat, liquid only, Jillian Michaels, Jane Fonda, Suzanne Somers, full body HIIT workouts, gym memberships, YMCA weight trainer, DietBet, StepBet, Mediterranean diet, vegetarian diet, the raw food diet, intermittent fasting. She had even tried hypnosis. She had three teenagers, a rewarding job in communications and a loving boyfriend. She struggled with obesity even though she spent much of her adult life tracking every morsel of food, eating mostly healthy meals, and exercising every day. She had successfully lost weight countless times. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was, she always got it back. She always blamed herself for being obese. She didn’t yet know the biology of obesity.
Excerpted from “Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It’s Like to Be Free” by Ania M. Jastreboff, MD, Ph.D., and Oprah Winfrey. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission from Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Get the book here:
“Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It Means to Be Free”
Shop locally at Librairie.org
For more information:
- “Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It’s Like To Be Free” by Ania M. Jastreboff, MD, Ph.D., and Oprah Winfrey (Avid Reader Press), in hardcover, ebook, and audio formats, available January 13
- oprah.com
- Ania Jastreboff, MD, PhD, Yale School of Medicine
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