The Tamesis
Avid Reader Press 
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Broadcast superstar Oprah Winfrey, who has struggled with her weight most of her life, and Dr. Ania Jastreboff of Yale School of Medicine have teamed up to study the biology of obesity and offer a new way forward.
Their new book is “Enough is Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and a Feeling of Freedom” (To be published on January 13th by Avid Reader Press).
Read the excerpt below, and Don’t miss Jane Pauley’s interview with Winfrey and Jastreboff on CBS Sunday Morning on January 11!
“Enough is Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and a Feeling of Freedom”
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Enough shame and blame
My patient Alice began experiencing self-blame in childhood. Her well-meaning mother put her on a diet when she was a teenager. Even before that, she had begun to develop what she would eventually call her “self-hating voice.” She clearly remembered when she was ten years old, sitting in the front yard with her legs bent, looking at the inner curvature of her legs and wishing they were smaller. “It’s the line where your muscles are, and there’s a curve in there. That’s fat and excess skin. I thought, ‘Oh, if I could just cut that off, then my legs would be perfect.'” I had a pen and I drew lines where I thought my legs should be and where the fat should be cut out. All I know is that I am greater than I want 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 recalled. At thirteen, she was sitting at the table and thinking, “Here’s a plate of three slices of lettuce and a carrot,” and she was wondering how she could get through basketball practice or soccer practice without passing out or blowing up her teammates.
After a few years, her mother put herself and Alice on a carb-free diet. “Atkins is a little big,” Alice said. Her father and two younger brothers were exempt; only the girls of the family were eligible. This basically means that Alice and her mother are still eating everything from the garden except radishes, which contain “too many carbohydrates.”
Three days later, Alice rebelled. She reached for the biscuits in the cabinet: “Mom, I just ate a whole sleeve of soda biscuits!” After hearing this, her mother was not angry with her. Alice shared, “She was also craving carbs and ate herself three saltine crackers. Then dutifully returned to a no-carb diet.”
At the age of sixteen, Alice began tracking her exercise weight. The self-hating voice in her head started to become very specific and clear. “That cupcake you just had – how many calories was it? How many carbs was it?” She described saying it wouldn’t let up, not even with a small bite. It’s heartless.
Fast forward more than thirty years, and by the time Alice was approaching fifty, she had tried every diet and exercise plan in the world: forty-seven, to be exact. Atkins, Keto, South Beach, Zone, Low Carb, No Carb, Ultra Low Fat, Liquid Only, Jillian Michaels, Jane Fonda, Suzanne Somers, Full Body HIIT Workout, Gym Membership, YMCA Weight Coach, DietBet, StepBet, Mediterranean Diet, Vegan, Raw Food Diet, Intermittent Fasting. She even tried hypnosis. She has three teenage children, a satisfying communications job, and a loving boyfriend. Even though she spent most of her adult life tracking every bite of food, eating mostly healthy meals, and exercising every day, she struggled with obesity. She has successfully lost weight countless times. That’s not a problem. The thing is she always gets it back. She always blamed herself for being fat. She also doesn’t know the biology of obesity.
Excerpted from Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and the Sense of Freedom, by Ania M. Jastreboff, MD, PhD, and Oprah Winfrey. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Get the book here:
“Enough is Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and a Feeling of Freedom”
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For more information:
- Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and the Sense of Freedom by Ania M. Jastreboff, MD, PhD, and Oprah Winfrey (Avid Reader Press), available January 13 in hardcover, e-book, and audio formats
- Oprah website
- Ania Jastreboff, MD, PhD, Yale University School of Medicine
