Original subtitles

SG: I’m still alive, it wasn’t all that bad, I s’pose.

0.54

VO SG: I listened to experts talk about the impact junk food has had on our community and how junk food can affect the brain and I went to Middlemore Hospital to meet patients who were suffering the cruel complications of diabetes.

1.08

HH: It can be a hard journey trying to wrap your head around other mental things that go on and the changes in the body.

1.17

VO SG: All done to answer the question – why are we fat?

1.30

VO SG: The Auckland night markets are where people of all ages come to get a bite to eat.

As this is my first time here, I’m keen to see what’s on offer and why this place is so popular with all the people that come here.

1.43

SG: How are you guys going?

1.45

Woman: Bugger!

1.46

SG: What have you got?

1.47

Woman: Alirghty.

There you go.

1.49

SG: Alright.

Is that good?

1.51

Child: Spongy.

1.52

SG: Spongy.

You guys come here much?

1.54

Woman: Yeah, course.

1.55

SG: Every week?

1.56

Woman: Oh, not every week no.

1.57

SG: Most weeks?

1.58

Woman: Yeah.

1.58

SG: How come you come here?

1.59

Woman: Cos the food’s good.

2.00

SG: Food’s good?

2.00

Woman: Yeah.

2.01

SG: What have you had tonight?

2.02

Woman: I had dumplings.

2.03

SG: What have you guys had tonight?

2.04

Man: Butter chicken [indistinct 2.05].

2.05

SG: Butter chicken’s good?

2.07

Woman: I like the chicken kebabs over there – the chicken on the skewer and the [indistinct 2.10].

2.11

SG: Yeah.

2.11

Woman: Those are good.

2.12

Man: There’s teriyaki chicken on the other side [indistinct 2.11].

2.14

SG: Good?

2.14

Man: Oh, mate.

2.15

SG: Healthy?

2.16

Man: [indistinct 2.16]!

2.20

SG: Is there any healthy food here?

2.21

Woman: No.

2.21

Man: Tasty.

2.22

SG: Cheap place to eat?

2.23

Man: Cheap as.

2.24

SG: Is there anything healthy?

2.26

Woman: Only … I dunno.

All the [indistinct 2.29]!

2.31

VO SG: So people know the food’s not healthy but they buy it because it’s tasty and it’s really cheap.

2.39

SG: So what are you gonna order here? You got sausages …

2.41

Man: I’m gonna get a massive as thing – BBQ meal.

2.42

SG: BBQ meal, so you get a sausage, lamb chop, pork chop, chop suey, coleslaw …

2.46

Man: Potato salad.

2.47

SG: And potato salad for $10.00.

2.48

Man: Mm.

Good value.

2.50

SG: Good value.

2.51

Man: I’m all about value.

2.53

SG: So you think it’s healthy?

2.55

Man: Maybe if I eat half of it.

2.57

SG: Half of it? Would you polish the whole thing off?

3.00

Man: I could usually but I’m not, I already had some of these.

3.04

SG: Oh, okay.

3.05

Man: I do have to be careful cos my Dad’s got early onset diabetes.

3.10

SG: Man, this is not being careful.

3.12

Man: Yeah, I don’t eat this every day.

3.15

SG: Every second day?

3.16

Man: No.

3.19

SG: Wow, awesome.

3.20

Man: Sure you don’t want anything?

3.21

SG: No, I’m all good, thanks.

I reckon you’ll have half of that left over that I can share with you! Walking around here I can see everybody’s thoroughly enjoying the food but as a diabetic it’s a complete disaster area for me.

Most of the foot is cooked in refined oil.

Most of the food is refined, starches and grains.

All the meat is totally processed by added sugar, then they’re squirting sugar all over the top of it – it’s all bad news for me.

So the moral of the story is if you get fat you could end up as a diabetic and you can’t treat yourself anymore.

I’m going home for a boiled egg.

Or maybe I’ll cheat.

4.10

VO SG: I’ve come to the Auckland University medical school to speak with Dr Rinki Murphy, an expert in obesity and type-2 diabetes.

4.18

RM: Two hundred and sixty thousand people in New Zealand have diabetes, the majority of those is type 2 diabetes and it costs about a billion dollars a year.

4.28

VO SG: Many different from different backgrounds have developed type 2 diabetes but just because you’re overweight doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to get it.

4.36

RM: Some people deposit excess body weight into their organs at different levels than other people so individuals have a different personal body fat threshold.

The point at which it tips into more dangerous areas that are in the liver and the pancreas and the heart and a marker of those is in the belly.

So people who have increased waist circumference tend to have increased deposition of fat in the liver and the pancreas.

5.07

VO SG: The MRI scan showed that 10% of my pancreas and 33% of my liver was fat.

Rinki shows me what my fatty liver might look like.

5.16

RM: A slice through someone’s liver who I would expect had some excess fat in their liver.

5.24

VO SG: Oh, my God, that’s my liver.

Check it out, it looks like fois gras.

I asked Rinki if losing weight would help.

RM: There have been studies overseas that indicate around 10 to 15 kilos is required to reverse fat that’s led to type 2 diabetes so we say about 10 to 15 kilos.

Individuals may have a different response depending on their ethnicity and the tempo and trajectory of their weight gain during the period that someone’s developed type 2 diabetes.

5.58

SG: Ten to 15 kilos.

5.59

RM: One thing I find useful is to ask people to cast their minds back when they were last well and without diabetes and that weight gives some idea as to what would be an initial target and going beyond that is obviously even better.

6.17

VO SG: Getting your weight down is key to avoiding diabetes or the complications from diabetes.

Dr Rinki’s pep talk inspired me to go extra hard today at the gym but I’ve gotta tell ya, I still hate Luke and the exercise.

6.32

Luke: Strong glute muscles are actually protecting your lower back in this exercise.

That’s really good.

Good.

Keep it going, keep it going.

Lean back, row.

Lean back and row.

There you go – your body’s telling you to stop, your mind’s telling you to stop, just keep going.

Good [indistinct 6.48].

Bend those, knees reach forward.

Ten seconds, 10 seconds, finish strong.

Three, two and one, nice work.

Big breaths, stay relaxed.

Good, now let’s get the rotation [indistinct 7.08] so we’re out of the way.

Good, come back around and do the same rotations in front.

How you feeling?

7.15

VO SG: What do you think, Sherlock?

7.17

Luke: [indistinct 7.17]? I don’t mind the sweat, I’m a trainer! I don’t mind, you can give me a hug if you want.

There it is!

8.01

VO SG: I got together with my support team and something that two of the experts said really surprised m

8.07

WF: It’s taken me 30 years of working in general practice but I’ve come to the conclusion from just looking at people’s health and wellbeing that sleep quality is almost, if not as important, as diet quality.

You’d have to know how important diet is to understand the magnitude of what I’ve just said.

8.27

MW: Dare I say, William, that as the PhD qualified nutritionist here – I 100% agree with that comment.

8.34

WF: Yeah.

8.35

VO SG: It had never occurred to me that sleep had anything to do with my weight or my diabetes.

To find out more about how and why, I talked to sleep specialist Dr Kirk Parsley.

8.45

SG: How you doing? Nice to meet you, Kirk.

8.48

KP: Nice to meet you, Simon.

I was a former Navy Seal and after going to medical school I came back to the Seals team as their doctor and these Navy Seals that were approximately my age were coming in and discussing with me these problems they were having.

One of the things that they were discussing is that they were tending to hold more body fat than they were used to, their blood work was coming back looking like an 80 year old man, just looking like they were pre-diabetic.

I just thought, well, let me look into sleep and see if it could possibly explain the symptoms they were talking about and then I found dozens and dozens of relationships between how much body fat you have and how well you sleep.

The average sleep in America right now, I believe, is 6.2 hours per night and it was about 6.8 hours per night 10 years ago.

Every decade you go back there’s about a 10% decrease in sleep all the way back to the early 1900s.

9.49

KP: We can all survive on a short sleep but when you talk about actually thriving and performing at your best, to date, I don’t think that there’s been anybody who’s been well documented to thrive on less than what we suggest is about 7 and a half hours sleep for an adults.

10.06

VO SG: Which is bad news for me – living the life of a busy chef means I’d be up late working all hours of the night.

So how does less sleep affect us all?

10.18

KP: Sleep contributes to obesity and diabetes in many ways.

It’s primarily through hormones, getting less sleep than you need will affect your Insulin sensitivity in a negative way, much like a diabetic or somebody who’s maybe pre-diabetic and that affects how you store the food you eat.

Then sleep also affects your overall appetite through a couple of other hormones.

Just sleeping one hour less than you need to sleep on average, over the course of the year you’ll put on 14.3 pounds of body fat.

10.49

VO SG: As if lack of sleep isn’t bad enough for your weight, Kirk went on to explain that lack of sleep affects a whole lot more.

10.56

KP: We know that decreasing your sleep increase your risk for all disease – it increases your risk for heart attack, it increases your risk for stroke, it increases the risk for all auto-immune diseases, diabetes, obesity.

It affects your relationships, your risk for suicide risk is greatly enhanced, mood disorders – just about everything.

11.17

VO SG: I asked Kirk to give me some tips for a good night’s sleep.

11.20

KP: The first thing you’ll notice in a modern bedroom is I don’t have any big television there up on my wall which a lot of people tend to have.

I always tell people that your bed is for sleep and sex only.

The other thing you wanna do is make sure, of course, that you have a good quality mattress.

If you’re feeling bed springs and things like that then you’re just gonna be tossing and turning a lot more, you’re gonna be moving, you’re just not gonna get the deepest levels of sleep.

Then you have to have an adequate bed size so if you’re sleeping with somebody else, there has to be enough bed for you both to move around, to get pressure away and to also find cool spots on the bed.

Then we have these black out curtains which is key, no light comes through these whatsoever, goes all the way from your ceiling all the way down to the floor.

This bedroom is so dark at night that you can’t see your hand in front of your face, you keep it nice and cool, keep it nice and comfortable, get rid of the electronics and you’re half way there.

12.21

SG: I thought you said you weren’t allowed any reading but you’ve got reading glasses right by the bed.

12.24

KP: These are actually not reading glasses, what these are is a way to block the blue light.

These are actually shooting glasses but what they’re doing is they’re blocking blue light so once the sun goes down, my wife and I both have these glasses and it’s keeping the blue light out of my eyes and it’s not messing with my circadian rhythm with my body’s ability to entrain with the sunlight.

12.46

VO SG: I was surprised by the difference sleep can make but I was equally shocked to learn that other species might be making me fat.

12.54

ES: There are trillions of bacteria, about 10 times more bacteria in our gut than human cells that we have so in a way we’re actually more microbial than we are human.

These microbes that are living inside of us are controlling so many aspects of our health, they’re helping regulate our metabolism, helping regulate our immune system.

There’s even a connection between the microbes in our gut and our brain so they’re potentially regulating aspects of our mood.

13.23

JS: The gut microbiome not only helps with digestion and intestinal health but it’s involved in regulating our metabolism, it actually changes the set point in our immune system.

There’s really a huge complement of our biology that’s directly impacted by the gut microbiome.

13.41

VO SG: So the microbiome affects lots of things about my health but is it making me fat?

13.47

JS: We’ve known for some time that obese individuals have a somewhat different microbiome than lean individuals and a major question has been is that microbiome that’s different in the obese individuals actually contributing to or causing the obesity.

So researchers did a very clever experiment where they took that obese microbiome and they put it into healthy, normal mice and they compared what happened to those mice in terms of weight gain to other mice that just received a lean microbiome and what they saw was the mice that received the obese microbiome gained weight more rapidly.

It was a very vivid demonstration that the gut microbiome can actually cause obesity.

14.29

WC: If you reverse that and put the bacteria from a skinny mouse in a fat mouse, it can lose a third of its body weight, that’s pretty dramatic.

14.36

VO SG: Dramatic sounds good but I’m a chef, not a mouse.

14.40

WC: The question is for humans – will we behave like mice? Can we change a human’s gut bacteria and will that change their risk of obesity and diabetes and the answer right now is we don’t know but if it did it could be dramatic, it could be a game changer.

15.02

VO SG: Okay but what can we do right now?

15.04

FJ: What it comes down to in the end is pretty simple and that is looking at the nutrition guidelines and following them.

If you’re eating your vegetables and fruits and whole grains and legumes and nuts and seeds which are all part of the national dietary guidelines in most countries then you’ll be doing your gut a favour.

16.02

VO SG: On my journey I’ve heard what’s causing the obesity epidemic but how do we fix it? Is there something that will solve this problem?

16.11

WC: We’ve been in pursuit of the holy grail which is the quick fix, give me the pill – I eat badly I don’t exercise, I’m gonna get obese, I’m gonna get diabetes – give me the pill so I can still live badly – live fast, live badly – but it fixes my problems, it fixes obesity, it fixes diabetes.

We’ve gotta stop thinking about the pill, we’ve gotta look at our lifestyles and we’ve gotta think about making some hard choices.

16.36

NM: We’ve gotta steer away from the recent trend of the last 50, 60 years of dominating our diet with processed foods that have a physical chemical form that doesn’t suit us.

16.49

GS: It’s a simple philosophy, it’s like is this stuff coming out of a packet? I need a food label to understand what’s in it? Yes, okay, that’s not food so don’t eat that.

We’ve ended up with these star ratings and colour codes and traffic lights for what we should and shouldn’t eat – the mere fact that we need those for packaged food should tell you to step away from the packet.

17.12

VO SG: Ditching the processed food is a good idea but there’s so much food available, it’s hard to know what’s healthy and what isn’t.

Is dieting the answer?

17.21

NM: Going on a diet will make you gradually lose weight but at some point your survival mechanism in your brain is gonna kick in and it’s gonna think we’re now starving and if there’s any food about we’d better eat it pronto because we’re going to starve to death.

That’s the inbuilt subconscious mechanism that’s going on and what tends to happen with dieters and we know the term yo yo dieting – when they go back on eating or splurging out on foods and eating the way their brain is telling them to eat, they’re going to put on weight very quickly.

17.56

VO SG: There are other factors that cause dieting to fail like stress.

18.01

SJG: Some people when they’re stressed will overeat.

Other people will actually eat less when they’re stressed but one interesting thing is that almost everyone will change the types of foods that they select when they’re stressed.

Almost everyone will go and shift toward more calorie dense, so called comfort foods, when they’re stressed and those tend to be fattening, unhealthy foods.

18.23

LF: A lot of people eat use eating as a stress reduction technique so if you can’t learn a different and more effective or hopefully more better mechanism for dealing with stress then you’re gonna have a very hard time following any diet for any period of time.

18.44

VO SG: But if you’re overweight and want a lifestyle change which of the diets out there is the best one to take up?

18.51

RM: One of the most interesting studies on this was the Mediterranean diet in a predimed study where about 400 people were randomised to the usual American guideline diet versus a olive oil supplemented group or a nut supplemented group which were both called the Mediterranean diet.

What the study showed that people in those nut supplemented group and the olive oil group actually got diabetes at half the rate at what the people on the traditional American recommendation diet got.

So it suggests to me that a Mediterranean diet may have particular benefits for promoting less fat spilling over into the pancreas and the liver and protecting against type 2 diabetes.

19.40

VO SG: Our modern western diet is also out of touch with out gut bacteria.

19.45

JS: If you look at these hunter gatherer populations that have no western disease, no obesity and you look at what they eat, its primarily plants in large quantities.

They eat 150 grams of dietary fibre per day, we eat 15 grams of dietary fibre per day – a 10 fold decrease in the food that feeds our gut microbiota.

We’re actually starving our microbial selves to some degree because we’re not eating the dietary fibre that the microbes in our gut rely upon.

20.18

VO SG: So a healthy diet starts with plenty of plant foods which have less calories, are filling and have added benefits.

20.26

FJ: Plant foods are high in fibre, they’re high in antioxidants and vitamins and minerals so this is your vegetables of all different colours.

It’s your legumes so your chickpeas and your lentils and your beans and your nuts and your seeds, your whole grains, quinoa – those sorts of foods.

The foods that we know are good for us.

20.51

VO SG: We also need protein which is missing in starchy, processed food and is helpful as it reduces hunger.

20.58

SJG: Protein, as you’re losing weight, can make your brain think that you’re not starving.

Normally your brain would think you’re starving as you’re losing weight – you’d get hungry, the way your body burns calories would start to diminish but if you eat a high protein diet it can attenuate those things so you feel more comfortable, you’re maintaining more lean mass and you’re maintaining your calorie expenditure as you’re losing weight.

21.27

VO SG: I’ve been watching what I eat and exercising but what makes the biggest difference?

21.25

NH: Last one.

21.31

SG: It’s hard, there’s a bit of weight to lift up.

21.34

NH: Nutrition is the most fundamental thing but I don’t see it as a pie graph where you’ve got one percentage on one side and one percentage on the other.

I see it as what you’d call a Venn diagram where they very much overlap and are complementary so if you’re exercising in the right way and you’ve got your nutrition pretty well sorted, those 2 things together are incredibly powerful and a lot more powerful than simply doing one or the other.

21.58

GS: This only happens once a week but the everyday reality for people is that they’re bombarded with unhealthy options.

22.05

VO SG: But we live in a world where we’re constantly presented with tempting, sugary, processed food.

22.13

NM: There are a few things we could be doing, a number of them our Government authorities are trying to do already to various extents.

We’re trying to educate people, that’s the first thing.

Educate people what are the right foods to eat and what aren’t.

22.26

SG: What have you guys got?

22.29

Child: We’ve got a snowman and Coke.

22.32

SG: And Coke.

22.33

Child: Yeah.

22.34

VO SG: Education is one way forward but not everyone agrees it will work.

22.35

SG: Sugar’s bad.

22.39

Child: Sugar’s good.

22.40

WW: If you educate people mostly the message only goes to the people that are already fairly healthy so we find it just increases the gap so that the people who are already healthy, they get healthier because they want to be healthy and they’re interested in their education.

Then the people who are not so interested, they are not yet changing their behaviour because of the education.

23.02

VO SG: Dr Wilma Waterlander wanted to test the effect of price on people’s food buying decisions.

She set up an experiment in a computerised virtual supermarket and sent people grocery shopping.

23.15

WW: The virtual supermarket really looks like a real supermarket so it’s three dimensional and people can shop with their trolley, they go around the shelves and click products with their mouse.

We ask people to do a shop as they would do normally for their households but what we can do in the backend is that we change things without telling people.

Say 100 people go in, they have normal prices, 100 other people go in they get a fat tax and then we can see how that influences their purchases.

23.46

VO SG: Wilma manipulated the price of products to see if it would encourage people to make healthier food choices.

23.52

WW: We have done about four different experiments in the virtual supermarket – subsidy on fruits and vegetables, we’ve done one where we did taxes on unhealthy food and subsidies on healthy food.

One where we changed the prices and changed the labels and one where we did a soft drink tax.

We found that in all experiments that changing the price is very effective in changing consumption so if you introduce a subsidy people buy more healthy food and if you introduce a tax on unhealthy food people buy less of the unhealthy food.

24.27

SG: [indistinct 24.27].

No sugar, right?

24.31

Man: Yeah.

24.

VO SG: Should our government be subsidising healthy food and taxing things like sugar?

24.37

ST: Yeah, I think we’ve got to go down the same track as tobacco with sugary products.

They’re causing us all kinds of harm, most of us are having a truck load of sugar without even thinking about it.

It’s laced in the manufactured foods that we eat.

24.56

GS: A tax on sugary drinks has been shown to be effective in Mexico quite recently.

They bought it in in 2014 and it showed that with a 10% tax consumption reduced by 12%.

The reduction in consumption was greater for people of lower socioeconomic status, they reduced their intake of sugary drinks by about 17%.

25.21

SG: Lovely work, guys.

25.23

WW: It’s not just about introducing taxes or subsidies but also thinking about how can it be that unhealthy food is so cheap? Why does a Big Mac only cost $2.00 or $3.00 and how can it be that we have all these shelves of all these unhealthy foods? Thinking one step further into what are we doing at the moment? How do international agricultural subsidies and policies and commercial pressure influence the food system and how can we change that?

25.51

WC: I think we all need to make more active decisions about our lives, we are all quite passive.

It’s easy to be passive and become obese – you actually have to become much more active to prevent becoming obese.

26.07

VO SG: An “active” role is just what one south Auckland school has taken and they’ve seen huge changes for the better in their students.

26.16

SG: Dilworth Rural Campus has a real different way of feeding the kids.

26.22

JR: It started off we were really interested in getting kids fit when they came out here because they do a lot of outdoors and we do daily fitness, that’s an important part of what we do.

What we noticed was that in our first couple of years, really, that even though we did a lot of outdoor stuff and daily fitness that we had a lot of big boys who, I guess, had gained more muscle but they actually weren’t dropping a lot of weight and I was thinking, why is that because they’re eating pretty well.

Then I had conversation with my chef and said, “I think we need to maybe start to look at our diet.”

26.53

VO SG: John asked AUT dietician Dr Caryn Zinn for advice.

She suggested cutting back on the carbs and removing sugar from the boys’ diet.

But when head chef Craig heard about the idea, however, he was sceptical.

27.09

CJ: I thought this is just bonkers so I thought, oh well, I’ve gotta do this myself before I take it to the kids and stand in front of 100 kid’s parents.

27.18

SG: You don’t look like you need to lose weight, mate!

27.21

CJ: This is 27 kilos later and a year and a half.

27.26

SG: Twenty seven kilos?

27.26

VO SG: Craig’s massive weight loss is an inspirational story in itself but he still had to convince everyone else that this was going to work.

27.35

CJ: First year talking to the parents, talking to the boys getting them to understand.

We started doing the pulled pork and the cereals went and the butter chicken, the boys like those sort of dishes.

27.45

SG: Sounds pretty tasty.

What did you used to eat before you came here for breakfast? What would you have at home?

27.48

Boy: KFC, McDonald’s and all sorts of fast foods at restaurants and sugary foods.

27.55

SG: Are you serious?

27.56

Boy: Yes.

27.57

SG: Really?

27.58

Boy: Yeah.

27.59

SG: What do you think about what you’re now eating when you’re at school compared to at home?

28.04

Boy: It’s a lot better, it’s a lot more filling and nutritional and it helps us get through the day and you have no sugar highs and sugar lows and all those sorts of things.

28.13

VO SG: The boys are rostered on to help make the evening meal.

Tonight’s dinner is lamb curry with fresh green beans and cauliflower rice – high in protein and vegetables and low in carbs.

28.24

CJ: We’ve got our nice grated cauliflower and again we’re gonna put that into our woks, little bit of oil, we’ll flavour that up, stir fry that up and we’ll put a cup of that with our lamb korma tonight.

28.36

SG: I’m working with a spoon.

28.37

CJ: You’re not bad, get in there, go.

We’ll keep building the flavours in it anyway but that’s a start, we’re gonna put more spice, put more seasoning.

28.48

SG: Delicious.

28.49

CJ: If we can keep these boys happy, keep them learning and teach them some good, healthy, nutritious meals, give them good, healthy, nutritious meals on the way it puts them in good stead, eh?

29.01

VO SG: Come dinner time, the students can’t seem to get enough of this wholesome food.

29.06

SG: How’s dinner?

29.07

Boy: Yum.

29.08

SG: Yeah?

29.09

VO SG: Both students and teachers eat from the same menu and everyone is enjoying the benefits of this nutritious, tasty meal.

29.16

JR: The main thing we’ve got rid of is a tonne of sugar.

29.20

SG: Literally a tonne?

29.21

JR: Yeah, it’s actually over.

Craig estimates it’s over a tonne of sugar out of the diet.

29.27

SG: That’s a lot of sugar.

29.28

JR: That’s a lot of sugar.

Last year we did the whole year on this new diet and we noticed a significant difference in our bigger kids, particularly in the waist measurements coming down to the point those boys were different body shapes altogether by the time they got to the end of last year.

We figured this is it – it’s not just exercise, diet was really the key thing that made the difference.

30.34

VO SG: I’ve been working hard for three months now and finally I’ve got enough confidence to go to the gym rather than just working out at home.

Luke: Keep the core tight, good.

[indistinct 30.47] good, jump back.

There it is, jump up.

Perfect.

Keep the weight over the hands, that’s good.

30.54

VO SG: Well, this is it, I’m ready to redo all the tests I did three months ago and it’s time to see if all the expert nutritional and fitness advice has paid off.

I’ve been working out three days a week.

I haven’t necessarily loved it but I’m pretty sure Luke has got me to the stage where I’ll be fit enough to show a marked improvement.

31.18

Avon: It looks like you missed your appointment with the beautician again so we have to …

31.22

SG: I’ve come to see you, mate, I know that you’re gonna do your nice little artistic shaving thing so you just fill your boots.

31.32

Avon: Yeah, why not.

31.36

SG: I’m back here again, I’m getting my chest shaved very artistically done by Avon, thank you.

31.44

Avon: Pleasure.

31.46

SG: Hopefully I’ll be a bit fitter on that treadmill.

31.50

VO SG: The test is the same as before, ECG electrodes will monitor my heart rate and an oxygen mask measures my exercise capacity on the treadmill.

Last time I definitely ran out of puff, let’s see if i can do better this time.

32.04

Matt: In less than a minute it’s gonna start and if you recall it started at quite a low speed to begin with and it’s gonna work its way up to a brisk pace and then that gradient’s gonna come in thereafter.

Hopefully it’ll feel a little bit easier to you this time.

32.22

VO SG: I’m eased into the test with a gentle amble but it’s not long before the speed increases and, hey, between you and me, I’m quietly confident.

32.31

Matt: This is where last time Simon really increased but it’s looking really nice so far.

32.39

VO SG: The 6% incline is punishing on the legs.

At this stage last time my heart rate increased dramatically but I’m feeling good so I’ll push on.

32.49

Matt: Great stuff, Simon, that’s it.

Just come a little forward on the treadmill.

Good work, keep it going, keep pushing.

Doing really well.

That’s it, keep it up.

32.57

Man: Doing well, Simon.

Keep digging.

32.59

Matt: Keep those good strides going.

Doing well.

There’s about 45 seconds left for the test.

33.11

VO SG: Now my heart’s pounding and breathing in the mask is very difficult but I really wanna finish this.

I’m not giving up.

33.27

Matt: And coming down, coming down.

That’s the one.

Awesome, good effort.

33.40

SG: This is something you have to do every week, every week – good for us.

33.46

VO SG: But did I do better than last time?

33.49

Matt: The difference between last time and this time, especially when you got to around about that 6 to 9% gradient on the treadmill, so it was getting up to a reasonable slope there, last time you really ramped up and basically finished off pretty quick thereafter.

This time you’ve gone on another two stages further and capacity cardiovascular fitness has improved substantially so that’s gone from 26 up to 30 which is doesn’t sound like much in terms of just general numbers but that’s a big jump in terms of fitness.

To go from that point to there is around about a 15% or so risk reduction in terms of cardiovascular disease so moving that up’s a really, really good thing to see.

Yeah, a lot better.

34.41

SG: I’m pleased I didn’t make a total disgrace out of myself but I am seeing some results.

34.47

Matt: What we’re looking for is to make a big jump all the way down to this phase through here which is approximately the 25th but you’ve gone even further round about to 42nd percentile approximate.

You’ve made that really big risk reduction leap.

35.05

SG: When I see my cardiovascular risk has decreased substantially and if you just go to the gym or go for a walk or go for a run, you don’t know what difference you’re making to your body so I’ve seen some hard concrete evidence – my blood pressure was good all the way through, I didn’t fall off the damn thing at the end so I’m making progress and the gym’s working.

35.33

VO SG: Fitness is looking good but what about body fat?

35.36

SG: Hi Pam.

35.37

PVH: Hi Simon, welcome back.

35.41

SG: Body Pod time.

35.41

PVH: You can see the BodPod’s all ready and waiting for you.

35.45

VO SG: Last time I climbed into this thing i was carrying 40% body fat.

I’m really hoping to have dropped below 30% so I’m not in the risky category anymore.

Then it’s on to the DEXA for a quick scan.

Three months ago it showed a heap of fat around my waist and thighs but I’m hopeful there’s been some changes there, too.

With both tests now complete, it’s time for the results.

36.10

PVH: Looking at what the BodPod tells us and the BodPod is pretty much gold standard for body composition and as you can see here your percentage body fat is now 33.8% whereas it was 40%.

So that’s quite a considerable loss.

36.31

VO SG: It’s an improved result but if I can be brutally honest, I’m bloody disappointed.

Although I’ve lost 7% body fat, I’m still in the risky category and I’m gutted.

36.44

PVH: With people who are Insulin resistant or even with type 2 diabetes we see a marked improvement in Insulin sensitivity with just a 10% body fat loss and that’s close – we’re getting close to 10%,.

It’s certainly on the way to being an awful lot more healthy and it shows that whatever it is you’ve been doing it’s been working really well.

Your muscle mass is gone from 55.09 and now it’s 55.7.

Muscle mass increase can make quite a difference to overall health but also it really will assist in weight loss because muscle is quite highly metabolic so it burns a lot more energy.

The more muscle mass you’ve got, even if you’re not actually exercising right at the time, that muscle is burning more energy.

37.47

VO SG: When we compare the old DEXA results with the new I feel a little better because the belly fat, which is highlighted in yellow, has gotten smaller.

This will further reduce the risks of cardiovascular disease and diabetes so I have turned a corner.

37.53

SG: Oh, well, that’s the answer, isn’t it? I’ve just gotta keep going …

37.56

PVH: Keep going.

37.58

SG: … and it’s sustainable loss that I’m looking for, isn’t it?

38.01

PVH: Yeah, mm hm.

38.01

SG: Perhaps I was expecting a magic formula weight loss and I haven’t got that but I have lost weight, I have lost a lot quite a lot.

38.12

PVH: You’ve lost a lot of weight and that was dangerous weight so that’s good to have gone and it’s only going to get easier now because I suspect you’re probably a lot fitter and maybe it might be a good time now to look at your exercise programme and start building a bit more resistance training, start getting that lean mass up a little bit more.

38.34

SG: Okay.

Resistance training – awesome!

39.31

Tamara: Hi.

39.32

SG: How are you, Tamara?

39.32

Tamara: How are you, Simon? Good, how are you? You look great! Wow, really good.

39.37

SG: I’m buying these thin jerseys.

Slimming [indistinct 39.40].

39.40

Tamara: Oh, seriously? You look marvellous.

Let’s check what the numbers are doing, hey?

39.45

SG: Okay.

39.46

SG: So it’s crunch time – the tape measure.

Tamara: Just wrap this around here.

That’s 101 so that’s great.

39.55

VO SG: After being measured and weighed by Tamara I’m off to see Dr William Ferguson for the last time.

I’m anxious to see what he thinks.

40.03

Tamara: I can’t remember what you were at the beginning but I’m sure that’s …

40.06

SG: A tad more.

40.07

Tamara: A tad more.

Great.

Alright, let’s go through and give these to William.

40.10

WF: Simon, you’ve really achieved something here, I can see it.

You’ve really changed your shape and I first realised, of course, that you’d really succeeded when I saw this BodPod image.

The thing that just leaps off the page is how your central fat distribution has just melted away.

I’m just so impressed with the with what you’ve been able to do here but let’s go through it.

Your weight has come down from the first visit at 95 to 84 and that’s actually taken your BMI – your Body Mass Index – from 31, which I remember you were shocked to discover, classified you as obese, it’s taken you down to 27.5.

40.56

SG: So am I still in the obese category?

40.59

SG: No, you’re not obese – you’re in the overweight category and if we can get you to 25, down from 27.5, we’d say you’re at the upper end of the normal range.

Your waist circumference has come down from 112 to 101 – you’ve lost 11 centimetres of lard from your middle.

41.20

SG: That’s quite a long – 11 centimetres in my world is that long, right? That’s quite a lot.

41.26

WF: And along with that, according to the BodPod, you’ve put on a kilo of muscle and a lot of people when they go on weight crash loss things they actually lose muscle as well so that’s a positive gain.

The next thing – the report I have from your fitness man …

41.47

SG: Luke.

41.47

WF: Yeah, is that you’ve gone from somewhere probably below the 15th percentile up to the 40th percentile in terms of your fitness.

The overall picture is completely clear – you’ve just normalised everything, you really have.

With what you’ve done, despite these setbacks, you’ve really taken yourself into the normal range of almost everything.

42.12

VO SG: So I’m almost normal but it’s the internal fat that was killing me – back to the MRI to look inside

42.20

SG: Three months late and I’m back and I’ve gotta go back in that thing and, let me tell you, I don’t like it at all.

You’re in a tube and you’re all constrained and it’s not very nice but hopefully it’s gonna be friendly to me with the results, hopefully my liver and pancreas doesn’t have quite so much fat around it.

That's certainly what I’m hoping for.

Wish me luck.

42.54

RH: Breathe in, breathe out.

Stop breathing.

Breathe normally.

43.07

JL: Let’s see if your work regime has worked out for you.

This is the result.

43.16

SG: Oh, check out that pancreatic fat.

43.19

JL: Look.

First scan on the left and second scan and the total abdominal fat you reduced by 5%.

It’s a huge reduction.

Those are the bad fat which are infiltrating your organs and in your abdominal chamber and then, as you can see, subcutaneous fat – no change which is good.

Why? Because those are the fats keep you warm is in your skin and keep you warm.

You don’t want to reduce that.

The visceral fat – that infiltrate your organs within your abdominal cavity – reduced by 5%.

The most amazing thing is pancreatic fat – you reduced nearly half.

It was 10.8 before, as I said, normal people will be around 5 and you’re normal!

44.16

SG: Normal range?

44.16

JL: Yeah, almost normal.

Pretty much normal.

44.20

SG: Pretty much.

44.21

JL: Pretty much normal.

This is the hardest fat to reduce and I don’t know how you do it but you did it and that’s the most significant risk factor for type 2 diabetes.

From that result alone, I can tell your diabetes parameters should be improved significantly.

Fantastic and I’m a little bit astonished, actually, because never seen people can reduce 50% of the pancreatic fat that quick.

As I said, people need to do surgery to get that and you, whatever you’re doing, you’ve already achieved that – so amazing!

45.02

VO SG: Professor Jun Lu’s enthusiasm encourages me to ask the impossible.

45.09

SG: Could I potentially reverse this diabetes?

45.12

JL: That’s a possibility, that’s what I said because if people with bariatric surgery can reduce their pancreatic fat and then can turn back into normal then you have a high chance to be normal.

I don’t know whether you’re normal or not yet but from that point, from pancreatic fat alone – you’re nearly normal.

45.35

SG: And if I keep going …

45.36

JL: There is a possibility that you’ll be diabetes free and hopefully next year I will see you diabetes free!

45.46

SG: Alright, it’s a mission.

45.48

JL: Yes.

45.49

SG: High five for that.

45.51

JL: That’s amazing.

45.55

SG: Shall we taste the basil first?

45.57

VO SG: Back when I was diagnosed as an obese diabetic, I worried that I wouldn’t live to see my daughter grow up, that she wouldn’t get to know me.

46.07

SG: Do you wanna try some?

46.08

VO SG: I don’t feel that way now.

I’ve had great advice and support and I’ve learned a lot.

46.16

SG: When you get this and you smell it.

46.16

VO SG: Now I know why so many of us are fat and I know what I have to do to change that.

I’ve turned a corner but the process is not finished.

Like everyone else, I’ll have to keep making the effort.

But it’s definitely worth it.

Béo phì là cuộc khủng hoảng sức khỏe

lớn nhất thế giới hiện nay.

Lần đầu tiên trong lịch sử,

con cái đối mặt với nguy cơ

tuổi thọ ngắn hơn bố mẹ.

Chúng ta ăn uống kém lành mạnh hơn

và ngày càng béo hơn.

Đó là một gánh nặng lớn

đối với hệ thống y tế.

Chúng ta có thể làm gì đây?

Xin chào, tôi là Simon Gault

và tôi là đầu bếp.

Cuộc sống của tôi chỉ có đồ ăn,

tôi yêu khoảnh khắc được ăn uống.

Nhưng thật không may,

tôi trở nên to béo.

Giờ tôi lại mắc thêm bệnh tiểu đường

căn bệnh đang từ từ giết chết tôi.

Và giờ đây tôi quyết định đi tìm hiểu xem

"Vì sao ta béo?"

In the second episode I got down and dirty with an excruciating fitness regime. Trong tập 2, tôi đã

0.51