Obese and Overweight in NC - "Overweight State" - A WRAL Documentary

from WRAL needles this is focal point you love our burgers bacon breakfast Bistro sandwich only its honor the jalapeno steak burger [Music] everything's gotten bigger beer and it's not just fast food we're bigger - do you want to look good you got to lose the weight too many of us in North Carolina look like this it's actually pretty alarming and it's no secret why people eat more calories than they expend it's easy to avoid activity sort of engineered a lot of activity out of our lives and it's easy to eat too much if you got to McDonald's get you know like number one combo or whatever you got anywhere get the combo with a little shake with a soda yeah meals like that may be cheap but there's another price to pay I'm tired of being the heaviest person in the room not to mention the risk for high blood pressure diabetes and heart disease for the first time since recorded time our lifespan is now starting to decrease instead of increase because of obesity what should we do about our overweight state [Music] while you watch this program you may be sitting down to dinner or maybe even a snack and there's nothing wrong with that except that too many of us do too much sitting and too much eating the result nearly 2/3 of North Carolinians are overweight or obese in fact to put it bluntly North Carolina is the 14th fattest state in the country so over the next half hour we hope to show you why what it costs all of us and what we can do about it and just for fun I'm walking while you're watching to make a point at the end of the program come on Doug and Sarah Erickson are like most of us they were thinner and more active in their 20s but you know wife kicks in you have a family you have a job there was less time to cook at home well we don't have time for that let's go eat out let's grab something through the drive-through and then there were the between meal snacks very heavily buttered popcorn chips nuts sometimes cookies there's four quarters of football that's time for four different things to eat you know and sitting with the bag and eating it not putting a portion in a bowl and eating it that way at work the Erickson sidled day at computers and they gave a biking and racquetball years ago I was noticing the weight gain and then the 30s I just you know it ballooned it's not impossible but it's difficult to get comfortable in an airline seat you know I can barely snap the seat belt and you know movie seats sometimes aren't comfortable and and things like that I'm tired of of having the weight sort of control what I do in my life there's another car coming the Erickson's have plenty of company a recent study shows that nearly 63 percent of adults in North Carolina are overweight and nearly twenty-six percent of them are obese reason scientifically that it occurs is that people eat more calories than they expend activity so it's really a very simple scientific explanation while genetics may predispose someone to obesity it doesn't guarantee it I could take you put you in a hospital ward and not feed you much other than some water and vitamins and you'll lose weight no matter what your your genetics are being overweight increases the risk of cardiovascular disease diabetes and other health problems just about every one of these health consequences can be reversed by losing weight and so can the waste of money those health consequences cost the state 24 billion dollars a year in medical care and lost productivity so six weeks ago you made a major change the Erickson's knows air future is brighter if they're lighter so they entered a weight loss program at Duke how would you characterize the type of foods that you're eating that Sarah wants to shed between 80 and 100 pounds the first two weeks the cravings for the strongest Doug wants to lose between 50 and 70 we hope to someday not be classified in the overweight category step right on there later we'll check in to see how the Erickson's are doing she gets a snack attack because she's watching TV and seeing all these food ads but next the example were setting for our state's children for the first time in human history our children are not going to live as long as we do and that's and that's historic and monumental you're watching the focal point from WRAL news the children of overweight people tend to be overweight too doctors say there's a cycle there you've already heard them say it's not just genetic so what does that say about our future when nearly a third of our state's children are either overweight or well on their way girl at 16 Ashley and amber Anderson lead busy lives there's school after school jobs what's it called and they play volleyball and fall and softball in spring maybe life gotten away and it was just easier to stop between activities and and stop at a fast food place and get hamburgers and fries and eat them on the way and mom made sure there was plenty to snack on at home when our friends would come over she would go and buy all these little chocolate cakes and everything because our friends like snack food too you want from your choices at school weren't much better at least about lunch like every day and be like pizza and fries and chocolate milk chicken and fries something with fries eventually it caught up with them we were really over waiting and like our body messed and my body mass index was like off the charts and like hers was like really really high - I blame myself give us Lord our daily bread oh man Ashley and Amber's mother has also struggled with her weight she says she didn't set a good example as most Americans we love to eat so it was just you know I love my fried food I love my desserts and I you know if I was gonna have them I couldn't very well sit there and say you can't have it we all hit a point where we looked at ourselves in the mirror and said oh we got to do something this is not good hi girls are you doing the girls had high blood pressure and were borderline diabetic 20 years ago we didn't diagnose much type 2 diabetes and children and now it's fairly common I'm just going to check your eyes - the Anderson twins joined the high five for fitness program at Duke Children's Hospital it treats children under 18 who are overweight or on their way there once it was up today probably about 80% of those children already have high blood pressure and we've seen several kids between the age of 4 and 7 months who are already overweight and what about the activity the program promotes good nutrition exercise and provides counseling for the psychological scar as many of the children have we know that they're often bullied we know that their rates of depression are much higher than their normal weight peers that makes that time very very difficult and you guys are rewarding yourselves parents are involved in the treatment one of the best things parents can do for their children is to eat healthy themselves and to change their own behaviors and role model that for their children for the first time in history children have a shorter life expectancy than their parents I mean shouldn't that be enough to just wake people up well we're talking about cultural change and it's very in rained change doesn't come easy in our schools where children spend much of their day things like sausage pizza corndogs and french fries are still on school lunch menus why it's all about money it's money versus health for kids in many cases yes why aren't you in that's because the state's child nutrition programs make money off the school lunches they sell the state says they can't afford to immediately stop selling the most popular items we could bankrupt some of the counties if we did that in and then in the nutritional arena so the state required transition to healthier lunches is starting in elementary schools first hopes are that as those students move on the transition will then be easier in middle and high schools we believe that we can begin to educate kids over time to make the right choices it in many schools kids can still make the choice to buy sugary soft drinks out of bending machines why allowed these vendors in the public schools at all well again revenue unfortunately education is costly soft drink revenues help pay for things like football uniforms band instruments and other extras but school systems are working with soft drink vendors to provide more sugar free options as for exercise the state says only half of elementary and middle schools are complying with its requirement that students get at least thirty minutes of physical activity a day only a few provide more have seen less and less physical education less time for students to get physical activity time and primarily that's because of the rigorous academic strains that are put on teachers and students even though there's medical evidence linking physical activity to better academic performance clearly academics are extremely important but if your child is not healthy the academic piece is gonna go want it okay I'm gonna have you on touch base with the dietitian again just later we'll check in to see how the Anderson twins are doing in their weight loss Pro but next if the answer is as simple as calories in versus calories out why are so many of us overweight it's really easy to sit there on the couch and eat but to burn off those few calories that you eat it's a lot of work you're watching a focal point from WRAL news it's hard to imagine that anybody would want to be overweight and by now just about everybody knows how to avoid it but for many of us it just seems to happen it's no surprise though when you consider our behavior and our environment ok good I can feel you guys are ready to work out hard today it's January 2nd and a lot of people are trying to live up to the resolution that they made yesterday my resolution was to get in shape get in better shape I made a new year's resolution to lose 30 pounds to get down to 200 woke up like 5 pounds of cookie weight I need to get off set people see the new year as a renewal of themselves and they want to take that opportunity to make enormous changes in their lifestyle what happens is that people make all those changing it becomes too much for them to continue doing it every year I kind of forget after 3 months why I wanted to do it and it's easier to eat Bojangles and workout so as a society we've gotten used to easy if you look at the world around us we've sort of engineered our world to make it harder to get physical activity we work at computers watch TV play video games we use moving sidewalks escalators and elevators many of us take the elevator instead of walking up just one flight of stairs people circle parking lots and wait for the closest space to open when there are plenty of open spaces just a short walk away they're missing the chance to burn some extra calories probably wasting more time and sometimes even holding up others behind them then there's the drive-thru and why walk in when we could just sit here and have our food handed to us thank you and what about that food were being handed the big twin from Hardee's two for three bucks we're surrounded by cheap and often unhealthy food and we get bombarded by as encouraging us to buy it was just grease on the bond just how unhealthy can some of that food be a nutrition expert gives us the skinny on some fattening fast food starting with this bacon egg and cheese breakfast sandwich a large amount of fat and around 500 calories so not a great way to start your day for lunch it's a 1/3 pound cheeseburger with large fries and an extra-large coke this is 1,800 calories for this meal oh my word that's more than I need in one day 18:18 calories and 85 grams of fat the drink alone is about 400 calories it really is calories count I mean we can count carbs we can count fat but really it's calories that matter an afternoon snack of a coke and a pack of NAB's is 11 grams of fat and 400 calories and for dinner it's delivery pizza this pizza 2 slices of a 14-inch pizza with cheese and pepperoni is around 600 calories the total for this day of eating about 3,300 calories and about this much artery-clogging fat this is over 150 grams of fat it's over a cup of fat Carol gave me that cup of fat as a souvenir so I keep that container of lard that Carolyn gave me right up here on my computer and I like to do that so that every time somebody brings something in say some sort of treat or something like that I can look at that chunk of fat and realize that might be what I'm eating what about a chicken dish from a popular Italian chain restaurant chicken marsala seems a reasonably healthy it sounds healthy can be healthy until you have three chicken breasts in a serving and a huge serving of potatoes cooked in a lot of olive oil then you add a salad with dressing and croutons and a garlic bread stick and you're looking at a meal that's a little over a thousand calories it's called portion Distortion as people start to think it's normal to eat this much for dinner three chicken breast is not a normal serving that's more than really we need every day on the dinner buffet and who eats only what they need at an all-you-can-eat buffet for many paying a limited price for unlimited food means loading up to get their money's worth and we have to think about weighing the difference between getting our money's worth and taking care of our health because there sometimes can be two very different things so maybe we should purge the urge to splurge on those low buffet rates split those unfit Restaurant plates and get the kid size if we just have to have the burger and fries having that Big Mac or those fries or even supersizing at once in a while is probably not a big deal it's when people make that their routine that it becomes a real problem over time calories add up if you don't use them up for example a difference of a hundred calories a day that you consume or burn can lead to a weight gain or weight loss of 10 pounds a year one glazed doughnut it's around 200 calories so it's not that terrible if you can just eat one but one a day unless you burn those calories up can put on an extra 20 pounds a year you have to run about two miles to burn off a single glazed doughnut that means the runners in NC state's annual Krispy Kreme run need to go a lot further than the races for miles to burn off the dozen doughnuts they eat at the halfway point it was a good idea at the time not even halfway there little heart monitor says I born I've burned off 420 calories eating less exercising more may seem simple but how do we get an entire state to do it everybody really needs to work together to make sure that people understand how important this truly is to learn more about the issues covered in this episode of focal point visit wral.com and click on news then documentaries if someone's overweight it's up to them to do something about it but what do we do about our entire overweight state that's a little more complicated so move more each day your body would thank you in 2002 the state Division of Public Health launched a campaign to promote healthy eating and exercise it's called eat smart move more we're doing our best to get the word out best we can I think people are starting to catch on people definitely get the word from the restaurant industry it spends tens of millions of dollars a year on television advertising in North Carolina alone you live here eat smart move more campaign has less than two million dollars a year to spend on its entire campaign so does sweet tea and other sugary drinks are full of calories it's spent a poultry $136,000 on radio and TV advertising how do you compete it's hard the fast food industry Hobbit obviously has a lot more money than we do so the point is just trying to educate people the state school system is at a disadvantage too we had a million dollar budget in North Carolina to push the appropriate nutrition the major soft Drake industries had hundreds of millions of dollars to push their products at least more healthy choices are appearing in school cafeterias some say more pressure needs to be put on school systems to make sure students get the required exercise - we've got to hold schools accountable in some way such as we do with test scores in order to make sure that we provide that physical education and physical activity time for students many people would like to see more school recreational facilities open after-school hours so that the public that paid for them can use them a big part of being able to be active is having access to facilities to be active so you guys some want state and local governments to fund more parks and greenways if the state in the communities work together more these venues would be available and I think it would really help the obesity situation so would more employers helping to cover the cost of weight-loss programs and encouraging healthy lifestyles but it really starts with each of us we can park a little farther away and walk just a little more we can take the stairs instead of the elevator we can drink water instead of that super-sized soda it's the small daily changes that people make that actually make a difference right now you're at a healthy weight after about three months amber Anderson has lost 34 pounds and her sister Ashley lost 26 you both have math thanks mr. right they cut calories by cutting fat and sugar and eating less it's hard sitting there and watching your friends eating the fries and all but I mean you know what's worth it and I think it really helps their self-esteem to know that they can do this and they are doing this on their own you're funny they've even been role models for their mother since the twins started their diet she has lost 14 pounds so they've been good for me too Erikson's went on a low carb high protein diet in the past two months we've learned at least 6 ways of cooking eggs that we weren't aware of before after two months the carb cravings vanished and so have some towns I've lost 13 pounds I've lost 16 and deep breath in and blow it out as fast as you can the Erickson say dieting under a doctor's supervision helped you know I can talk myself out of anything and so in out of a diet it's real easy but if I have to talk it out but I talk about something I'll talk a doctor out of me doing a diet that's a little harder to do because I don't have a good argument when a return to regular exercise is part of their plan I want to get out there and do the things that other people do and I want to you know not be you know a subject of ridicule because of it when I can be what I think is normal size then all of these things will now be open to me that haven't been open to me for the majority of my life it's not hard to live a healthy lifestyle you just have to want to live the healthy lifestyle all it takes our small study steps like the ones I've been taking since this program began in that time I've burned about 200 calories it's a lot easier than you might think and for many of us it is certainly a step in the right direction [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: WRAL Documentaries

Views: 20,408

Rating: 4.6938777 out of 5

Keywords: obesity, overweight, fast food, unhealthy food, wral, north carolina, nc, focal point, heart disease, blood pressue, obesity problem, unhealthy

Id: I1gIkK8Ujx4

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 10 2019