When Dr. Ali Zentner arrived in the small town of Taylor, B.C., she found a big problem.
A big fat problem.
More than 60 per cent of the oil-and-gas town’s roughly 1,300 residents were considered obese — twice the national average that’s alarming enough on its own.
The community’s grocery store was a gas station. Kids were so overweight, Zentner says, that the school had to order adult-sized T-shirts — large and extra-large — for its students.
So Zentner, a specialist in internal medicine and obesity, put the entire town on a diet. The challenge: lose one tonne of weight in 90 days.
Their massive journey is traced in the new 10-part CBC series Village on a Diet, an intimate look at an entire community committed to making a big change.
“It’s about vicious circles,” Zentner says of the health woes facing Taylor, which mirror big and small communities across the country.
“The average Canadian who struggles with their weight wakes up every morning and wonders how they got here. They’re like, ’How did I get here? I’ll start my diet tomorrow.’ And all of a sudden it’s a year later and they’re 10 pounds heavier and it’s another year and they’re maybe another five pounds heavier and it comes on slowly.”
Residents battle the bulge with the help of a team of experts including a nutritionist, a chef, two personal trainers and a psychologist, who converged on Taylor last May to July.
What the town learns is disturbing — a rigorous “body age” test reveals many participants have health risks indicating their bodies are actually far older than their chronological years.
A young stay-at-home mom is told her body has already reached middle age, while a middle-aged truck driver learns his body is akin to a nearly diabetic senior citizen.
Zentner said a big factor was a lack of healthy food options, noting there was no real grocery store in Taylor, located on the Alaska highway just outside Fort St. John.
“The only access to a formal grocery store they have is kind of like a convenience store, a gas station if you will,” Zentner said.
“There’s a pizza place that’s sort of a family run pizza place in the town and that’s it.”
Dietitian Maria Thomas said her challenge was to teach basic healthy eating strategies and keep people motivated through tough new diets and weekly fitness challenges.
The intense regime pushes some to the brink — the budding confidence of a bride-to-be may change her relationship with her fiance, and a young couple’s stress over weight issues are compounded by problems conceiving.
“I think what distinguishes this series from other series of its kind is that this was real life,” said Zentner, setting it apart from TV shows like Biggest Loser, where contestants live together to focus on dropping pounds.
“They were more on a lifestyle change to be quite frank, but they still went to work and they still picked their kids up from school and they weren’t separated from their real lives. So it was a real life interaction and trying to get people to make changes within their own environments.”
Psychologist Adele Fox said a key part of the transformation was helping residents understand how they may be using food in harmful ways.
“Do they use food to manage their emotions? Do they use food to help cope with personal difficulties in their life? What prevents them from doing the activity that they need to do?” said Fox, noting that depression and troubled relationships were among the personal issues making it hard for some to get on the right path.
Zentner fought her own battle with obesity, noting she grew up as a “fat kid” and ballooned to 327 pounds in residency.
“People joke that my career is purely self-interest now. And I myself made small changes,” she said, noting her transformation started with five minutes a day on an elliptical trainer.
Through small but steady changes, Zentner said she has shed 170 pounds over the years.
She now competes in triathlons and marathons.
“It’s quite ironic that when I became a doctor I was my first patient.... I spent probably about three years really educating myself about nutrition and then created a practice around it. I thought, ‘If I could do it, then there’s no way these patients can’t,’ and it sort of built from there.
“I established a clinic in Alberta where we treated 500 patients at any given time for obesity medicine and now I have a practice in Vancouver where I treat patients on a daily basis.”
Village on a Diet is part of the CBC’s multi-platform “live right now” campaign to encourage Canadians to lead healthier lives. Zentner says she hopes it will inspire viewers to take concrete steps towards a fitter future.
“It’s the kind of show that teaches you. It’s quite inspiring what people did and how they supported each other as a community and how they got behind this. And the message of the show was very clear, that small changes make a big difference.”
Village on a Diet premieres Jan. 3.