Book excerpt: “Enough” by Dr. Ania Jastreboff and Oprah Winfrey

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Broadcasting superstar Oprah Winfrey, who has struggled with 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, offering a new way forward.

Their new book is “Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It’s Like To Be Free” (‎to be published Jan. 13 by Avid Reader Press).

Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Jane Pauley’s interview with Winfrey and Jastreboff on “CBS Sunday Moring” January 11!

“Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It’s Like To Be Free”

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Enough Shame and Blame

My patient Alice began experiencing self-blame in childhood. Her well-intentioned mom put her on diets when she was in her early teens. Even before that, she had started to develop what she eventually called the “self-hatred voice.” She vividly remembers when she was ten years old, sitting in the front yard with her legs bent, seeing the inside curvature of her leg and wanting it to be smaller. “This is the line where your muscle is, and on the inside is a curve. That’s the fat and the extra 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 that I was larger than I wanted to be.” Alice lived in Vermont at the time, and her mother had a garden where she grew all sorts of vegetables—lettuce, carrots, cucumbers. “I just remember eating salad, so much salad!” Alice recalls. At thirteen, she sat 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 practice or soccer without passing out or blowing the game for her teammates.

A few years later, her mother put herself and Alice on a no-carb diet. “Atkins was kinda big,” Alice says. Her father and two younger brothers were exempt; it was only for the girls of the family. Which basically meant Alice and her mother were still eating everything from the garden, except no turnips, because turnips had “too many carbs.”

After three days, Alice revolted. She reached for some crackers in the cupboard: “Mom, I just ate an entire sleeve of saltines!” Hearing this, her mother was not upset with her. Alice shared, “She was desperate for carbs, too, and ate three saltines herself. And then dutifully returned to her no-carb diet.”

At sixteen, Alice started tracking her weight for sports. The self-hatred voice in her mind began to be very specific and explicit. “The cupcake you just ate—what is the number of calories in it? What is the number of carbs?” She described that it wouldn’t let up, not even for just one tiny-teeny bite. It was unrelenting.

Fast-forward more than thirty years, and by the time Alice was nearly fifty, she had tried every diet and workout program under the sun: forty-seven of them, 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, a YMCA weight coach, DietBet, StepBet, a Mediterranean diet, a vegetarian diet, the raw food diet, intermittent fasting. She’d even tried hypnosis. She had three teenagers, a fulfilling job in communications, and a loving boyfriend. She struggled with obesity despite spending much of her adult life tracking every morsel of food, eating mostly healthful meals, and exercising every day. She had successfully lost weight countless times. That wasn’t the issue. The problem was that she always gained it back. She always blamed herself for having obesity. She did not know about the biology of obesity, yet.

From “Enough: Your Health, Your Weight, and What It’s Like To Be Free” by Ania M. Jastreboff, M.D., Ph.D., and Oprah Winfrey. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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