We hate to break it to you, but if you’re waiting for a weight loss white knight to come and save you from your expanding gut, it’s not going to happen. Even with an onslaught of public service campaigns that have consumers and the food industry on high alert, help probably isn’t coming soon enough, and the person most responsible for the current state of your body is, well, you.
While there are plenty of external factors that contribute to your weight—the availability of fresh foods in your neighborhood (or lack thereof), how your parents fed you as a child, confusing food labels and misleading advertisements—it’s time to own up to your role in creating that spare tire. In order to take control of the number on the scale, you need to acknowledge how the pounds piled on in the first place. Here, Steve Siebold, author of Die Fat or Get Tough: 101 Differences in Thinking Between Fat People, and Keri Gans, RD, author of The Small Change Diet, shoot straight about why America is so fat and what you can do about it.
