True Life › Ep.

What if every time you shed unwanted pounds, you gained them right back? That's the frustrating reality for two-thirds of us who go on diets every year. On this episode of True Life we meet two young people with long histories of yo-yo dieting, who are doing whatever they can to lose weight and keep it off for good.

Morbidly obese Adam was so desperate to drop one hundred and forty pounds that he quit his job and school, isolated himself from family and friends and limited his food intake to four hundred calories per day. After meeting his goal weight, Adam succumbs to the urge to binge and consumes more calories in one sitting than he normally consumes in two weeks. Determined to find a way to be healthy and normal again, Adam goes out with his friends and family for the first time in six months. Unfortunately, a night of drinking leads to Adam binging once again and hoping it will be his last. He decides the best way to break the cycle is to stop his starvation and binging lifestyle. Hoping to make it a habit, Adam goes to lunch with his sister and then buys a normal amount of groceries and hopes for the best. Once again, he falls back to gorging then into starvation mode to get himself under two hundred pounds before heading to a resort in Mexico for his sister's wedding. Seeing him for the first time, Adam's mom is thrilled by how good he looks, but encourages him to take advantage of the all-inclusive resort they've paid for. When Adam takes her up on the offer, he ends up gaining eleven pounds in just three days and realizes that starving himself is equally damaging to his health.

Kinsey lost thirty pounds last summer by following a fad diet that she found on the internet, but gained all the weight back by winter. Now she's dieting again, but can't seem to stop giving into temptation. With her self-esteem at an all time low, Kinsey begins seeing a dietician to help her learn how to eat healthily, lose weight and keep it off. However, after five weeks on the plan, Kinsey gets frustrated because she's not losing weight fast enough. She decides to switch to the NutriSystem diet with her mom, but goes off it for a Valentine's Day binge with her boyfriend. Before heading to Spring Break, Kinsey begins exercising excessively and taking diet and water pills to help her drop the extra weight. Thrilled that she's dropped below one hundred and eighty pounds before leaving for her trip, Kinsey thinks that if she keeps it up she can be at one hundred and seventy by time she returns. Too bad she's going to stay with her grandmother and aunt, who love to cook delicious but fattening meals that Kinsey has troubles resisting. After choosing the family meal instead of her NutriSystem twice, Kinsey's aunt confesses the she feels bad for tempting Kinsey and that she wishes she had made efforts to lose weight when she was younger instead of succumbing to obesity. But she also warns Kinsey against dieting and exercising so extremely, otherwise she'll always be miserable. Kinsey vows to stop yo-yo dieting and just focus on being healthy, period.