Georgia is 15 years old and weighs 33 stone. The teenager from South Wales has been told that her life is at risk unless she loses weight. This moving and inspiring documentary follows Georgia on a journey 3,000 miles from her home to the Wellspring Academy in North Carolina, USA, a residential school for obese children, where she has been offered a scholarship. Georgia has been given the chance to change her eating habits forever, as she comes to terms with her addiction to food. The programme is part of BBC Headroom's campaign tackling the psychological issues surrounding eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia and obesity. Wellspring Academy provides their students, aged from 12 to 19, with a calorie- and fat-controlled diet, a regime of exercise and the opportunity to explore how their unhealthy relationship with food has developed, through cognitive behavioural therapy. Counsellors talk to students both in group and individual sessions to allow them to discover what has triggered their eating disorder. Georgia, separated from her mum for the first time in her life, goes on a moving journey and makes a determined effort to change the way she looks and feels forever.
Anorexia and bulimia were once more commonly associated with teenage girls but are now on the increase among older women. This film goes into the seemingly perfect world of four housewives who are struggling with the fallout from their eating disorders. They may seem to have it all with their nice houses, perfect children and middle class lives, but behind the wisteria, they are having a constant battle with their food and eating. Jane in her early fifties now has the bone density of a 92 year old; 36-year-old Zoe has turned to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to reclaim her life from anorexia; bubbly Tracey is bulimic and spends her nights binging and vomiting in secret from her children; and young mum Georgia tries hard to lose her baby weight, but will her obsession with weight see her falling back into the anorexic danger zone?
Hannah Jones is a 36-year-old journalist with a razor sharp wit and a lifelong problem: her weight. At 21-stone, Hannah is officially clinically obese; she has tried everything to lose weight, from the egg diet ("abject misery"), to the cabbage soup diet ("torture"), the Atkins diet ("all you can eat, just don't make a sandwich out of it") and the just-eating-cereal-all-day-long diet. All have failed, and Hannah invariably ends up diving headfirst into a vat of carbohydrates and putting on more weight than she lost in the first place. Hannah knows exactly what she needs to do to lose weight: "eat less and exercise more", but what she cannot understand is why she is unable to follow this simple advice. Hannah has come to believe that for her, and millions of overweight people like her, the answer lies inside her head. Is her dysfunctional relationship with food a psychological rather than a physical problem? Does it have its origins in her childhood? With humour and remarkable honesty, Hannah embarks on a six-month journey to find out and to fix her fat head, forever.