Nicole Garner didn&rsquo;t even want to be on television. She was just looking for the ladies room at Marshalls in Zona Rosa when she crossed paths with a producer for the &ldquo;Dr. Oz&rdquo; show, who insisted on giving her a medical checkup.</p><p>&ldquo;I thought they were just doing people&rsquo;s blood pressure,&rdquo; recalls Garner, who works for the Missouri Lottery. &ldquo;But then they were checking my BMI and learning about my lifestyle and they said, &lsquo;Oh, my God, you&rsquo;ve got to sit down!&rsquo; And I was, like, &lsquo;Gee, you think?&rsquo;&ensp;&rdquo;</p><p>Her body mass index, or BMI, was high, and Garner freely admitted to being out of shape and addicted to foods like fried chicken and waffles, a combo she says &ldquo;tastes so good but it is <em>so</em> bad.&rdquo; What&rsquo;s more, she came from a family with weight struggles, and her mother, Deborah Hope, was a diabetic.</p><p>Flash forward six weeks, and Garner is madly pushing a shopping cart filled with junk food up the 23rd Street bridge south of Kemper Arena. </p><p>Waiting at the bridge&rsquo;s midpoint is Bob Harper, the fitness trainer known to millions as one of the team leaders on the hit NBC show &ldquo;The Biggest Loser.&rdquo; He&rsquo;s standing in front of a 45-foot coach bus with the &ldquo;Dr. Oz&rdquo; logo and the likeness of its host, celebrity physician Mehmet Oz plastered on the sides.</p><p>Garner&rsquo;s teammate, Leann Burris, a stay-at-home mom from Independence, is running beside her yelling encouragement. The two women &mdash; who are wearing &ldquo;Team Missouri&rdquo; shirts &mdash; have been scrambling around Kansas City all morning with a camera crew, collecting clues on a wacky scavenger hunt. They&rsquo;re about two minutes ahead of another team that&rsquo;s still loading its shopping cart over on the Kansas side of the bridge.</p><p>These four, and more than 30 other people from the Kansas City area &mdash; divided into two teams for the two states &mdash; were selected at an August tryout to take part in a challenge to get &ldquo;10 years younger in 60 days.&rdquo; Their latest progress report, including footage from the scavenger hunt, will air Monday on the &ldquo;Dr. Oz&rdquo; show.</p><p><strong><span class="subhead">&lsquo;I can&rsquo;t go back&rsquo;</span></strong></p><p>As the gateway to Oz, Kansas City was a natural choice for the first challenge on the new show, which is co-produced by Oprah Winfrey&rsquo;s Harpo Productions.</p><p> But it&rsquo;s also true that Kansas and Missouri sit right in the buckle of the nation&rsquo;s fat belt. From the Canadian border to the Rio Grande, an unbroken chain of Plains states report that at least a quarter of their people are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Obesity has effectively doubled across America in 15 years.</p><p>Earlier in the summer, hundreds of people attended local tryouts for &ldquo;The Biggest Loser,&rdquo; many of them 100 or more pounds overweight. Those I spoke with said they felt helpless to reverse their weight gains and had hoped the intervention of a TV show would make the difference.</p><p>While &ldquo;The Biggest Loser&rdquo; typically selects only contestants at the extreme end of the obesity scale, the &ldquo;Dr. Oz&rdquo; crowd looks more like America: people obviously overweight but seemingly in control of their destinies. Not true, according to those taking part in the &ldquo;Dr. Oz&rdquo; challenge.</p><p>&ldquo;I hadn&rsquo;t really struggled with my weight until I had my child,&rdquo; says Garner, who has two small children. &ldquo;I wanted to get healthy. I just didn&rsquo;t know what to do.&rdquo;