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“I [started out] among the skeptics who felt food addiction was a copout. But after meeting Prager and reading his book, my view has shifted.” — JENNIFER LaRUE HUGET, Eat, Drink and Be Healthy columnist, Washington Post
“A compelling description of the process of addiction.” — JOSEPH FRASCELLA, National Institute on Drug Abuse
— Buy it. // Visit the website —
Above: a contemporary photo; Below: the "before" picture.
I had a fat and troubled childhood that lasted almost 35 years, and my body reached 365 pounds. I could lose weight, but I always gained it back and more. Then, on the advice of others, I started accepting standard addiction treatment, and now I'm approaching 20 years in a normal-sized body. In that time, public acceptance of food addiction has barely moved, and insurance support for treatment has regressed.
Both of those need to change, and my story tells why. I'm no diet guru, and this isn't a diet book, but if I escaped more than a decade above 300 pounds, lots of others can find relief too.
It's a good read with a happy ending, and it could change your life.
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The connectedness of obesity
Been meaning to get to this for a while; the video above was released by the TED organization in May. It is of Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis, speaking about the value of connection and social networks — the actual kind, as opposed to merely the virtual kind.
What caught my interest is the first example of his research, obesity. He says his research showed that if your friends are obese, your chance of being obese is 45 percent higher."
If your friends' friends are obese — people you may not even know — your chance of being obese is 25 percent higher. If your friends' friends' friends are obese, you still have a 10 percent higher chance. It's not until the fourth degree of separation, he says, that the effect wanes.
Though I have definitely experienced some of what he described — if you've ever had an eating buddy, you know that you're more likely to eat, and overeat when you're together, as if you give each other license. Often, overeating may be the reason you two are getting together, just as I used to have friends with whom I cooked and smoked crack; I never hung out with them otherwise.
Another part of the phenomenon, Christakis said, is that your friend's size may alter your sense of social norm; if he's fat, it becomes more acceptable in my thinking to be fat.
I can't share some great insight that I experienced as the result of his descriptions, but I found them interesting enough to spend this time passing them on to you. Does any of it ring true, in your experience?
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