"Fat Boy, Thin Man"
"This book should not only interest individuals who have failed classical diets and are looking for answers, but also for physicians who are interested in helping the obese subject lose weight." — Dr. Richard Johnson, University of Colorado researcher and professor, and author of "The Sugar Fix, The High Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Sick and Fat"
Above: a contemporary photo; Below: the "before" picture.
I had a fat and troubled childhood that lasted almost 35 years. Then I started to understand that I might have a more substantial problem than just being a weak, slovenly misfit. I started getting 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. That's why I'm writing, to pass ideas to others as they were shared with me.
The book will be self-published within a few months (as of 2/10/10). If you want to be notified when the book is published, please leave word here.
Or just return here soon: In addition to being for sale, the book will be available for free download. Though I'm investing money, as well as five years-plus of writing time, it's more important to me that the ideas get out than we recoup our investment.
Excerpts are available here and here.
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Eating is very good — for the food industry
Joan Ifland, principal organizer of the Promising Practices in Food Addiction conference last weekend in Houston, shared some back-of-the-envelope figuring, and suggested that overeating is responsible for 7 percent of the economy. It went like this:
Food is responsible for about 15 percent of the economy.
On average, Americans take in twice as many calories as we need.
If everyone ate at levels to sustain ourselves nutritionally, then demand for half of that 15 percent would disappear.
Even if you want to quarrel with the numbers, you’ve got to concede the logic: Lots of people are obviously eating more than they need to sustain themselves. Apart from the farmers in that cohort, those folks are paying for that food, and companies are profiting from it.
If we start cutting back to healthy proportions, this will be bad for the bottom line. I don’t think the food-industrial complex is going to like that.
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Green heroes
In my series "Green people," I ask everyone to name a green hero, and this compiles their answers. The link is to the interview, but you can click through for more information on each:
