Living Large
A Big Man's Ideas on Weight, Success, and Acceptance
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A poignant, funny, and, above all, honest look at obesity from the inside out. Is it the goal of life to be thin? Or to be happy? In this inspiring story, those two elusive goals become one, as a fat man learns acceptance, loses the guilt, and gains the wisdom to manage his weight.
You can hardly pick up a magazine or turn on the TV today without encountering a torrent of talk on weight. But all too rarely do we hear from overweight people themselves—especially men—about how life feels inside the body of a fat person. Mike Berman shares that story in this hopeful and uplifting memoir.
A self-proclaimed "fat man" who is also a happy man—successful in his career, marriage, and friendships—Berman has earned his insight and peace of mind through decades of personal struggle. In Living Large, this well-known political activist and Washington lobbyist never shies away from the pain and daunting challenges of being seriously overweight. But Berman has an important message that he wants to be heard: Fatness is not a moral failing, but a disease; and once it is accepted as such, it can be successfully managed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Berman, a political strategist, is a "fat man," having weighed as much as 332 pounds, and as little as 217. He is also a self-proclaimed happy man; content with his life, at peace with his weight and itching to let the world know how he got to this place of equanimity. Berman tells a familiar tale of being a big kid forced by his mother to clean his plate lest children overseas go hungry. As he balloons, his parents react by picking on him for his weight. Shunned at home and laughed at in the gym locker room, Berman feels an ever-escalating crush of humiliation and self-loathing. While chronicling his numerous attempts to diet, Berman doles out shopworn wisdom and dubious insight gained in doctors' offices, gyms and "fat farms" from coast to coast. His tone is heartfelt and genuinely self-effacing, yet Berman never gets beyond what is already known: weight is a direct function of calories consumed versus calories burned. Readers are left with the exact impression Berman is trying (and failing) to correct: overweight folks are doing themselves in and all the talk of accepting one's self is not going to make them healthier.
