This Is Big
How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World -- and Me
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3.7 • 19 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From a contributor to The Cut, one of Vogue's most anticipated books "bravely and honestly" (Busy Philipps) talks about weight loss and sheds a light on Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch: "a triumphant chronicle" (New York Times).
Marisa Meltzer began her first diet at the age of five. Growing up an indoors-loving child in Northern California, she learned from an early age that weight was the one part of her life she could neither change nor even really understand.
Fast forward nearly four decades. Marisa, also a contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times, comes across an obituary for Jean Nidetch, the Queens, New York housewife who founded Weight Watchers in 1963. Weaving Jean's incredible story as weight loss maven and pathbreaking entrepreneur with Marisa's own journey through Weight Watchers, she chronicles the deep parallels, and enduring frustrations, in each woman's decades-long efforts to lose weight and keep it off. The result is funny, unexpected, and unforgettable: a testament to how transformation goes far beyond a number on the scale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Meltzer (Girl Power) delivers an insightful look at the business of weight loss, illustrated by her own attempts at it, and by those of late Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch. Meltzer begins by describing her relationship to the ubiquitous weight loss company, which, she once felt, existed only to torment her Meltzer was a Weight Watchers dropout by the age of nine. After coming across Nidetch's obituary in 2015, however, Meltzer was surprised to find her longtime b te noir both relatable and inspirational a woman who lost 70 pounds, and kept it off, and confronted 1960s sexism to found a now-global company. Meltzer explores how Nidetch and Weight Watchers changed with the times, in the '70s moving into creating exercise plans, nutrition educational campaigns, and other offerings outside of its originally single-minded focus on dieting. One especially intriguing point Meltzer raises is the innate narcissism in dieting both her own and that of the celebrities she regularly interviews for magazine profiles. The result is a thoughtful exploration of how to make diet choices on one's own terms, rather than in "fear of the final weigh in."
