Michael S. Berman - Living Large: A Big Mans Ideas on Weight, Success, and Acceptance

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2006 by Michael S. Berman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berman, Michael S.

Living large : a big mans ideas on weight, success, and acceptance / Michael S. Berman ; with Laurence Shames.

p. cm.

eISBN-13 9781609616625 ebook

ISBN-13 9781594862779 hardcover

ISBN-10 159486277X hardcover

1. Berman, Michael S.Health. 2. Overweight menUnited StatesBiography. I. Shames, Laurence. II. Title.

RC552.O25B49 2006

362.196'3980092dc22

2005031222

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To Carol

my friend, my partner, my lovewho more than anyone has borne the burden of my fatness.

M y name is Mike Berman. Im 66 years old, five feet nine inches tall, and I weigh 235 pounds. Today, that is. Over the course of my adult life, Ive weighed as much as 332 and as little as 217. Ive spent years commuting between 230 and 280; Ive crossed the 300-pound threshold four or five times. I would reckon, conservatively, that when all my ups and downs are figured in, I have gained and lost well over a thousand poundsmore than three times my total weight, even at my heaviest.

In short, I am a fat man. But I am also a happy man. Yes, those two things can go togetherthough it took me a lot of years, a lot of pain, and a lot of psychotherapy to realize that.

Along the way I realized something else as well: that my best chance for peace of mind and also for controlling my weight lay in accepting my situation. I dont mean giving up on the hope of being thinner; I have always tried to lose more weight, and I always will. I mean being honest and realistic about what Im up against. Ive accepted the hard but liberating notion that I have a disease. My fatness is not a function of willpower or discipline or laziness or weakness. Its the result of physical and psychological factors that are outside of my control. Like diabetes or flat feet, my fatness is a chronic malady that cant be cured but can be managed.

Let me make it clear that having a disease is no excuse to shirk responsibility. I have a problem, but I am not helpless. I dont see myself as a victim. I refuse to be passive or self-pitying when it comes to my well-being. Every life has its difficulties, and being fat is one of mine. Thats just how it is. Still, I have a choicea choice made far tougher and more complicated by my disease, but a choice nonethelessas to whether or not I eat that piece of chocolate, whether or not I keep my appointment with the treadmill.

But responsibility is one thing; guilt is something else. Responsibility is positive, a duty we owe to ourselves, a matter of self-respect. Guilt is destructive. Guilt breeds desperationand desperation makes it even harder to make good decisions.

In recent yearsafter more than six decades of living as a fat personI have finally learned to stop feeling guilty and desperate about my weight. Again, this doesnt mean I am thrilled to be fat or that Ive stopped working at becoming thinner. But I have largely moved beyond the torment. The pressure is off. I dont have to lose weight; Im okay the way I am.

Needless to say, this acceptance has made me a much happier and less frustrated person. But it has had another, completely unexpected bonus as well. I have found that since I dont have to lose weight, I can lose weightand keep it off more successfully than ever before. These days I hardly ever binge, and if I do overindulge, its likely to be with healthy foods. I seem finally to have tamed the wild fluctuations of weight that have plagued me all my life. I am in control of my fatness, rather than being controlled by itand I am proud of this. To me, at least, it feels like a victory.

This book is the story of the gradual, often agonizing, and unsteady progress by which I have learned to manage my weight effectively and to live a full and satisfying life in spite of having the fat disease. I am not writing as an expert; I am not a doctor, a scientist, or a therapist, and I have no ambition to set up shop as a diet guru. I claim no credentials other than the life that I have lived.

As a fat boy I was assaulted with taunts and name-calling. As an adolescent I endured the loneliness of living at the social margin, and as a young man I learned the anguish of the blind date, that awful moment when the woman you are meeting quite literally sizes you up and decides, before youve said a word, that you are not the man of her dreams. Even in my professional life, I have felt the need to work harder, prepare more thoroughlyto be betterin order to neutralize the antifat bias of others.

Ive been on probably 20 different dietsWeight Watchers, Stillman, Pritikin, Scarsdale, Atkins, South Beach, you name itin several cases more than once. On three occasions Ive entered residential weight-loss programs. Ive been hospitalized to go on fasts that permitted only water, vitamins, and minerals; starved for 10 days, I have had the bizarre experience of hallucinating giant cheeseburgers.

In past decades I have had a closetful of clothes with waist sizes ranging from 44 to 58; I hated to throw any of them away, because I never knew when I might be that size again. All in all, I know what it is to live life as a fat person.

I know, as well, how difficult it is to get straightforward, trustworthy advice about the realities of managing fatness. Oh, theres plenty of information out there. Too much information, most of it written by people who are not fat themselves, who dont know how life feels inside the body of a fat person, and who are trying to make money from our desperate desire to be thin. Much of the information from these sources turns out to consist of false promises, phony hope, half-truths, and dubious claims that are then disclaimed by the tiny print at the bottom of the label. An ever-expanding weight-loss industry tries to sell us this diet or that pill or some brand-new miracle supplement. But isnt it obvious that if the pills and diets really worked, if the quick fixes delivered what they promised, the weight-loss business would be