The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict

ISBN: 1592401554

Title: The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict

Author: William Leith

KDL Description:

A journalist for the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph describes his own struggle with weight issues as well as his observations about today’s size-obsessed culture, in an account that discusses society’s unhealthy relationship with food, the dynamics of carbohydrate addiction as explained by Dr. Robert Atkins, and factors that have contributed to body image in today’s world.

Amazon Description:

Combining the revealing cultural commentary of Fast Food Nation with the visceral insights of A Million Little Pieces, this is the story of a journalist’s struggle with weight, and an unflinching look at our own culture of fat and thin.

“I thought: if I can understand the despair, my own and everybody else’s, I could write the story of why we hate fat, of why we are fat, of why, in some perverse way, we want to be fat. And, most importantly, what we can do to stop being so fat. Obesity is the essential human problem in a nutshell — we try to make life easy by giving ourselves access to resources, and then we make life difficult by overconsuming those resources. We have more of everything than we’ve ever had, and yet we feel emptier.”

While on assignment to interview Dr. Robert Atkins, journalist William Leith realized that he could not report on diet alone; he wanted desperately to develop a deeper understanding of his relationship with food and the pathological cravings that led him (and millions of others) to become dangerously overweight.

His Atkins interview led him to probe not only the link between carbohydrates and addiction, but also how our relationship with food has changed over the last few decades in light of economic, technological, and cultural changes in the world, as well as our cultural obsession with our bodies. Combining the science of food addiction with memoir, humor, and sociological insights, The Hungry Years is a book that will force us to look at our culture of consumption in a new way.