The Hungry Years
Books | Biography & Autobiography / Editors, Journalists, Publishers
William Leith
“Hunger is the loudest voice in my head. I’m hungry most of the time.”William Leith began the eighties slim; by the end of that decade he had packed on an uncomfortable amount of weight. In the early nineties, he was slim again, but his weight began to creep up once more. On January 20th, 2003, he woke up on the fattest day of his life. That same day he left London for New York to interview controversial diet guru Dr. Robert Atkins. But what was meant to be a routine journalistic assignment set Leith on an intensely personal and illuminating journey into the mysteries of hunger and addiction.From his many years as a journalist, Leith knows that being fat is something people find more difficult to talk about than nearly anything else. But in The Hungry Years he does precisely that. Leith uses his own pathological relationship with food as a starting point and reveals himself, driven to the kitchen first thing in the morning to inhale slice after slice of buttered toast, wracked by a physical and emotional need that only food can satisfy. He travels through fast food-scented airports and coffee shops as he explores the all-encompassing power of advertising and the unattainable notions of physical perfection that feed the multibillion dollar diet industry.Fat has been called a feminist issue: William Leith’s unblinking look at the physical consequences and psychological pain of being an overweight man charts fascinating new territory for everyone who has ever had a craving or counted a calorie. The Hungry Years is a story of food, fat, and addiction that is both funny and heartwrenching.I was sitting in a café on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 24th Street in Manhattan, holding a menu. I was overweight. In fact, I was fat. Like millions of other people, I had entered into a pathological relationship with food, and with my own body. For years I had desperately wanted to write about why this had happened — not just to me, but to all those other people as well. I knew it had a lot to do with food. But I also knew it was connected to all sorts of outside forces. If I could understand what had happened to me, I could tell people what had happened to them, too. Right there and then, I decided that I would do everything to discover why I had got fat. I would look at every angle. And then I would lose weight, and report back from the slim world.—Excerpt from The Hungry Years
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Author
William Leith
Pages
304
Publisher
Doubleday Canada
Published Date
2010-08-20
ISBN
0385672926 9780385672924
Community ReviewsSee all
"This wasn’t the food investigation or eating memoir I expected - I should have focused on the “addict” portion of the subtitle and descriptions on the back because what this is, is a book about addiction. Note that the author is also involved with alcoholism and drug use (cocaine). <br/><br/>I found the use of present tense, combined with a very vague sense of timeline, really off-putting. Leith seems to hate himself and also be a not very nice person overall. I suppose that could be refreshing in a memoir and the back might be drawing on that to get the “darkly funny” reviews. But honestly this isn’t funny. It’s just kind of sad. <br/><br/>What it also is, is disorganized and vague. Despite plenty of vivid descriptions (including three pages of incredibly in-depth description of a facelift survey, shudder), he manages to say very little. The summary of the book is probably “people are overweight for a lot of complicated reasons, the most important of which are rarely directly food-related”. And I mean…you don’t need a book to tell you that? He seems to be trying to do a series of interviews and some solid journalistic research here but entirely fails to communicate it. It almost feels like he forgot to get an editor or include the conclusions of most of his plotlines. <br/><br/>This is two stars instead of one, however, because he DOES show some interesting ability to tell seemingly unrelated anecdotes that link back to his point in interesting ways; also because he has some half-decent insights by the end. I’m not entirely certain what they are though. So maybe two stars is generous!"
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Teresa Prokopanko