Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped

After a lifetime of binge eating and morbid obesity, L.A. writer and producer McBride (Just Stop Eating So Much!) began to take responsibility for his own weight, and ceased blaming it on his unhappy childhood. In this funny and candid memoir, McBride reveals without shame the psyche of the fat person who learns to "eat his problems away," beginning as a small child sneaking money out of his Air Force officer father's wallet for afternoon binges of candy. As an army brat, moving around constantly as a child including stints in Singapore and Germany, McBride (along with his younger sister, Lori) became acutely aware of his father's drinking problem, his mother's promiscuity, and the fissures in their marriage. Indeed, his mother enlisted him in her romantic entanglements by making him foil her phone calls, and when he grew embarrassingly fat, passed him off as an adopted son with a health problem. Brazen about lying to other people and stealing money for binge eating ("in the world of junk food, I was safe, warm, and loved"), McBride grew huge, taking on the clown characters in drama productions, learning to surround himself with beautiful people and act "foxy for a fat kid." But the moment of truth had to come, and there were many: when he blossomed to 464 pounds and watched his doctor cry; when a child in the store asked loudly why he had "boobs"; and when the therapist ceased buying his excuses. McBride unrolls an excruciatingly honest tale of becoming thin. (Sept.)