Read Online Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own by Mika Brzezinski - Free Book Online Page B

is such garbage .—Diane
    It was a story I could barely believe as I looked at her slender body, but I knew it was true when I looked into her eyes. “I am a junk food addict,” Mika said. She talked about stuffing herself with chips and ice cream in prep school, gorging on pizza in college, and scarfing down entire boxes of kids’ cereal at a sitting. That habit caused her husband, Jim, to nickname her “Jethro,” after the Beverly Hillbillies character with the enormous appetite. I really could not imagine her acting that way. I’d never seen it .
    Mika’s honesty about herself helped me hear what else she was trying to say .
    “You’re fat,” Mika blurted. “If you don’t lose the weight now, you’re going to die. Plain and simple: your weight will kill you.” That was either the rudest thing anyone had ever said to me, or the kindest. That’s Mika. She’s no diplomat. She puts all her cards on the table, and she was characteristically blunt. “I love you Diane, and you are fat,” she said .
    Friends, family, and colleagues had been dancing around my dramatic weight gain over the last ten years, so it was shocking to hear it stated so bluntly. Mika softened it a little when she said, “I want you to be around for my girls. They need another woman in their lives, especially when I am driving them nuts.” That last part made me laugh, because it’s true!
    Up until then I had always thought about my weight as an issue of vanity. When I was heavy I didn’t look the way I wanted to look, or how TV viewers expected me to look. I never really considered my weight to be a health issue, although I should have. My dad was a skinny kid and a slender young adult, but he has been overweight since then, and heart disease very nearly killed him. It’s a medical miracle and a testament to his constitution that he’s still around. My grandmother was overweight and later in life developed diabetes, which she called her “sugar problem.” At the time, I didn’t recognize the link between diabetes and obesity, but I sure do now .
    I was moving along the same path. A path that was almost guaranteed to result in one or more chronic diseases .

    Shortly after our infamous encounter on Long Island Sound, I suggested to Mika that she write a book about her struggles with food. Readers have told her how much they have learned from her earlier books, about finding life and work balance, and about learning to stand up for yourself in the workplace, and knowing your true value. I thought if Mika told her own story, it would help other women .
    Mika took me up on the idea of writing this book, but I had no idea she was planning to aim her message squarely at me. And then my cell phone rang as I was driving to a speaking engagement in the far west corner of Connecticut, about ninety minutes from where I live. Mika was on the line. It was nearly dusk and I was heading down a lonely country road, not feeling great about giving the speech .
    I’m a former radio talk show host and I love talking to people, but for several years the fun of greeting a live audience and spending a couple of hours with them had disappeared. Instead of looking forward to it I’d been feeling a kind of dread, because I knew the audience wouldn’t see the person they expected, that stylish, slender anchorwoman of years ago. Instead, they would face a fat, fiftyish female who felt frumpy in a size 18 jacket and stretchy pants. You can hide some of that on TV with good camera work, but standing at the microphone at the front of the room, they were going to see all of me .
    On top of that my feet hurt, my knees ached, and I dreaded having to stand at a podium during my talk. It was going to take all the charm I could muster to make them forget who and what they were looking at, and concentrate instead on what I was saying. I wanted to get them wrapped up in my stories: stories about the people and places that make the state of Connecticut special, and