"'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, 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 over-consuming those resources. We have more of everything than we've ever had, and yet we feel emptier. Nothing is enough for us. We are an obese race.' The Hungry Years is the result of his investigations."
Makes fat not just a feminist issue but relevant to everyone: William Leith’s unblinking investigation of the physical consequences and psychological pain of being an overweight man charts new territory.
Shortlisted for the Mind Awards 2006 Book of the Year