The Big Fat Truth: The Behind-the-scenes Secret to Weight Loss Read Online Free

story. He was the COO of a very large hospital on the East Coast and is one of the smartest businessmen I know. Forget the fact that he’s in a medical environment every day; he thinks that eating 15 pieces of bacon for breakfast and three sausage sandwiches, hold the bread, for lunch, is a diet (“because Dr. Atkins said so”). One day, he walked into a meeting at the hospital and felt a pain in his chest. He took out his key card, quietly let himself into the cardiac unit, and proceeded to have a heart attack. Within 15 minutes, they had a stent in his heart. How lucky is that? If he’d been home, he probably wouldn’t have made it. So after this traumatic episode, I’m thinking, This is it, now he’s going to change, finally listen to his son, and lose the weight that probably contributed to sending him into the cardiac unit.
    “Hey, Dad,” I say, “you’re going to change your life now, right? Eat better, exercise?”
    “Naw,” he tells me. “At 69 years old, these things happen.” The following Tuesday after the heart attack, he was at a local steakhouse finishing off a New York strip with a glass of red wine.
    These things happen? You mean heart attacks? Come on! These things don’t have to happen if you use all that brainpower toward good! They’re my family, and I love them—but I knew from a young age that I didn’t think like them. And for what it’s worth, they think I am a little crazy in the opposite direction. Why do I exercise so much? What do I have against eating meat? They may be right; I can go to extremes. But healthy extremes. An error on my side does not give you a heart attack.
    Plus, from an early age, I seemed to have a different constitution. I’d go out to play basketball and come back seven hours later. I couldn’t sit still. But it wasn’t always easy to buck the family way of life. Growing up, every night at eight o’clock, there was a race to the freezer to pull out the Breyer’s chocolate-chip ice cream. (My mouth waters just writing it down!) We each got a coffee cup and were allowed to mash as much ice cream as possible into its interior. By the time I got done with mine, it took two hands to lift it off the counter. The memories of that ritual give me a lot of happiness, but at almost 50 years old, if I was still doing that I would be in the same category as 70 percent of America . . . overweight and wondering how it happened!
    Most days, my mom packed us kosher salami sandwiches, potato chips, and a vanilla creme Dunkin’ Donut for lunch. (I loved it! And it came with a note about how much she loved us.) But, in those days, every other family was doing the same thing. I didn’t even know there was another way to eat. About all we knew of vegetables was corn on the cob and maybe some tomatoes in the summer. (It was Jersey! You had to have tomatoes. We were famous for our tomatoes!) The Jersey culture went something like this: If you were happy, “Let’s go get a cheesesteak.” If you lost a game, “Let’s go get a cheesesteak.” Cheesesteaks solved every problem. They were used for both celebration and when cheering up was necessary. My picture still hangs in the most famous cheesesteak house in the United States, Jim’s Steaks on South Street in Philly. I can smell the grilled onions as I write this!
    These days, I am so not that guy (and my kids are so not those kids). I made a conscious effort not to go down that path, especially when I discovered how great it felt to be fit and eat healthfully. I also happened to marry someone who is committed to feeding us healthfully. It’s my wife’s passion; therefore, it is my passion, too. If her passion was ice cream and fresh pastries that would also be hard to avoid. You are who you hang out with when it comes to food. Family pressures are especially hard to shake, and that’s something I’ll deal with at length in this book. Families don’t like outliers; if they’re fat, they want you to be fat, too.