Active Low-Carber Forums - "Passing For Thin" by Frances Kuffel

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/...-for-thin_x.htm

After reading this review, I bought the book on overstock.com. I'm on page 95 as of last night. Awesome.
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Fat-to-thin tale is much more than skin deep
By Karen Dukess, Special for USA TODAY
For the unhappily overweight, January is the cruelest month. It's a time when maintaining dignity after a night of heartfelt New Year's resolutions demands at least a symbolic effort to drop some pounds. Before turning to the eternal question — carbs or no carbs — serious dieters should take a look at a memoir that may be the most inspiring diet book of the year.

In Passing For Thin, Frances Kuffel discusses the physical and emotion journey she experienced while losing 188 pounds.

At 42, after decades of excruciating struggles with her weight, Frances Kuffel lost an astonishing 188 pounds. Her brazenly intimate memoir, Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self, offers a powerful rebuff to anyone who believes that people can't change. What's most inspiring about Passing for Thin is that Kuffel devotes only a single paragraph to the actual diet she followed (for the insatiably curious: no sugar or flour, limited everything else). Her scanty discussion of the diet itself drives home the point that the details of a diet don't matter as much as hefty servings of willpower and commitment.

Kuffel, a New York literary agent and writer of poetry and short stories, is more interested in discussing the realities of being obese and the disconcerting discovery that, as much as she had fantasized about it, she wasn't totally prepared for her departure from "the planet of the fat."

On the restrictions of obesity, Kuffel is brutally honest, recounting the myriad humiliations: the blood pressure cuff that doesn't fit, the hairdresser's gowns that don't close, the fact that she is too large to join her friends on an amusement park ride or to fit in the velvet chairs of a restaurant favored by certain New York book editors.

"Fat people take nothing in the material world for granted," she writes. "When an obese woman is ushered into a guest room featuring an antique bedstead, or gallantly offered a man's jacket on a chilly night, she will insinuate herself onto the mattress, proffer reassurances that she isn't cold." And those things are minor compared with the more significant deprivations — lovers, a husband or children — that Kuffel associated with her weight problem.

But it was in the process of losing weight that Kuffel realized how much her weight was intertwined with other fears. For all her desire to be thin, she found it unsettling when it happened. Years of obesity had left her "inured to appalled second glances." As an attractive thin woman, she had to learn that being looked at could be a sign of flirtation. "As I took up less space I became more visible," she writes. "My visibility would lead to evaluations of me I could not blame on being fat."

Kuffel's journey was a tough one, and her memoir occasionally suffers from the sheer impact of her anger and fears. Thankfully, she doesn't delve too much into the 12-step program that was the key to her success, probably because she approached it with a healthy dose of cynicism.

Kuffel's transformation leads her to leave a job and her demeaning boss. She starts dating and recounts a series of encounters that are humorous and heartbreaking. As a heroine, Kuffel can be exasperating, but it's impossible not to root for her. Read her memoir and you can be assured of one of two results: You will be motivated to maintain a diet, or you will think twice before judging someone for being fat.