Fat Chance

New York Times Bestseller Robert Lustig’s 90-minute YouTube video “Sugar: The Bitter Truth”, has been viewed more than three million times. Now, in this much anticipated book, he documents the science and the politics that has led to the pandemic of chronic disease over the last 30 years. In the late 1970s when the government mandated we get the fat out of our food, the food industry responded by pouring more sugar in. The result has been a perfect storm, disastrously altering our biochemistry and driving our eating habits out of our control. To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents personal strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger, reward, and stress; and societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. Compelling, controversial, and completely based in science, Fat Chance debunks the widely held notion to prove “a calorie is NOT a calorie”, and takes that science to its logical conclusion to improve health worldwide.

Sugar is addictive, toxic and everywhere. Find out how your sweet tooth might be nibbling you to death in this straight-talking expos�. 'Fat Chance', documents the science and the politics that has led to the pandemic of metabolic syndrome - which results in conditions like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Dr Robert Lustig exposes how changes in the food industry and in our wider environment have affected our collective metabolisms and our waistlines, and he shows how industry and political forces, motivated by greed, don't want things to change. To help us lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents personal strategies to readjust the key hormones that regulate hunger and reward and suggests societal strategies to improve the health of the next generation. Discover how every calorie is different and that cutting out sugar is not just about making us thin - it's about making us healthier, happier and smarter.

The companion cookbook to the New York Times bestseller Fat Chance Fat Chance became an instant New York Times bestseller. Robert Lustig’s message that the increased sugar in our diets has led to the pandemic of chronic disease over the last thirty years captured our national attention. Now, in The Fat Chance Cookbook, Lustig helps us put this information into action for ourselves. With more than 100 recipes as well as meal plans, nutritional analyses, shopping lists, and food swaps, he shows us easy ways to drastically reduce sugar and increase fiber to lose weight and regain health – both for ourselves and for our families. Lustig also shows us how to navigate the grocery store with handy lists for stocking the pantry as well as how to read a food label in order to find hidden sugars and evaluate fiber content. Accessible, affordable, and geared toward lasting results, The Fat Chance Cookbook will be a fun and easy roadmap to better health for the whole family.

In a series of diary entries, thirteen-year-old Judi recounts her struggles to lose weight, hide her bulimia from her mother, find a boy friend, and decide on a profession. Suggested level: intermediate, junior secondary.

Confident at work but clueless at love, Claire is 40 and overweight—not a recipe she imagines can solve the romance gap. Dealing with her father’s death and an angry teen doesn’t make it easier. Finding no help from her ex, who is distracted by remarriage to a much younger woman, Claire copes by relying on a faithful circle of friends, a wicked sense of humor, and a new interest in fitness. When Claire meets Rob, a beguiling, slightly pudgy man at the gym, there is an instant connection. Just maybe she can haul the composure she finds at work into the gym with her. Or is it fat chance for that? ~ ~ ~ “A funny, moving portrait of a small-town Jewish community and the people who inhabit it, including a single mom coping with loss, a teen, and modern love. You’ll be rooting for Orenstein’s characters—especially her witty, lovably self-deprecating heroine—the whole way through.” — Jennifer Richler, author of essays appearing in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, and The Atlantic “Fat Chance is an evocative journey that sharpens our contact with what it means to be human. And it is a hilariously loving yet unflinching portrait of a woman imprisoned by the body she thinks isolates her from love and—maybe more important—sex. Orenstein is like a magician pulling pennies from the air, infusing the haunting with laughter, the seeming inescapability with hope, and in the end offers the surprising and poignant gift of a special kind of joy.” — Michael Adams, author of Blind Man’s Bluff and Anniversaries in the Blood

Coming of age as a Fat brown girl in a white Connecticut suburb is hard. Harder when your whole life is on fire, though. A NEW ENGLAND BOOK AWARD WINNER! Charlie Vega is a lot of things. Smart. Funny. Artistic. Ambitious. Fat. People sometimes have a problem with that last one. Especially her mom. Charlie wants a good relationship with her body, but it's hard, and her mom leaving a billion weight loss shakes on her dresser doesn't help. The world and everyone in it have ideas about what she should look like: thinner, lighter, slimmer-faced, straighter-haired. Be smaller. Be whiter. Be quieter. But there's one person who's always in Charlie's corner: her best friend Amelia. Slim. Popular. Athletic. Totally dope. So when Charlie starts a tentative relationship with cute classmate Brian, the first worthwhile guy to notice her, everything is perfect until she learns one thing--he asked Amelia out first. So is she his second choice or what? Does he even really see her? Because it's time people did. A sensitive, funny, and painfully honest coming-of-age story with a wry voice and tons of chisme, Fat Chance, Charlie Vega tackles our relationships to our parents, our bodies, our cultures, and ourselves. An NPR Best Book of the Year! Named to the TAYSHAS Reading List A POPSUGAR Best New YA Novel! A Cosmopolitan Best New Book! A Bustle Most Anticipated Debut!

During the early 1990s, the diet drugs fen-phen and Redux achieved tremendous popularity. The chemical combination was discovered by chance, marketed with hyperbole, and prescribed to millions. But as the drugs' developer, pharmaceutical giant American Home Products, cashed in on the miracle weight-loss pills, medical researchers revealed that the drugs caused heart valve disease. This scandal was, incredibly, only the beginning of an unbelievable saga of greed. In Fat Chance, Rick Christman recounts a story that a judicial tribunal later described as "a tale worthy of the pen of Charles Dickens." Bill Gallion, Shirley Cunningham, and Melbourne Mills contrived to bring a class-action lawsuit against American Home Products in Covington, Kentucky. Their hired trial consultant, Mark Modlin, had a bizarre relationship with the presiding judge, Jay Bamberger of Covington, who was once honored as the Kentucky Bar Association's "Judge of the Year." Soon after, Stan Chesley, arguably the most successful trial attorney in the United States, joined the class-action suit. Ultimately, their efforts were rewarded with $200 million for the 431 plaintiffs, and the four lawyers immediately began to plunder their clients' money. When the fraud was discovered, two of the attorneys received long prison sentences and another was acquitted after claiming an alcoholism defense. All four were permanently banished from the practice of law and Judge Bamberger was disbarred and disrobed. Recounting a dramatic affair that bears conspicuous similarities to opioid-related class-action litigation against the pharmaceutical industry, Christman offers an engaging, if occasionally horrifying, account of one of America's most prominent product liability cases and the settlement's aftermath.

'A powerful, poignant tale of dieting and despair.' The Times 'A moving, brutally honest memoir about what it feels like to be fat-shamed.' Mail on Sunday _______________ At sixty-four, Jenni Murray's weight had become a disability. She avoided the scales, she wore a uniform of baggy black clothes, refused to make connections between her weight and health issues and told herself that she was fat and happy. She was certainly fat. But the happy part was an Oscar-worthy performance. In private she lived with a growing sense of fear and misery that her weight would probably kill her before she made it to seventy. Interwoven with the science, social history and psychology of weight management, Fat Cow, Fat Chance is a refreshingly honest account of what it's like to be fat when society dictates that skinny is the norm. It asks why we overeat and why, when the weight is finally lost through dieting, do we simply pile the pounds back on again? How do we help young people become comfortable with the way they look? What are the consequences of the obesity epidemic for an already overstretched NHS? And, whilst fat shaming is so often called out, why is it that shouting 'fat cow' at a woman in the street hasn't been included in the list of hate crimes? Fusing politics, science and personal pain, this is a powerful exploration of our battle with obesity. _______________ 'Agony and confusion, humour and hope. A beautiful book.' Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue 'A perceptive look at health and happiness.' Sunday Express