The Hungry Years

A story of food, fat and addiction that is both funny and heart-wrenching: it will change the way you look at food forever

Draws from oral histories, memoirs, local newspaper reports, and scholarly texts to tell the story of America's Great Depression in the words of people who lived through it.

The all-time classic picture book, from generation to generation, sold somewhere in the world every 30 seconds! Have you shared it with a child or grandchild in your life? For the first time, Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar is now available in e-book format, perfect for storytime anywhere. As an added bonus, it includes read-aloud audio of Eric Carle reading his classic story. This fine audio production pairs perfectly with the classic story, and it makes for a fantastic new way to encounter this famous, famished caterpillar.

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“Hunger is the loudest voice in my head. I’m hungry most of the time.” William Leith began the eighties slim; by the end of that decade he had packed on an uncomfortable amount of weight. In the early nineties, he was slim again, but his weight began to creep up once more. On January 20th, 2003, he woke up on the fattest day of his life. That same day he left London for New York to interview controversial diet guru Dr. Robert Atkins. But what was meant to be a routine journalistic assignment set Leith on an intensely personal and illuminating journey into the mysteries of hunger and addiction. From his many years as a journalist, Leith knows that being fat is something people find more difficult to talk about than nearly anything else. But in The Hungry Years he does precisely that. Leith uses his own pathological relationship with food as a starting point and reveals himself, driven to the kitchen first thing in the morning to inhale slice after slice of buttered toast, wracked by a physical and emotional need that only food can satisfy. He travels through fast food-scented airports and coffee shops as he explores the all-encompassing power of advertising and the unattainable notions of physical perfection that feed the multibillion dollar diet industry. Fat has been called a feminist issue: William Leith’s unblinking look at the physical consequences and psychological pain of being an overweight man charts fascinating new territory for everyone who has ever had a craving or counted a calorie. The Hungry Years is a story of food, fat, and addiction that is both funny and heartwrenching. I was sitting in a café on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 24th Street in Manhattan, holding a menu. I was overweight. In fact, I was fat. Like millions of other people, I had entered into a pathological relationship with food, and with my own body. For years I had desperately wanted to write about why this had happened — not just to me, but to all those other people as well. I knew it had a lot to do with food. But I also knew it was connected to all sorts of outside forces. If I could understand what had happened to me, I could tell people what had happened to them, too. Right there and then, I decided that I would do everything to discover why I had got fat. I would look at every angle. And then I would lose weight, and report back from the slim world. —Excerpt from The Hungry Years

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Women Food and God This is how Geneen Roth remembers her time as an emotional overeater and self-starver. After years of struggle, Roth finally broke free from the destructive cycle of bingeing and purging. In the two decades since her triumph, she has gone on to help tens of thousands of others do the same through her lectures, workshops, and retreats. Those she has met during this time have shared stories that are both heartrending and inspiring, which Roth has gathered for this unique book. Twenty years after its original publication, Feeding the Hungry Heart continues to inspire women and men, helping them win the battle against a hunger that goes deeper than a need for food. With contributions from Ronda Slater, Sylvia Gillett, Carolyn Janik, Janet Robyns, Sharon Sperling, Lyn Lifshin, Linda Ostreicher, Sondra Spatt Olsen, Jill Jeffery, Penny Skillman, Leslie Lawrence, Juneil Parmenter, Lisa Wagner, Joan P. Campbell, Micki Seltzer, Rita Garitano, Barbara Florio Graham, Linda Myer, Laura Fraser, Rachel Lawrence, Florinda Colavin, and other Breaking Free workshop participants.

In this timely and profoundly original new book, bestselling writer and physician Gabor Maté looks at the epidemic of addictions in our society, tells us why we are so prone to them and what is needed to liberate ourselves from their hold on our emotions and behaviours. For over seven years Gabor Maté has been the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. His patients are challenged by life-threatening drug addictions, mental illness, Hepatitis C or HIV and, in many cases, all four. But if Dr. Maté’s patients are at the far end of the spectrum, there are many others among us who are also struggling with addictions. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, work, food, sex, gambling and excessive inappropriate spending: what is amiss with our lives that we seek such self-destructive ways to comfort ourselves? And why is it so difficult to stop these habits, even as they threaten our health, jeopardize our relationships and corrode our lives? Beginning with a dramatically close view of his drug addicted patients, Dr. Maté looks at his own history of compulsive behaviour. He weaves the stories of real people who have struggled with addiction with the latest research on addiction and the brain. Providing a bold synthesis of clinical experience, insight and cutting edge scientific findings, Dr. Maté sheds light on this most puzzling of human frailties. He proposes a compassionate approach to helping drug addicts and, for the many behaviour addicts among us, to addressing the void addiction is meant to fill. I believe there is one addiction process, whether it manifests in the lethal substance dependencies of my Downtown Eastside patients, the frantic self-soothing of overeaters or shopaholics, the obsessions of gamblers, sexaholics and compulsive internet users, or in the socially acceptable and even admired behaviours of the workaholic. Drug addicts are often dismissed and discounted as unworthy of empathy and respect. In telling their stories my intent is to help their voices to be heard and to shed light on the origins and nature of their ill-fated struggle to overcome suffering through substance use. Both in their flaws and their virtues they share much in common with the society that ostracizes them. If they have chosen a path to nowhere, they still have much to teach the rest of us. In the dark mirror of their lives we can trace outlines of our own. —from In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts