



THIS IS BIG

How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World — and Me

By Marisa Meltzer



This is the story of a kinship between two women who have never met. This is a before-and-after tale that loops around, only to begin again and again. This is a triumphant chronicle in which no cinematic “grand finale” victory is claimed.

Marisa Meltzer (whose previous books include “Girl Power” and, with Kara Jesella, “How Sassy Changed My Life”) has made her name as a third-wave feminist journalist covering pop culture, trends and celebrities. Now she brings herself to the center as a dieter of long standing (her parents put her on her first diet at age 4 or 5; she was a Weight Watchers dropout by 9). Nearing 40 and troubled, once again, by her weight, Meltzer decides to give the diet program another shot. In “This Is Big,” she crafts parallel tales of her own weight-loss efforts and the life of Jean Nidetch, the Queens housewife who founded Weight Watchers in her living room in 1963.

As someone who has relied on Weight Watchers in times of avoirdupois, I read this book while in the befuddling state of being obese yet not obese. I’m overweight per the old-school B.M.I. chart, yet my gym’s fancy body-mass-assessing electro-thingymabob measures me as firmly in the obese category — the two conflicting metrics casting me into an indeterminate condition I refer to as “Schrödinger’s Fat.” I’ve recently lost enough weight to be able to slide my wedding ring onto my finger, but not enough to be able to slide it back off. I am, in the groan-inducing lingua franca of the weight-loss, recovery and self-improvement realms, “a work in progress.”

[ Read an excerpt from “This Is Big.” ]

We all know that “relatable” and “likable” are compliments and traps — gendered ones, at that — so I’m reluctant to use them to describe Meltzer as a narrator, however much I both liked and related to her perspective as a yo-yo dieter. Sometimes I related to an uncomfortable degree, as when she describes what’s known as “emotional eating” — the practice of downing deep-fried food at diners alone, or medicating heartache via “cookie dough breakfasts washed down with Diet Coke and the kind of delivery order where the restaurant packs four sets of plastic utensils.” As disturbing as these too-recognizable epic feeds may be, they also assured me I’ve got a sister out there, consuming secret pizzas after hours. Meltzer perfectly depicts a binge-eater’s grand cross of shame, relief, pleasure and self-recrimination. How many of us are up there, puzzling how to get down for good, safe and sated?