Fat but Happy

March 15, 2006 — -- Michael Berman's life has been almost perfect in every sense: He is the president of the Duberstein Group, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm; served as counsel and deputy chief of staff to Vice President Walter Mondale; and is married to a woman he loves very much.

Obesity, however, has always plagued him. Berman, 66, and 5-foot-9, now weighs 239 pounds. He has weighed as little as 215 and as much as 332 -- a weight he attained after Mondale's disastrous 1984 presidential campaign. He has battled obesity most of his life and documented that struggle in a book written with Laurence Shames, "Living Large: A Big Man's Ideas on Weight, Success, and Acceptance."

In the book, Berman says that his inability to lose weight successfully is a disease much akin to alcoholism, but, unlike a beer, one cannot avoid eating food if he wants to live a healthy life.

"Normal-weight people don't get this," said Berman, who is a member of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. "Even fat people don't get it. I've come to learn it's a chronic disease and there's no magic pill. All of the diets worked. I lost weight, but I couldn't keep it off. That's part of the disease. You may lose the weight, but you haven't lost the problem that caused you to gain weight in the first place and so you gain it back."

Berman is unique because most of the people who discuss being overweight are women who are more likely to be affected by society's prejudices. Even Berman said he avoided dating overweight women when he was younger. When he married his wife, Carol, to whom the book is dedicated, he weighed 290 pounds and she weighed 125.

"I was shallow for the moment," said Carol Berman, 65. "But I invited him in because I didn't want to be totally rude. We started to talk. He asked me about myself, and he was such a good conversationalist. We had a lot in common. I was won over, and we ended up going out to dinner. Luckily I'm not shallow, but I was 24 years old and I was looking for someone who was handsome and looked good on my arm."