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."
In the end, she proposed to him.
Women, Berman said, have much more to think about than men when it comes to weight. Female clothing styles are constantly changing while Berman said he had been wearing the same kind of outfit since he was 18.
"First of all, it's a subject, like many personal subjects, men don't like to talk about," he said. "Women are more willing to share the pain that men aren't. Secondly, fat men do have an easier time than fat women both in employment and social life. … When's the last time you saw an average-size guy with a fat woman?"
Berman said that he went through nine years of therapy and was never able to stop gaining weight. At one point, he was in the hospital, undergoing supervised fasting. He hallucinated, seeing cheeseburgers floating in the air. He and his doctors decided it was time to stop and go home.
In the end, he concluded that the point of life was not to be thin, but to be happy. His career as a lawyer and in politics has been successful, and even though he and his wife never had the children they desired, he has led a full life.
"Happiness has to do, in my case, with accomplishing certain things," he said. "I've gotten involved in politics and advocacy work. Two years ago, serving on the Human Rights Campaign -- the only straight man to do that -- and I have a great marriage that makes me happy."