All her life, Mitchell had eaten lustily and mindlessly. Food was her babysitter, her best friend, her confidant, and it provided a refuge from her fractured family. But when she stepped on the scale on her twentieth birthday and it registered a shocking 268 pounds, she knew she had to change the way she thought about food and herself: her life was at stake. She tells us how she discovered balance in an off-kilter world, finding beauty in acceptance...

Avoiding relationships to protect her sensitive heart, plus-sized Molly supports her once-cynical twin, Cassie, when the latter has her own bout of lovesickness, a situation that is complicated by sibling dynamics and an unexpected romantic triangle.

Uncovers the influences that have conditioned people to overeat, explaining how combinations of fat, sugar, and salt; food cues; and the cultural norms that are difficult to ignore have hijacked our brain circuitry, and demonstrates how to regain control.

"Robert Lustig's 90-minute YouTube video "Sugar: The Bitter Truth", has been viewed more than two 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...

By the time they reach kindergarten, most kids have learned that "fat" is bad. As they get older, kids learn to pursue thinness in order to survive in a world that ties our body size to our value. Multibillion-dollar industries thrive on consumers believing that we don't want to be fat. Our weight-centric medical system pushes "weight loss" as a prescription, while ignoring social determinants of health and reinforcing negative stereotypes about the...

When her honeymoon with new husband Dirk Coulter is interrupted by the discovery of a dead body on the beach, Savannah Reid does some investigating of her own when she discovers that the deceased is a popular Los Angeles anchorwoman.

When two teens, one gay and one straight, meet accidentally and discover that they share the same name, their lives become intertwined as one begins dating the other's best friend, who produces a play revealing his relationship with them both.