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I climb the stairs to the street and step to the side to catch my breath. I peel my hands from the pole and get off.
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He catches me in the groin and it hurts, but not as much as the shame when the other kids laugh and the bus driver gets up and storms toward me-Īnd the train stops and jolts me back into now. He reaches back and starts clubbing me with it, below the waist, out of the driver’s line of sight. An older kid sitting in front of me-a redhead, freckles, I’ll never forget his face-has a cast on his right arm. The driver glares at me in the rearview mirror. Nobody wants the fat boy mashed in next to them. Every time I spot an open space, somebody slides to the edge of the seat and covers it up. He can’t take us home until everybody sits down. To elementary school in Georgia, standing in the aisle on the bus. My palms start to sweat and all of a sudden I flash back. There’s an old woman sitting three feet away. Some of them stare at me and I figure they’re thinking the same thing. But what really scares me is the chance I might land on somebody. When a fat guy falls, it’s hard to get up. I’m praying this one doesn’t lurch around a corner or slam to a stop because I’m terrified of falling. I live in Charlotte and don’t visit New York much, so I don’t have a feel for how subway cars move. I’m on the subway in New York City, standing in the aisle, clinging to the pole.
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I’m six-foot-one, or seventy-three inches tall. My shirts are size XXXXXXL, which the big-and-tall stores shorten to 6X. The government definition of obesity is a body mass index of thirty or more. I’m the biggest human being most people who know me have ever met, or ever will. The average American male weighs 195 pounds I’m two of those guys, with a ten-year-old left over. Nobody knows that number-not my wife, not my doctor, not my closest friends. Those are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write. One of them says, “Here’s what you have to do.” Three or four official-looking people are lined up at a table, like judges on a panel. Suddenly we’re back in a room and I can sense I’m being watched. My mouth is coated with hog-slime, and I reach in and scrape it off my tongue. I get to my feet and kick it and ram it with my shoulder and we tumble out into the yard. I push it away but it keeps plowing back and I see tusks. It stinks and it’s slick to the touch and I can’t keep it off me. We’re on a road trip, out in this house in the country, and I’m trying to talk to my wife. The Elephant in the Room Prologue KILLING THE HOG “Add this to your reading list ASAP” ( Charlotte Magazine). Affecting and searingly honest, The Elephant in the Room is an “inspirational” ( The New York Times) memoir that will resonate with anyone who has grappled with addiction, shame, or self-consciousness. “What could have been a wallow in memoir self-pity is raised to art by Tomlinson’s wit and prose” ( Rolling Stone). Over the course of the book, he confronts these issues head-on and chronicles the practical steps he has to take to lose weight by the end. From buying a Fitbit and setting exercise goals to contemplating the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, America’s “capital of food porn,” and modifying his own diet, Tomlinson brings us along on a candid and sometimes brutal look at the everyday experience of being constantly aware of your size. He also hits the road to meet other members of the plus-sized tribe in an attempt to understand how, as a nation, we got to this point. In The Elephant in the Room, Tomlinson chronicles his lifelong battle with weight in a voice that combines the urgency of Roxane Gay’s Hunger with the intimacy of Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’. But nothing worked, and every time he tried to make a change, it didn’t go the way he planned-in fact, he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to change. Raised in a family that loved food, he had been aware of the problem for years, seeing doctors and trying diets from the time he was a preteen.
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When he was almost fifty years old, Tommy Tomlinson weighed an astonishing-and dangerous-460 pounds, at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, unable to climb a flight of stairs without having to catch his breath, or travel on an airplane without buying two seats. A “warm and funny and honest…genuinely unputdownable” (Curtis Sittenfeld) memoir chronicling what it’s like to live in today’s world as a fat man, from acclaimed journalist Tommy Tomlinson, who, as he neared the age of fifty, weighed 460 pounds and decided he had to change his life.