[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 32 (Tuesday, March 14, 2006)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2118-S2120]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             MICHAEL BERMAN

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, my dear friend of over 30 years, Michael 
Berman, has just written his memoir, ``Living Large: A Big Man's Ideas 
on Weight, Success and Acceptance.'' Mike possesses one of the most 
astute political minds along with a generous heart and kind soul. I am 
proud of his courage in writing about his struggle with weight control 
and hope his book will encourage others to honestly confront and 
overcome their weight challenges.
  This week, both The Washington Post and Roll Call reviewed Mike's 
book. I ask unanimous consent that those articles be printed at this 
point in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                  [From the Roll Call, Mar. 14, 2006]

                         Weighing in on Weight

               (By Elizabeth Brotherton, Roll Call Staff)

       Michael Berman is kind of a big deal.
       Now president of the lobbying firm the Duberstein Group 
     Inc., Berman has worked on every Democratic presidential 
     campaign since 1964. He was even deputy chief of staff to 
     former Vice President Walter Mondale.
       That's on top of all the nonprofit boards he sits on.
       But to Berman, there has been one lingering thing that has 
     followed him all those years: his weight.
       See, Michael Berman is kind of a big deal.
       ``Food,'' Berman said. ``It's like a drug.''
       Berman's lifelong struggle with food is chronicled in his 
     new book, ``Living Large: A Big Man's Ideas on Weight, 
     Success, and Acceptance,'' set to hit bookstores Wednesday.
       Berman said he wrote the book primarily because in all his 
     years of reading weight loss books, he rarely found one about 
     overweight men. Even more rare was trying to find a book 
     written by an overweight man.
       So he decided to provide that voice.
       ``I'm hoping that some people will come to understand more 
     of what fat people go through,'' Berman said.
       Berman said the book, which he co-authored with writer 
     Laurence Shames, took seven years to complete.
       ``It really became kind of a vehicle to help me,'' Berman 
     said of the book. ``It kind of helped me stay on path with my 
     weight management.''
       Berman, who has struggled with food since he was a child, 
     has always been conscious of his weight. He has tried every 
     diet imaginable, he said, from South Beach and Atkins to even 
     undergoing two hospitalized starvation diets. He once 
     hallucinated cheeseburgers.
       But whenever he managed to get his weight under control, it 
     would shoot back up again.
       The 66-year-old tipped the scales at 317 pounds in January 
     1999. (He now weights 240 pounds, he said.)
       ``I really have the view, for really fat people like myself 
     there's a significant psychological component as to why we 
     are fat,'' Berman said. ``There's some issues, some of which 
     kind of get revealed in the book.''
       ``Living Large'' reads a lot like a biography. Berman talks 
     about his childhood, meeting his wife and his career in 
     politics.
       He also includes first-hand views from his wife, Carol, on 
     how his heavy stature has affected their marriage.
       ``One day, I said to her, `Why don't you write a chapter 
     called: `Living with a fat man: A Spouse's Perspective '' he 
     said. ``I just came to realize that I had an enormous effect 
     on her.''
       Only parts of his wife's chapter made it into the book (the 
     entire section is available on Berman's Web site, 
     www.mikelivinglarge.com). But Berman also manages to touch on 
     some serious issues.
       For example: Why did he gain weight at certain times? How 
     has his weight affected his life and the lives of those -
     around him?
       Plus, he deals with the issues behind his significant 
     weight, issues he has kept secret for quite some time.
       ``I feel like, OK. I've shared this stuff with the 
     psychologist I had all these years, and I'm really 
     comfortable with myself,'' Berman said. ``I just became more 
     and more comfortable.''
       The book's release comes at a time when the United States 
     appears to be losing the war against obesity.
       About 119 million adults in the United States--64.5 percent 
     of the adult population--are either overweight or obese, 
     according to the nonprofit group Trust for America's Health.
       Obesity has been linked to a slew of serious health 
     problems, from diabetes and heart disease to strokes and some 
     cancers, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
       That means the issue will be relevant--and political--for 
     quite some time, Berman said.
       ``It's going to kind of be an issue of, `Are we going to 
     apply resources to beginning education campaigns to show 
     young people that we are going to do something about it?' '' 
     he said. ``I think it's increasingly going to be a political 
     issue. But it is going to be a resource issue.''
       Berman said that he now has created a manageable situation 
     for controlling his weight. He monitors his daily calorie 
     intake in a meticulous journal, and he regularly gets on the 
     scale.
       ``I'm never going to be a thin person,'' Berman said. 
     ``But, by golly, maybe I can keep (my weight) in a somewhat 
     healthy range.''

[[Page S2119]]

     
                                  ____
               [From the Washington Post, Mar. 13, 2006]

The Measure of a Man: Lobbyist Michael Berman Comes to Terms With Size 
                      and Self in ``Living Large''

                       (By Laura Sessions Stepp)

       For more than six decades, Michael Berman has lived as a 
     fat person. At 5 feet 9 inches, he has weighed as much as 332 
     pounds. He has been known to eat three racks of ribs at one 
     sitting, or a 40-ounce steak, or a whole box of saltines. In 
     1986, after dropping a few pounds, he spent $2,100 on three 
     custom-made, pinstriped suits in gray, blue and brown. By the 
     time the suits were ready, 10 weeks later, they no longer 
     fit. Eleven years after that he gave them away, having never 
     been able to wear them.
       A highly successful political campaigner and Washington 
     lobbyist, Berman, 66, doesn't deny the dangers of fatness or 
     the urgency of encouraging people to exercise and eat 
     healthier. He acknowledges that with 60 percent of the U.S. 
     population overweight or obese, and the rate of obesity 
     increasing particularly dramatically in children, being fat 
     has serious consequences for the health of individuals and 
     the economy. He'd like to see government and private 
     resources used for a public education campaign similar to 
     that for smoking and seat-belt use.
       But forget the notion that fat people can become slim, he 
     says in a part memoir, part self-help book scheduled for 
     release this week. They can--and should--manage their weight. 
     They can--and should--find an exercise program they can stick 
     with. But fat adults will always be fat. They are in the 
     grips of a disease over which, in the end, they do not have 
     complete control.
       This is not likely to be a popular message among those who 
     manage their daily lives with BlackBerrys, filter out porn on 
     their kids' computers, block negative information coming from 
     government sources. Is he trying to say that the fatties who 
     sprawl over airplane seats could not shrink to a reasonable 
     size if they just stopped wolfing down those Big Macs?
       Yes, that's what he's saying. ``The idea that you can slim 
     down by willpower is a bunch of horse manure,'' he said. If 
     ``nonfat'' Americans could be convinced of this, perhaps 
     they'd start relating better to fat Americans. And if fat 
     Americans understood why they're fat and accepted that they 
     will always have to shop at Rochester Big and Tall or Lane 
     Bryant, they could begin ``Living Large,'' as Berman called 
     his book.
       A Minnesota native, Berman has lived large for a long time 
     among Washington's elite. He served as counsel and deputy 
     chief of staff to former vice president Walter Mondale, acted 
     as scheduler for six Democratic conventions and, in 1989, 
     formed a bipartisan lobbying firm that today counts General 
     Motors and British Petroleum among its clients. During the 
     Clinton years, he was on a ``special access list'' that gave 
     him virtually unrestricted entree to the White House. He and 
     Carol, his wife of 40 years, live in the gracious Colonnade 
     condominiums in Northwest Washington and entertain 
     powerful friends they've accumulated over the years.
       Being a BMOC means you're treated differently than the 
     masses. The Palm restaurant, noted for its creamed 
     vegetables, serves Berman steamed spinach and broccoli. The 
     chef at I Ricchi created a dish of roasted vegetables for 
     him. The maitre d' at Georgetown's Four Seasons restaurant 
     knows that for breakfast meetings he prefers the table one 
     row from the windows near the center of the dining room; the 
     servers never place a basket of toast on his table.
       But politics is dangerous for anyone hoping to maintain a 
     reasonable weight, Berman says over breakfast at the Four 
     Seasons.
       ``The cocktail parties are not difficult,'' he says, his 
     shirt sleeves pushed up to reveal a large yellow Corum 
     wristwatch. He attacks a dish of large blueberries, then an 
     egg-white omelet and four wide slices of turkey bacon. ``I 
     can get a glass of Diet Coke, mingle, and only occasionally 
     grab an hors d'oeuvre as it goes by. What is hard are the 
     large sitdown dinners where you can't control the menu. Or 
     where you're with 3,000 other people, you order a vegetarian 
     meal, it takes forever to arrive and meanwhile there's a 
     basket in front of you full of bread.''
       He is comfortable with being different, now. But he has 
     suffered through countless eight swings, 20 diet programs, a 
     kidney infection and knee surgery. And it has taken him eight 
     years of counseling, the careful attention of a personal 
     trainer/nutritionist and the sustained support of his wife to 
     get to that place.
       Berman first realized he was not just husky, but really 
     fat, when he was 13, weighed about 170 pounds and was 
     standing in the shower of the boys' locker room one day after 
     gym class in his home town of Duluth, Minn.
       ``I hated gym,'' he recalls in ``Living Large: A Big Man's 
     Ideas on Weight, Success and Acceptance,'' written with 
     Laurence Shames. ``I couldn't climb ropes, couldn't do 
     pushups. . . . I dreaded being naked in the shower with the 
     other boys. . . . I hid as much as possible, showered as 
     quickly as I could, and pulled a shirt on even before my skin 
     was fully dry.''
       On the morning in question, as he stood in the open 
     showers, a boy next to him grabbed his chest, saying he 
     wanted to know what it felt like to touch a girl's breast. 
     That was just one of thousands of indignities he would 
     encounter or bring upon himself.
       In his sophomore year at the University of Minnesota at 
     Duluth, his fraternity brothers determined that he should 
     lose his virginity at a party in a cabin by a lake and 
     enlisted the help of an attractive woman a couple of years 
     older than he. She took his hand and led him into a bedroom. 
     She lay down and motioned for him to join her. As he did, he 
     realized she had passed out, having drunk herself silly 
     before having sex with a 250-pound 19-year-old.
       One afternoon in law school, reading in a wooden armchair, 
     he started to get up only to realize that he was stuck in the 
     chair.
       ``My body had essentially flowed out to fill the space 
     between the arms and seat,'' he writes. ``My hips were 
     captured; my bottom stayed glued to the chair and the whole 
     thing lifted up with me as I tried to stand. . . . I felt all 
     eyes on me, understood that people didn't want to look but, 
     as at a train wreck, couldn't turn away.''
       He decided to play the clown. ``Still crouched over, taking 
     small, constricted steps, I carried [the chair] across the 
     room, somewhat like a turtle with its shell, and sat down 
     once again.'' Today he winces at all the times he played the 
     jolly fat man: leading college cheerleaders onto the football 
     field by pedaling a miniature girl's bike; assuming the role 
     of Santa Claus at White House Christmas parties, the Easter 
     Bunny at the vice president's residence. Perhaps his 
     experience in acting the fool is why he was able to ignore 
     the advice of a friend who tried to steer him away from 
     writing a book about his fatness, saying it would be 
     ``undignified.''
       Undignified? His pal, like so many thinner people, didn't 
     know from undignified.
       Berman realized pretty quickly as a teen that in order to 
     be taken seriously and make something of his life, he would 
     have to develop talents other than vaudeville. In the family 
     rec room, his parents taught him ballroom dancing--the first 
     thing, he writes, that his rotund body was good at. He took 
     up musical theater in high school and continued it in 
     college. He managed his first political campaign in junior 
     high for a girl running for president of the student council. 
     She lost, but the campaign taught him he could succeed in 
     politics behind the scenes. He didn't need to be cute, just 
     hardworking, shrewd and resourceful.
       He would have preferred to be a football star. ``Over time, 
     though--and largely without my noticing from day to day--I 
     realized that something sort of wonderful had been 
     happening,'' he writes. ``My various `compensations' had been 
     adding up to a pretty good approximation of the sort of life 
     I feared I'd never have. I was busy; I had friends; I was 
     appreciated and respected for things I was good at.''
       One of the things he was, and is, good at, says wife Carol, 
     is listening to and valuing women.
       In the book, Berman calls Carol ``the strongest and most 
     stable component'' of his life. But their first date almost 
     didn't happen. It was Aug. 1, 1964, and Berman, 26, had been 
     hired to lead a voter registration drive in a Duluth suburb 
     for President Lyndon Johnson's reelection campaign. After 
     swearing off blind dates at least half a dozen times, he 
     arrived at the door of the apartment for yet one more try, 
     this time with Carol Podhoretz, a 24-year-old speech 
     pathologist.
       She greeted him in a nice dress, stockings and high heels. 
     Taking one look at his 288-pound frame, she announced that 
     she had a headache and wouldn't be able to go out. Here we go 
     again, he thought. But then she invited him in for a drink.
       ``He was big, and I reacted like a lot of young women would 
     have reacted,'' Carol Berman recalls in a phone conversation. 
     ``He asked me why I worked as a speech pathologist and I 
     really liked the reaction I got when I said I liked to help 
     people. He said, `I love that.' ''
       About an hour into their conversation, Carol announced that 
     her headache had disappeared and she'd like to go out as 
     planned. They dined at his favorite restaurant, then headed 
     to a club to dance. That was all it took. Carol, a former 
     Arthur Murray instructor, was as graceful on her feet as he 
     was. ``Somewhere between the cha-cha and the Lindy,'' he 
     writes, ``we began to have the feeling that it would be nice 
     to see more of each other.''
       They went out on 29 of the next 30 nights. Carol said she 
     found him ``adorable,'' and a man with ``great lips.'' In 
     early December, while they were dancing together and a little 
     bit tipsy, she whispered, ``You know, we should just get 
     married.''
       ``Fine,'' he said.
       Life together since has been good, although Carol had to 
     make a couple of what she calls ``accommodations.'' The 
     hardest for her was not being able to have children. Six 
     years after they married, she began trying to conceive. For 
     several years after that, she endured various painful 
     interventions, none of which worked. A fertility specialist 
     told Michael and her that his sperm count might be a factor; 
     fat men tend to have a lower number. For Michael, not having 
     children wasn't that big a deal. For Carol, who eventually 
     had a hysterectomy because of fibroid tumors, it was. ``It is 
     still what I consider a loss,'' she said.
       Michael gradually realized during these years how hard 
     politics was on a man trying to shed pounds. He had developed 
     sharp political skills that were in demand at the highest 
     levels of political and corporate Washington: making someone 
     feel as if he or she were the only person in the room, paying 
     attention to detail, distilling and delivering big ideas in a 
     few seconds. What he couldn't

[[Page S2120]]

     do was turn down the doughnuts, chips, big steaks and 
     potatoes that are the staple of political life. By the time 
     his first Democratic convention was over, the famous Chicago 
     convention in 1968, his weight exceeded 300 pounds for the 
     first time.
       Convention years were tough on the marriage. Michael and 
     Carol first realized this in 1989, on their 25th wedding 
     anniversary. On a visit to the beach, Michael brought Carol a 
     handful of shells, put them on a board and suggested she use 
     them to show how happy she was in their marriage for each of 
     their 25 years. The year 1965 got a big shell; 1968 a little 
     shell; 1984 a shard.
       That was the year Walter Mondale lost the election to 
     Ronald Reagan, and Berman weighed 330 pounds. He was wearing 
     a size 58 suite, consuming up to five pounds of red meat a 
     week along with up to 18 eggs. He couldn't walk a city block 
     without panting. He developed sleep apnea, where his body 
     would forget to breathe. Carol told him he looked green. 
     Scared for his health for the first time in his life, he 
     enrolled in a Pritiken Longevity Center in Pennsylvania. He 
     lost 112 pounds--and that's when he ordered the custom suits.
       Berman never again weighed as much as he did in 1984. In 
     1989, he joined Republican Ken Duberstein--who had served as 
     Reagan's chief of staff--in forming the Duberstein Group. He 
     started psychotheraphy in 1990 and, several years after, 
     employed a private nutritionist and trainer.
       Still, his weight seesawed. By 1997--a year after he was 
     diagnosed with a kidney problem--he was up to 309 pounds.
       In 1998, on the advice of a friend, he started jotting down 
     thoughts and memories about being fat with the idea of 
     writing a book someday. The exercise became, not 
     surprisingly, an obsession. He read scientific reports and 
     researched cultures of the past in which fatness was 
     considered a symbol of wisdom, serenity and wealth. One day 
     he walked into a pharmacy and bought 22 different diet aids, 
     one of everything on the shelf, to investigate how effective 
     they are. His conclusion: They aren't.
       He read that for some people, fatness is genetic. But he 
     had researched his family tree; that wasn't true for him. So 
     he began to develop his own theory on why people are fat.
       The easy answer, of course, is that they take in more 
     calories than they burn. But then it gets more complicated, 
     he writes. Each person's metabolism is different. He, his 
     sister and his parents all ate a lot of his mother's 
     delicious briskets and lamb chops and none of them 
     exercised much. But he was the only one who got fat.
       Emotions, buried for many years, play a role, too. From the 
     age of 4, he sneaked cookies, crackers and anything else he 
     could into his bedroom.
       ``I could not control my appetite because something was 
     driving me,'' he writes, ``something that was beyond the 
     reach of willpower, outside the realm of reason.''
       He and his psychologist came to believe that his compulsion 
     started partly as a reaction to his mother. Early in his 
     life, she showed her affection by cooking rich meals and he 
     showed his affection by eating lots of it. As he got older 
     and heftier in early adolescence, she started withholding 
     food and he ate as a way of asserting his emerging will.
       Later in life, dropping out of weight-loss programs even 
     though he was losing weight, he had to confront another 
     factor: He was fat-dependent.
       Fat was something he could hide behind, an excuse for not 
     doing things that he was afraid of doing. For example, in 
     high school, he felt anxious around girls. By making himself 
     fat and unattractive, he could approach them as potential 
     friends, not girlfriends.
       Eventually he had to admit that he was an addict. But 
     unlike alcoholics or drug users, he couldn't go cold turkey.
       ``The most difficult thing about a food addiction is that 
     you can't give up food,'' he said at breakfast.
       He pulled out a tiny spiral notebook in which he records 
     everything he eats each day and the total calorie count, as 
     well as how much he exercises.
       ``March 1--1,610 calories. March 2--2,295. March 3--2,500. 
     March 4--4,465.''
       What happened on March 4? He and Carol attended a dinner 
     party at pollster Peter Hart's. He couldn't resist the 
     chocolate cake. ``I ate probably eight ounces of chocolate,'' 
     he admitted. ``But I don't beat myself up anymore. I knew I'd 
     be heavier the next morning so the next couple of days I'd be 
     careful.''
       A couple of years ago, he wouldn't have been so sanguine. 
     But if there was one thing he had learned in writing his 
     book, it was this: ``Losing weight is only one aspect of 
     dealing with the reality of being a fat person--and not 
     necessarily even the most important one. Managing fatness 
     means accepting ourselves as who we are. . . . in short, 
     learning to live a full and satisfying life at whatever 
     weight and size we happen to be.''
       Two days after Hart's party, he was back down to 1,830 
     calories.

                          ____________________