[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.
____________________