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I was afraid of the evil in me that seemed to rise out of nowhere and take me over” (p. With only an adversarial relationship with her grandmother and an equally adversarial relationship with her mother, Moore describes the life of a very lonely little girl eating as a means of filling the hole where love should be.Her mother’s constant beatings and verbal abuse regarding her weight, as well as the starvation and other diets she inflicted upon her only served to further remove any chance that Moore would be able to overcome her weight issues as a child.Īs Moore describes it, although she was religiously faithful to many of the diets her mother placed her on, the moment she was out of her mother’s reach, she would slip back into her old eating habits, again as a way of attempting to fulfill a need for acceptance. I starved for my father, whom I would never once see for many years, and my mother, who came to visit for Christmas and soon again was gone” (p. She instead traces her weight issues back to when she was four years old and her parents divorced and left Moore with her maternal grandmother, Grammy, where Moore says she “ate and ate and ate.

She describes herself in college as “finally slender”, but this does not solve her problems as she continues “awkward, homely and half nuts and Sam didn’t love me any thinner than he’d loved me chubby” (p.

However, she doesn’t use this as an excuse for her own weight issues. Understanding how this first-person account brings forward these issues of overweight children provokes a deep reaction on the part of the reader and provides clues as to how health professionals, such as a pharmacist, might better help their patients through the experience and insight gained through reading this book.Īlthough Moore doesn’t say she is genetically incapable of losing weight, she makes it clear that she is genetically predisposed to the capacity for gain as she traces the line of overweight relatives back on both sides of her family. Speaking on an adult level and extremely candid, Moore makes it possible to see how abuse, neglect, genetic history, society, and a number of other factors both contributed to and were (and are) influenced by her weight.

Fat Girl by Judith Moore