The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict

'Hunger is the loudest voice in my head. I'm hungry most of the time'. One January morning in 2003, William Leith woke up to the fattest day of his life. That same day he left London for New York to interview controversial diet guru Dr Robert Atkins. What started out as a routine assignment set Leith on an intensely personal and illuminating journey into the mysteries of hunger and addiction. "The Hungry Years" charts new territory for anyone who has ever had a craving or counted a calorie. This story of food, fat, and addiction will change the way you look at food for ever.

"The Hungry Years is a confessional, satirical, wise, tragic, truly original book about addiction, food and what's really inside a fat man that's trying to get out. The Hungry Years defies categorization - it's part memoir, part diet book, part comedy, and part sugar rush. It's the first real book about body image for men, and it breaks taboos, breaks new ground, and breaks your heart. William Leith has finally fulfilled his always huge potential. I loved it."
-Tim Lott, cultural critic and author of White City Blue

"This hilarious, self-lacerating memoir of a compulsive eater is a superb book. I feel about The Hungry Years the way William Leith feels about buttered toast: I couldn't get enough and I panicked when I was reaching the end. William Leith has always been one of our best nonfiction writers and this is his crowning achievement."
-Jon Ronson, author of Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare At Goats

"A personal journey of discovery, written as a feverish addict's memoir: waist size, sex life, repressed childhood bullying, it's all laid bare in painful details. It's wired, often desperate but, finally, hopeful. Its striking design and well-connected author will ensure plenty of exposure and unlike most books about diets, you don't have to feel guilty about devouring it."
-Bookseller(UK)