Documents comedian Jeff Garlin's hilarious journey to lessen both his physical and carbon footprint. Garlin dedicated the filming of an entire season of Curb Your Enthusiasm to completely make over his lifestyle in two major ways--by lightening his physical and his ecological footprints. After many false starts, he believes that writing a book about the experiment is the only possible way to help him lose weight and go green. The hardest part of the endeavor is overcoming his food addiction--especially when craft services has a constant buffet on set. In addition to cutting calories, Jeff falls into a love affair with Pilates, sweats with Richard Simmons, and twice visits the Pritikin Longevity Center for "rehab." Larry David's rooting for him, Jerry Seinfeld's plotting against him, and his wife is just plain annoyed. As far as going green, Jeff has always been a big recycler, but he has a lot to learn.--From publisher description.

By the time my fortieth birthday loomed, I'd married, had two kids, left the country of my birth for another and picked up plenty of baggage along the path. I was long overdue for a spiritual spring-clean. But I couldn't very well take a year off to meditate in an ashram. Who was going to make the lunchboxes? So instead, I opted for doing something about the fatty deposits on my rear-end before they fossilized. And that's where this story begins. Or so I thought. *** A photo of herself in a bikini on her son's fifth birthday led Joanne Fedler to take stock of her life. How had she reached a point where she could barely look at her own body without cringing? Armed only with the certainty that she did not want to be 'fat and forty' Joanne decided it was time to get rid of the excess weight she'd been carrying for far too long. While on a strict new eating plan in which she radically changed her relationship with food, Joanne began to see it wasn't only pounds she needed to lose, but the weight of fear, guilt and anxiety she was lugging around in her heart. In making friends with hunger and dropping a few dress sizes, Joanne found greater peace not only with her body, but with herself, her life and her adopted country. What began as a mission to get back into a bikini became a journey towards acceptance, proving that a spiritual journey can start by saying 'no' to the chocolate mousse. When Hungry, Eat is a celebration of unexpected spiritual insight, small portions and the gifts of hunger.

Every extra pound tells a story . . . At five four and 230 pounds, film critic Jami Bernard took the plunge into what she half-jokingly calls "the heart of darkness"- her innermost self, where, by confronting a past both funny and painful, she was able to let go of those pounds, one by one, week after week. At the end of this intensely personal, bitterly humorous journey, she had lost seventy-five of them. Jami chronicled her weight loss in the New York Daily News , where she was a film critic for thirteen years. This book goes behind the scenes to tell the unvarnished truth of what it's like to live large in a body-obsessed culture that takes no prisoners. Here is the reality of weight loss: a stock-market chart of crazy gains and losses, a crumb trail of doomed relationships, the terrors of pleasure, and the best pizza this side of Naples. With a sharp wit and the confident, easy style that makes her a nationally known critic and champion of women's issues, Jami candidly explores the secret world of fat people-their fears, bodies, clothing; their forbidden love affair with food; and what it's like to leave that all behind and emerge thin again on the other side. Moving, sometimes shocking, and always mordantly funny, The Incredible Shrinking Critic takes it all off-seventy-five pounds and counting.