This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World -- and Me

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About This Is Big: How The Founder Of Weight Watchers

Product Description From a contributor to The Cut, one of Vogue's most anticipated books "bravely and honestly" (Busy Philipps) talks about weight loss and sheds a light on Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch: "a triumphant chronicle" (New York Times). Marisa Meltzer began her first diet at the age of five. Growing up an indoors-loving child in Northern California, she learned from an early age that weight was the one part of her life she could neither change nor even really understand. Fast forward nearly four decades. Marisa, also a contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times, comes across an obituary for Jean Nidetch, the Queens, New York housewife who founded Weight Watchers in 1963. Weaving Jean's incredible story as weight loss maven and pathbreaking entrepreneur with Marisa's own journey through Weight Watchers, she chronicles the deep parallels, and enduring frustrations, in each woman's decades-long efforts to lose weight and keep it off. The result is funny, unexpected, and unforgettable: a testament to how transformation goes far beyond a number on the scale. Review Named a Best Book of the Year by  Glamour  Esquire  Real Simple    “In this memoir-nonfiction hybrid, Meltzer skillfully blends her own extensive dieting history with the life story of Jean Nidetch, the Queens housewife who founded Weight Watchers in 1963 and helped to create “diet culture” as we know it today.” Vogue  ― Vogue "Her life changed dramatically as she realized you can live a big life at any size."― People "A triumphant chronicle... Meltzer has created singular companionate text for those who know the agony of frustration surrounding weight as an issue, both personal and political. Acerbic, culturally astute and genuine, [Meltzer] makes exquisite company in the struggle."― New York Times "Meltzer writes movingly of her own struggles with having a body, but her experiment isn't the exclusive focus of the book: It also chronicles the life of Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch, whose vaudevillian comic timing, retrograde ideas about fat and happiness, and unconcealed desire for fame and connection make her a fascinating subject."― Vox "Marisa Meltzer's new Weight Watchers biography feels surprisingly in sync with the emotional arc of isolation eating."― Wall Street Journal Magazine "If you've ever been critical of diets, diet companies, and diet culture in the past, you're going to love what Meltzer has to offer here."― Bustle "Not a memoir of radical self-acceptance or saccharine inspiration, but a candid - at times dark - look at what it means to be an overweight woman in 2020."― Los Angeles Times "This heartfelt, incisive book layers the story of Weight Watchers founder Jean Nidetch with the author's own lifelong journey through various fad diets. What emerges is a surprising portrait of a remarkable but little-known life in business, as well as a thoughtful critique of America's obsession with thinness."― Esquire " This is Big...[finds] in Nidetch both a genuine pioneer - a woman who built a massive culture-defining business as a time when women couldn't even have their own credit cards - and a representative of many ideas about weight and health that are as destructive as they are enduring."― Vanity Fair "Meltzer looks at her own pursuit of weight loss and uses it to illuminate our culture's relentless focus on thinness."― Washington Post "[This] brilliant book tells the story of thinness obsession through the lives of two women-Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weight Watchers, and Meltzer herself."― Glamour "Meltzer looks at her own pursuit of weight loss and uses it to illuminate our culture's relentless focus on thinness."― The Daily Beast "Inventive...Meltzer's own experience with weight loss."― Bitch "This book is an honest, open exploration of one woman's relationship with her body as it exists in the world."― Here Magazine "[Meltzer] writes with a voice that feels like you're chatting wit