Magnificent Obesity: My Search for Wellness, Voice and Meaning in the Second Half of Life
Martha M. Moravec, 2014
Hatherleigh Press / Random House
239 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781578265053
Summary
Lose weight, calm down, find God.
Priorities fall quickly into place for a 55-year-old compulsive overeater with a panic disorder when a mild heart attack accelerates her midlife crisis into a furious race to close the gap between where she appears to be going in life and the very different place she wants to be.
Hindered by numerous, longstanding obstacles to wellness and wholeness—from an obsessive fear of death to a two-pack-a-day smoking habit—writer Martha Moravec turns crisis into opportunity, loss into insight and the pain of her past into a means for growing up in time to grow old with grace.
A diabetic weighing in at 324 pounds, Martha pulls together a support team of doctors, therapists and priests, helpers, healers and friends from the grid of small town life in southern Vermont. The patience and dedication of the people she calls "the angels we can see" prove that it takes a village to make a self-actualized adult as she addresses childhood developmental trauma, panic attacks and phobias, addictive behaviors and debilitating symptoms in an often painful but always illuminating fight toward recovery, reinvention and rebirth.
Magnificent Obesity depicts one woman’s effort to look honestly and compassionately at her obesity through a kaleidoscopic lens of anxiety disorder, addictive behavior, agnosticism and the onset of aging. Her conviction that it’s never too late to grow up, that it is possible to feel born again at any age and that there is no expiration date on dreams will inspire anyone who yearns to rewrite their story and take their own magnificent leap into a life lived with passion, purpose and authentic power. (From the publisher.)