The Measure of a Man
Lobbyist Michael Berman Comes to Terms With Size and Self in 'Living Large'

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 13, 2006

For more than six decades, Michael Berman has lived as a fat person. At 5 feet 9 inches, he has weighed as much as 332 pounds. He has been known to eat three racks of ribs at one sitting, or a 40-ounce steak, or a whole box of saltines. In 1986, after dropping a few pounds, he spent $2,100 on three custom-made, pinstriped suits in gray, blue and brown. By the time the suits were ready, 10 weeks later, they no longer fit. Eleven years after that he gave them away, having never been able to wear them.

A highly successful political campaigner and Washington lobbyist, Berman, 66, doesn't deny the dangers of fatness or the urgency of encouraging people to exercise and eat healthier. He acknowledges that with 60 percent of the U.S. population overweight or obese, and the rate of obesity increasing particularly dramatically in children, being fat has serious consequences for the health of individuals and the economy. He'd like to see government and private resources used for a public education campaign similar to that for smoking and seat-belt use.

But forget the notion that fat people can become slim, he says in a part memoir, part self-help book scheduled for release this week. They can -- and should -- manage their weight. They can -- and should -- find an exercise program they can stick with. But fat adults will always be fat. They are in the grips of a disease over which, in the end, they do not have complete control.

This is not likely to be a popular message among those who manage their daily lives with BlackBerrys, filter out porn on their kids' computers, block negative information coming from government sources. Is he trying to say that the fatties who sprawl over airplane seats could not shrink to a reasonable size if they just stopped wolfing down those Big Macs?

Yes, that's what he's saying. "The idea that you can slim down by willpower is a bunch of horse manure," he says. If "nonfat" Americans could be convinced of this, perhaps they'd start relating better to fat Americans. And if fat Americans understood why they're fat and accepted that they will always have to shop at Rochester Big and Tall or Lane Bryant, they could begin "Living Large," as Berman called his book.

Big Man on Campus

A Minnesota native, Berman has lived large for a long time among Washington's elite. He served as counsel and deputy chief of staff to former vice president Walter Mondale, acted as scheduler for six Democratic conventions and, in 1989, formed a bipartisan lobbying firm that today counts General Motors and British Petroleum among its clients. During the Clinton years, he was on a "special access list" that gave him virtually unrestricted entree to the White House. He and Carol, his wife of 40 years, live in the gracious Colonnade condominiums in Northwest Washington and entertain powerful friends they've accumulated over the years.

Being a BMOC means you're treated differently than the masses. The Palm restaurant, noted for its creamed vegetables, serves Berman steamed spinach and broccoli. The chef at I Ricchi created a dish of roasted vegetables for him. The maitre d' at Georgetown's Four Seasons restaurant knows that for breakfast meetings he prefers the table one row from the windows near the center of the dining room; the servers never place a basket of toast on his table.

But politics is dangerous for anyone hoping to maintain a reasonable weight, Berman says over breakfast at the Four Seasons.

"The cocktail parties are not difficult," he says, his shirt sleeves pushed up to reveal a large yellow Corum wristwatch. He attacks a dish of large blueberries, then an egg-white omelet and four wide slices of turkey bacon. "I can get a glass of Diet Coke, mingle, and only occasionally grab an hors d'oeuvre as it goes by. What is hard are the large sitdown dinners where you can't control the menu. Or where you're with 3,000 other people, you order a vegetarian meal, it takes forever to arrive and meanwhile there's a basket in front of you full of bread."

He is comfortable with being different, now. But he has suffered through countless weight swings, 20 diet programs, a kidney infection and knee surgery. And it has taken him eight years of counseling, the careful attention of a personal trainer/nutritionist and the sustained support of his wife to get to that place.

Berman first realized he was not just husky, but really fat, when he was 13, weighed about 170 pounds and was standing in the shower of the boys' locker room one day after gym class in his home town of Duluth, Minn.

"I hated gym," he recalls in "Living Large: A Big Man's Ideas on Weight, Success and Acceptance," written with Laurence Shames. "I couldn't climb ropes, couldn't do pushups. . . . I dreaded being naked in the shower with the other boys. . . . I hid as much as possible, showered as quickly as I could, and pulled a shirt on even before my skin was fully dry."

On the morning in question, as he stood in the open showers, a boy next to him grabbed his chest, saying he wanted to know what it felt like to touch a girl's breast. That was just one of thousands of indignities he would encounter or bring upon himself.

In his sophomore year at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, his fraternity brothers determined that he should lose his virginity at a party in a cabin by a lake and enlisted the help of an attractive woman a couple of years older than he. She took his hand and led him into a bedroom. She lay down and motioned for him to join her. As he did, he realized she had passed out, having drunk herself silly before having sex with a 250-pound 19-year-old.

One afternoon in law school, reading in a wooden armchair, he started to get up only to realize that he was stuck in the chair.

"My body had essentially flowed out to fill the space between the arms and seat," he writes. "My hips were captured; my bottom stayed glued to the chair and the whole thing lifted up with me as I tried to stand. . . . I felt all eyes on me, understood that people didn't want to look but, as at a train wreck, couldn't turn away."

He decided to play the clown. "Still crouched over, taking small, constricted steps, I carried [the chair] across the room, somewhat like a turtle with its shell, and sat down once again." Today he winces at all the times he played the jolly fat man: leading college cheerleaders onto the football field by pedaling a miniature girl's bike; assuming the role of Santa Claus at White House Christmas parties, the Easter Bunny at the vice president's residence. Perhaps his experience in acting the fool is why he was able to ignore the advice of a friend who tried to steer him away from writing a book about his fatness, saying it would be "undignified."

Undignified? His pal, like so many thinner people, didn't know from undignified.

Berman realized pretty quickly as a teen that in order to be taken seriously and make something of his life, he would have to develop talents other than vaudeville. In the family rec room, his parents taught him ballroom dancing -- the first thing, he writes, that his rotund body was good at. He took up musical theater in high school and continued it in college. He managed his first political campaign in junior high for a girl running for president of the student council. She lost, but the campaign taught him he could succeed in politics behind the scenes. He didn't need to be cute, just hardworking, shrewd and resourceful.

He would have preferred to be a football star. "Over time, though -- and largely without my noticing from day to day -- I realized that something sort of wonderful had been happening," he writes. "My various 'compensations' had been adding up to a pretty good approximation of the sort of life I feared I'd never have. I was busy; I had friends; I was appreciated and respected for things I was good at."

Scared for His Health

One of the things he was, and is, good at, says wife Carol, is listening to and valuing women.

In the book, Berman calls Carol "the strongest and most stable component" of his life. But their first date almost didn't happen. It was Aug. 1, 1964, and Berman, 26, had been hired to lead a voter registration drive in a Duluth suburb for President Lyndon Johnson's reelection campaign. After swearing off blind dates at least half a dozen times, he arrived at the door of the apartment for yet one more try, this time with Carol Podhoretz, a 24-year-old speech pathologist.

She greeted him in a nice dress, stockings and high heels. Taking one look at his 288-pound frame, she announced that she had a headache and wouldn't be able to go out. Here we go again, he thought. But then she invited him in for a drink.

"He was big, and I reacted like a lot of young women would have reacted," Carol Berman recalls in a phone conversation. "He asked me why I worked as a speech pathologist and I really liked the reaction I got when I said I liked to help people. He said, 'I love that.' "

About an hour into their conversation, Carol announced that her headache had disappeared and she'd like to go out as planned. They dined at his favorite restaurant, then headed to a club to dance. That was all it took. Carol, a former Arthur Murray instructor, was as graceful on her feet as he was. "Somewhere between the cha-cha and the Lindy," he writes, "we began to have the feeling that it would be nice to see more of each other."

They went out on 29 of the next 30 nights. Carol said she found him "adorable," and a man with "great lips." In early December, while they were dancing together and a little bit tipsy, she whispered, "You know, we should just get married."

"Fine," he said.

Life together since has been good, although Carol had to make a couple of what she calls "accommodations." The hardest for her was not being able to have children. Six years after they married, she began trying to conceive. For several years after that, she endured various painful interventions, none of which worked. A fertility specialist told Michael and her that his sperm count might be a factor; fat men tend to have a lower number. For Michael, not having children wasn't that big a deal. For Carol, who eventually had a hysterectomy because of fibroid tumors, it was. "It is still what I consider a loss," she said.

Michael gradually realized during these years how hard politics was on a man trying to shed pounds. He had developed sharp political skills that were in demand at the highest levels of political and corporate Washington: making someone feel as if he or she were the only person in the room, paying attention to detail, distilling and delivering big ideas in a few seconds. What he couldn't do was turn down the doughnuts, chips, big steaks and potatoes that are the staple of political life. By the time his first Democratic convention was over, the famous Chicago convention in 1968, his weight exceeded 300 pounds for the first time.

Convention years were tough on the marriage. Michael and Carol first realized this in 1989, on their 25th wedding anniversary. On a visit to the beach, Michael brought Carol a handful of shells, put them on a board and suggested she use them to show how happy she was in their marriage for each of their 25 years. The year 1965 got a big shell; 1968 a little shell; 1984 a shard.

That was the year Walter Mondale lost the election to Ronald Reagan, and Berman weighed 330 pounds. He was wearing a size 58 suit, consuming up to five pounds of red meat a week along with up to 18 eggs. He couldn't walk a city block without panting. He developed sleep apnea, where his body would forget to breathe. Carol told him he looked green. Scared for his health for the first time in his life, he enrolled in a Pritiken Longevity Center in Pennsylvania. He lost 112 pounds -- and that's when he ordered the custom suits.

The Role of Emotions

Berman never again weighed as much as he did in 1984. In 1989, he joined Republican Ken Duberstein -- who had served as Reagan's chief of staff -- in forming the Duberstein Group. He started psychotherapy in 1990 and, several years after that, employed a private nutritionist and trainer.

Still, his weight seesawed. By 1997 -- a year after he was diagnosed with a kidney problem -- he was up to 309 pounds.

In 1998, on the advice of a friend, he started jotting down thoughts and memories about being fat with the idea of writing a book someday. The exercise became, not surprisingly, an obsession. He read scientific reports and researched cultures of the past in which fatness was considered a symbol of wisdom, serenity and wealth. One day he walked into a pharmacy and bought 22 different diet aids, one of everything on the shelf, to investigate how effective they are. His conclusion: They aren't.

He read that for some people, fatness is genetic. But he had researched his family tree; that wasn't true for him. So he began to develop his own theory on why people are fat.

The easy answer, of course, is that they take in more calories than they burn. But then it gets more complicated, he writes. Each person's metabolism is different. He, his sister and his parents all ate a lot of his mother's delicious briskets and lamb chops and none of them exercised much. But he was the only one who got fat.

Emotions, buried for many years, play a role, too. From the age of 4, he sneaked cookies, crackers and anything else he could into his bedroom.

"I could not control my appetite because something was driving me," he writes, "something that was beyond the reach of willpower, outside the realm of reason."

He and his psychologist came to believe that his compulsion started partly as a reaction to his mother. Early in his life, she showed her affection by cooking rich meals and he showed his affection by eating lots of it. As he got older and heftier in early adolescence, she started withholding food and he ate as a way of asserting his emerging will.

Later in life, dropping out of weight-loss programs even though he was losing weight, he had to confront another factor: He was fat-dependent.

Fat was something he could hide behind, an excuse for not doing things that he was afraid of doing. For example, in high school, he felt anxious around girls. By making himself fat and unattractive, he could approach them as potential friends, not girlfriends.

Eventually he had to admit that he was an addict. But unlike alcoholics or drug users, he couldn't go cold turkey.

"The most difficult thing about a food addiction is that you can't give up food," he said at breakfast.

He pulled out a tiny spiral notebook in which he records everything he eats each day and the total calorie count, as well as how much he exercises.

March 1 -- 1,610 calories . March 2 -- 2,295. March 3 -- 2,500. March 4 -- 4,465.

What happened on March 4? He and Carol attended a dinner party at pollster Peter Hart's. He couldn't resist the chocolate cake. "I ate probably eight ounces of chocolate," he admitted. "But I don't beat myself up anymore. I knew I'd be heavier the next morning so the next couple of days I'd be careful."

A couple of years ago, he wouldn't have been so sanguine. But if there was one thing he had learned in writing his book, it was this: "Losing weight is only one aspect of dealing with the reality of being a fat person -- and not necessarily even the most important one. Managing fatness means accepting ourselves as who we are. . . . in short, learning to live a full and satisfying life at whatever weight and size we happen to be."

Two days after Hart's party, he was back down to 1,830 calories.