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

Written by Marisa Meltzer

Narrated by Marisa Meltzer

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. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781478999683

Marisa Meltzer

Marisa Meltzer is a journalist based in New York who for over two decades has covered beauty, fashion, wellness, and celebrity for top national publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller It Girl, Glossy, This Is Big, How Sassy Changed My Life, and Girl Power, and lives in Manhattan. 

Reviews for This Is Big

[thewestwing-864351 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Overall I really enjoyed this book. The chapters on Jean were excellent and I found out a lot about the founder of Weight Watchers that I never knew. At times I found Marisa difficult to empathise with, not wanting to have fat friends for example, but overall I recognised a lot of my own story in Marisa’s.

[bookwyrmm_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Part biography, part memoir, this book is an engaging look at the diet industry.