The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale is possibly the foremost entity for research and advocacy into the issues embedded within its name. Regular readers will know that I've been seeking to illuminate a report it released less than a month ago on the marketing of junk food to kids, strictly because I believe in their mission, and their information.

I now have a set of videos that I hope will be another avenue to spread word of "Fat Boy Thin Man" and the ideas contained therein. A couple of them are readings from the book, but this one is the centerpiece:

To be fair, when Cherrie Herrin-Michehl, a therapist in Seattle, wrote the phrase of the headline in her post about "Fat Boy Thin Man," she was speaking more about the details of my story, rather than my telling of it.

That's an important distinction: A joke, for example, can be really funny but can still be ruined by the jokester. My opinion is that "FBTM" has both, but as the author, I'd better think so, no? I hope you'll investigate for yourself, of course. 

Thank you to Meredith Terpeluk for inviting me to be the first guest on her "Healthy Voice" show. We talked about being obese and overcoming it, and at Meredith's request, I also gave a couple of tips for surviving Thanksgiving. Here's the audio.

Please listen and, if you find it useful or entertaining, share.

My hometown weekly did a Q&A with me that ran last week. I'm a little lax in posting it.

Thanks to writer Nicole Laskowski.

Pretty exciting news for us here at Fat Boy Thin Man central: I've been invited to be on "Where We Live," an hourlong morning show on WNPR-FM in Hartford, Thursday morning (Nov. 4) at 9. That's the first exciting part.

A friend who's highly, highly placed in the columnist universe and has written a number of books once told me, "There's only two good days when you write a book. The day it comes out and the day you get the dough." [I'd ID him/her, but it was a private comment.]

I"m grateful to Devra First, food critic at the Boston Globe, for mentioning "Fat Boy Thin Man" in her most recent online chat, whose transcript can be found here. (Go to 11:39)

If you and I are hooked in via the Fat Boy Thin Man Facebook page, or my personal FB page, or fatboythinman on Twitter, then you may already know this: We approved the proof of the paper version on the book last night! I ordered 100 copies to start, to be used almost entirely for promotional purposes.

Now that I actually have the book and am no longer hoping to see it "sometime soon," we can set an official release date, and I'm aiming for the latter half of October. I hope to be able to announce a date, well, "sometime soon" — next week, maybe.

Many thanks (and a little "woo-hoo!") to childhoodobesitynews.com, which referenced some of my reporting in a blog post a couple of days ago.

I hope it won't be the last time Oprah and I appear in the same sentence:

That is regrettable, but, fortunately, there are people like Oprah Winfrey and Michael Prager, who are doing their best to raise consciousness and offer the beacon of hope to fellow addicts.