The Magazine

Weighing America and Finding It Wanting

David Kessler's anti-obesity crusade.

Aug 10, 2009, Vol. 14, No. 44
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David A. Kessler is a man of science--former dean of the medical school at Yale and a physician himself--but he is also a man of pudge, so not long ago he decided to combine the two interests in an experiment.


"I walked into a bakery," he writes in his new book, The End of Overeating, "and asked for two semi-sweet chocolate-chip cookies." He took them home and looked upon them. And Kessler saw that they were good. Better than good.


"They were thick and gooey--chunks of chocolate filled the craters of the cookies and rose into peaks."


He placed them on his work table, an arm's length away. "I was fixated on those cookies," he writes. Without noticing, he inched his right hand closer to the cookies, just within reach of the overbrimming craters, the peaks rising chocolaty to the sky.


He went upstairs. "But even from that safe distance, I could not fully shake the image of the cookies." Yet he didn't eat them! He left the house, "and I felt triumphant." Then he went to a coffee shop and ordered "an orange-chocolate cookie and ate it at once." There his experiment ended.

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