English Summary/英文概要： Combining the revealing cultural commentary of Fast Food Nation with the visceral insights of A Million Little Pieces, this is the story of a journalist’s struggle with weight, and an unflinching look at our own culture of fat and thin.
“I thought: if I can understand the despair, my own and everybody’s else’s, I could write the story—of why we hate fat, of why we are fat, of why, in some perverse way, we want to be fat. And, most importantly, what we can do to stop being so fat. Obesity is the essential human problem in a nutshell—we try to make life easy by giving ourselves access to resources, and then we make life difficult by overconsuming those resources. We have more of everything than we’ve ever had, and yet we feel emptier.”
While on assignment to interview Dr. Robert Atkins, journalist William Leith realized that he could not report on diet alone; he wanted desperately to develop a deeper understanding of his relationship with food and the pathological cravings that led him (and millions of others) to become dangerously overweight.
His Atkins interview led him to probe not only the link between carbohydrates and addiction, but also how our relationship with food has changed over the last few decades in light of economic, technological, and cultural changes in the world, as well as our cultural obsession with our bodies. Combining the science of food addiction with memoir, humor, and sociological insights, The Hungry Years is a book that will force us to look at our culture of consumption in a new way.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 2003年一月，William Leith人生最胖的ㄧ天，他訪問了全世界最具爭議的減肥教父Dr. Robert Atkins，William Leith發現光只報導減肥是不足的。“如果我能了解對於食物的慾望，我就能寫個關於為何我們討厭肥胖、肥胖的原因或是為何有時反而想要胖ㄧ點。更重要的是如何阻止肥胖?!”肥胖不再只是女性議題，現代人普遍都有體型困擾以及飲食問題，作者深入了解關於人們對於食物的心理學、食物在各個層面包括經濟、文化等的改變以及體型的文化迷思等。作者以幽默的筆法描寫食物成癮的各層面文化觀察！(VC)

Awards/获奖情况： This book was a bestseller in the UK (it was published by Bloomsbury in August 2005) and so far we have sold translation rights to Tammi (Finland), Ambo-Anthos (Holland), Sperling & Kupfer (Italy) and Albert Bonniers Forlag (Sweden).