The Elephant in the Room Quotes

“The surest sign of an adult is the ability to accept delayed gratification.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“Telling a fat person Eat less and exercise is like telling a boxer Don’t get hit. You act as if there’s not an opponent.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“Here are the two things I have come to believe about diets:
1. Almost any diet works in the short term.
2. Almost no diets work in the long term”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“I don’t pretend to know how love works. I can tell you a thousand things I love about Alix, but none of them are exactly why I love her. The why, I don’t have words for. It’s a code we decipher every time we hold hands, a secret song we hear when we look in each other’s eyes. It’s really true. You just know.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“I always hoped I would find someone and we would fall in love. But I didn’t think I had much to offer, especially in those first few moments where you make an impression or you slink back across the room. I came to believe I was just a fat guy with bad teeth, and I pretty much quit trying. The only reason my heart didn’t get broken is because I rarely took it out of the box.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“I’m almost never hungry in the physical sense. But I’m always craving an emotional high, the kind that comes from making love, or being in the crowd for great live music, or watching the sun come up over the ocean. And I’m always wanting something to counter the low, when I’m anxious about work or arguing with family or depressed for reasons I can’t understand.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“A diet is no good if it works for just a week or ten days or a month. It has to be something you can live with (apologies to Shakespeare) tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“Making a fundamental change of any kind is the hardest thing an adult human being can do.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“At some point we have to own our choices. If not, we’re eternally children.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“I don’t know how much guilt weighs. Guilt and shame are the hardest weight to shed.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“What I want you to understand, more than anything else, is that telling a fat person Eat less and exercise is like telling a boxer Don’t get hit. You act as if there’s not an opponent. Losing weight is a fucking rock fight. The enemies come from all sides. The deluge of marketing telling us to eat worse and eat more. The culture that has turned food into one of the last acceptable vices. Our families and friends who want us to share in their pleasure. Our own body chemistry, dragging us back to the table out of fear that we’ll starve.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“I tell myself that a quick stroll around the block is enough exercise, and I believe it. I tell myself that the mound of peanut butter on my sandwich is just a couple teaspoons, and I believe it. I tell myself that a cheat day is just a onetime thing, and I believe it. The worst lie I tell myself, and the most powerful one, is about tomorrow. Tomorrow is the golden day. That’s the day when I’ll quit overeating and start working out and set the course for a new version of myself.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“Losing weight is not the hard part. The hard part is living with a diet for years, maybe the rest of your life. That’s why almost no diets work in the long run.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“Every fat person, and every fat person’s family, pays with anger and heartache and pain. For every one of us who can’t shed the weight, there are spouses and parents and kids and friends who grieve for us. We carve lines in their faces. We sentence them to long years alone.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“In our fractured country, we all agree on one thing: second helpings.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century British writer, wrote for three hours every morning before going to his job at the post office. If he finished a book with ten minutes left in his three hours, he grabbed a blank sheet of paper and started the next book. He wrote forty-seven novels that way, plus many volumes of short stories and nonfiction.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“I’ve never done hard drugs, but on the worst days I feel the way I’ve always imagined a heroin addict feels—blissful on the outside, self-hating underneath, chained to an anchor in a bottomless ocean. No way to make it to the surface. Might as well let go.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“What causes us to fail: the devil’s whisper in our ears, or the angel we ignore? At some point it doesn’t matter. The number on the scale reads the same.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“And in my dad’s lap, there I am: a baby, eyes closed, bald as a butter bean. In that moment, I could have turned out to be anything. I didn’t have to be a kid who snuck cheese out of the refrigerator, a teenager who stole sandwiches at school, a college kid who drank way too much beer, a young man who quit running and jumping, a middle-aged guy who caused pain and worry for the people who loved him. I could have been better. I want to reach back into that photo and tell that little baby to live a different life. But as my friend Thomas Lake once wrote: Time is a dark blue river, and it rolls one way.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“What I want you to understand, more than anything else, is that telling a fat person Eat less and exercise is like telling a boxer Don’t get hit. You act as if there’s not an opponent.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“Here are the two things I have come to believe about diets: 1. Almost any diet works in the short term. 2. Almost no diets work in the long term.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“These diets are all hugely popular, and they all fail what I call the Carny Test. The Carny Test applies whenever somebody is trying to sell you something: If you can imagine a guy in a straw hat hollering it outside a carnival tent, it’s probably a bad deal. “Step right up! Lose up to 10 pounds in 10 days with 10 all-you-can-eat foods!” You would never spend a ticket on that at the county fair.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“The body’s metabolism slows down as people lose weight, which means they have to eat fewer and fewer calories to keep losing. But this study showed that, for the contestants who lost weight quickly, their metabolism kept slowing even when they started gaining weight again. Basically, however fat they had been, that’s what their bodies wanted them to be.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“We’ll sacrifice most anything for speed and convenience. When researchers noticed that cereal sales were going down, they did a study to figure out why. It turns out millennials don’t eat as much cereal because it’s too much trouble to wash the bowl. They grab protein bars or yogurt cups and scarf them on the way to work. Cooking shows are more popular than ever—you can find Bobby Flay putting meat on a fire twenty-four hours a day—but it seems like people are watching instead of cooking, in the same way people watch Fixer Upper a lot more than they fix anything up. The proof is on the shelves. The stuff you used to find in the 7-Eleven is now in the grocery store: Lunchables, protein packs, quickie meals packed in plastic clamshells. Life, to go.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“Being fat made me a kid who turned inward. Being fat made me stand out to people inclined to be cruel. Being fat made me think I’d never find love. Being fat made me doubt every good thing about myself. Being fat made me.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America

“Writing for anyone but yourself requires two skins. One has to be soft and porous, to let the feelings of the story flow through you. The other has to be solid and flameproof, to shield you from the blowback. Anything you write that matters enough to be loved will also be hated.”
― Tommy Tomlinson, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America