Who the Heck Is Mike Schatzki
and Why Did He Write the Great Fat Fraud?

Actually, I didn’t have any intention of writing a book at all. It all started out when I was doing research for a speech that I was planning to give called “The No Sweat Couch Potato Recovery Program.”

I’m a professional speaker and when you give a speech, it’s not just a matter of grabbing some facts and putting them into a nice verbal package. You have to have deep knowledge. You really need to know what you’re talking about, not only to be sure that the information in the speech is accurate, but also so that you can answer questions from the audience during and after the program. That means serious research.

And so, over about a year’s time, I accumulated a bunch of books and several hundred scientific research articles and put it all together in a speech.

But research can have a sort of seductive quality about it, particularly if you’re the kind of person who is easily intrigued by new information. As I read the research on how to get fit without working up a sweat, I couldn’t help bumping into discussions on weight and obesity. And so inevitably, you follow the footnote trail. The paper you’re reading mentions something interesting and there is a reference, so you go and get that article, and then there are couple of footnotes in that article, and you go on to the next and so on.

And so another bunch of books and a couple of hundred more research papers. And the more I read, the more amazed and appalled I became. Practically everything that that was being said about weight and obesity was either flat out wrong or totally misleading.

There is no obesity epidemic, fat is not a disease, and all the problems being attributed to weight were actually being caused by something else. But almost nobody was talking about the real problem and what to do about it. Why? Because to do so would would pose a dire threat to the profitability of the $60 billion Weight Loss Industry

Not Okay. Time to set the record straight and speak truth to power.

And thus was born The Great Fat Fraud. I hope you will enjoy reading it and I hope that it will make a real difference in your life.

Mike Schatzki received his B.A., Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Haverford College, and his MPA from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Mike lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife Jeanne and their cat Karma.