Martha Moravec
Life, pleasure, identity
On the edge of self-destruction, a writer takes a journey into the complicated depths of her relationship with food
During my stay at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, I got a rude lesson in portion control.
I assumed my meals had been designed for me, an overweight diabetic who had presented with a heart attack, so the lean trays brought to my bedside did not surprise me. Even so, my disappointment over one particular item helped awaken me to the realities of my relationship with food.
My wake-up call
For a local writer, a heart attack forced her to face the unspeakable: the end of her long friendship with cigarettes
I started smoking when I was 15 years old, back when almost everybody smoked, shortly after the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health confirmed a causal relationship between cigarettes and lung cancer. The committee's 400-page report claimed that an average smoker was 9 to 10 times more...