Victoria Moran

Fat, Broke & Lonely No More

Your Personal Solution to Overeating, Overspending, and Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

Victoria Moran's latest book offers an up-tempo and on-target practical and spiritual plan for breaking up with inner emptiness (that's what caused the trouble in the first place), kicking fat, broke & lonely to the curb, and hooking up with the life of your dreams.

Unique in the genre, the 50 bite-sized essays in FAT, BROKE & LONELY NO MORE recognize that although charting a new course with food, money, and relationships demands personal responsibility ("Life belongs to those who floss!"), guilt has to go. As long as corporations produce most of our food and subdivisions are built without sidewalks, "fat" will be the default setting for a lot of bodies. In a plastic-makes-perfect marketplace, maintaining financial solvency can take work. In a society short on the extended families and close communities humans have depended on since before we walked upright, loneliness will be here. Those are the facts of the culture. FAT, BROKE & LONELY NO MORE aims to change the facts of readers' lives.

What they're saying

"This guide to getting back your life from the fears that hold you captive is funny, frank, and will forever change your life. It is simple, straightforward, and the perfect antidote to the struggles we all face." (Mariel Hemingway, actress and author of Healthy Living from the Inside Out)

"Victoria Moran is neither fat, broke, nor lonely and she's telling the truth about how not tobe any of those, ever again. Everyone with daughters should recommend this book to them. I know I will." (W. Bruce Cameron, author of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter)

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Breaking Up with the Emptiness Inside

Fat, broke and lonely arise from an inner void
and withdraw when you develop a viable inner life.

   1. The Anatomy of Fat, Broke and Lonely

   2. The Emptiness Epidemic

   3. To Go Where Other People Only Dream Of, Do What They Won't Do

   4. Get Busy on Your Mission Already

   5. It Doesn't Natter What Tou Do for a Living: Your Life Is Supposed to Be Art

   6. Yes, You're Flawed. And You're Perfect. Chew on That

   7. Your Life Believes Every Word You Say

   8. Got God*?

   9. When Doing Nothing Can Bring You Everything

   10. 'Fit, Flush, Partnered & Still Empty' Is Just Fat, Broke & Lonely in Drag

II. Breaking Up with Fat

There is a power inside you that leads to right decisions,
even in areas as ordinary as your food choices and getting to the gym.

   11. Fat Phobia May Also Be Harmful to Your Health

   12. Start Seeing Yourself as Gorgeous. Now.

   13. What You're Looking For Is Not in the Refrigerator

   14. Fill Your Life, Then Your Plate

   15. Good Food Is a Good Thing

   16. Find Out Who Isn't Fat and Do What They Do

   17. When in Doubt, Use the MAP: Moderation, Activity, Persistence

   18. I Know This Much Is True

   19. One Other Person Has to Be In On This

   20. With a Higher Power, Willpower Is So Last Season

III. Breaking Up with Broke

Abundance - financial and otherwise - is normal, natural, and right.
You attract it by thinking, speaking, and living abundantly.

   21. It Wasn't in the Fridge and It's Not at the Mall

   22. The Twelve Stops

   23. Maybe Boring but Never Broke

   24. Give Cash a Chance

   25. Put Ten Percent to Work for Good

   26. Put Ten Percent to Work for You

   27. Expect, Affirm, Envision

   28. Appreciate Now, Appreciation Later

   29. Put Your Money Where Your Morals Are

   30. Create a Life that Attracts Abundance

IV. Breaking Up with Lonely

When your life is full and your spirit engaged, you'll delight in your own company
and draw caring, supportive people into your world.

   31. Lonely Isn't Funny

   32. The Score Is: Energy 1, Lonely Nothing

   33. Fall in Love with Your Own Company

   34. Sex and the Gritty

   35. History with Drunks and Losers? Don't Let History Repeat Itself

   36. You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To

   37. How to Win Friends and Put Up with People

   38. Entertain, Dahling

   39. It's Not About You

   40. Charisma 101

V. Hooking Up with the Life of Your Dreams

You came to this planet to be remarkable. You do that by being yourself,
using your gifts, and shining your light.

   41. Ya Gotta Have a Dream

   42. Full Frontal Fearless

   43. Put Together Your Dream Team

   44. Light Up Your Look

   45. One Day a Week, Unplug and Reconnect

   46. Live Your Dream Right Now, Live Your Life Right Now

   47. You Have to Stand for Something

   48. Keep Adding to the Soup

   49. When You Don't Want to Do this Stuff, You Need It More than Ever

   50. If You Knew Who You Really Were, You'd Be Star-struck

Read a Chapter - Introduction.

As the reader of this book you deserve to be in on how it came about. My editor called and said, "We've been playing with a title we really like but we didn't know who could write it. Then it occurred to me: You could write it!" I loved that he'd thought of me to take on this title, surely something graceful and gracious, beautiful and uplifting. "Fat, Broke and Lonely!" he announced enthusiastically. I felt as if I'd been punched.

You see, I've been fat, broke and lonely, and I don't like these words - especially "fat" because I was hurt the most by that one. I haven't been overweight in more than twenty years, but I am still well aware that fat isn't a mere synonym for overweight. In our society, fat is a somatic epithet, a judgment, and a weapon. To this day, when I know that someone else has been stung by the word, I flinch with them. Broke and lonely are less piercing but scarcely more appealing. The three together paint a picture no one wants to see. Nevertheless, before I could say, "I wouldn't write a book called that in a million years," I remembered something: Although I have been fat, broke and lonely, I'm not anymore and I haven't been for some time.

This is how I see it today: there is shared responsibility for the problem. The giant corporations that produce much of our food and the planning commissions that decide to build developments without sidewalks do play a role in our collective fatness. The advertisers who adroitly convince us that we ought to be able to buy everything they're peddling, and still come up with the money for the next status symbol or must-have toy, are far from blameless for the debt pandemic. Living in a society short on the extended families and close communities that human beings have depended on before we first walked upright is undeniably part of the reason that so many of us feel lonely and disconnected.

Knowing this, you deserve to take a minute (or as long as you need) to feel righteously outraged at a culture that makes it so easy to be fat, broke and lonely. When you're finished, though, it's still up to you to find a way out.

As someone who's done that, I figured my editor had a point: I'm supposed to share what I know with people who want it. This includes individuals who might describe themselves as fat and/or broke and/or lonely, and the many others who are just so afraid of ending up there that they run themselves ragged at the gym, on the job, and in their relationships. They're operating under the logical assumption that a perfect person can't possibly be fat, broke and lonely, so doing everything perfectly has to be the best cover. But after the killer workout, the plum assignment, and the dream date, the fear of becoming fat, broke and lonely hasn't gone anywhere.

Obviously, I said I'd write the book. We tweaked the title to Fat, Broke & Lonely No More. Being able to say "No more!" - and mean it - in your own life has less to do with food or money or the people who are (or are not) sending you text-messages than it does about you, on the inside. Your core beliefs. What you want for yourself. Your spirituality.

Don't blow this off as New Age mumbo-jumbo or the sole purview of the baptized, born again, or bat-mitzvahed. It's simply understanding that there is more going on here than our five senses can fathom, that you're more remarkable than you may have thought, and that you have some control, via your thoughts, words, and attitude, over how you experience life. For example, when you focus on fat, broke and lonely, that's what shows up: "I'm fat and disgusting: I need to eat something... I'll never have enough money: I need to buy something... I'll never meet the right person: I need to call what's-his-name. I mean, he only had that one DUI and something could have been wrong with the Breathalyzer..."

I wrote Fat, Broke & Lonely No More to help you part company with this plague once and for all. For this to work, you'll have to put what you read about into practice. Every chapter ends with the directive, "Take an action." Your actions, far more than my words, will make the difference. Your actions will give you access to the missing ingredient that, like caulk or Hamburger Helper, can fill the empty places. With it, there's always enough, and this sufficiency feels like a banquet. Or a trust fund. Or a standing ovation.