Michael Prager

Michael Prager believes in the power to change, born not from faith but experience. His trial was excess weight, begun as a fat kid and flowered as an obese adolescent, surpassing 300 pounds for the first time at age 15 and twice more until topping out at 365 pounds at age 33.

Today, he maintains a 155-pound loss for almost a quarter-century — and considers the second number far more significant than the first. His first book, Fat Boy Thin Man, uses memoir techniques to make the case for food addiction as a powerful influence on many lives and on all of society. But he says nothing about dieting and little about food, because he eventually came to understand that weight was "a" problem, but by no means "the" problem.

Prager's second book, Sustainable You, is a workbook that lays out a case, and a practical course, for achieving “personal sustainability.” The vehicle is a set of concepts distilled from the two halves of Prager's experience: the angry, frustrated 350-pounder, and the happy, grateful, normal-bodied husband and dad.

Professionally, Prager was a daily newspaper journalist for 30 years, most recently editing for 14 years at the Boston Globe. Additionally, his writing on a range of topics and in the forms of news and feature stories, reviews, and op-eds have appeared in dozens of newspapers and a number of magazines.

His combination of decades of storytelling practice and decades' worth of a unique, personal, and inspirational tale to tell situates him to share his journey's implications with all who want to achieve and maintain healthy, personal change of their own.

Prager has been interviewed by ABC’s “World News Tonight,” NPR, the BBC, Bloomberg Businessweek, the Washington Post, and dozens of other print, television, radio, and internet outlets.