When you're feeling down, sad, lonely, negative, you don't want to take care of yourself - and the weight problem and the diabetic problem and the heart attack and stroke problems and high cholesterol set in.

When I talk to kids who are overweight, I see my face on their bodies.

Truthfully, everyone knows how to eat right. They know the difference between oatmeal and a jelly cream doughnut. They know how to walk. Everyone has this in their brain. When I started, we didn't have all this knowledge. Forty years ago, I lost my weight, but only by watching what I was eating.

Stop trying to find something in food that will make you feel better. I used to have eating disorders; I'd binge and purge all the time: fried oysters, po' boys, muffulettas, beignets, coffee and doughnuts. I tried to medicate myself with food when people made fun of me or hit me with a bat in school. I'd always turn to food. Knowing what I now know, I'd turn to me.

But if you pick up every other magazine, it is the peanut butter diet, or the cabbage soup diet, and then you go to the radio and you hear that you can drink some solution and you will lose weight overnight. It just does not work that way!

I suffered from eating disorders when I was just a kid. I did not like me or the way I looked. But back then, you could not tell anyone.

I've never lived in the visual world. I live very much in an emotional-contact world.