The Book
Fighting Weight
How I Achieved Healthy Weight Loss with “Banding,” a New Procedure That Eliminates Hunger — Forever
At her heaviest, Khaliah Ali weighed 325 pounds. In Fighting Weight she tells the story of a lifetime of dieting that did not work, the risk she was not willing to take with one kind of surgery, and the decision she made instead: laparoscopic gastric banding, a procedure she underwent in 2004. The book is a memoir as much as a health story — her account, in her own voice, of what carrying that weight cost her and what getting free of it gave back.
The facts of the book
- Author: Khaliah Ali, with Dr. George Fielding, Dr. Christine Ren, and Lawrence Lindner
- Publisher: Collins, a HarperCollins imprint — hardcover, 2007 (ISBN 978-0-06-117094-2)
- Paperback: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2008 (ISBN 9780061170966)
- Printings: her Juvenile Law Center biography notes the book is in its third printing
Publisher's page: HarperCollins — Fighting Weight
The health work around it
Her advocacy did not stop at her own story. She served as editor-in-chief of WLS Lifestyles Magazine, a magazine for the weight-loss-surgery community (see Fashion), and she fronted “Fight to Flourish,” a public service announcement from the American Academy of Family Physicians and Johnson & Johnson about the impact of obesity — filmed at the Deer Lake camp in Pennsylvania (Fighter's Heaven Newsletter, Vol. 3).
One more credit, stated exactly
Khaliah Ali is sometimes loosely described in connection with The Jewels of Happiness. The accurate credit: that book is by Sri Chinmoy, and she is one of seventeen narrators of its audiobook, reading Chapter 12, “Gratitude” (Sri Chinmoy Books).