Michael Prager

Michael co-founded the Food Addiction Institute alongside his mentor and friend, Phil Werdell, and joined its board in 2024. He has been chairman since April of that year.

An advocate for Food Addiction for more than a quarter century, he is a two-time author, including Fat Boy Thin Man (2010), which uses memoir and reporting techniques to make the case for the existence and importance of Food Addiction.

He was interviewed by ABC News’s World News Tonight  for a story on the advent of the Yale Food Addiction Scale, and was featured in the documentary film Follow Me, which told the stories of 16 people who lost significant weight and kept it off for years. All told, he has sat for five film crews, including from the BBC and South Korean television.

A former daily newspaper journalist for 30 years, Michael’s feature stories, book and magazine reviews, op-eds, and more have been published in dozens of US newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Boston Globe, his employer for 14 years.

Michael is maintaining a 150-pound for more than 35 years, directly as a result of a life transformation achieved through Food Addiction recovery.