Though he did not realize it was stress-related at the time, one way that Josh Peck coped in early childhood was with food. He eventually ballooned up to close to 300 pounds, all before hitting his teenage years. Peck continued to rely on food — which he called his “first love” in his book — as a crutch even after his career took off, and his weight is sadly the defining part of his childhood. “For me, when I think of childhood, the singular, powerful, and all-consuming memory that comes to mind is being fat,” he said in his memoir. “I have good memories from childhood too, of course, I grew up with a deep awareness that I was loved, decent, cared for, and blah blah blah, but FAT, very very fat.”
Peck has said that his own preoccupation with food was also modeled by his mother, who herself struggled with food addiction. Eventually, eating became his fix and he would stop at nothing to consume junk food. “I would observe friends who would freely pop open a bag of fruit snacks and not obsess over the other six in the cabinet. Kids who when their parents washed their clothes didn’t have melted chocolate bars in their pocket,” he wrote. “I obsessed over it, enough to lie, cheat, and steal just to get my fix. If that meant sneaking into your family’s snack drawer when I came over, like an addict rummaging through a stranger’s medicine cabinet? So be it.”
