Some eager foodies will flip through Frank Bruni's memoir to get the dirt on his five-year assignment as The New York Times' chief restaurant critic -- the disguises and the cloak-and-dagger games he played to hide his identity from the restaurants he was reviewing, the waiters who recognized him and the restaurant gossips, always the gossips.

But that's all empty calories compared with Bruni's secret: He was an adult bulimic who had recovered from a life of diet pills, purges and binges before taking a most gluttonous job.

How's that for delicious irony?

"Born Round" is an unflinching account of a restaurant critic whose life revolved around his obsession with food and his inability to shed his fat-boy image.

Even as a toddler in White Plains, N.Y., Bruni possessed a voracious appetite and an expanding waistline he couldn't control. He tried the Atkins program (at 8). He tried fasting. He tried every fad diet, eventually turning to diet pills, laxatives and speed.

It's a newsman's brutally honest account. His weight yo-yoed between pants waist sizes 33 and 42 until he topped off at 268 pounds -- about 80 pounds overweight -- while he was covering George Bush in the 2000 presidental election.

Bruni possesses a gift for narrative and pacing, interweaving details about his large and loud Italian-American family with his own secret, using funny, lighthearted moments to balance the gloom.

Exercise and diet eventually led him to a healthy lifestyle before he was brought back from Rome, where he was a correspondent, to be the food critic.

Bruni could make a restaurant the hottest reservation in the city or ruin a chef's career with his biting critique and star rating. New York restaurants worked hard to crack his identity.

One establishment, which identified Bruni, swapped a female server for a handsome male one thinking it would matter because Bruni is gay.

As critic from 2004 to 2009, Bruni often ate out every night -- even hitting two steak houses one night. But this was a different Bruni, a gym rat who commuted to Washington, D.C., every Wednesday morning to work out with his personal trainer.

Bruni asks a lot of readers, who are taken through hundreds of pages about his eating disorder and food obsession until he resolves to exercise and eat less.

But Bruni doesn't promise his weight problem is behind him, although he seems to have it under control. At the end of the movie "Julie & Julia," one of the diners at the dinner table, a slim, dashing man, is Bruni.

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