I just read "The Great Starvation Experiment" by Todd Tucker. It was about "the Minnesota Starvation Experiment" done in the 1940's run by Dr. Ancel Keys. In it 36 conscientious objectors were willing to starve themselves for 24 weeks, so that Dr. Keys could learn more about hunger. How it worked, what is was, and how people who were in the process were more or less likely to behave.

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I recently got a nasty post on my blog. It was not the first one and won't be the last. Being fat is bad enough in the eyes of some people but to be accepting of my size seems to them worse than being a member of NAMBLA. I debated whether to keep the comment or delete it, even discussing it with my follow bloggers. I decided to keep it to show the world that people really do make comments so horribly nasty such as I got where the poster essentially wished that I was dead.

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It's been a while since I ranted about shopping. The last time I went shopping was Halloween and that scared me more than any ghoulie. But even though the seasons have changed, the fashions at department stores still stink. If anything I think they have gotten worse.

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I'm sure by now everyone has heard the buzz about the new TV show "How to Look Good Naked." In it women of all sizes (although not too fat or too thin) get a make over without involving diets or other methods of weight loss. It's a cute, almost-inspiring show. However while looking good may increase one's self-esteem in the short run, what happens on days when we don't have four hours to get a makeover or shop endlessly. A lot of us have jobs and lives. And the vast majority of us will never get to be on a makeover TV show.

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It's that time of year again. When we run to Weight Watchers because we had an extra serving of stuffing at Thanksgiving. For 17 years, come January, I was on some kind of diet: Counting exchanges, drinking diet shakes, low-fat, high-fat, low-carb, eat only their (processed) food, and of course my very first diet which commanded me to eat nothing but Melba toast, rice cakes, ice milk and healthy choice TV dinners. (To this day if I see Melba Toast, I scream.) For most of those 17 years of yo-yoing and ping-ponging from diet to diet, I thought that I was the one who has been doing it wrong. That I was the one who couldn't hack it. That I was a failure.

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A recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association stated what two other studies have demonstrated before, namely that being fat is not as bad as it is supposed to be. That if you are in the "Overweight" category you may actually have a longer life expectancy than those who are of so-called normal weight. Immediately there was an outcry from those who probably meant well but plainly didn't know any better, who voiced concern that when (fat) people were given this new information, they would eat everything in sight. (Doesn't their concern make you feel all gooshey inside?)

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