Anastasia Kidd

This is a fairly interesting book. For decades, if not longer, we've been told that being fat is unhealthy and is, in fact, the cause of what ails fat people. Which is to say, doctors don't take valid medical complaints of people deemed overweight seriously and claim that the problems would vanish were one just to lose some weight. For example, if you have a fall and bung up your knee, a doctor will take x-rays and prescribe appropriate physical therapy to get things back to normal, provided you are a person whose weight is deemed normal. But if you are deemed decidedly overweight, the doctor will just tell you to slim down and the damaged tendons will magically repair themselves. Something like that.

Anyway, we have a problem in our society that deem people who are on the heavy side as being lacking in moral character. They'd be slim like a model if only they ate properly. Apparently, however, most diets only work for a short time, but all the literature pimping various diet plans only talk about short-term gains. Yes, it's relatively easy to lose ten pounds if you diet diligently. I was a wrestler in high school and college, and know all about a quick crash diet to "make weight" for the match. But such crash dieting is unhealthy in the long run, and I can attest from my own experience, that "dieting down" to a lower weight class only works a little bit. Back in the day, I weighed something like 150 lbs, but the guys I would wrestle at the 152-lb weight class were all bigger and stronger than I. If I went down to the 145-lb weight class, I was competetive. But, I learned to my chagrin, that trying to get down to the 138-lb class rendered me lethargic and ineffectual.

What does that have to do with the book? Well, dieting works only a bit, and, generally, not long term. According to the author, all the glowing studies of success in losing oodles of pounds on the "something-or-other" diet plan only work for a while. But, if there were any follow up some five or ten years later on, all those alleged success stories would show that the weight-loss regime didn't actually solve any long-term problems. But, the diet community is controlled by people in the for-profit industry, so they constantly put out scientifically flawed studies. [thank the Good Lord that there was no "financial" incentive to fabricate similar successes regarding the observation of glowing gases containing excited argon or nitrogen with various other molecules. I can safely look at myself in the mirror, knowing the results I observed weren't ephemeral].

I suppose that, technically, I didn't read the whole book, and shouldn't get credit for the whole 299 pages. The book ends with a bunch of discussion questions on the issues raised by each chapter. I just skimmed them. I read the book to understand the author's point of view, but I wasn't involved in any kind of book-discussion group around the book's contents.
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