by Pat Ballard

Created on: July 14, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Nutrition and Lifestyle Not Dieting and Weigh-Loss

It seems that the whole world is targeting one group of people - the obese - to try and teach us how to be healthy. This seems to be assuming that average size and slim people don't need this same information because they're healthy by just being a certain size.

In the meantime:
1. Seven million women and one million men have anorexia.

2. More than 35 million people in a country of some 294 million went hungry last year.
3. 10 million people suffer from eating disorders.
4. The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate of ALL causes of death for females 15 24 years old.

Every time some article or media report spews out a misguided fact about obesity, another group of uninformed people heads down the long hard road of eating disorders.

I fear no, I KNOW that this is especially true of the children who are being targeted in schools. Even "weight" report cards are being sent home with children in some schools.

I saw my first Height/Weight chart when I was eleven years old. I realized my numbers weren't "right." Therein followed 23 years of eating disorders. At the deepest pit of my own hell, I promised myself that if I got one bit worse, I would put the barrel of a gun in my mouth and end the torment. I thank God that circumstances developed that kept me from ending my life.

If the so-called "experts" are really concerned about the health of our nation, then we should get back to a forgotten word. Nutrition. Nutrition for everyone, not just the obese. "Nutrition" has been replaced with "diet," and "health" is being defined by "normal weight," but weight has nothing to do with good health and eating right is not the same as dieting or counting calories. If the "authorities," state officials, school officials, government officials, etc., want to get seriously involved, then they should ban the BMI and Height/Weight charts. Ban the need to judge someone's health by a set of numbers. If they really care about the health of this nation, then ban the multitude of diets that are
absolutely unhealthy and cause many deaths. Ban diet drugs that kill people.

The obesity epidemic is greatly exaggerated, as we see pointed out by the New England Journal of Medicine. "Given the enormous social pressure to lose weight, one might suppose there is clear and overwhelming evidence of the risks of obesity
and the benefits of weight loss. Unfortunately, the data linking overweight and death, as well

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