In a book being published next week, the former Food and Drug Administration chief brings to consumers the disturbing conclusion of numerous brain studies: Some people really do have a harder time resisting bad foods. It's a new way of looking at the obesity epidemic that could help spur fledgling movements to reveal calories on restaurant menus or rein in portion sizes.

"The food industry has figured out what works. They know what drives people to keep on eating," Kessler tells The Associated Press. "It's the next great public health campaign, of changing how we view food, and the food industry has to be part of it."

He calls the culprits foods "layered and loaded" with combinations of fat, sugar and salt — and often so processed that you don't even have to chew much.

Overeaters must take responsibility, too, and basically retrain their brains to resist the lure, he cautions.

"I have suits in every size," Kessler writes in "The End of Overeating." But, "once you know what's driving your behavior, you can put steps into place" to change it....

...At issue is how the brain becomes primed by different stimuli. Neuroscientists increasingly report that fat-and-sugar combinations in particular light up the brain's dopamine pathway — its pleasure-sensing spot — the same pathway that conditions people to alcohol or drugs....

"You're not even aware you've learned this," says Dr. Nora Volkow, chief of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a dopamine authority who has long studied similarities between drug addiction and obesity.

• Four of my least favorite words: "reshape and dry flat."


• Having said that, I had a good day! Yesterday at work was crazy. Practically everyone on my team called out. I -- like an idiot -- went to work. I was there for ten hours. It was incredibly rough. Today was a vacation in comparison. But my boss was really pleased with my performance from yesterday. \o/


• I was amazingly productive this morning. Took Hubby to the train at 6:00, went and got the car gassed up, came home, did a good workout on the treadmill, showered & dressed, took out the garbage, made a protein shake and packed my lunch. And got to work on time. Boo-yah!


• Ha! The impostor Life on Mars has perished, not even making it to the second season like the original. Dear TV people: stop remaking perfect British TV series. You cannot improve it. The Office was lightning in a bottle. Just stop it.


• I love love love my iPhone! I've discovered why the white noise apps like Binaural Beats and Ambiance are so popular. It's absolutely the perfect stuff for me to listen to while I work and concentrate on these long complex loan credit agreements! I spent a huge part of the day listening to both apps, and when I took my headphones off, I felt like I was coming up from underwater. I can't listen to audiobooks; the talking is too distracting. Even rock music makes it hard for me to concentrate. But I could listen to thunderstorms or wind or the ocean for hours.


• Another app I've come to love: Lose It. It's a simple and elegant calorie tracker. It makes it easy to count calories and journal your food. The database is huge, plus it's easy to add your own foods. Oh, and it's free! If I have an easy system to help me work on losing weight, I will do it!


• More reasons to love mah prezdent: Obama Suspends Bush Rule on Endangered Species. Yeah, it ain't sexy, but it's the right thing to do!


• How did voting in the 2008 election look when analyzing voter incomes? FiveThirtyEight.com knows. The answer... will probably not surprise any of you. But there are cool graphs!


• "A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations... were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day." Our prezdent gets it.


• Off to make a "brag book" album so I can have my favorite photos on... you guessed it, my iPhone! G'night!

Yow. There is a wicked bitter conversation going on at Elastic Waist about the points program and WW's newest ad campaign. Which, to be fair, I haven't seen.

I know that Weight Watchers isn't perfect. I've gone through the pros and cons of Core and Flex. I've commiserated with friends who have crazy low Points Targets due to their smallness of frame. But if you need structure, this gives you structure. And maybe you have to tweak it a little. If you're not eating enough? Add a couple more points, see how that goes.

Personally, Vitamin W has been a help to me staying on program so far. As I've said, switching back to counting points has been painless. So the program hasn't changed, but I have changed a little. Although, I can't say that everyone who "fails" at Weight Watchers doesn't need to be on medication. But there's definitely people with food issues at the WW meetings, and that's one of the reasons I'm online only. And that attitude of "good week = loss, anything else = bad week" has to stop, and that should be a directive from the corporate level on down.

I don't know. Go read the comments over there (bring your fireproof oven mitts), and let me know what you think over here.

Personally I would not be into the group aspect of it at all.

I think the point counting thing could be useful if a person just isn't realizing how much they're eating or how little they're exercising. For example, people might way-underestimate the number of calories in a coffee from starbucks. If they're forced to count the points, then they'll estimate that correctly and make better decisions.

I think there are a lot of people who do have confusion on those kinds of basic facts, and so I can see this helping people with that. But there are also a lot of people who have problems unrelated to information -- they know perfectly well that eating a carton of ice cream isn't good for them, but they do it anyway. That's a whole other dimension that WW doesn't really address. That sort of thing needs either (1) therapy or (2) drugs, depending on whether the source of the problem is environmental or biological....

...It's for people with bad habits or bad information who have the emotional and cognitive ability to take advantage of new information in order to develop better habits. For example, I can imagine that someone in their 40s who has been gaining a pound a year for 20 years might benefit from WW.

But people with more serious issues probably need more than just WW. I don't think everyone would benefit from vit W, but I could imagine that there are a variety of biological and personality problems that go above and beyond what WW can address. For the biological problems there are often medications (if the person is lucky -- I'm sure there are plenty of biological problems for which no meds yet exist) and for the personality problems there's therapy.

Um... hi! *waves to you*

Sitemeter reports there's been a lot of interest from readers in my "weightloss" tag. I just wanted to point out that I have a lot more current info under that tag than you are seeing. I have a special Friends filter just for weight loss posts. If you are a LiveJournal user and would like me to add you to that group, please comment below.

If you aren't a LiveJournal user, but have general questions, please comment below and I'll do my best to answer them.

1) Cottage cheese + Fiber One + apple + cinnamon is a very tasty breakfast.

2) Yellow Delicious apples are hard to cut up with a plastic flatware knife.

3) My left finger is not as hard as a Yellow Delicious apple.

Oh well. At least #1.

13-Year-Old Follows up Lipo and Tummy Tuck with Lap-Band

Big Fat Blog has a post today about Brooke Bates, a 13-year-old girl who underwent liposuction and a tummy tuck at 12, gained back most of the weight, and has now been fitted with a Mexican Lap-Band. Her parents had trouble finding a doctor to do it in the States, stunningly enough — for starters, Brooke’s BMI was well under the usual cut-off of 35, and it’s just so much more expensive to go through all the screening required to make sure the surgery will be, you know, safe.

“It’s so much paperwork that you have to go through — so much red tape is what I call it. They want you to get psychological testing, they want you to get sleep apnea testing and all those things I’m sure are very important, but it’s money,” said [mother Cindy] Bates.

Yes, god forbid you spend the money on psychological testing for a child whom you said in the previous breath is a “compulsive overeater.” Those greedy American bastards might have actually wanted to treat your child’s eating disorder before performing another surgery on her. The nerve!

For employees at Clarian Health, feeling the burn of trying to lose weight will take on new meaning.

In late June, the Indianapolis-based hospital system announced that starting in 2009, it will fine employees $10 per paycheck if their body mass index [BMI, a ratio of height to weight that measures body fat] is over 30. If their cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose levels are too high, they'll be charged $5 for each standard they don't meet. Ditto if they smoke: Starting next year, they'll be charged another $5 in each check.

Clarian has been making headlines for its aggressive and unusual approach to covering escalating health-care costs. Rather than taking the more common step of giving employees incentives for merely participating in its wellness programs, such as joining a smoking cessation group or using a health coach, Clarian is actually measuring outcomes. And unlike most employers, it is penalizing workers for poor health instead of rewarding them for taking healthy steps....

At Clarian, employees who have blood pressure that's above 140 over 90, blood glucose levels over 120, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol over 130, or a BMI over 29.9 could be subject to the paycheck deductions. Of the company's 13,000 employees, about 8,000 are enrolled in the company's health plan. The company estimates that as many as 34% of its employees will meet the definition of being obese, while it expects lower levels for other health measures. About 26% are tobacco users. The fines are waived for employees who can provide a doctor's note stating it's not advisable for them to try to meet the benchmark -- employees will be able to submit new notes from their doctors quarterly -- and that they are complying with the proper diet, exercise, and treatment plan.

From today's "Ask Amy" column, which I read in the Philly Inquirer, but is carried in plenty of other papers:

Dear Amy: I am the nanny of two 10-year-old girls this summer, and I am concerned with comments they have made about their looks.

Both are normal-size, healthy girls with regular bodies, but I have heard them say how fat they think they are at least five or six times. One time one girl complained about her "big belly," and the other said, "I need to work out soooo bad. I'm so fat."

Amy, these girls are 10!

After they say these things, I always tell them that they aren't fat, that they are a healthy size and beautiful girls.

I am wondering if this is the proper way to handle this, or what I could possibly do to make these girls believe that they are healthy and not fat.

I do not want them to suffer the same self-esteem issues so many women (including myself) face.

- Wondering in Illinois

Dear Wondering: You are right to be concerned, and you are responding just as you should. You can help further by exposing them to positive girl role models, rather than the stick-insect pop tarts and cultural "icons" in vogue.

If your summer charges haven't yet started the Harry Potter books, now would be a good time to read J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1998, Scholastic) with them. The Hermione character is one that any 10-year-old girl should emulate. On TV lately, I'm enjoying Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide on Nickelodeon. The character Moze is a girl who is tough, savvy and funny.

Girls should be encouraged to be smart and creative problem-solvers, not miniature workout queens.

Obviously, let a parent know what you're observing. Unfortunately, the girls might be re-creating talk they hear at home. You would be doing these young girls a service to let them know that the content of their character is always going to be the most important thing to you. They're watching and learning from you.

Forget Survivor and The Amazing Race and all the other reality shows that feature generally good-looking, generally physically fit people running around doing generally silly things. In our nation of overstuffed couch potatoes, The Biggest Loser hits closer to real reality by combining the TV genre's outlandishness and greed with the more mundane goal of shedding unwanted pounds. With its $250,000 grand prize and dramatic stories of weight loss, the show is a natural for the nation's chubby, if not huddled, masses yearning to breathe free without having to unbutton their pants after a meal. More than 100,000 people applied to be on the show's fourth season, now in production,and more than 5 million have had their diets assessed on the show's biggestloserclub.com

But while the message of the show is inspiring, it is also unrealistic. The Biggest Loser achieves rapid transformations--contestants often drop more than 20 lbs. in a week--through calorie restriction, endless exercise and no small amount of dehydration that occurs behind the scenes. Ryan Benson, 38, an actor who works for a DVD distributor in Los Angeles, lost 122 lbs. to win the first season in January 2005 but says he regained 32 lbs. within five days simply by drinking water. Matt Hoover, 31, a motivational speaker based in Seattle, had a 15-lb. rebound within a day of winning Season 2. Last season's runner-up, Kai Hibbard, 28, an aerobics instructor in Alaska who says she spent the night before her final weigh-in hopping in and out of a sauna for six hours, consumed only sugar-free Jell-O for several days and wolfed down asparagus, which is a natural diuretic. "It's amazing the things you learn in a weight-loss competition," she says.

The show tries to prevent unhealthy behavior by making contestants keep food journals (to make sure they're not starving themselves) and threatening penalties if tests show they are too dehydrated (although an executive producer says no violations have been uncovered yet). But like the $55 billion U.S.diet industry, The Biggest Loser places the bulk of its emphasis on shedding pounds rather than maintaining the loss. After all, a show called The Biggest Maintainer wouldn't have nearly the same zing. Contestants learn how to make healthy choices, but total-immersion exercise accounts for most of the weight loss. And it's not as hard to work out for four or more hours a day when urged on by professional trainers. It's also easier to resist high-calorie temptations when the cameras are rolling. Two and a half years after Benson's final weigh-in at 208 lbs., the new dad has slipped out of the spotlight and into old habits. "No one sees me get an apple pie in the drive-through," says Benson, whose weight now hovers at around 300 lbs.

Kelly Minner...the first-season runner-up dropped from 242 lbs.to 163 lbs. by the finale and now weighs 140 lbs. A school administrator in Bethlehem, Pa., Minner, 31, says she works out from one to four hours a day, six days a week. She exercises while watching TV--and did so throughout our phone interview. For motivation, she keeps a souvenir from the show in her office: a life-size photo of her old fat self.

• Best mashup in the world: Pussycat Dolls "Doncha" + Prince "When the Doves Cry." Amazing!


• I set up X-Files to DVR this afternoon. It's the "Orison" episode -- yes, with my TV boyfriend Nick. His second appearance on the show playing the same character, Donnie Pfaster. I've seen it before, but there's a shot of him in tighty whities, and it's breathtaking! I'm sure he's very intelligent and a good person, but damn. BEEFCAKE! (It's on at 5 p.m. ET on Sci Fi!)


• I totally failed at self-control at this weekend's food events. I scarfed food at the party on Friday night. Then I ate bingey food before our guests came over for dinner, plus I had two helpings of ribs. Ugh, I felt so gross even this morning. I didn't think calling out for fatness would be acceptable, so I had some Pepto and came to work. Yay me.


• I did make my own barbecue sauce from scratch yesterday, thank you very much! Hubby said it was not bad, but I guess to him it's not as good as Gates barbecue sauce from Kansas City. But I liked it. So there.


• Plus this Thursday is the day I'm taking off to hang out with Dr. H. Still don't know what we're doing, but hey! We won't be at work, and that's the point!


• Another thing to discuss with the designer lady about our living room: we desperately need more comfy chairs so when we have guests over, we can sit with our coffee and chat. Everyone stayed at the dining room table after dinner last night, and the chairs get kind of hard after a while.


• Our one friend brought her boyfriend to dinner last night, but gave Hubby the heads-up that she might be breaking up with him. I'm not 100% sure why. He seems nice and fun. He has kids, but if that doesn't put her off, then I'm not sure what the problem is. So that may have been the last time we see him. Odd!


• Hubby's pal and best man from our wedding is still single, and I don't understand that either. You've never met a guy more eager to settle down, get married, kids, dog, et cetera. He's cute, he loves kids, he's funny and smart. Yet every single female we know makes this face when we suggest him as a potential date, like, "Ohhhhhh, I don't think so..." I doangeddit.


• We stopped in at the Princeton Fete on Saturday. The big draw seems to be the flea market and rides for the kids. We don't care for flea markets all that much, and we have no kids, so we didn't stick around for a long time. We did try to meet up with our friend who was on the organizing committee, and we called her from the stage where the music was playing, so she knows we were there. We also said hi to another friend who can verify our attendance.


• OK, got work to do. See ya later.