Before her weight-loss memoir, Passing For Thin, was even published, Frances Kuffel had started to regain the pounds she’d written about shedding. In all, Kuffel lost 188 pounds – and then gained back more than half of it. In her new follow-up book, Kuffel describes her role in a circle of five online friends: the Angry Fat Girls.

All in, the fivesome have lost (and gained, and regained, and lost again) hundreds of pounds. They’ve also struggled with confidence, body image and mental illness, and dealt with embarrassment, shame and – sometimes, thankfully – self-acceptance. Most women, sadly, contend with the same problems, no matter the number on the scale. That’s why there’s universal appeal to Kuffel’s narrative, which is honest, smart, and sassy.

I was lucky enough to ask Kuffel, who describes herself as a “food addict” and refers to periods of clean eating as “abstinence,” about her book, women’s body image, and how she thinks we ought to define health.

Where are you now in terms of weight and your health?

I’m not sure of my weight – I need to get a new kryptonite battery for my scale. I haven’t fretted about it because when I don’t want to get caught up in the numbers game. My size 22 jeans are comfortable. That puts me at about 260 pounds.

December was a marathon stumble and now that the holidays are over, I’m detoxing. I feel flu-ish and that physical memory is good for keeping me abstinent when I feel wobbly. I want to keep those symptoms – the muscle aches, the fantastic thirst, the running to the bathroom, the lethargy, the indifference to the world – foremost in my mind.

I think (and correct me if I’m wrong), that a lot of people are still under the impression that excess weight = laziness, or a lack of control or care over one’s appearance or health. You frame the discussion much more in the context of illness or addiction. Can you comment on that? For you – and your friends – do you think this is an addiction much like alcoholism?

Managing to be a hundred and fifty or two hundred pounds overweight takes great dedication! Carrying it around while working, doing the shopping, cleaning the house is Herculean. Take one of those accusers and make them live one normal day carrying a hundred pounds on their back and then tell me fat people are lazy. That assumption annoys the shit out of me. Being seriously overweight is hard physical labor. continue »

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

I’ve been covering military medical initiatives for around eight months now, and seen the Pentagon struggle with addressing the growing problem of PTSD diagnoses among returning vets. Of course, they’ve come up with some out-there ideas: a pharmacological intervention to prevent post-traumatic stress before it starts, for example. But the military’s also got a growing body of neuroscience on their side, and now the Navy wants to cram dozens of cognitive tests into a portable battlefield brain scanner.

The device would offer near instant diagnosis of brain damage, trauma or the earliest signs of PTSD-related symptoms. Read about that device – and other mental health-oriented gadgets that the Pentagon’s been after – at Danger Room. And there’s no time like to present to educate yourself in war-related mental illness: just today, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced that suicide rates among young, male veterans had increased by 26 percent between 2005 and 2007. A startling 20 percent of America’s 30,000 annual suicides are committed by veterans.

Ah, the joys of modern living: paved running pathways line scenic waterways, fresh food is available mere blocks from most residential areas, and every Barnes & Noble is flooded with hours upon hours of mildly entertaining fitness and diet books for me to peruse on quiet weekend afternoons.

Especially in January, when everyone and her dog are on the lookout for the latest, greatest weight-loss method. Now, the New York Times is pleased to announce, we’ve got a winner for 2010: the Caveman Diet.

In Sunday’s Style section, the Times explores a diet fad that I’ve written up, with much skepticism, several times. To make a long, bizarre story short, the Caveman Diet is a food and fitness approach that mimics the – apparent – habits of our long lost ancestors. Raw meat, fasting, and exercise routines that would allow one to “flee from a mastodon” are all integral. And, according to Caveman devotees – photographed by the Times inside what appears to be a Museum of Natural History exhibit (bizarre Times photo number two last week) – the result are impressive: they’ve lost fat, muscled up and feel “in touch with their inner ancestor.”

Oh, my. How many ways do I hate this entire idea? So many ways. Mostly, though, it comes down to this:

“I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” Mr. Durant said.

Ahem. First of all, Mr. Durant (whom the Times generously describes as “a cheerful Jim Morrison”), women aren’t the only ones attracted by faddish diets. Men are too. And know what? I’d say you’ve probably been hook-line-and-sinkered into a diet fad yourself. Because nothing says “diet fad” like no carbs, 24-hour fasts and an at-home meat locker. I’ve seen it before, and I’ll see it again. Week one, it’s bacon-and-eggs for breakfast and a glowing smile as the pounds melt off. Week four, it’s nibbling “just a little” of my lunchtime bagel. And week eight, you’re binging on donuts in the bathroom and scrambling to rub the powdered sugar off your nose for fear that someone finds out what a phony you are. Shame.

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A few weeks ago, NPR published a spot-on assessment of the invention of an illness – osteopenia – to spur the sale of a Big Pharma cure – Fosamax, a bone-building drug. Until 1992, the word ‘osteopenia’ didn’t even exist. Then, under less-than-ideal conditions at a WHO conference in Rome, experts coined the term to designate a group of people whose bone density measurement fell somewhere between a few arbitrary numerical metrics:

“Ultimately it was just a matter of, ‘Well … it has to be drawn somewhere…And as I recall, it was very hot in the meeting room, and people were in shirt sleeves and, you know, it was time to kind of move on, if you will. And, I can’t quite frankly remember who it was who stood up and drew the picture and said, ‘Well, let’s just do this.’”

So there in the hotel room someone literally stood up, drew a line through a graph depicting diminishing bone density and decreed: Every woman on one side of this line has a disease.

That was all it took for Merck – my favorite little faux-medical journal-writing pharma company – to jump on the bone-density wagon. continue »

Image via Wikipedia

You wish I was referring to cooking.

Alas, my Inbox greeted me this morning with a press release from a cosmetic surgeon’s website, informing me that my ‘Fat Was Phat‘ this year. Necessary for hormone production, insulation for my inner organs, and padding for long bike rides, maybe. But – the press release wants me to ask – what else has my fat done for me lately?

Not as much as it could, apparently. 2010 has been marked as the year that fat takes over the plastic surgeon’s office, with new procedures utilizing human body fat to aesthetically “improve” the body.

The year 2010 ushers in a new decade where science , beauty, and your own fat consummate a marriage that promises to deliver one of the most disruptive medical technologies of the century.

That’s an interesting visual, right there. Science, vanity and a liposuction siphon getting all up and at each other. And the end result, apparently, includes less bleeding and fewer scars. And I think we can all agree that blood and scarring do not a good consummation make. If you’re into the idea of using your own fat to create a new you (as a lifestyle choice, not a science experiment), here are a few of the real winners: continue »