The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health (Hardcover)

Read this book. It will change your outlook on yourself, your perception of what is 'healthy', your attitudes towards food, your attitudes towards society. With any luck it will free you from the feelings of self-hatred and disgust and 'not good enough', constantly insisted upon by today's society.

In THE OBESITY MYTH, author/law professor Paul Campos makes an erudite and scathing case against the American diet industry, which, with its paid-lackey researchers and gullible fellow travelers in the medical and government health establishments, directly and simplistically links obesity with disease and generally compromised health. Rather, Campos concludes that the evidence shows that:

1. It's more dangerous to be underweight than overweight.
2. Health is not improved by long-term weight reduction.
3. Health is adversely affected by the yo-yo pattern of weight loss and subsequent regain experienced by serial dieters.
4. The nebulous connection between weight and health disappears when other factors are considered, e.g. the individual's cardiovascular and metabolic fitness. An overweight fit person is better off than a thin sedentary person.

Rather than being a monotonous, 250-page diatribe against the Fat Police, Campos goes out on a limb in a couple of chapters to make some novel observations. For instance, regarding the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky sleazefest in the chapter "The Feeding of the President", the author postulates that the entire affair wouldn't have happened if "at several crucial junctures in their respective lives, either the fat boy from Hope of the zaftig princess from Beverly Hills had simply been allowed to eat what they wanted to eat." Later, in "Anorexia Nervosa and the Spirit of Capitalism", Campos asserts that the true anorexic - the perfect dieter endlessly laboring to achieve perfection and salvation, but never satisfied - is the new embodiment of the Puritan work ethic.

It would be difficult, I think, for any American that's grown up in our fat-conscious society not to relate to this most excellent volume. At 56, I've never perceived myself as slim or trim, a rather odd admission since, if I look at pictures of myself taken in late elementary and high school, that's what I indeed was; in my first year of college, I had a 29-inch waist. Perhaps my misperception stems from my days as an admittedly chubby 5-8 year old when my Mom would buy me "husky boy" jeans. Far from being an omniscient observer of something that's never personally affected him, Paul Campos remembers much the same childhood experience, when he was called "stocky". As an adult, he admits to being a slave to the same cultural imperative for thinness, going so far as to state that his periodic weight losses from "overweight" come when the women in his life have left him, or hinted they might.

In the "Conclusion", Campos mildly castigates himself for not saying in THE OBESITY MYTH all those things which might have made it better. (For instance, surprising to me, he virtually ignores the current fad for weight loss surgery - stomach stapling and banding.). But he concludes:

"Yet still, certain things that needed to be said were, in the end, said." Yes, they were. And it was smartly done, too. Good man!

I must admit that this book came as quite a revelation to me. Professor brings a lot of common sense and good science to bear on the question of weight and health. Now, don't be fooled, this book is no rubberstamp for overeating and under-exercising, but it does explain a lot about your health, and those who claim to have your best interests at heart. I highly recommend this book to everyone!