Vote for 2FT?

If you enjoyed voting for Two Fisted Tales so much that you wanted to do so again, good news! Lost all of Monday's votes so they're asking people to resubmit them. The rest of us, naturally, are just vaguely annoyed but what you do about it, really?

LGM on the Childhood Obesity Epidemic

Many of you may be interested in the discussion over at Lawyers, Guns and Money. I'm not sure how I think about the issue, honestly; I'm awfully ignorant about human biology and only feel qualified to discuss the research on methodological terms. A lot of it looks shoddy, but there's so much out there I don't want to dismiss everything with a wave of my hand.

I'm also not a neutral observer. I was a chubby little kid and went to a stern pediatrician (the appropriately named Doctor Winter) who lectured me about my weight, and put me on my first diet, when I was 7 years old. Today, a typically chubby middle aged guy who would like to be thinner (if only for aesthetic reasons), I wonder if all the scoldings did much good.

I do know, again from personal experience, that regularly changing the goalposts doesn't help much at all. (I remember once, in the 1990s, getting down to the low 160s and feeling pretty good that I was no longer "overweight." I then picked up the paper and saw that the definition of "overweight" had changed and I needed to be in the 150s to avoid that dreaded category. I said "fuck it" and had ice cream after that.) Unfortunately it looks like that's what they've been doing, at least when it comes to kids.