A week or so ago, I read a mother's thoughts on the ultimate goal of eating disorder treatment. I couldn't find the actual statement, but I remember most of what she said.

The goal of treatment, then, is to help build up our own strength to face ED on our own. In the beginning, it's hard (for me, it was impossible) to do it on my own. At first, I needed someone to do it for me--or at least to insist that I kept on the proverbial recovery bike.

People love to say that an eating disorder is an issue of "control," that if you can't control the events around you, at least you can control your food.

I'm not exactly fond of this theory, although there are elements of truth to it. Stress often precedes the onset of an eating disorder, and people typically feel out of control when they're stressed. As well, most people do want to control what they eat. I think this is natural. I'm not talking about "control" here like I will only eat X calories or only fat free foods or what have you. Just that you will pick what--and how much--you want to eat.

Nothing messes with that more than dieting!

However, a new study suggests that preschoolers who are ordered to clean their plates at mealtime* tend to eat more at snacktime.

"We found that the more controlling the parents were about telling their child to clean their plate, the more likely the kids, especially the boys, were to request larger portions of sweetened cereal at daycare," says lead author Brian Wansink at the keynote address of the Carolinas HealthCare System Obesity 2009 Conference in Charlotte, NC on Friday.

First off, I have major criticisms about some of Brian Wansink's work that I won't go into here. Suffice to say, he deals with some shaky assumptions and occasionally questionable methodology. I do find his work interesting, if occasionally dubious. As well, any results being presented at a conference on obesity also make me look a little more closely at what is going on.

However, from what little I've been able to find of this study, it seems straightforward. Mothers of preschoolers were asked how much they encouraged their children to clean their plates at mealtimes. Then the preschoolers were allowed to eat as many Froot Loops as they wanted at snacktime in day care. The researchers found that the kids who were told to clean their plates ate more sugary cereal.

Yet this sense of rebellion would also seem to hold true in people who diet. Having been there myself, eating something "forbidden" can seem like the perfect way to give the diet police the finger.

Is this a control thing? Perhaps. Could it be that the kids who are told to clean their plates have less sugary foods around and therefore at more of them at daycare? Perhaps. Could it be the actions of loving parents trying to make sure that their children eat a balanced diet? Probably.

But it really drives home the wisdom of Ellyn Satter and how to feed young children, so that they may be "joyful and competent eaters."

*My parents pulled the starving-kids-in-China line on me once, until I offered to ship what was left on my plate over to Beijing. But otherwise, I never remembered having to eat everything.

I don't normally watch much TV- I usually have never had the time nor inclination. But as I'm visiting my parents, I've been watching considerably more, especially since they have cable and I'm trying to escape Politix as Usual.

This might seem terribly eating disordered but...I love the Food Network. Not so much the straight up cooking shows, but the travel-related ones and so on. One of the shows was touring family-owned bakeries and the hostess announced that she would be showing us "a chocolate chip cookie that is actually good for you!!"

Which makes the implicit assumption that all other chocolate chip cookies must be BAD for you. Right? Because why would anyone care that a chocolate chip cookie could be GOOD for you, then?

Obviously, chocolate chip cookies can be bad for certain types of people. Those with gluten intolerances or allergies. Or dairy. Or a diabetic with off the charts blood glucose levels. Not a good idea.

But for the average person, there is nothing wrong with a chocolate chip cookie. And I do mean nothing. Is a steady diet of cookies good? No (and not even if they're part of the Cookie Diet. Check the link. I'm not making this stuff up. Seriously. I couldn't do it. And this guy also sells shakes and supplements). But a steady diet of apples isn't either. Been there, done that.

Young children especially get stuck in this either/or notion of "good food" and "bad food." If we adults can't shake our way out of it, imagine a six-year-old trying to do the same. And this is it. This might be all that they ever learn about food. The emphasis on "healthy eating" is, to me, clearly the driving factor in the increase in eating disorders in very young children.

Kids are not collateral damage in the "war on obesity." And if dieting were a good "weapon," we probably should have seen some results already, shouldn't we?

The Nintendo Wii-Fit is (apparently) all the rage right now. I've see the ads on the tops of the taxis that drive by in my city. I've heard a bit of the hype in passing. Otherwise? I couldn't be bothered.

Then again, I grew up on Atari and Frogger, so go figure.*

The idea of Wii-Fit is clever and interesting, and it's not something I would flat-out refuse to consider buying. Until I read this: the machine measures your BMI. And then tells you whether or not you are fat.

I guess that throws the whole fit-and-or-fat debate right out the window, huh?

You tell the little Wii-fit machine your age** and your height, and the platform you exercise on weighs you, spitting out your BMI. A number, of course, is not enough. You see, to the people at Nintendo, BMI isn't arbitrary enough. No. The Wii-fit has to then tell you whether your are "underweight," "normal," or "fat."

That's right. Not "overweight." Not "obese." Fat.

Now I am all for making fat a less loaded term. It's an adjective, that means the opposite of "thin." But that's not how most people use that word anymore, nor is BMI a rock-solid indicator for the amount of fat you have. And the Wii-fit measures your BMI each time you play. A person's weight can fluctuate up to five pounds each day. So a machine that tells you fat/normal/fat/normal/normal/normal/fat/fat is just a super-quick way to become utterly paranoid about your weight. As if we weren't before.

With any sort of fitness equipment, there's a bit of a caveat emptor. But the Wii-fit is also marketed at children, specifically those children who are taking our country to hell (hell, I tell you!) because they have velcroed their fat asses to the sofa to do nothing more than stuff potato chips in their faces and suck down gallons of Coke. Because we all know that's just what kids do these days.

Never mind that more children than ever are involved in athletics. But that's beside the point.

The issue was raised when a man's healthy, active, fit ten year old daughter (weighing 84 pounds) was told she was fat after playing Wii Fit. Thankfully, for all of the other families out there, he cried foul, bringing the issue to media attention.

BMI for kids is random and arbitrary at best. Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum in the UK, had this to say about the Wii Fit:

"I'm absolutely aghast that children are being told they are fat," he said. "BMI is far from perfect but with children it simply should not be used. A child's BMI can change every month and it is perfectly possible for a child to be stocky, yet still very fit.

"I would be very concerned if children were using this game and I believe it should carry a warning for parents."

Wii-fit doesn't need to measure your BMI to work properly. I'm no super-geek (at least not in the tech sense), but I can't see why the machine would need to know your BMI and then rate you accordingly in order to work. Rather than a warning, parents should be allowed to disable the feature. I don't think this will give anyone an eating disorder. But it can be one more step on the way to anorexia or bulimia. And I do see MUCH potential for it to be abused by a young person with an eating disorder.

So unless Nintendo starts sending the Wii-Fit to medical school (and it can start writing refills for some of my meds, which would be mighty convenient), it shouldn't tell me whether I'm fit or fat. That's just Wii-diculous.

*Yes, this dates me. Horribly. But, damn- wasn't Frogger great?
**Isn't that silly thing supposed to know you aren't supposed to ask a lady her age? Methinks Nintendo doth protest too much...

I still can't get over- even after all this time- how obsessed Americans are with food and fat and weight. Santa needs to go on a diet and so many parents don't think their kids are obese- when they really are.

The wonderful folks at Keep Santa Fat are doing a great job of addressing the first one (though I never thought I would see the day). The second one is much more disturbing, in part because people seem to be accepting the word of the 'fat police' at face value.

Not that I blame the parents. After all, the truth really isn't out there, not really.

The premise of this news article was that kids are obese, this is horrible, and parents need to know exactly how horrible it is. Parents are "in denial" about their children's weight issues. It's a press release about a study performed by the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) where parents of obese children were asked what they thought about their children's weight. Approximately one third said their child was "slightly overweight" and 13% said "very overweight." The rest of the parents (about half) said that their child's weight was fine.

The authors of the study bemoaned this finding, basically concluding that our world was going to hell, and all fat kids were going to die of heart disease before age 20. What was astounding was the lack of research by the journalist- no critical analysis was done of the study, either by the reporter or by interviewing other scientists. Okay, okay, it's an AP story, they work under tight deadlines. As a journalist, I get that. On the other hand, that's not an excuse for crap reporting. Most scientists love to talk about their research, and they also are (mostly) more than willing to put you in touch with their critics. This means that either the reporter didn't ask, that the scientist didn't give any critics, OR that most scientists are uncritical of such studies.

So-called legitimate scientists are willing to openly deny evolution (upon which all biology is based). Yet scientists aren't questioning this line of research. Granted, the question of evolution is much more central to science and medicine than obesity, but it's the premise that's important. You can question evolution but not obesity.

I had a different take than probably most people when I read the results of the study. I don't have PubMed at my parents' house, so I couldn't look up the actual findings, but even just reading what this person wrote, I thought:

"Maybe parents are accepting that their children come in a wide variety of healthy weights. Maybe they love their children for who they are, rather than what size clothes they wear. Maybe- get this- they don't give a shit."

Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe there's nothing to be in denial about.

Being "too fat" is not nearly as bad health-wise as being "too thin." It's not. Period. Also, as your self-consciousness about your weight increases, your risk of suicide also increases. Regardless of your weight. Suicide is a leading cause of death among young people. Not heart disease, not high cholesterol, not diabetes. So you're telling me that making kids feel bad about themselves is the way to decrease overall death rates. Right...

"Happy" and "healthy" have a large range of definitions. Why don't we keep it that way?