I've been pretty sluggy recently about blogging, having been thrown off my game by the Thanksgiving interlude and some low-grade depression. Not that you asked.

Unquestionably, I am a biomimicry groupie, and have referenced it many times. I venerate Janine Benyus and Dayna Baumeister, its leaders, and consider the movement to be one of the best combinations of simple and clever that I've ever encountered.

This is the last in a series of posts based on a recent f.a.c.t.s. (“food advertising to children and teens score”) report on sugary sodas issued by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. A while ago, the center did a similar report on the advertising of junk food to children, and you can read my excerpts from that here.

This is the second in a series of posts based on a recent f.a.c.t.s. (“food advertising to children and teens score”) report on sugary sodas issued by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. A while ago, the center did a similar report on the advertising of junk food to children, and you can read my excerpts from that here.

Another excerpt from "Animal Vegetable Miracle," Barbara Kingsolver's 2007 book.

If I were to define my style of feeding my family, on a permanent basis, by the dictum, "Get it over with, quick," something cherished in our family life would collapse. And I'm not just talking waistlines, though we'd miss those. I'm discussing dinnertime, the cornerstone of our family's mental health. If I had to quantify it, I'd say 75 percent of my crucial parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our family convenes for our evening meal. I'm sure I'm not the only parent to think so. A survey of national Merit scholars — exceptionally successful eighteen-year-olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and class — turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down to a family dinner table. It's not just the food making them brilliant. It's probably the parents, — their care, priorities and culture of support. [pp 125-126]

People often ask me, misguidedly, what's the one thing that's going to reverse the obesity trend, I first reply that there is no one thing. Obesity arises from such a terrible tangle of forces that no single change is going to have an effect. But I am persuaded that family dinner would be a huge influence in so many positive directions.

I’ve gained weight recently. In overweight/obese America, that’s certainly not unusual, and the circumstance can provoke reactions ranging from klaxons and self-hatred to cluelessness and denial.

For today, I don’t have any of those, and I’m delighted. Even though I weigh myself only a handful of times of year, almost exclusively in doctors’ offices, I became aware that my bod was burgeoning by the feel of my clothing. So that’s how I avoided cluelessness.

I don't know much about Deepak Chopra, other than that he's established himself as a brand on matters involving personal health. That is to say, I've heard of him, and perhaps seen him on TV talk shows, and whatever impressions I have of him are neutral-positive.

A version of this was also posted today at Sprout Savvy. I'm delighted to share with them, and delighted they invited me to.

One of the first questions people have for me is, Never mind how you lost 155 pounds, how have you been keeping it off for almost 20 years?

I have several answers, depending on how much time we have, but the best, most accurate one is, I finally realized and accepted that I’m a citizen of the planet.

So it turns out that when I wrote yesterday about the Jane Brody squib in the Times yesterday, referred there by my friend Ron-the-voracious-reader, I had actually been referred slightly elsewhere, to the mainbar of what Brody wrote. She was reporting the release of a series of reports in the British medical periodical The Lancet that address the growing obesity epidemic.

My voracious reading friend, Ron, points toward this morning's squib from Jane Brody of the Times on the public health consequences of the continued rise of obesity in America: By 2020, demographers say, three out of four Americans will be obese or overweight, ands that by 2030, there will be 65 million more in those categories than there were last year.

Though certainly, the current proportion of two out of three is horrendous enough, she says: