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.

Another excerpt from "Animal Vegetable Miracle," Barbara Kingsolver's 2007 book. This one comes from the same paragraph we visited last time, but I wanted to make a separate point:

Crop failure is a possibility all farmers understand, and one reason why the traditional farmstead raised many products, both animal and vegetable, unlike the monocultures now blanketing our continent's midsection. [p. 54]

The notion of crop failure — hell, the notions of crops at all, as opposed to consumer goods sold under plastic wrap in supermarkets, has longer standing in most Americans' thinking — came to me in a new way during the hurricane last month.

Another bite from "Animal Vegetable Miracle," Barbara Kingsolver's 2007 book:

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.

Usually, I try to have a larger point when I post, but I haven't found it yet for this one: Still, I'm pretty sure it fits in here somewhere.

Saturday was my wife's birthday. I went about my early day, including two-plus hours in the cooperative community garden whose second season is (sadly) drawing to a close.

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.

Is it common for sick people to wish they had a different disease, if they have to have one at all? I don’t know, but a couple of examples have come up for me in the two decades I’ve identified as a food addict.

I'm finally reading "Animal Vegetable Miracle," Barbara Kingsolver's 2007 book in which she and her family eat for a year only with local sources, save for one personal exception each. As I've done with other books, I thought I'd blog along.

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: