I thought I was done blogging about my experiences at the Binge Eating Disorder Association's national conference, but a line uttered during the panel I participated in keeps clanging around in my head:

"When I hit 700 pounds, my health started to go down hill."

It was said by Marybeth Quist, who shared her experience as a bariatric surgery survivor on the panel. Even in a sharply sad story where even the ups had downs, that statement of hers has just kept coming back.

I’ve been following Dr. Yoni Freedhoff on Twitter for some time, and appreciate his espousal — from inside the medicine tent — of many of the same principles for health vis a vis obesity that I hold. Recently, I added an RSS feed of his blog to my reader, and I’ve been working through the backlog.

It’s unfortunate that my first impulse to share his ideas  is over what I regard as a clunker.

Perhaps it’s only self-flattery when I say that one of the ways in which I contribute most to discourse is my honesty. Believe me, there’s enough I don’t disclose, but I believe in the power of disclosure to move myself and others forward, even when I don’t look great in the process.

I’m going to test that again in this post.

As a result of attending the Binge Eating Disorder Association’s national conference over the weekend in Bethesda, Md., I’m revisiting some of my biases, which include:

I writing from the ballroom of a Bethesda, Md., hotel this morning, awaiting the second day of the national conference of the Binge Eating Disorder Association. Yesterday was interesting and rewarding, and I hope to share a few things I learned over the next few posts.

But I begin with what struck me most from day one, what I regard to be a collection of tribes within this group.

There's a gross moment or two in this, but its direct comparison of drug pushers and Big Food is right on target to me. Its paid flacks will not only disagree but feign outrage, but that's what they do. The fact is, a substantial portion of what Big Food concocts and purveys is as health-threatening as illegal drugs.

Michael Moss’s Sunday Times Magazine cover story offers the goods in several respects, but no more so than at the beginning, in which he describes a meeting in 1999 — that’s 14 years ago — in which the honchos of Big Food gathered for a rare summit.

Man, these people just don’t get it.

At the FMI mid-winter executive conference, a panel of supermarket mucky-mucks traded pats on the back while complaining that the government’s regulation of their industry is way overdone.

First, alert the media: Big business types think government regulation is onerous. What robber baron, what sweatshop operator, what industrial polluter, what gangster ever thought that government intrusion into his affairs was justified?

Gotta love a target-rich environment, and that’s what this NBC News story provides: Fat-shaming may curb obesity, bioethicist says.

I’d been saving Jon Entine’s post in Forbes on a back screen for a while, motivated by the headline, “Is 2013 a Watershed Year for the Anti-Obesity Movement?”/ and I finally got to it.

What a bunch of hooey!

Though not every addict experiences the same lack of control for every addictive substance or behavior, an addict is an addict.

This is borne out by the phenomenon of switching addictions, whose classic example is, for me, old AA meetings: They were chokingly thick with cigarette smoke and had officers assigned to ensure the meetings would be adequately supplied with coffee (with or without sugar and cream) and donuts.

And, surely you know someone who, say, quit smoking and gained 40 pounds.