The time has come, The Walrus said...

... to talk of many things. Did you notice the capitals in the title above? 

I used them because I'm referring to The Walrus, Canada's smartest and classiest magazine. And I'm not just saying that because it published a profile of me in its latest issue (Jan/Feb 2013, on newsstands this week).

If you check out the story at http://thewalrus.ca/critical-mass/, or pick up the magazine (and thus get a lot of other fascinating reading, plus the entire 5,000 word article), you'll learn a lot - and not just about me and my rollercoaster life as a Fat Chick, and how that led me to write my No Fat Chicks books, and brand myself as I have.

"Critical Mass" writer Katherine Ashenburg ferreted out a wealth of little known information about weight-related matters, and wove it together masterfully - everything from why Tolstoy would likely have been horrified to see Keira Knightley's gaunt arms in the new movie version of Anna Karenina - to the fact that scientists have recently discovered that excess weight involves as many as 400 genes, and in terms of complication, is assessed at 100 while heart disease ranks as 1 and cancer as only 10.

Katherine also reports that - thanks to what I firmly believe is orchestrated prejudice aimed at marketing billions of dollars of worthless weight-loss products and services - Canadian kids are being robbed of what should be happy childhoods. Tragically, 25% of grade six girls and boys in Canada now believe they're too fat, while the number among girls rises to 40% by grade ten. And don't think for a minute that all these youngsters think what they think because they've succumbed to what marketers want us to believe is an "obesity epidemic," because only a tiny minority of them are overweight, while others are actually underweight.

There's also this: It took two years for a prominent and well-respected doctor to get his eye-opening research about the obesity paradox (described in my earlier posts) published. "People thought there was something wrong with the data," he recently told the New York Times.

All in all, The Walrus article is an important, even ground-breaking, read. My hopes are high that it will help effect some of the same attitudinal changes I am striving for.

www.terrypoulton.com