Wonderfully put. This is exactly the attitude we need, and in fact this focus on the extremes actually leads TO the extremes.

The talk about obesity causes people to restrict their food intake in puruit of the emaciated extremes. Restricted diets lead inevitably to binge eating. The cycle begins.

Laura Collins
author of "Eating With Your Anorexic"

We shouldn't focus on looks at all, not just weight, for a person's worth; but people being what they are, we all do make snap judgements based on weight, dress, skin color, etc. Studies by Goodall & others have shown that all primates living in social groups do so, so it may possibly be a hard-wired trait.

Unfortunately in Western cultures weight has become an obsession, aided & abetted by the multibillion-dollar industries of diet programs & products, fashion, & the MSM. Indeed it is in the interests of the diet industry that women & girls NEVER lose their sense of bodily insecurity; and even now they're working on getting men & boys to think the same way, altho that's an uphill battle because males aren't so easily preyed on when it comes to self-image. A fat MAN is considered to be prosperous &/or jolly & easygoing; a fat WOMAN is considered to be a slob, period. And meanwhile all the little boys look like Pugsley Addams to me: little lardy pudgeballs well on the way to becoming walking heart attacks by the time they reach voting age, thanks to McDonalds, Hardees, Kentucky Fried, and dozens of others. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the fast food industry were in cahoots with the diet industry: 'you put it on 'em, they become anxious, & they'll pay ME to take it off!' Surveys have shown that since the inception of western fast-food joints' arrival in places like India, China, Japan & other places where formerly the population was typically UNDERweight if not on target, & occurances of cardiac diseases rare, the incidence among the general population of both obesity & heart disease has mushroomed suddenly. Before WWII, the average Japanese male stood about 5' 7 or 8 & weighed about 140 lbs or less. In fact, during WWII, the media cartoons of Japanese showed them all as scrawny, wirey little men. Today the image is directly the opposite: they're all little sleek, plump butterballs, thanks to the postwar influx in the 60s of the US fast food chains, & the increasing taste for greasy & fatty, high-calorie quick foods instead of the traditional low-fat, low-calorie seafood/vegetable diet. Interestingly, along with the advent of fast food chains there arose simultaneously & slowly but surely the Japanese media emphasis on weight; today while still less fixated than we here in the US, the Japanese are slowly becoming just as bad, & just as enslaved to the vicious circle of eat fast food - gain weight - diet.

IMO the various corporate industries that dine off us & our image problems are the ones responsible for them, encourage them, & nurture them at an increasingly early age, regardless of the harm involved to individuals, in the name of profit.

The average American 15-year-old girl on the other hand is 5-foot-8.5

While I agree wholeheartedly with everything you say in this article, I am extremely skeptical of this statistic. 5-foot-8.5 sounds awfully tall to be the average height for a 15-year-old girl. May I ask what the source of that figure is?

Lisa,

You should be skeptical, the data is wrong. Thank you for pointing this out. I should have caught the error when I was editing. The actuall average height should read 5 feet 3.8 inches. I believe that I switched around the 3.8 to 8.5 when I was typing and then used that to calculate the BMI. I will have that changed. In the mean time, the new BMI, using the correct data is 23.7. This still places the average American 15 year old in the healthy weight category.

All the data is from the following National Center for Health Statistics document.

Again, thanks for pointing this out. I apologize for not catching it before it was published.

No problem -- I've made the changes (I'm an editor here).

Thanks for bringing some attention to this issue -- I think that our current obsession with weight is also what contributes to the alarming rate of smoking among teenage girls, who I think often use cigarettes as a means to stay thin. All in all, a very unhealthy scene.

I think the ideal is changing. The gal who won Miss USA was ultra-curvy. I have seen other signs...

Thanks for this article. I have a little girl and wory about this all the time.

I am pleased to tell you this article has been chosen as one of the Culture Editor's Picks of the Week for January 29 through February 4.

Diana Hartman
Culture Editor