Seriously: the celebrity gossip sites and blogs are run by people with far more intelligence than junkscience.com…and, in my experience, greater credibility.

I’m mystified that anyone would find anything published there to be worthy of attention. In fact, the “junkscience” connection pretty much guarantees that the research they claim to be debunking is sound.

Especially where medicine, health, and nutrition are concerned. Sheesh.

The hell is that supposed to mean? There’s no fat in the broth that wasn’t originally there – it doesn’t magically appear when you cool it, it just congeals instead of being liquefied. Skinny people don’t have liquid fat swirling around inside their bodies that then turns into flab if they eat too many Cheetohs.

I think I want a shirt that says “I am a pot roast.”

Love if you can’t accept your girlfriend where she is right now, you probably shouldn’t be her girlfriend. I wish my husband wouldn’t smoke, but it’s his decision. Everyone has to walk down their own path.

Maybe you could take a cooking class together? Not a “diet” cooking class, but something more fun and exotic, like Indian cuisine or something else that you’ve both enjoyed before. Or just laying off the discussion for awhile — give her a break from your concern and/or disapproval (and the disapproval does come through in your responses, so I’m sure it comes through to her, too) — would probably do more to help than anything else.

As hard as it is to accept, sometimes you have to just let people do their thing. If you want to help her, then make sure to make healthy stuff when it is your turn to cook and/or take her to healthy restaurants and plan active dates. But I think you have to look at the situation realistically and understand that no matter how hard you try, you may never be able to convince her to change. People have to be ready to change themselves and as someone who has had trouble with food myself, I know that that moment where everything “clicks” and you are ready to make a change is very elusive. No matter how bad you want to stop eating like that, it can be extraordinarily hard to actually do it.

I would say especially that if you are emphasizing at all how unhealthy fat is and how out-of-control fat people are by way of motivation, that is really unlikely to do any good and will probably just cause her to resent you and act out more with her eating. Again I’m not saying so much that her behavior is your “fault” as that you have to step back from the situation as it is and decide if you can live with it. If you can’t (or the only way you can envision being able to tolerate it is if you convince her to change), you may need to think about ending the relationship because she may never change. In my own life I find that if my husband takes any kind of an active role in passing judgment on my eating, it makes me resent him and feel like he’s trying to be the “dad” in our relationship, and not only does that make me want to eat in secret and adopt other unhealthy behaviors, but it affects other aspects of our relationship. When I feel “safe” to eat around him because he’s not being judgmental about it, I actually eat less. I really do think the bottom line here is that you can’t control other people no matter how hard you try, and it usually just makes things worse in the end to try. In the end my husband married me for better or worse and we both try to be the best we can be for each other, but I struggle with food sometimes and he understands that that can be part of the package with me.

She does sound depressed and perhaps some counseling would help (I find that for me, overeating is a downward spiral and the more you do it, the more you want to do it and the less you want to exercise, and you just get more and more depressed until you are able to force your way out of the cycle somehow) but that is not a guarantee either. I hope she feels better soon and your relationship starts improving again. I think it’s great that you are looking for ways to help her and hopefully your kindness and caring will help carry you guys through this issue. Good luck.

The problem for me is the design of the ‘obesity crisis’ goes against what suits me. It is designed to panic, undermine your confidence in your appetite, hunger and body. It is obsessed with food and inserts a dubious morality into it, none of these suit me one little bit.

Only when I took responsibilty and turned away from this and stopped hiding behind scientists and doctors was I able to learn what actually suits me. I feel I was being lazy then, even though it was hurting me, it was so much easier to follow than to take charge. For me this is what FA is all about, whatever the style or ideas of some of the people involved, I can make up my own mind and not be lectured to by people who consider themselves my ‘betters’.

To flip the axiom, with responsiblity comes POWER. I have the former, so I must have the latter.