Thanks to the NBC tech monkeys, you can watch my appearance on The Today Show here. If you are a new reader, thanks for stopping by! You may like to read some of my best entries here and check out my product recommendations here if you’re looking for tools to start your weight loss journey.

Thank you to everyone who has left comments and sent me emails about my appearance! However, those of you who have complimented my hair and make up should redirect your accolades to Joel and Hair-Guy-Who’s-Name-I-Didn’t-Catch who made me look more fabulous than I shall ever look again.

I shall write more about my New York adventure soon, and, oh yeah, get back to blogging about health and fitness too. Just as soon as I take a long, long, nap.

• Continue reading "Today’s entry about yesterday’s Today"

Star Jones recently wrote an article for Glamour magazine where she admits she had weight-loss surgery. For foreigners and people who do not pray at the altar of the cathode ray tube, Star Jones is an American television personality and former prosecutor who is best known for co-hosting a morning talk show called The View for almost 10 years. She was morbidly obese, but lost a lot of weight about three years ago. She was very evasive whenever asked about how she’d done it and sort of implied she’d done it through diet and exercise, but many people guessed she’d had weight-loss surgery.

I’m not really a Star Jones fan. When she got married, she pimped products on The View in exchange for free services and products at her wedding. When the show decided not to renew her contract last year, they gave her the option of making up a reason for why she was leaving. Instead, she ambushed her co-hosts one morning on live TV by unexpectedly mentioning her exit. The situation descended into nasty [...]

• Continue reading "Star Jones and the constellation of shame"

It’s fairly common knowledge that you have to be skinny to be a model or an actress, but do you have to fight the battle of the bulge to become president? And I’m not talking about having a World War II service record. A recent Newsweek article says that Al Gore’s waistline might be an indicator of whether he decides to run for president and that “the theory is that slimming down will be a signal he intends to run.”

Would we elect a fat president? A president’s health and fitness is always a campaign issue, so one could argue that an obese candidate would be more likely to die in office. But I think the aesthetic issue is more important. I seriously doubt we’d elect a candidate in a wheelchair today, but Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to wheel himself into office because the TV and Internet didn’t exist. If we were to elect a fat president, they’d have to be damn charming or charismatic to compensate for the perceived negative of being overweight. Bill [...]

• Continue reading "Veto the junk food"

I lost a round of grocery store Russian roulette this Saturday and ended up in the slowest of four open lines. The women two spots in front of me was having some sort of problem which required the general manager to descend from her high counter of postage stamps and money orders to swipe her magic pass card over the bar code scanner. I imagine her magic card allows her to do all sorts of forbidden things, like run the conveyor belt backwards and play solitaire on the register’s computer screen, or maybe it just lets her issue refunds.

While I was trying not to watch the man who had been behind me check out in the next lane over, I picked up the latest issue of People magazine featuring Tyra Banks, who weighs 161 pounds. How do I know Tyra Banks weighs 161 pounds? Because it’s right there on the cover in all caps, 72pt bold font, you fool! An excerpt of the article is here.

Previously I didn’t have much of an opinion [...]

• Continue reading "Hope in the check-out lane"