Reply #31: You left out yo-yo dieting

[eridani]

--also, there is nowhere else in the world where weight loss is such an obsession, and where work hours are so long. When my husband and I were biking through southern Germany, he commented that most of the women looked like American women used to look in the 50s--no hardbodies, and not a lot of extremely fat people either. One of our flight attendants on the Dutch-owned MartinAir that we used to get there was 180 lbs or so. She'd be unemployable in that field if American, and would probably have dieted her way up to 300 lbs. Europeans tolerate moderate plumpness much more than we do, therefore those people aren't stigmatized and they walk and bike around like everybody else. Result--they stay moderately plump instead of getting really big.