Fat Nation...horrible title but attention getting cover

This cover (which I still have in print format) and the accompanying article is what got me on my real quest for weight maintenance information.  I was taking a trip and in the airport I saw this cover, the title and yes, also the subtitle.  I was captivated.  The author decided to have bariatric surgery after years of struggling with his weight. He gets into his personal issues and that was great and then he started in with the statistics and I just could not contain myself.  I forgot for a moment that I was reading a magazine and started to look for his reference page and so on and so forth.   I am a medical/clinical librarian and I wanted the source of him stating that, “it will take less than 30 years for all black women to become overweight or obese.” First of all, I am a black woman and the part that sent me over the edge was the word “all.”  I just could not get this out of my head, he mentioned the journal, Obesity, so my quest was on and it was worse than I thought. The article is: "Will all Americans become overweight or obese? estimating the progression and cost of the US obesity epidemic."  The citation for the article is Obesity (Silver Springs)(2008) Oct; 16(10)2323-2330.  The prediction ended up being 96.9% of black women will be overweight or obese by the year 2034, going by the current rate.  So basically if 97% of black women are going to be overweight or obese, then that meant ALL.

I think this article made me more determined not to be a part of the 97%, but I don’t want that number to be so high.  I want to be a maintainer.  I wanted to stop failing at weight loss by not taking care of myself and making excuses about why I didn’t take care of myself.  The author goes on to call obesity a social illness and writes about embarrassing events experienced by obese people.  For me, this was another one of those events that have stuck with me in my goal of not to lead an obese life.  I always wonder what events happen to other people that make you feel like you will do something with your weight or what was your aha moment with your weight.