Who isn’t stressed out?

Some people claim stress causes them to lose their appetites. Others, the vast majority, find that long-term stress does just the opposite: causing them to overeat or binge and pack on pounds around their bellies.

Scientists are finding that there are at least two neurotransmitters in the brain that act to cause weight gain in the face of adversity. The molecules, called neurotransmitter Y (NPY) and PYY, are part of our ancestral heritage, built when famine (a form of stress) meant a death sentence.

But today, in times of plenty, the “Y” molecules are unwanted friends crashing our holiday parties, again and again.

Even Goby fish do it.

Dieting, that is.

Why, you may ask? You’d think that dieting would be a death sentence for a tiny osteichthyes, no bigger than a bloated paper clip. But some goby fish see slimming down as survival.

In essence, gobies, lower on the ladder of piscine hierarchy, starve themselves to minimize their threat to plumper, more powerful leaders. Starving is a way out of imminent confrontation.

This fish story doesn't just have import for our marine friends; it bears on human behavior as well and brings] to mind several of the marriages I profiled in Lying in
Weight: the Hidden Epidemic of Eating Disorders in Adult Women.

They do it because they want to be fat.

Women in Mauritania, on the northwest coast of Africa, stuff themselves and their daughters to torturous discomfort, even death, because obesity is their ideal of female beauty.

Across the ocean, Americans may gasp at the details: In a recent New York Times article, Sharon LaFraniere reports on five-year-old Mauritanian girls forced to drink up to five gallons of creamy camel’s milk daily; nine-year-olds made to ingest their own vomit (produced after force feeding); and teenagers "gavaged," a take-off on the French practice in which a funnel is inserted into a goose’s mouth and grain poured down in order to fatten up the fowl for foie gras.

But before we howl, “Barbaric!” let's turn the lens into a mirror -- and look at what we do to our own daughters in what we view as our "enlightened" corner of the world.

During an interview for Oprah and Friends XM Satellite Radio, host Dr. Mehmet Oz, M.D., asked me, “So, are you on a diet?”

My response was knee-jerk. “Oh, no,” I answered. “Diets are so dangerous for me.”

The reason came out in follow-up question by Dr. Oz: “How did your eating disorder begin?” he asked.

They do it even in their 90s.

Adult women starve, binge, and purge. Eating disorders, once thought to be the province of misguided teens who twist the cultural thinness imperative into ravaged bodies, are now rampant in the aging, health-conscious, baby boomer population. And beyond.

That’s the news, according to a recent Associated Press (AP) article. In fact, the situation has been brewing for some time and is only now gaining national attention. Women in their 40s and 50s are showing up for treatment in numbers triple and quadruple those of ten years ago. (The greatest surge has occurred in the last 5 years.) The influx is so great that some treatment centers are creating special programs for older patients. One step further, the Park Nicollet Health Services’ Eating Disorders Institute near Minneapolis, MN, is building a new facility, set to open in 2009, that will offer a special treatment track for mature patients.

How old is "mature?"

I was surprised to learn that the most common search terms that are bringing people to my site are "chewing and spitting" -- or variants of the two words. I'm astonished because I didn't realize how many individuals are trying this tactic in order to ward off fat. I also thought --mistakenly-- that chewing and spitting out food was new, something about which girls are swapping tips, just as we, back in the 1980s, whispered secrets about bingeing and vomiting.

Apparently not. My friend Joe, 61, told me the following story:

My dad was doing this in his fifties, when I occasionally visited home from college. In retrospect, I think he'd just moved from the public to the private sector, and was frantically trying to lose weight so he could get into his suits without a corset.

They do it even in remote island villages.

In my last blog, several people who posed comments asked if the U.S. was the only country suffering eating disorders.

Here's my answer:

In Sigatoka, Fiji, eating disorders have emerged from, literally, nothing.

According to anthropologist Anne Becker, before 1995, no eating disorders existed on the island, excepting one murky case of anorexia. The Polynesian island meandered along under balmy eating-disorder-clear skies for 3,000 years, as villagers proudly displayed their large brown bodies, built to a size we would label obese. But in Fiji, the bigger the body, the more the love.

Then, in 1995, it all changed. The village chief permitted television.