The Freshman 10? Freshman 15? As 1.5 million students pack up their lives and enter college this fall, weight will be an issue. But is the concern more about pounds on or pounds off?

We all know the message of weight gain, as mythologized by "The Freshman 10" (or 15, these days), referring to the alleged propensity of students to pack on 10-15 pounds as they first enter the world of dorms and frat parties. The myth has been debunked. But that doesn’t stop public health officials from aggressively counseling students about how not to get fat at school.

In their zeal, anti-obesity campaigners have overlooked a startling proportion of students losing 15 pounds, and more, and getting eating disorders. A startling poll commissioned by the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) showed that 20 percent of students admitted to having an eating disorder at some point in their lives. More frightening, 75 percent of surveyed students claimed that they never got any treatment.

Britney Spears-bashing is back in vogue. The fusillade of criticism about her recent MTV Video Music Awards first targeted her performance, but then shifted to her “bulging belly” (exposed by a black sequined bikini).

While the subject of Brittany's belly has been a great Internet hit, an Associated Press article appealed to us not to forget that Spears is a mother of two -- and to refrain from holding her not-so-pristine abs up against a younger, never-pregnant benchmark (set by Spears herself – a decade ago).

As a mother, I feel compelled to respond -- on two levels.

As the spring holidays fast approach, we begin to think again about eating as a family. There’s growing evidence that family meals play an important role in the health and well being of adolescent girls, not to mention in blunting eating disorders. But there may be a troubling fly in this family-style soup.

They skip it because they want to lose weight. Breakfast, that is.

In a study published this month in Pediatrics, Dianne Neumark-Sztainer’s group at the University of Minnesota reported that adolescents who regularly skip breakfast end up heavier than their counterparts, who spoon their cereal and nibble their toast regularly. Because the skippers tended to be trying to --or thinking about trying to -- lose weight, the authors concluded that breakfast-skipping may be a misguided attempt at weight loss.

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.

I was taken aback by a recent New York Times Magazine article about pregnant women who are morbidly obese.

It is a ghastly image: up to 600-pound mothers-to-be in unprepared maternity wards. Beyond the demand for bigger scales, extra-wide operating tables and longer surgical instruments (obese women are twice as likely as normal-weight women to require Caesarian Sections), the situation is dangerous. Newly-minted “bariatric obstetricians” are desperately try to manage the risks: