Me too. And I get impatient with people about exercise: I was a miserably overweight teen who rode MILES in summer heat every day without my size changing by so much as a pound. Because I couldn't stop bingeing from all the stress I was living with. It was drugs I could afford; bottom line.

All someone has to do is look at group pictures and street scenes from the 50s and 60s, before the "food guidelines," and marvel at the slim people who predominate. This was the era of a "diet plate" being a hamburger patty, full fat cottage cheese, and carrot sticks on a lettuce leaf. It worked.

Study after study shows that people over the decades, people DID listen. In the aggregate, they lowered their fat, exercised more, used margarine instead of butter, ate dry chicken breasts instead of marbled steaks.

And that's what made them fat.