My mom

There is a poem about my mom in Fat Poets Speak (2): Living and Loving Fatly.

She was plump and beautiful when she was younger. Now she is thin and tiny and still beautiful.

With all that, I feel sometimes as if doctors kept telling her to do things that were completely wrong for her and for her body - and she has been slim for years!  She has high cholesterol, but her ratio is "good" because she has a lot of  "good" cholesterol. But one doctor told her to keep off dairy products. WRONG. (She may even have gotten the colon cancer (operated 1996 successfully) and rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis (Lipitor, lack of calcium) because of  this rather wrongheaded advice. Her blood pressure also may have gone up -she takes medication for it now- because of this rather shortsighted advice.

She fell in 2009 and fractured her hip - probably also at least partly because of this rather inappropriate advice. She walks with a walker, and cannot walk far or sit up for periods longer than an hour.

I should add that she is a "diet success story" - she lost forty pounds when she was younger and kept it off, mostly by dieting fairly strictly. Doctors, even the rather benighted individual who told her to keep off dairy products, all love her.

Too bad that their advice and care caused her to become an invalid. I'd bet that if she were fifty pounds heavier but with no history of cancer, high blood pressure or high cholesterol, they would consider her unhealthy, even though she would be stronger and able to walk more than twenty feet at a time.

Welcome to Stupidity Central...