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...Committed - and to a certain extent, Powell's Cleaving - demonstrates the curse of the conversational writer. I confess to having found EPL tedious at times and to struggling with the fortuitous arrival of true love at the end of Gilbert's year of self-discovery. (In Committed, she pokes fun at herself, quoting her sister Catherine's response to her gushy e-mails from Bali: "Yeah, I was planning to go to a tropical island this weekend with my Brazilian lover, too ... but then there was all that traffic.") There was no denying, however, that she was a vibrant woman...
Committed gives us a woman trapped in a command performance she's too smart not to be dubious about. She seems self-conscious about the need to remain everyone's best friend, littering her prose with chirpy asides ("Listen, I want to make it clear here that I am not intrinsically against passion. Mercy, no!") and cutesy interjections ("Just a little free advice there, from your Auntie Liz"). Then there are the apologies for anything that might offend. Her eloquent defense of gay marriage, for instance, is diminished by this chatty advisory: "You see where I'm heading with this...
...psychology is relatively straightforward: being abused or otherwise traumatized is painful, and food can be a numbing or comforting escape. Hence, abused children may turn to overeating, which causes obesity. Indeed, ACEs are also strongly linked with other types of unhealthy "self-medication": for instance, cigarette smoking (which accounts for the increased rate of emphysema among high ACE scorers) and drug abuse (having four or more ACEs increases the risk of injectable-drug use by a factor of 10). As Felitti puts it, "Being fat [or having other unhealthy behaviors] is not the problem. It's the solution...
That sentence will self-destruct some time this month...
Since stickK was first launched in January 2008, more than $3 million has been put on the line. But the site relies on the honor system, and with a self-reported 70% success rate among users who pledge money, only $116,000 is scheduled to be paid out in 2009. (For various reasons, disbursements to charities are made in lump sums at the end of the year.) Karlan knows there are cheaters among the site's 50,000 users, and Sisson admits that she is one of them. She says she lied in 2008 about achieving her goal of losing...