LEE KRAMER'S ROOM: With Views

[janice shell]

And he couldn't stick to it. He knows he has a problem, but can't seem to do anything about it. Evidently he was pretty much normal till he finished college. He'd been very athletic as a young man. But when he began a pretty sedentary job, he packed on the pounds.

I have no idea whether it's a genetic problem, or if he just eats way too much. There're kids who feel incredibly hungry all the time. Their parents have to put locks on the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator. And the kids are miserable, because they feel as if they're starving.

On the other hand, I once watched an interesting show about four or five morbidly obese people on Discovery Health. The fattest of the five could no longer get out of bed. He ate $14,000 worth of chocolate a year. Along with other candy and tons of other things. None of these people were rich. How did they afford their habit? Of course most of them had enablers: family members who were also overweight, but not THAT overweight. They could still go to the store.

For each person, they laid out a table with the food he or she would eat in a single day. Damn! An ordinary person could have thrown a party.

One of the least fat of them was a woman who said she once had a friend who was a drug addict. She condemned her as unwilling to deal with her problems and ended the friendship. She eventually realized her own problem was no different.