Body Mass Index

Think of a person with an eating disorder and your first thought will likely be of a college coed. Yet children as young as six and retired seniors are increasingly being treated for eating disorders. Those with eating disorders have the highest...

Re "What we should learn from the 1-800-GET-THIN saga," Column, April 21 Readers should not be left with the impression that patients who underwent weight-loss surgery after seeing an advertisement on a billboard were unaware of the risks. Those...

Lisa Harrison weighed 527 pounds on the day she was fired from her job at a Louisiana drug addiction treatment center. The 5-foot-2-inch Harrison, who believed her employer considered her "disabled" due to her weight, filed a discrimination charge with...

An article by Bruce M. King in the February-March 2013 issue of The American Psychologist indicates 502 million persons worldwide are obese (i.e., a body mass index greater than 30, calculated by weight in kilograms divided by height in meters, squared)....

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Regularly eating cereal for breakfast is tied to healthy weight for kids, according to a new study that endorses making breakfast cereal accessible to low-income kids to help fight childhood obesity. One in every four American...

Dieters may want to forget episodes of falling off the wagon, but researchers say an attentive memory for what is eaten could help people eat less at their next meals. So sitting at a movie with a bucket of popcorn holding perhaps a day’s worth of...

There’s no strong evidence of an association between living within walking distance of places to buy food and being overweight or not, researchers said after interviewing nearly 100,000 Californians. Given the attention to the idea of food deserts...

This post has been updated to include comments from a researcher and an American Heart Assn. spokeswoman. Giving toddlers skim or 1% milk to keep them from growing overweight doesn’t seem to work, according to a study out Monday that gives pause...

Giving toddlers skim or 1 percent milk to keep them from growing overweight doesn’t seem to work, according to a study out Monday that gives pause over the common advice to avoid whole milk from age 2. Researchers led by Dr. Mark DeBoer of the...

Getting moms to nurse their babies longer and exclusively did not mean the kids were less at risk for obesity by the time they were 11-1/2 – despite suggestions from other studies that breastfeeding can protect against obesity, researchers in a...

As we look toward the beginning of March, were you one of the many who resolved to lose weight and have yet to shed one pound? Or, on the down side of it, put on a pound or two? Likely you are not alone. Finding reasons to attain and maintain a...

Gyms can be intimidating. All those beautiful people, hard-core exercisers, pushy salespeople and that complicated equipment can send the average mortal running right back to the couch. But for those who bring with them an extra 100 pounds, gyms are...