Some things learned in childhood have stuck with me throughout the years. Like the letter “I” comes before “E” except after “C,” always look both ways before crossing the street and it’s impossible to dig to China from your backyard in Columbia, S.C. (believe me, we tried).  But one very important thing didn’t – the belief that I’d always struggle with my weight. Unfortunately, I’m in the minority here.  Childhood obesity is skyrocketing out of control and unless something changes, those kids are going to be facing adulthood with the scales literally tipped against them.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years. In 2008, more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese.  Efforts are underway to change those statistics, ranging from Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to the NFL’s Play 60 effort. However it takes more than better eating habits and increased exercise. Kids need to understand that they will feel better about themselves by making healthier choices.

This I know first-hand. Inspired by a slew of Twitter friends ranging from Alexandra Williams to Nora DePalma who joked about posting their childhood photos, I picked out this lovely snapshot of me at my 10^th birthday party. I was the epitome of 1970’s kid sartorial style in my red jumpsuit with lapels wider than Kim Kardashian’s level of sham marriage denial. My little cousin Kevin reached up to give me a kiss but I remember my mind was focused on that jumbo coconut cake in front of me. I was already planning to devour a second helping before the first slice was served.

I’m the daughter of a deli owner, people.  Emotional eating came to me as freely as others breathe.  Statistically, it didn’t appear that I’d be anything except an obese adult. The rollercoaster relationship with my weight continued until I hit my mid 20’s. That’s when my brain got involved. Therapy to improve my self-esteem opened the door to claiming a healthier life. While that’s great and all, my worry is that kids today can’t afford to wait until they are adults to tackle bad habits. The increased onset of childhood diabetes and elevated blood pressure is causing problems during the pre-teen years that may be impossible for them to fix.

Did you struggle with extra pounds as a kid or believe you were pre-destined to be an obese adult?  Have you been able to change that situation and if so, how? What do you believe should be done to combat childhood obesity?

In past generations, getting up early was seen as a smart strategic move. We’ve all heard that the early bird gets the worm and Benjamin Franklin himself, sometime between discovering electricity and founding our country, coined the phrase “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”  It made a lot of sense in those days when you had to milk the cow and collect eggs for breakfast before the sun appeared in the sky. But as new research out of the United Kingdom substantiates, rising early can make your life better in these modern times too.

The study, conducted by Roehampton University, found that early risers are happier, healthier and in better shape than their late night counterparts. This group also had the fewest signs of depression and anxiety. Personally, I couldn’t agree more. Most mornings I’m out of bed before 6:00 a.m. and at the gym before starting work. My energy levels, confidence and happiness tend to skyrocket on those days too. But when I stay up late – especially on weeknights – I come close to being an extra from the set of “The Walking Dead.” You know, without the missing body parts and murderous tendencies.

My personal opinion aside, I’ve interviewed numerous weight loss success stories who credit waking up early to exercise as one of the keys to their on-going wellness. The flip side is that one’s ability to drink into the wee hours of the night and close down bars is going to diminish significantly.

Are you an early riser or a night owl? Think the benefits of getting up early are a plot concocted by makers of alarm clocks, or a very real phenomenon?

Occasionally I tweet inspirational stories about families who abstain from junk food for a year, or how a parent’s weight loss influences their partner and offspring to also get in shape. Unfortunately those incidents are far and few between. Relatives can often inspire overeating and turning to junk food out of conformity or comfort. When you are seeking a healthier life style, sometimes it can be hard to break the siren call of your family’s traditional Friday pizza night or the need to inhale half a carton of cinnamon buns along with everyone else during Sunday brunch.

That has certainly been the case for one of my buddies, who has asked to remain unnamed. Smart, good-looking and extremely active, he’s the kind of guy your mom would love. But the pressure to eat truckloads of fattening foods escalates every time this gem visits his extremely overweight parents and obese sister. They constantly turn to food for comfort and don’t understand why he won’t join in. Planning ahead one year, he arranged for a fruit basket to arrive at the parental abode during a Christmas visit.  Sure enough, my friend was the only one to snack on apples and pears while everyone else gorged on baked goods. Yesterday he sent me the photo above of his parents' freezer, most of which appears to be devoted to ice cream. Talk about navigating a mine field!

At some point, all of us deal with family gatherings or meals where large quantities of food consumption are the norm.  Who can resist an extra serving of stuffing during Thanksgiving or those chocolate and peanut butter cookies Aunt Harriett spent hours baking before the last family Bar Mitzvah? But the problem starts when overeating daily is the family norm.

Have you ever dealt with pressures to overeat with relatives? How have you handled it and what was the result?

My skin, like an old-fashioned record player, only comes with three settings – pale, heavily freckled or burnt.  During my teenage years, attempts to  tan were futile at best and sometimes disastrous. Like the time I represented South Carolina at the National Debate Tournament in San Antonio, Texas. A friend thought it would be a good idea to lay out by the pool in the 100 plus degree heat and I half-heartedly applied some generic suntan lotion. A few hours later, my body resembled a red and white swirled Jell-O pudding pop, with an alternating pattern of burnt and pale. Such a pretty look, right?

Since that time, I’ve mostly stayed out of the sun. But during the summer of 2005, I had a brief flirtation with spray tanning. At the time I was seeing a guy who was super addicted to tanning booths, one of those brief relationships that make me appreciate my current boyfriend even more. A string of his unsubtle hints about the glare of my white skin, coupled with the glowing testimony of a fellow redhead who transformed her chalky legs before a wedding weekend, prompted me to try the process.

For those of you who haven’t tried spray tanning, it involves stripping off your clothes and covering your hair with a shower cap after applying a pre-tanning gel. Then you enter an enclosed booth where cold jets will spray the darkening agent on your skin at a high speed.  Getting full body coverage is important, so it’s important to hold your arms in the air and rotate fully around. Nobody really explained all of that to me upfront, so it didn’t quite go as planned. I selected a setting that was too dark for my skin and pulled the shower cap down too far, creating a three inch white crescent ring around my forehand.  Apparently I didn’t turn quick enough and some parts of my body weren’t doused with the mixture.  I looked like an unevenly painted house and the only fix was to return the next day and try again.

After a couple of times, I finally got the process down. Broke up with the guy but was delighted with the novelty of having tan skin. But then it started getting in the way of my daily life. I couldn’t use the cleanser from my dermatologist anymore, as it stripped off the fake color around my face. My skin dried out. Pedicures always left my feet looking 12 shades lighter than the rest of my body. I got impatient planning my weekends around giving my spray tan enough time to dry before I could take a shower and head out again. So like the end of summer camp, I bid the spray tan process farewell without any plans of staying in touch.

Have you ever spray tanned, used a tanning booth or laid out in the sun with methodical precision? How has the way you treat your skin changed over the years?

Have you ever gotten obsessed about a song from a television commercial or the scoring on a TV show? Well I certainly have. Before you make fun and encourage me to pursue less nerdy hobbies, those mediums are the inspiration for this particular workout playlist. From Target ads to the recent X-Men Movie, many of these retro grooves got me hooked within a few bars. I've also added some rocking tunes that I’d like to see used to shill by favorite products. Hope you enjoy the mix! 

What is your all-time favorite song from a commercial, movie or television show?

• Let Me Entertain You – Robbie Williams
• Run – Gnarls Barkley
• Liar – Madcon
• I Bet You look Good on the Dance Floor – Arctic Monkeys
• Get Rhythem - Johnny Cash remix by Philip Steir
• Any Which Way – Scissors Sisters
• Hello – Martin Solveig & Dragonette
• Romance – Wild Flag
• Countdown – Beyonce
• Jolene (The Voice Performance) – Vicci Martinez
• Gangsta’s Paradise – Coolio
• California Soul – Marlene Shaw remixed by Diplo
• Pictures of Matchstick Men- Status Quo

Size matters. At least that’s the theory when it comes to items ranging from bank accounts to body parts. And across all socio-economic factors, there is one size that all women truly care about – their dress size. Trust me, this I know first-hand. Wearing a size 18 at my largest, there was no greater thrill than being able to fit into a single-digit number right off the rack post weight-loss. But now it seems that we can’t trust the size of our clothes anymore to monitor weight gain. Not when vanity sizing is deluding perceptions and possibly hurting our health.

Vanity sizing takes place when clever clothing designers slap a size eight label on an actual pair of size 12 pants. From a marketing perspective, I grudgingly admire its brilliance. Make a woman feel good about the fit on those black pants or wrap dress, and she’s going to buy more. However, Dr. Oz recently aired a segment exposing the dangers of this practice. Turns out it is keeping people in denial about weight gain.

Take a typical size 12 dress for example. Back in the days of Marilyn Monroe, it had a standard 26 inch waist. In the ensuing decades, manufacturers added more inches to that figure. Now a standard size 12 can have a 36 inch waist. That’s a whopping 10 inch gain around the middle of one’s waist, which is the most dangerous place to store body fat.

While some clothing articles can still act as a decent monitor for weight gain, Dr. Oz advises people to depend more on their waist size and numbers on a scale for greater accuracy. The rule of thumb he espouses is that your waist should be no more than ½ your height. So a woman who is 5’4” (64 inches) should have a waist size less than 32 inches for better health.

What do you think about vanity clothing sizes? A delightful boost to the ego, or a real health risk?

I’m patriotic. That admission might surprise you, in light of my mile-wide smart ass streak and penchant for tweeting sometimes subversive pop culture info. But I’m that person who loudly recites the pledge of allegiance at public events and proudly sings the "Star Spangled Banner" so off-key glass could crack in nearby automobile mirrors. (Don’t tell State Farm, they’d probably revoke my car insurance at the thought.) So mashing up the upcoming July 4^th holiday with my interest in healthy living, here are a few “red, white or blue” things I’m digging right now:

• Blueberries. They are pretty much the perfect food – tasty, packed with antioxidants and available all year long through flashing freezing when necessary. Thanks for dueting so nicely with my oatmeal each morning.
• The red car. About 20 years ago, just a few years out of college, I bought my first new car. A red Chevy sedan with hardly any upgrades beyond air-conditioning and a semi-functional radio, I nicknamed it “Hot Damn” and tried to pretend it was cool. Except it wasn’t.  That lemon broke down pretty regularly until I got rid of it five years later. Then in 2009, I got another red car. It’s a Lexus mini SUV that’s able to cart cases of water bottles and other supplies from Costco back and forth in a flash. Her nickname is Scarlett and she really is pretty cool, at least from my mid-forties perspective. Scarlett makes me proud of how far I’ve come in life overall and like me, she combines attitude with reliability.
• My pasty white skin. Growing up, I didn’t care much for my "whiter shade of pale" skin tone. Casper the Friendly Ghost might be fine in a comic book, but not facing me in the mirror. I envied friends who tanned constantly and buddies of African American and Hispanic descent whose skin tones looked even and lovely, especially in bathing suits or shorts. But now, it turns out avoiding the tanning beds was a smart move after all in terms of the aging process. A few weeks ago, the cashier at Trader Joes thought my boyfriend – who is five years younger – looked older than me. Hah! Bring on the pale skin after all, baby.

On the eve of Independence Day, what makes you feel patriotic? Have any interesting celebration plans to share for this weekend?

I come from a long line of strong women. My great, great grandmother in Poland was a chicken plucker, which apparently was quite the impressive career path back in the day. My mom managed to juggle three of us in diapers at the same time before working full-time at the family deli, back when many of her contemporaries focused exclusively on carpool and mahjong. Spending a lot of time writing in front of my computer sometimes pales in comparison those these pioneers of my DNA.  That’s one of the reasons I enjoy lifting weights so much. The process of picking up a heavy metal object for three sets of 15 reps each somehow makes me feel strong.

Strength, though, isn’t just about being able to get all Incredible Hulk-like and lift a car with your index finger or karate chop a concrete block. (Though admittedly it would be cool to do both.)  I believe it is also a state of mind. Take the survivors of the recent tornadoes in Missouri and Alabama. I’ve seen interviews with people who lost everything and rightly demonstrated their grief – but then they moved on to help neighbors cope. While I don’t know what’s happening in Maria Shriver’s daily life, it took strength for her to appear on Oprah’s farewell special as news broke about the former Governator’s indiscretions.

The act of asking for help from others can also take strength. Realizing that you need support in losing weight, encouragement to pursue the career of your dreams or seek counseling to gain better self-esteem are all major milestones on the road to wellness.

What makes you feel strong? How do you help others recognize and/or gain their own strength?

From high-end appetizers to low-end strippers, there is equal parts talent and skill in leaving you wanting more. Just ask the television networks. They have perfected the formula for season finale cliffhangers that leave you holding the remote in delighted frustration. There’s the build-up with hype and spoiler videos that create “must-watch” TV.  Then those much-heralded episodes are over in the blink of an eye. Personally, I don’t want to wait four months to find out about the fate of a budding romance on Parks and Recreation or if Stephan Salvatore has been converted to the dark side on the Vampire Diaries. But depending on how much time you spend with your DVR, there’s no stopping the inevitable let-down. That’s why I think May television season finales are like the end of a diet.

Think about it. You spend three months eating healthy and sweating it up in boot camp fitness classes to look good for your sister’s wedding or squeeze into a little black dress for that 20^th high school reunion. The anticipation helps you refuse that second glass of wine and bypass the dessert tray without a second thought.  You look great and feel even better. Finally the event arrives and it exceeds all of your wildest expectations. Then the morning after, you slam back three mimosas after devouring seconds of everything offered on the brunch buffet line. A slight sense of disappointment sets in and your new healthy habits are quickly forgotten.

Okay, I’ve got to go make sure my DVR records the season finale of The Good Wife tonight. But before I depart, let me ask - Have you ever dieted for a special event? Did you keep the weight off afterwards, or see the pounds climb back on? What television show will you miss most during the summer hiatus?

We can put a man on the moon, successfully transplant faces and even program a DVR remotely using a cell phone. But 50 years of creative thinking and scientific breakthroughs still haven’t produced something millions of people clamor for - a pill that safely cures obesity.

Don’t think that researchers haven’t tried. Diet pills prescribed in the 1950’s were basically amphetamines – a.k.a highly addictive “speed” that suppressed your appetite and any ability to concentrate.  Pharmacologists switched gears in subsequent decades, concocting metabolism boosters, other appetite suppressants, and fat absorption blockers galore. Each of which struck out with some nasty side effects ranging from strokes to “anal leakage,” which sounds more like a punch line from Family Guy than a serious warning label symptom.

As this CNN piece notes, just last week the Public Citizen Health Research Group asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban Orlistat, the only currently approved long-term weight-loss drug. You might know it as Alli, from the ubiquitous television commercials of women joyously dancing around their scales and triumphantly fitting into various clothing items.  Guess they wouldn’t be too happy if allegations of liver and kidney damage from the drug prove to be true.

Last year alone, the FDA rejected three proposed weight-loss drugs because of concern about serious side effects.  While the big pharmaceutical companies continue to spend billions of dollars collectively on searching for a magic pill, unfortunately whatever they create may be too good to be true.

What do you think about weight loss drugs? Have you ever taken medication or supplements to lose weight, and if so, how did that experience work for you?