Last weight post. I promise! For a little while, anyway. This post is going to cover some ground covered in my previous post about Inulin. This one was written first and Inulin became a hot news topic before this went up.

I wrote twice before about how people that have never really, truly struggled with their weight (losing 10 pounds to look good for your high school reunion doesn’t count) don’t understand how complex the process of losing weight is. At least from a psychological perspective. Another factor is that people lose weight in different ways. What works for one person does not mean that it will work for another. For instance, if you have one guy that loves cheese and pork and doesn’t have any real use for bread and crackers and put him on the Adkins diet, he’s much more likely to succeed than a bread-lover with a fondness for pastries. Even though they may have will-power, self-control, and discipline in equal measure, the results won’t be equal.

I have personally found that a couple of minor tweaks made all of the difference. What matters most for me is simplicity. Anything that requires me spending a whole lot of time counting points is likely to lose me. I’ll lose track of how many points I have for the day, get frustrated, and put the diet off for another day. Likewise, anything that requires of me to not eat cheese isn’t going to happen. Or a diet that says that if I drink a coke, I’m screwed for the day. I need room for a little bit of sin, lest I end up settling for a lot of sin.

I decided after moving up here to make one and only one major, written in stone change: I will eat my daily allotment of fiber at least five days a week. My initial thought was that I would try to do this, see if it did any good, and then if not I would find some other simple rule. I figured that by then I would have the habit of eating fiber and therefore taking the next step (whatever it might be) might be easier. Turned out that the fiber created a cascading effect of virtue.

Partially, I think, because of how I chose to get those calories: High-fiber cereal. Really high fiber serial. I eat 80-90% (or more) of my daily allotment for breakfast. That has the benefit of getting breakfast into my system at the beginning of the day. As everyone knows, it’s better to eat more meals of smaller quantity than fewer meals of greater quantity. I always knew that, but could never manage to do it. But breakfast set the stage for that. And it prevented me from going out and getting breakfast of a much worse sort. I did have to strike out a compromise and created a compromise: I get to eat breakfast at McDonald’s on Wednesdays. I gave in on this so that I would always have McDonald’s to look forward to without eating it on too regular a basis. To say that I’m never going to eat there is to set myself up for failure. Knowing which day I will be eating there helps solidify the thing to look forward to.

In addition to preventing greater dietary sin, the cereal keeps me full until lunch. For lunch I really lucked out. Another example of how an external circumstance can make all of the difference in the world. Mindstorm, my employer, has a great employee cafeteria. A wide selection of food at reasonable prices. But the biggest thing is that it’s a very short walk away. That’s how I learned something about myself: One of the problems in the past is that I have a psychological fixation on the notion that if I invest time and energy to go some place for lunch, I am going to do some serious eating while I am there. Since going across the street to the cafeteria is no great inconvenience, it’s incredibly easy to just get a quick, relatively small thing.

Sometimes I do get hungry later in the day, so I try to keep a box of cereal at work that I use for snack food. I did this after I realized that I was starting to go to the vending machine to satiate that end-of-day hunger. Plus, Mindstorm has free milk. So that works out. But the important part of this is not what I eat, it’s that by having fewer dietary problems (now I’m eating a good breakfast, eating a smaller lunch) I am better able to identify what the problems are and come up with solutions. It’s not so overwhelming anymore. The more changes you have to make and urges you have to fight off at once, the exponentially harder it gets to make them. I know someone that quit smoking this way, by-the-by. He just got rid of one cig a day per week (the third after lunch, the second in the morning, etc) until it wasn’t worth bothering anymore.

Dinner varies pretty wildly. When Clancy’s not on a horrendous rotation, she cooks and she makes enough for two. Otherwise I usually open something canned or in some cases just have a snack at night. The canned foods are generally not very healthy. But they’re not ridiculously unhealthy either, unless you count sodium. If I’m really hungry it’ll be some sort of pasta like Beefaroni or maybe spaghetti. Chili and/or a burrito is also an option. If I’m less hungry, I’m more likely to eat soup or just get a snack. The snacks are usually not of the healthy sort. They often include Spam.

I’ve recently expanded my attempt to include a morning workout. The workout is actually not entirely for weight. It’s partially an issue of general health and partially in anticipation for my next chore. One thing I don’t mention above is that I still drink three cokes a day and that’s not good. So I’m going to try to make a change there, too. But I know that I have to actually be ready for it in more ways than I currently am.

So for all of you I don’t know how many of these tricks might work for you. I think that it is really important to recognize that overweight people generally have bad habits in different ways. I really don’t think that there is any diet out there that is right for anyone. I think that boosters of one diet over the other (say low carb vs low fat) often mistakenly give people the impression that the way that they lose weight is the only way to do so. According to low carb people, I should be ballooning up about now when in fact it’s my low-fat diets that have historically proven to be more successful. When my wife diets, she has to go all-in. Whenever I go all-in, I burn out and fail.

Of course, what works for me may not work for anyone else. Indeed, what worked for me in the past stopped working five years ago. It used to be that I lost weight by going all-in, spending a couple days eating scratch and then slowly working my way from there. When I lost 70 pounds at the end of high school, that was how I did it (albeit not completely with intent).

Last week I ran across an MSN list about weight loss with a mathematical oddity. In the process of trying to track it down, I read just about every diet-related thing that they have. What struck me as I was reading was how many of their “tips” just didn’t apply to me. It warned against monotony, for instance, but for me monotony is a powerful thing. Creating “defaults” so that if I’m not in a particular mood for something else, I’ll eat the same thing every day. For the author of the article, though, it was a recipe for failure.

Ten years ago little changes were hard for me. Now they’re the only way that I can make changes. Ten years ago eating a little bit of cheese meant that I would go hog-wild. That’s not the case anymore. Ten years ago I could completely steer clear of cheese and sweets. I can’t anymore. Some people need carbs and others need fats and asking them to go without is completely counterproductive.

It seems to me that the best way to go is with an eye towards knowing what your limitations are and what your strengths are. My strength (and weakness) is that I am a creature of habit. I don’t get tired of foods. There are also some ubiquitous foods that I can almost completely eliminate from my diet such as french fries. There are others that I can’t. My wife’s diet includes sacrifices I could never make. Sacrifices I’ve made without little effort are things that would require the world of her.

For me, right now, the path to success is replacing one bad habit at a time.

One danger of forward-dating posts is that between the point when you write it and when you post it, something hits the news that changes the reader’s perception of everything. Seriously, what are the odds that in the week in between my writing of a post involving fiber and it’s scheduled posting, that fiber would be in the news? Particularly the exact kind of fiber involved in the post?

Slate has an buyer-beware article on faux-fibers such as polydextrose and inulin. These don’t constitute real fiber, Jacob Gershman says, and Megan McArdle agrees. The implication, of course, is that people reading this need to go eat raw roots, nuts, and berries if they want to be healthy.

Unfortunately, I think this attitude has precisely the opposite effect. Instead of telling people what the true and good things to eat are, they sort of lead us to throw our hands in the air and say “What’s the point?” It’s sort of like that guy that, whenever you say so-and-so is bad, points to the alternative and says “that’s bad, too!” And we sort of end in this no-man’s land of nutritional post-modernism wherein whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Boiled roots and steamed beans are good for you. No one really contests that. And I get it. I get the notion that as long as I’m not eating things that I have no use for, I am a dietary sinner. I might as well be eating pig lard covered in triple-refined sugar.

One of the problems I have with the medical establishment in general is that they often have the perfect tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good. I tell my phys ed coach that I’m drinking orange juice, and I’m warned about the sugar. People get excited by new games and game systems like DDR and the Wii that encourage exercise and they go out of their way to say that the exercise isn’t as good as the exercise you might get on the treadmill. I half-expect them to complain that the treadmill isn’t as good as jogging, which isn’t as good as carrying logs, which isn’t as good as pushing boulders in persuit of building a cave.

The problem I have with this is that for most people, the alternative to natural orange juice is not prune juice, it’s Sunny Delight or Mountain Dew Livewire. The alternative to the Wii is the XBox. The alternative fake fiber is not a breakfast of… I actually don’t know of any breakfast that they haven’t told us is killing us at some point in the last ten years. Eggs, bacon, oats, orange juice. Maybe a pear and a grass salad is okay. Or eggs, if you strip it of the part that tastes good and don’t add anything to add taste (cause it probably contains sodium, which as well all know will kill you).

The more personal problem I have with it is that more than any other product I can think of, the one thing that has helped my life more than any other is the fake fiber discussed in this article.

When I moved to Cascadia, I made only one conscious dietary decision: to eat more fiber. I decided to do this with fiber-enriched FiberONE cereal. FiberONE contains inulin, which is discussed in the Slate article. Since making that decision, I have lost 35 pounds.

I drink three or four cokes a day. I eat McDonald’s for breakfast once a week. Donuts once a week. If I really want a burger or a couple pieces of pizza, I eat it. I put cheese in the canned pasta I not-infrequently have for dinner. I have not once said “That’s unhealthy. I shouldn’t eat that.” But the weight nonetheless came off.

It would be silly to attribute it all to the cereal. But what happened was the cereal replaced the far, far less healthy breakfasts that I had been eating. It got me to stop skipping The Most Important Meal of the Day. It kept my bowels regular. It suppressed my appetite. It got me started on the right foot. So when it came to lunch, unless I actively wanted something unhealthy, I would continue the trend that I set myself in the morning and get a boca burger. Since I’m less hungry (or have been hungry for less time), I’ll eat less.

If I had read this article before I’d made that decision, I never would have started eating the cereal. I mean, what’s the point? It’s not real fiber. You might get the impression reading the article that there was nothing worthwhile in the product at all. A waste of time. I might as well be eating at McDonald’s.

McArdle makes the comment that the FDA should release a statement saying “If it tastes that good, it isn’t good for you.”

In some people’s minds, it’s as though something tasting good is immaterial. Or that, if they really tried, they’d learn to like brussel sprouts. Maybe, if raised on it, they would.

But things like taste and convenience matter. They matter a great deal. Because without it, people will not continue to eat it. They will likely default to something far, far less healthy. If putting a cheese on a veggie burger makes me like it, it’s worth the added fat because it means that I will have liked my veggie burger and will eat it again. Struggling with no cheese or soy cheese may be acceptable, but it won’t have me coming back for more. That double cheese-burger, which I know will satisfy me, will call to me evermore loudly.

Granted, I am fortunate in that if I do the right things (and even some of the wrong ones), I will lose weight. I recognize that others don’t have it so easy. For whatever reason, they have to sacrifice a lot more to get a lot less loss in return. So for them, maybe these articles are worthwhile if they wonder why their high-“fiber” breakfast isn’t doing the trick.

But I think that a large part of the problem with obesity in this country has less to do with too many people thinking that faux-fiber is actual fiber and a lot more to do with being made to feel guilty any time they eat something that they didn’t pluck from the ground themselves. Diets are notorious for being short-lived and ultimately resulting in weight gain. They tell us that we need to not just go on a diet, but change our lifestyle. But anything convenient or tasty is off-limits.

That’s a recipe for failure.

The commentariat over at MamaPundit are outraged at a law that requires drug tests and (if applicable) intervention in cases of:

(1) No prenatal care;
(2) Late prenatal care after twenty-four (24) weeks gestation;
(3) Incomplete prenatal care;
(4) Abruptio placentae;
(5) Intrauterine fetal death;
(6) Preterm labor of no obvious cause;
(7) Intrauterine growth retardation of no obvious cause;
(8) Previously known alcohol or drug abuse; or
(9) Unexplained congenital anomalies.

In the minds of the commenters, this law was obviously written by men with little or no understanding of pregnancy. Or by pro-lifers looking at a back door towards obtaining control over a pregnant woman’s body.

There are things to object to in this law. I for one and unenthusiastic about how the vague language of the law could be interpreted so that a doctor is liable if the woman does not seek help. And the question of how the state should intervene in the cases of drug use on the part of mothers during pregnancy is pretty rocky terrain filled with potential disagreement even among people who usually agree.

The odd thing about the post and the comments is that they focus at least in large part on the criteria used. This is odd to me because if this law was drafted by a bunch of men without a clue as to how pregnancy works, they obviously consulted doctors. It reads almost line-for-line what Dr. Wife describes as indicators of drug use. And if a woman has the above, chances are that she’s already being tested. And if a test comes up positive, there is already a mechanism in place to inform the authorities. The whole bit about meetings and attendance checks is new, but by and large on the doctor’s end it’s codifying what is already done.

Further, if a doctor has a patient that has the above indications of having taken drugs and does not run any tests because the mother lies and says that she does not do drugs, the doctor is liable for malpractice if something goes wrong. The notion that “Oh, well the patient assured me that she did not do drugs” isn’t going to cut it. I personally would not bet much money that the lawsuit of a mother that did drugs suing the doctor for something going wrong that can be traced back too the drugs would get very far, but it doesn’t have to get very far for the doctor to be professionally negatively impacted.

The concern of MamaPundit and her allies is that they’re targeting women that don’t seek prenatal care because the medical establishment wants to gain more control over the process and/or because they want the money that they get with prenatal visits. Sure, sometimes there are women that for one reason or another did not seek prenatal care, but the most frequent reason that a woman wouldn’t seek any is if she has antagonistic attitudes towards the medical establishment or she doesn’t want to be tested because she knows it will come up positive and social services will be informed.

In the case of the former, it’s unlikely that the law is going to apply to the woman anyway because women that don’t trust the medical establishment for prenatal care don’t suddenly trust them when it comes to delivery. In the case where a woman wants to go it on her own but changes her mind when problems occur, chances are she’s going to get a full work-up anyway and that’s going to include the drug test.

The in the case of the latter, well that’s the case that it turns out frequently enough to be to make a drug test worthwhile. I have heard this story over and over again. A woman knows if she goes to get prenatal care that she will be tested and then social services is likely going to get involved. Presumably, she puts off prenatal care in hopes that she can get it out of her system prior to delivered. All too frequently, that never happens and so the woman has put the fetus’s health unnecessarily at risk in two ways.

But what about cases that fall between the cracks of the above? Do they happen? I’m sure that they do. But the worst-case result is a test that comes up negative. I’m not entirely sure what the downside is here except for hurt feelings. The further stigmatization of having a miscarriage or having an unconventional approach to childbirth.

That’s hardly the goal, though. Doctors need to know these things in order to know what risks to keep an eye out for. Drugs and alcohol during pregnancy are known to increase risks. Doctors need to know what these risks are. They can be sued for being insufficiently thorough. Then, once the baby is born, it’s no longer a part of her and it gets health care independent of her and there is, of course, the question of whether or not the baby should remain in her custody..

Interestingly, according to Clancy, few women object to getting drug tests and almost none consider it remotely the imposition that MP’s commenters do. I was a little surprised by this, to be honest. Mothers that come up negative aren’t offended and mothers that come up positive and don’t want to fess up spend more time trying to explain why there might be false positives than arguing that nobody has a right to ask for a sample.

Sheila Tone has an interesting post on Econoholic about Nadya Suleman, otherwise known as the Mother O’Eight:

Come on sisters, where are all your usual snide remarks about “clown car vaginas?”

The difference is that Nadya Suleman is a single mother on public assistance. So we’re not allowed to be mean to her. If she were a married fundie like the Duggar mom (deft switcheroo, Richaro) she’d be fair game.

Why the hostility? Perhaps it’s because the married, employed Tones are in the process of carefully planning our second, and last, child. We have a 30-month-old. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I want to be a mother, if and why I’d want a second child. And, oh yes, I spend a lot of time working. And a lot of time soul-searching. What’s my purpose in life? Am I a worthy human being? Having a kid turned up those voices, and added “Am I a worthy parent?” to the chorus.

I had to work hard to find which portion to blockquote. Read it all. I chose that portion because it gets to the nub of one of the things that interests me most about this discussion, which is to say the difference in reaction to different situations. Some liberals are saying that if Suleman were a Christian couple like the Duggars, they’d be applauded as the Duggars are. That this is really a classist issue and, owing to Nadya’s last name, possibly a racist one.

But Sheila points out that there are a number of differences between the Duggars and Ms Suleman. Which is one of the things that bothers me about the sort of “If circumstances were different, you’d be saying something different” gotcha attitude that infects blogs from to time. Yes, when circumstances are different, people render judgment. That Suleman will not be remotely able to care for her children, as the Duggars do, makes it something of a different situation. That Suleman used technology and had them all at once – which increases risks to their health and makes caring for them more difficult – matters. There are plenty of reasons to approve of the Duggars and disapprove of Suleman. There are fewer reasons to do the inverse. Those reasons usually come down to “But they’re icky Christians!” and that the Duggars will inflict bad ideas into their kids (this is, of course, in marked contrast to the wonderful ideas that Suleman will pass on… if she has time to).

Truthfully, though, I don’t approve of either the Duggars or Suleman. I don’t know what the “right” maximum number of kids to have is, but it’s clearly fewer than fourteen. An acquaintance of mine, the second of seven, said that once you reach five or so you start running into a situation where the older siblings raise the younger siblings. So on one hand, that seems a good a place as any. It could be said that helping to raise a sibling could be a learning experience for the older siblings, but from my mother’s stories on raising her sisters they can often lose more than they gain from the proposition.

Clancy and I have talked a bit about the Suleman situation. She takes something of a harder line. I feel sorry for Suleman, though I should note that I feel sorry for her at a comfortable distance wherein I am not affected by her actions and compassion is extremely easy. Clancy, like Sheila, has to deal with the consequences of irresponsible behavior every day at work. And as a woman, Clancy (like Sheila) has had a lifetime of experience trying to do the responsible thing in terms of procreation and is less inclined to have much sympathy for someone so clearly reckless. Objectively, it’s hard to disagree with her.

I am a little softer on irresponsible reproduction than are Sheila and my wife. I do see a sort of right-of-reproduction (God willing) in at least a limited fashion. The first child because of the right to reproduce and the second because children need siblings. Had Suleman had the octuplets because she desperately wanted a child, couldn’t afford multiple attempts and so stocked up on her single attempt, and had a moral reason not to abort… I might be willing to chalk it up as an epic lapse in judgment rather than a lapse in morals. But that she already had six that she was not able to take care of on her own and thus knew that she was enlisting her parents in something they didn’t want makes me disinclined to forgive any further pregnancies because her tubes should be tied.

I noticed on the news that they’re investigatinng the fertility clinic, which is something that Clancy and I have been discussing. There aren’t laws, but there are (obviously ignored) guidelines that if followed prevent this sort of nonsense. If there is a positive result in all this, hopefully it is a clamping down on this to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. We shouldn’t even have to be discussing this because it shouldn’t be legally permissible (assuming that it is).

Addendum: Sheila has followed up with a post on three ways to discourage welfare mothers.

“Mark my words — if we let them take away our God-given right to pickle small children in a nicotine haze, they won’t stop there. Don’t come crying to me if somebody eventually questions whether it’s wise to let children watch fourteen uninterrupted hours of television, or if tossing a baby into the air repeatedly until he throws up is harmful for his development.” –Tony Woodlief

Apparently, the wife of the Governor of Iowa was caught smoking in a government car:

The issue arose Wednesday morning, when a Des Moines Register reporter noticed Culver openly smoking in a sport utility vehicle the state provides to her family. The truck was stopped at a red light in downtown Des Moines. Culver was sitting in the passenger seat, with the window rolled down. A state trooper was driving.

Culver’s action violated the state smoking ban, which forbids smoking in most workplaces, including bars and restaurants. The ban also applies to employer-owned cars, and it specifically says no smoking is allowed in state-owned vehicles.

She requested a ticket and that was that. Nothing brings forth honor like getting caught, no? Whatever hesitations I have about smoking bans in public places, state-owned cars are certainly a place where it’s fair game.

I did enjoy this gem by an Iowa writer named John Carlson:

The loopy law does permit smoking in a hotel or motel room in Iowa, if said room is designated for legal smoking. But no hotel or motel may have more than 20 percent of such rooms in the establishment. But if you, Mr. Motel Owner, have 15 percent of your rooms as smoking rooms, you may not increase that to 20 percent. But you’re allowed to increase the number of nonsmoking rooms.

Unless there’s a full moon on the second Tuesday of the month, and then you have to go to the casino nearest your home to fill out the forms seeking an exemption. At least I think that last part was in there.

I have a printout of the law, but I stopped reading when the bizarre rules started making my eyes hurt.

I personally wish that they’d spend less time expanding the law and more time enforcing it. In our travels, it’s become not-uncommon to get non-smoking rooms that are clearly part-time smoking rooms and when confronted they don’t typically respond by apologizing and getting us a non-smoking room. Usually the negotiations involve paying more than we had planned so that we can get what he originally paid for because they don’t want to honor the Priceline (or equivalent) deal we got (specifying a non-smoking room) or the only rooms they have available are more expensive. Of course, maybe they’d do a better job of enforcing the law is people like us were to actually contact the appropriate authorities.

I always have mixed feelings about these things. The former libertarian in me is naturally resistant to regulating our private lives. Further, I find the piecemail approach a little bit insulting. Outlaw it or leave us be. However, the former libertarian in me says that the way that they’re going about it is probably the best way to cut back on smoking and make life easier on non-smokers while giving die hard smokers enough room to prevent a revolt.

Judging by our internet history, Clancy has visited a site called deadiversion.usdoj.gov. I spent a good three minutes trying to figure out what the heck Dead Iversion was and why Clancy would be visiting a usdoj.gov before it occurred to me that the site was almost certain DEA Diversion and is thus probably linked to her efforts to get full licensure in a handful of states which includes the ability to prescribe heavy-duty narcotics which is handled in part by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the DOJ.

That makes sense… though I got to say that Dead Iversion does sound pretty cool.

Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain is lending credence to the alleged link between vaccinations and autism:

McCain said, per ABC News’ Bret Hovell, that “It’s indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.”

McCain said there’s “divided scientific opinion” on the matter, with “many on the other side that are credible scientists that are saying that’s not the cause of it.”

The established medical community is not as divided as McCain made it sound, however. Overwhelmingly the “credible scientists,” at least as the government and the medical establishment so ordain them, side against McCain’s view.

Moreover, those scientists and organizations fear that powerful people lending credence to the thimerosal theory could dissuade parents from getting their children immunized — which in their view would lead to a very real health crisis.

I’ve previously discussed vaccinations insofar as they relate to “preventative medicine”. More and more, the current studies suggest that there is no link. If you continue to see a link, you are not only suggesting that all of these studies are by contemptible and corrupt figures that simply don’t care about autism while believing that the comparatively few studies suggesting that there might be a link are passed down by God’s divine hand to people whose motives are as pure as the driven snow… you are suggesting that the medical establishment suggesting that there is no link is so diabolical that they would risk the health of their own children to further their case. If medical professionals are willing to immunize their own kids, I am more than happy to immunize mine.

I am vaguely reminded of a subplot in The Shield from a couple seasons back. Vic Mackey, the star of the show, has two kids (of three) with autism. They are informed in the third episode of the possible link with thimerosal and they join a class-action suit. As we were watching, Clancy and I started rolling our eyes at the prospect of a season’s subplot turning the advocates for a highly debatable theory into the daring truth-tellers and the skeptics as the nefarious knights of the pharmaceutical theory and medical establishment. They were taking a very emotional subplot exploring the problems that countless parents across the country have and were going to use it to grind a political axe.

Then the funniest thing happened. A few episodes later, the entire subplot was dropped like an anvil. Suddenly they were part of a test program for some pharmaceutical but they had to back out of the lawsuit to join. I feared that this was going to be another volley in the subplot (“We will not be bought off!!”) but they accepted it and we never heard a word about the thimerosal or the test program again (though the autism is obviously still there). The only times I’ve ever seen subplots dropped so quickly in such an early stage is when there is some big unexpected casting change.

My personal theory behind the whole thing is that after the show started to air, producer Ryan Scott was approached by someone that he knows in the medical field who set him straight. An alternate, more conspiracy-minded explanation is that the advertisers got to the network who got to him. The Shield doesn’t exactly have a reputation for backing down from controversy, though.

Shortly after I first arrived in Estacado I got a temp job helping the state’s Child Protective Services move their headquarters from one location to another. While doing so I found an immense amount of respect for the horrors they hear day in and day out. Most of the people I helped move were first-respondants at the phone bank. Just the things I overheard sent shivers down my spine.

“Is she expected to be able to see out of that eye again?”

“Did he threaten to burn your apartment down with you in it or while you weren’t there?”

“How long did he hold her hand on the stove? How severe are the burns?”

And over and over again: “Have you informed the police?” and “Do you have a complaint number?”

Talking with them on break and whatnot, I could sense the frustration of their relative impotence over the situation. At least in Estacado it seems that it’s not very easy to keep an abusive parent away from his or her children.

Apparently it’s not quite so difficult in Britain:

A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of “emotional abuse”, even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way.

Social services’ recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met. {…}

Under the plan, a doctor will hand the newborn to a social worker, provided there are no medical complications. Social services’ request for an emergency protection order – these are usually granted – will be heard in secret in the family court at Hexham magistrates on the same day.

From then on, anyone discussing the case, including Miss Lyon, will be deemed to be in contempt of the court.{…}

Miss Lyon came under scrutiny because she had a mental health problem when she was 16 after being physically and emotionally abused by her father and raped by a stranger.

She suffered eating disorders and self-harm but, after therapy, graduated from Edinburgh University and now works for two mental health charities, Borderline and Personality Plus.

Maybe there is a side to this story that I am not seeing (the article does seem somewhat slanted), but this is some pretty disturbing stuff. Here is a woman that has turned herself around and now her child might be taken from her because of speculation that she might be a danger to it.

If mental health care professionals want people to seek help when they need it, they need to stand up for their success stories and prevent organizations from using unfortunate pits in their youth against them in adulthood. The result is that people will not seek help when they need it. This is even worse than preventing them from joining the army or even hassling them over getting their medical license: this is sending the message that if you seek help, it may be decided that you can never have children.

Who knows, maybe Miss Lyon is a threat to her child. Maybe there is something significant that this article is leaving out. If anyone has more information, I would love to hear it. I don’t want to believe what I am reading. It’s unfortunately hard to make any determination because everything is kept so secret. Despite the understandable frustrations of the heroes at the Estacado CPS, it ought to be a lot more difficult to take a baby from her parents than is portrayed in this article.

I took a trip to the dentist last week for another unsubsidized cleaning. Unfortunately my mouth is not doing as well as we would like it to be, so she had to put in some anti-bachterial powder in between my teeth and gums. I managed to surpress my smile when she told me that it meant that I couldn’t floss for a couple weeks. She also told me to avoid certain foods, namely crackers and chips.
I had absolutely no idea how much I eat in the way of crackers and chips until the past few days:

• I bought three 10-packs (with six a piece inside) of those sandwich cracker snacks just the other day. Now they sit in my desk and taunt me.
• I ordered soup that I couldn’t eat crackers with.
• I declined to order salad cause I would have wanted crackers with them.
• No Mexican restaurants cause they come with chips and salsa.
• No chips from the vending machine.
• I have to get cookies instead of chips at Subway with the combo meal (okay, so that’s not such a sacrifice…)
• Not mentioned by the dentist but implied was hard candy. I’m a sucker for hard candy that gets rooted deep into your teeth. Hence my dental problems.

I’d almost rather them tell me to give up refined sugar.