A distorted body image is one of the symptoms that define anorexia and related eating disorders. Patients may be painfully thin but still see themselves as fat while they continue to cut calories, over-exercise, purge, or use enemas in an effort to lose more and more weight.

Those of us who enjoy normal weight often also suffer from a warped view of our physical selves.

It's 11:30 AM. You've been up since 5 o'clock and the hunger meter is on high. "What to eat?" you think to yourself.

You pore over the menu for the deli downstairs but nothing you can allow yourself looks that good. Sure, you could go out for fast food but there's a meeting coming up and you don't really want to move your car and then have to find a new parking spot when you return.

We are a large people. 65% of us are overweight, 30% actually obese. How did we reach this point?

We ate ourselves into a prison of our own fat.

Why?

Well, we certainly didn't sit down and decide that we wanted to gain weight, did we? We had no pressure on us to fatten ourselves for some eventual slaughter. On the contrary, as our collective girth increased, we paradoxically elevated scrawny to a cultural icon, happily dismissing the corseted matronly figures of the past two centuries.

In our mind's eye, we see our ancient ancestors as they have been depicted in paintings, stories, films, and scientific recreations. Small, wiry, hairy figures surrounding a huge beast, poised for the kill.

Do we know if that picture is really accurate?

We do know, from skeletal fragments that have survived, that they were definitely smaller than present day human beings.

There is absolutely no question but that we are all getting heavier as each year passes. The statistics on overweight and obesity are truly staggering but already so well publicized I won't repeat them here.

In the good old American way, we look for a scapegoat. Somebody must be at fault for our predicament and somebody must be made to pay.

We are inundated by exhortations to lose weight - from the media, from our friends, from our family. As the richest, fattest, nation on earth, we idealize the impossibly thin supermodels who smile (or smirk?) at us from every magazine cover. We spend a fortune on trying to lose weight and despair when we don't.

Enough of the diet gurus, the nutritionists, and the weight loss experts (including me), let's enjoy ourselves for a while.

America is a nation of self-disclosers, amiably acceptant of our weaknesses. Celebrities, family members, coworkers and friends think nothing of admitting their compulsions and dependencies on alcohol, street drugs, prescription medications. We enter rehab programs, clean up, dry out, and go on with our lives: beating our problem or entering a long series of relapses and treatment episodes.

Have you ever wondered why diet books always seem to have a section of recipes?

Apart from the desire to make the book look larger and therefore more worth its inflated price, why should we be so interested in studying foods and ways to serve it when we are trying to avoid it as much as possible?

It is inconceivable that we have reached adulthood without the basic skills to boil, bake, steam, or roast our food.

We all encounter those hosts and hostesses who feel it is their duty to make us eat whatever their specialty is and generate a sense of guilt if we do not flatter their creation by stuffing ourselves with it, regardless of our weight control plans and weight loss goals. Here are some nice ways to decline her offering.

For example's sake, we will use her justly famous (but horrendously caloric) cheesecake.

Every day, in newspapers, magazines, television, and online, we are exhorted to lose weight. Alarming statistics about our national overweight and obesity rates are regularly revisited and the dangers of carrying too many pounds are trumpeted by dietitians, nutritionists, medical specialists, and the weight loss gurus on their talk show tours.

They don't have to keep trying to convince us that ideal weight is healthier; we know that.