“No,” he said, then checked my chart again for my age. “No, not at all.”

At 36, I had been preoccupied by my age, and this didn’t help. I’d been looking at every woman’s neck to see when the accordion stretch of the chin would kick in. Could I stave it off a few more years? Had I blown it by not being skinny, so that I couldn’t later gain five pounds to smooth out my wrinkles?

But it wasn’t just about my appearance. With each passing year, I counted all the things I could no longer do: be an athlete, be a model, be a ballerina. It didn’t matter that I never aspired to these things. The things I had aspired to do, like write a novel and be a young mother, were also undone. (I am a mother, but not a young one.) The world and its opportunities were closing like a window. I felt like I was choking.

And even as I thought of this, I knew the basic existential dilemma: Thinking about age wouldn’t make me young. And worse, I would never be younger than I was now. I was fairly accomplished for my age: I’d traveled and known many interesting people. I’d been in love with the wrong guy. I’d been in love with the right guy. Everything seemed right on schedule. But I was weighed down by the truth of time, that it’s coming for all of us.

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In the past few weeks, Radar has lamented that she's gone from "pretty to puffy" and "fattened her face with fillers" while Us declared her "nearly unrecognizable." SheKnows hit her even harder, complaining that "the pretty face we're used to [has been] replaced by a puffy disaster." And when her reps declared that her swollen look was the result of steroids for a sinus infection, they only fanned the flames, leading The Stir to snap of her "way chubbier than usual" look, "Come on, Ashley, we may be dumb, but we're not stupid."

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It began with a feature called "Weight Watchers" in the April Vogue, written by Dara-Lynn Weiss. In it, Weiss chronicles her then 7-year-old daughter Bea's dieting odyssey after the child had "grown fat." It was a tale that involved putting Bea -- who at 4-foot-4 and 93 pounds was veering toward childhood obesity -- on an intense regimen of calorie restriction and public shaming. "I once reproachfully deprived Bea of her dinner after learning that her observation of French Heritage Day at school involved nearly 800 calories of Brie, filet mignon, baguette and chocolate," she writes. "And there have been many awkward moments at parties, when Bea has wanted to eat, say, both cookies and cake, and I've engaged in a heated public discussion about why she can't."

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"You look healthy!" they exclaim, giving me a hug, or grabbing my shoulders like an aunt at a family reunion. They say it so often and with such enthusiasm that it can have the inverse effect of upsetting me. I can't help wondering how unhealthy I used to look.

"People won't stop telling me I look healthy," I complained to my friend Mary.

She laughed. "Those assholes."

Don't get me wrong: I love compliments. But I feel a stab of mortification for the bloated, slightly sweaty woman who thought she had everyone fooled with Target hoodies and elastic waistbands. I have spent a lifetime hoping no one noticed my weight, and so it is a special terror that everyone now does. I tend to deflect in these moments. I say things like, "It's amazing what you can accomplish when you stop burying your misery in Chipotle burritos." Or I pass the weight loss off to quitting drinking, which is not a lie, since I was a beer-binger who could put away a six-pack on a Tuesday. (It's hard to keep your girlish figure when even a casual night out includes 2,000 calories in sheer lager.)

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In a candid and wrenching plea on the eve of his 23rdbirthday last week, the Livermore, Calif., man did something extraordinary. He braved the mockery and opprobrium of the entire Internet in the calculated hope of "trying to go viral" and turn his life around. In a clip self-explanatorily called "Overweight guy asks for help," Gibbs explains, "I'm making this video because I don't know what else to do. I've tried losing weight on my own. Tried doing everything possible. Been on diets, been hospitalized. Always done what needed to be done at the time and then I'd just gain the weight back."

Gibbs' first wish -- to go viral -- has already come true. Within 24 hours, Gibbs' video had over 200,000 hits. It's now surged well past a million. And after Gibbs mentioned Dr. Phil in his video, the show reached out to him and is reportedly paying a visit to his home Wednesday.

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He bought me the first drink after I managed to scratch and knock the 7-ball onto the floor in a single shot. By the second drink, I’d already decided I liked him. There was something about the way he looked at me that made me feel attractive, pretty even.

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A collaboration between Disney and Blue Cross and Blue Shield to help teach kids to "fight bad habits," the Epcot attraction and tie-in app and Web page featured buff, virtuous characters Will Power and Callie Stenics squaring off against nemeses like the lazy, grotesque "Lead Bottom" and the self-explanatorily named "Glutton." Apparently, when a company famed for its meticulous crafting of exactly what children want and one of the largest health insurers in the nation pool their talents, they come up with "Fat people are bad."

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The 78-year-old Lagerfeld, a man who co-authored a best-selling diet book featuring "protein sachets," "homeopathic granules" and "quail flambé" -- and who has very publicly struggled with his own weight issues over the years -- has never been one to hold his tongue on the subject of women's bodies. In 2009, he was quoted in the German magazine Focus saying, "No one wants to see curvy women. You've got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly." But this time, the Chanel designer seems to have believed he was paying a compliment. While declaring the British chanteuse "a little too fat," he helpfully acknowledged that "she has a beautiful face and a divine voice" and called her "the thing at the moment."

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My search for the perfect shade of red took me to a SoHo store on Spring Street. The boutique was far from welcoming: a cavernous black-walled room with a black floor, black leather chairs, and spotlights that shined from high above. It was far more theatrical than I've ever thought of myself.

“Hi, welcome to MAC,” an assistant greeted me, as I began to glide carefully around the shiny, foreign objects.

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But along the taunt-strewn way, audiences and critics began to take serious notice of a very funny actress. When "Bridesmaids" became a massive hit last spring, its success was fueled in no small part by McCarthy's fearlessly brash performance. (Once you know that McCarthy based her character on Guy Fieri, the entire thing gets that much more fantastic.) It wasn't just the ferocious comic energy that McCarthy put into using a sandwich as a sex prop or defecating into a sink that made her so instantly indelible. It was the way she gave Megan such a convincing heart. In a sea of poop jokes, she emerged as the most real character in the whole movie, the one you'd want in your own entourage.

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Does anyone else think that sounds like an awful lot of powder and pills -- not to mention cold, hard cash -- for a "natural" process? Especially one that features one low-calorie meal a day "from a set of foods"? Not Emmy-winner Mariska Hargitay, who says that the system "has changed my life." Not celebrity divorcee Demi Moore, who calls it "the best!" Mmm mmm, what could be better than a "filling" 90-calorie shake composed mostly of rice protein concentrate, rice bran and rice syrup solids?

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There's more. As the magazine asks, "What's wrong with our bodies anyway?" it flaunts some sobering statistics. "Twenty years ago the average fashion model weighed 8 percent less than the average woman. Today she weighs 23 percent less," and "Ten years ago, plus sized models averaged between size 12 and 18. Today, the majority of plus-sized models on the agency boards are between a 6 and 14." With figures like that -- both the numeric and female kind -- it's not surprising the story became an instant meme.

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I had enrolled in a naked yoga class on impulse. My husband was gone for two months that summer, and in my solitude, I began a spiritual exploration of sorts, signing up for Buddhist book groups, taking long, contemplative walks, and reading a good deal of Eckhart Tolle. I was in a normal, fully clothed yoga class when I struck up a conversation with the woman I'd been paired with for partner poses. She was incredibly flexible.

"Wow, what do you do for a living?" I said.

"I'm actually a yoga teacher myself."

"Oh, like hatha? Vinyasa?" I asked, eager to show off how yoga smart I was.

"Not exactly …" she said. "Naked yoga."

I blinked. She repeated it for me.

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No one in Japan ever told me I was fat. Instead, relatives — my mother is Japanese — would say things to me like, “Wow. You are starting to look like your father, aren’t you!” Obesity, just so you know, is one of the major factors that contributed to my American father’s death.

My Japanese cousin asked me, “Are you considered large in America?”

“Small to medium,” I said.

“Oh. So I would be minuscule over there.”

“Yes. Very, very small.”

“It’s best to stay in one’s own country, isn’t it?”

My cousin’s comment initially struck me as the kind of naive thing a homebody might say to an inveterate international traveler. But now I take her words at face value. She meant that she ought to stay home to avoid what had happened to me.

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Back when I had hair, baldness was only a novelty. I found my dad's Rogaine in the bathroom closet when I was little, and I felt nothing. No sympathy, no fear. I was completely detached. It was just a thing sitting next to the toothpaste. Now I understand the panic he must have felt after he and my mom were divorced and he tried to Look Handsome around new women.

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In an attention-getting series of ads sponsored by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, grim youngsters stare at us with accusatory eyes. "Warning," reads one message under a photo of Tina, a chubby female. "It's hard to be a little girl if you're not." In a YouTube spot, Tina admits that "I don't like going to school, because all the other kids pick on me. It hurts my feelings." The tag line reads, "Being fat takes the fun out of being a kid." In another ad, overweight Bobby confronts his plus-size mother. "Mom, why am I fat?" he asks. When we live in a country in which children can be taken from their parents for the "medical neglect" of obesity, maybe it's time to start looking hard for answers.

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"This child's problem was so severe that we had to take custody," Madigan said, adding that her office had worked with the boy's mother for over a year before removing him. The boy first caught the attention of child services when his mother brought him to the hospital last year with breathing issues. He was diagnosed with sleep apnea, and now uses a machine to assist his breathing while he sleeps.

Was the boy's mother, in fact, neglectful? That's something the state still appears to be determining. The boy's mother told the Plain Dealer that "They are trying to make it seem like I am unfit, like I don’t love my child. Of course I love him. Of course I want him to lose weight. It's a lifestyle change, and they are trying to make it seem like I am not embracing that. It is very hard, but I am trying."

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The move is a blow to the Obama administration, which passed the Child Nutrition Act in 2010 to improve school food and permit more children to qualify for free meals. Michelle Obama has made childhood obesity the driving cause of her tenure as first lady, with a Let's Move! initiative to encourage physical fitness and healthy eating.

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The spectacularly fecund Duggars entered the reality game already way ahead of the Gosselins, and even left Octomom Nadya Suleman in the dust. They've been a source of weird fascination ever since they welcomed their 15th child on their first television special seven years -- and five pregnancies -- ago. And each time their brood increases, so does the public scorn. Along with occasional good wishes, commenters on the L.A. Times website have been writing things like: "How about you bolt your knees together?" and "Lady, your hooha isn't a clown car!"

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