I remember being a bit obsessed with whether or not I could "pinch an inch" back when those ads were on. Mind you, I was about 100 pounds at the time and so thin my mother encouraged me to put ON weight, but I could still pinch an inch. Fortunately I was grounded enough to decide the ads were stupid instead of deciding I needed to lose weight.

But I get your point. I'm constantly amazed at the number of overweight college students I see on campus (and wearing skin tight clothes, too--neither attractive nor comfortable, I imagine) but I guess most of them have grown up with overweight being so normal that they don't even necessarily notice it.

I struggle with my daughter--she's got the family tendency to put on weight, and now that she's in middle school and I can't control her intake as well as I was once able to I feel like I'm walking this narrow path between encouraging good choices and messing up her body image. She's NOT fat, but so many kids her age who are don't seem to do anything about it, and so many who aren't go around talking about how fat they are. I told her last night (after making her count out 55 goldfish crackers so she could see what a portion size was supposed to be when her inclination was to take a bowl full of them) that I'm just going to keep talking to her about these things every day, no matter how sick she gets of hearing it, so that she can never use the excuse that she didn't know how to eat.