Congratulations Colorado! You are the only state with an obesity rate of less than 20%. Twenty years ago, no state had an obesity rate above 15 percent. Today, more than two out of three states, 38 total, have obesity...

Japanese children "consume incredible amounts of soft drinks and junk food," says Hiroshi Osawa, a retired psychology professor at Iwate University. According to Iwate, the consequences go beyond poor nutrition and expanding waistlines. This junk food diet may be contributing to Japan's alarming juvenile crime wave. According to Osawa, "There is a connection between diet and violence."

Fletcher's approach to personal change, including dieting, focuses on what he terms "the forces of inertia", which are usually too great to defeat the "forces of change". So, instead of asking participants to change what they eat or to take more exercise, he focused on encouraging people to break their usual habits and discovered that a side-effect of challenging them to make small alterations to their routines was weight loss.

When we eat whole foods as thy are presented by nature, a plum from a tree, a tomato from a vine, we are connected in a direct, healthy and important way to our would. But the more that food is tampered with, the less it offers us nutritionally or spiritually. The traditional American diet comes, to a large extent, packaged. We eat from boxes, cans, jars, and bottles, and we eat food that's been engineered to get us hooked. We eat the flesh of other animals who have eaten the grain, rather than eating the grain itself. And we bake, broil, fry, boil, and we salt, spice and sweeten away. We are bored with the original, natural version, having acquired a taste for fat, sugar and salt, the "new and improved" version of food. The range of food possibilities available to most American is awesome an ever-growing. It is easy to become obsessed or fanatical about food. We are, in fact, the most overweight population in history. If the issue of food becomes our primary concern and dominated our lives, it can overshadow any larger purpose-–we then just eat to live and live to eat. But eating simple food can help us to strike a better balance. It can help us to plant our two feet more firmly on the earth we all share.

These are seven strategies that can help you respond more effectively to depression. They're not easy and developing skill will take some time and effort. But you'll find that most of these strategies will benefit you in other areas of your life: a healthier body, more intimate relationships, and a closer connection between your spiritual beliefs and your daily life.

Vaillant claims that there are seven key indicators of a person's life at age 50 that are pretty good predictors of where they will be (or if they will be) at age 80: "Whether we live to a vigorous old age lies not so much in our stars or our genes as in ourselves."