Interesting article - social overeating

Here's the article, from Time magazine.

Let's not equate overeating socially with obesity, as the article writer seems to have done. That seems to overdetermine the interpretation. But let's focus, more productively, on social comfort acting as a "permission" to eat as much as one desires. Doesn't that mean that eating alone (and therefore in ultimate comfort) is more dangerous than going back to school? Decent study, idiotic interpretation, in my estimation.

Groups who work with eating disorders have known for a long time that eating disorders closely resemble other addictive behaviors (such as alcoholism). If one shouldn't drink alone, should one eat alone? Shouldn't we worry more about our kids during summer, when they are definitively comfortable?

If not, it's because they're getting the other part of the equation... exercise. I have witnessed schools becoming more institutional and prisonlike over my lifetime, focused upon care, control, & custody of the children entrusted to them for increasingly longer hours. Kids are no longer allowed off campus at lunchtimes, and homework assignments just keep getting more time consuming (not better, just more time consuming). When are they supposed to go exercise during the school year?

The Time article seems to me to be a great example of blaming the victim. Or, in this case, the victim's subconscious.

Bah.