11 April 2016

A minor update and is our Federal Government fueling Eating Disorders?


We're a few months into 2016, and I know, I haven't posted in a while.  I have been busy a lot trying to balance the load between my full time job and my weekends at the railroad museum.  In my spare time I have been tweaking EdwardRingwald.com little by little trying out some new features.

If you haven't noticed, I made a slight change to the blog picture that you see to the left and also made it into an icon as you can see in the title bar of your browser.  How do you make this icon?  It's time for a web design Great American Teach-In moment!

First, you take an image and resize it to a small image file, usually 100 x 100.  You can use any image editor including Microsoft Picture Manager (which comes with the Office suite) to resize the image.  Save the image file as a .jpg file.

But you are not done yet!  There is one more step!

You have to convert the resized image into an icon file.  There are plenty of websites out there that will convert an image file into an icon for you, and I highly recommend the Favicon and App Icon Generator at Dan's Tools.  The site is easy to use, but make sure you deselect the check mark for including your favicon in the public gallery before you click on create favicon.  The resulting file will be a favicon.ico file (the .ico extension tells Windows that it is an icon file).

Simply upload the favicon.ico file to your web server, add the HTML (link rel="shortcut icon" href="(location of your favicon file)") for the favicon in your HTML header area on your web page, and you're all set!

With the minor updates aside, let's change gears here and discuss a subject that I haven't got around to in a while.  Lately, if you go to your favorite restaurant you have more than likely seen something new on the menu:  Calorie counts.

You can thank the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the same law that gave us Obamacare.  A part of the law requires that chain restaurants post calorie counts in their menus, all in the name of encouraging Americans to live healthier lifestyles.  To me, I think these calorie counts posted prominently on printed menus and menu boards have the potential to scare people away, especially people who are fighting a battle with eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa.

Is our Federal Government requiring restaurants to post calorie counts on the menus fueling people with eating disorders?  This article I found at reason.com on the Federal Government's mandatory calorie counts being hazardous to your health tells it all.

According to the article, twenty million women as well as ten million men (as of 2011) struggle with one form of eating disorder or another, including Anorexia Nervosa.  An eating disorder is a serious condition, both physically and mentally, in which a person avoids eating food for fear of weight gain.  The road to recovery for someone with an eating disorder is a long road to recovery requiring the help of a psychiatrist, clinical psychologist as well as a counselor specializing in eating disorders.  Most people with eating disorders are helped on an outpatient basis but a good number (especially the more severe cases) require some form of inpatient treatment, usually at a treatment facility specializing in eating disorders.

A person who is recovering from an eating disorder is usually taught to stop counting calories and stop weighing oneself as a part of therapy, according to the reason.com article.  Unfortunately, when a person in recovery from an eating disorder walks into a restaurant for a get together with friends and/or family, once the calorie counts are seen on the menu that person could potentially face an anxiety attack, worried about weight gain and appearance.  Is this what our Federal Government is doing to scare away people with eating disorders from restaurants?

My opinion is this:  Calorie counts have no place on a restaurant's printed menu or on a menu board.  However, restaurants can make nutritional information including calorie counts available to the customer upon request, as is present practice.  But don't post calorie counts to scare away customers!

Clearly, this is one part of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that should be repealed.  Our Federal Government should not be in the nanny business scaring people with calorie counts prominently posted.