Forgive me for straying into what be Oprah/daytime talk-show territory, but I did think it was interesting that Nancy Makin — who recently appeared on both the Oprah show and on Diane Sawyer’s show talking about her miraculous loss of more than 570 pounds over three years — effectively gave credit to the Internet for saving her life.
There are more details here, but the essence of the story is that Nancy weighed more than 700 pounds, and hadn’t left her house for about 12 years, when a relative gave her a computer and an Internet account. According to Ms. Malkin, she never actually went on a diet or got stomach-stapling or any of those drastic procedures — instead, she started joining discussion groups on the Internet, and as she started spending more time there, she spent less time eating.
Three years later, she weighs about 170 pounds and says that it was the non-judgmental nature of the groups she found on the Internet — the fact that they didn’t know or care that she was grossly overweight — that helped draw her out of her shell and gave her the strength to stop eating. Nice to see the odd good-news story about the Web now and then.