Karen Cheong

Everyone's getting more educated and informed nowadays. They know heart attacks, strokes and cancer are the major killers. They also know it is possible to detect certain conditions early, hence making it potentially treatable.

Breast cancer would be a good example. Mammograms have been able to pick up the disease at such an early stage that it is potentially curable.

Many weight-loss advertisements try to sell so many different things, all targeted at getting people desperate to lose weight quickly and willing to spend money rather than time and effort on it. The bad news is, they probably don't work. Anything quick and easy may work rapidly in the short-term, but is unlikely to last, and may not be good for your health either.

I recently saw a programme on TV. It was a talk-show with Tyra Banks as the host. The unfortunate subject was an obese young teenage girl. That's being politically correct. She was FAT.

The issue? The young girl had a bad relationship with her mother and Tyra Banks was going to help them patch things up. All her life, the young girl said, she had been having a problem with her weight, and her mother was making things so hard for her.