Please, Chris, I don't want to make a big issue out of the reincarnation thing. It's not a big deal, and I don't see your story primarily as a reincarnation story anyway. Interesting: I don't have a serious problems with the idea of alternate universes and alternate versions of Lois and Clark, even though I don't honestly believe in those, either. However, I have seen so many different versions of Lois and Clark in my lifetime that it somehow seems more natural to me that there should exist alternate versions of our favorite reporters than that they should have existed as other people, in other bodies, not Lois and Clark, in earlier times but in the same universe. Because of that, I found my interest slackening during the hypnosis and "reincarnation" part of your story, but that was really all I was trying to say.
I do think that the present "overweight epidemic" or even "overweight pandemic" has everything to do with our changing eating habits. Believe me, I'm 51 years old and I remember what it was like during the sixties, at least here in Sweden. Fast food hardly existed, apart from hot dogs. People ate traditional Swedish dishes. Normal helpings were relatively small. People ate three meals a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, and little else. Most days, kids ate no ice cream, cookies, cakes, candy, chocolate, potato chips etcetera, and they drank no Coke, Fanta or other carbonated soft drinks. Hamburgers and pizza didn't exist. A fat kid was a teenager weighing ten pounds too much. Throughout the sixties, I never once saw an obese person in real life.
I most certainly agree with Nan that one fat individual can be fat for all kinds of different reasons. It is indeed quite possible that he or she is trying to expel a sense of unhappiness by eating too much. I'm just saying that people must have been unhappy in Sweden in the sixties too, but at that time they weren't fat, because they didn't have the kind of eating habits that could easily make people gain weight. And the reason why they didn't have these eating habits was, pure and simple, that they weren't immersed in today's relentless "eating culture".
I do think it is hard to resist binging on delicious food when it is easily available, and that is why so many people are fat today. I think it would be interesting if Lois, too, was to share this problem that affects so many people all over the world today.
Also, I think that hypnosis can't be a miracle cure, because if it was the problem of overweight would largely go away. Of course... I can see that there might be only a few people who are good enough at hypnotizing others to transform them into slim people who will stay slim for the rest of their lives. Bridget might, indeed, be such a miracle worker, but no matter how hard she worked at hypnotizing people, she would hardly make a dent in the collective overweight of the human race today.
Anyway, Chris, I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is such a timely, hugely interesting premise for a Lois and Clark story.
Ann
