Recently I had a stomach virus that made me, what seemed, deathly ill for about a month. I lost about 10 pounds as a result and couldn’t believe the reaction I got from some of my female friends. One friend actually said she wished she could get a stomach virus so she could lose some weight. I couldn’t believe she would say such a thing given I conveyed to her how sick I was and how I was unable to really enjoy my life for those horrible weeks.

We have truly lost our minds when it comes to weight in this country. We pine over sickly skinny actresses and obsess about everything we put in our mouths, and on the flip side we’re getting fatter and fatter as a nation. How do we turn this freaky obsession off? How do we enjoy ourselves and our bodies again? Can we see and feel people for who they are, not what they look like?
It’s getting nasty out there. In my column for MSNBC.com today I discuss the growing amount of discrimination in the workplace for fat employees. Have you guys experienced this? Do you know of people who have? Do you think less of your obese co workers?

Congratulations to one of the only politicians I’ve heard dare talk about the growing disparity between the pay of CEOs and the regular working gal and guy. In the Democratic response last night to President Bush’s State of the Union address, Virginia SEn. James Webb had the guts to point out how it take the average worker more than a year to make what a CEO and the like make in one day.

It hasn’t always been like this. While Corporate bigwigs have always made more than the rank and file, the chasm today between the take home pay of bosses and their underlings is bigger than ever in our history.

We need to applaud Webb for saying it in prime time no matter what, if anything, comes from it.

There are lots of people out there who work hard at their jobs but have no or little health insurance coverage. (In total, 46 million Americans do not have health insurance today.)

With Democrats taking over Congress there’s been, as expected, lots of talk about patching up this nation’s ailing health care system. But what shape will the patches take?

President Bush in his radio address this past weekend talked about giving people tax breaks to help them buy coverage on their own. Tax breaks seem to be Bush’s answer to almost every economic problem but it’s unclear whether that will translate into more people being covered.

People who have their own businesses or work at jobs that offer little or no health coverage constantly complain to me about how expensive it is to buy insurance on the open market, if they can get it at all. One woman told me she and her husband tried to buy insurance after they decided to leave their corporate jobs and start a franchise business, and they were denied because at one point she was diagnosed with high blood pressure, and it also came up that her husband had smoked when he was younger. How did the insurer find out about these problems? Their doctor’s records. (That’s a whole other topic.)

The bottom line is they ended up getting coverage but it costs them nearly $400 a month for a bare bones plan. The couple is contemplating going back to the rat race and working for a major company again because they fear one catastrophic illness will end up putting them in the poor house.

Some Democrats see the answer in a socialized health care system. Hilary Clinton talked about that but was shot down big time during her husband’s tenure as president.

Now everyone realizes the health care problem in this country is nearing a breaking point and everyone’s scrambling to offer their plan. Tax breaks won’t do much to help people who can’t afford costly plans. And socialized medicine would be such a monumental change I can’t imagine how this country would be able to accept it…doctors, hospital administrators, drug company CEOs and health insurance big wigs are probably going to do what ever they can to keep the profit motive alive and well in the nation’s health care system.

So what’s the answer? Does anyone have a plan out there that will work?

I put out a call to all the female readers of my Your Career column to send in their most outrageous sexual harassment stories and how they dealt with the issue.

Well, I’ve gotten a lot of great stories, but I also got something quite unexpected…a bunch of irate emails from men out there who think I’m sexist for only asking women for their stories. They also think the whole issue of sexual harassment is made up and that many women use it as a way to destroy men.

I’m sure there are a lot of women out there who have filed bogus charges against men, or got overly upset when I guy asked them for a date. But alas the problem is real. I’m not saying I think women should go running to their human resource manager every time a guy winks at them, but there are some men who use inappropriate sexual advances/comments to derail the women in their midst. I’m just hoping women face these types of confrontations head on. Let them know you can’t be broken.

What’s your take? And do you all have some good stories to tell..men and women…

I’ve had quite a few bosses in my career. The majority I disliked (to use a nice word). The majority! Can you stand it? That means out of the maybe 20 to 25 bosses I’ve had I only liked about three. Now, I will be the first one to admit, I’m tough to get along with sometimes. I’m opinionated and extremely honest. I’ve found bad bosses hate that in their subordinates more than anything else. Sometimes I felt that being a woman didn’t help me with certain bosses, and in other situations it was the dreaded Peter Principle. That’s when people get to positions of power but are really inept.

Now, the bosses I loved, I really loved. In fact, I’m still in contact with the handful of bosses I respected, learned from, and had an overall incredible experience working for. My old editor from UPI is one of the smartest and savviest editors I ever worked for. And she was a tough cookie. If you screwed up there was no touchy feely, “please eve do better” bullshit. She’d tell me I screwed up and not to do it again. I liked her because she was upfront and honest. That goes a long way; especially coming from someone you think knows what they’re talking about.

So, this brings me to a survey I’m involved in as the Your Career columnist for MSNBC.com. MSNBC and Elle magazine have joined forced to do this survey on work and power, and the main thrust of it is bosses and our interactions and perceptions of these head honchos. If you get a moment please take the survey. I plan on writing a story based on the results and I’ll also include lots of the information in my blog so you can all see what life is like for us working stiffs when it comes to the boss-employee dynamic.

And please, please, share your bad boss stories here.

Here’s mine:

I was working for an editor who was extremely afraid of his boss, and his boss’ boss. That meant he never wanted to look bad no matter what. One time he blamed me for an error he made.

I had written that an auto plant was based in IRVING, Texas. At least that’s what I thought. But when my story came out in the paper the next day, it said IRVINE, Texas. The top editors at the paper were sticklers for accuracy and freaked out that the mistake was on the front page. My editor emailed me to write a long explanation for the error so he could share it with the higher ups, and he stressed how the mistake made me look bad to everyone concerned.

I was really bummed out, and perplexed how I could have made the mistake. I had never written anything about Irvine, and had written about this particular auto plant based in Irving many times before.

Since my editor was from California, where Irvine is, I started to suspect he might have put the error into my story.

I asked my editor if the error could have been made in the editing process and he insisted he had gone through all the electronic versions of the story and that it was my mistake. He was also pretty angry that I would question his assertion. The way our computer system worked, once I sent my story electronically to my editor I had no copy in the computer system.

Luckily I had saved a hard copy of the story to review and sure enough my version was correct.

I called my editor to inform him of this. He said, “I see”, and hung up.

He never mentioned it again. Needless to say, our relationship deteriorated from there.

We’ve all got our New Year’s resolutions, right? This morning I woke up with a renewed sense of purpose. I’ve got lots of projects on my plate, and I’ve already started developing new ones that I hope will propel me in my career.

The main thing is being positive and not letting your own negativity or failures derail you. All the stories the media does this week are about how everyone makes resolutions but few stick to them. NEGATIVE. Disregard all these stories.

A resolution is not about changing everything over night. It’s about baby steps.

Remember the movie with Bill Murray, “What About Bob”. There’s a whole scene where Richard Dreyfus, his shrink, tells him to take baby steps when it comes to overcoming his phobias. While Murray remains a nutcase, he does make some changes in his life (mainly torturing his shrink). Maybe people can’t see your progression, but it’s not about that. Who cares what other people see. What you see, feel, is all that matters.

Come on people — baby steps!!

Share your baby steps towards your New Year’s resolution here. Doesn’t have to be today. It could be a week, month from now.

Just resolve to resolve. (And rent :What About Bob” if you haven’t seen it. It’s so funny.)
(Check out my column today. It’s about changing careers.)