Is your fat holding you back? Mine is

One of the most insidious side-effects of joblessness is Noxious Doubt. After more than two years of underemployment, I've gone beyond the self-defeating exercise of blaming Fate and the Recession to simply blaming myself. Every day, words like "failure" and "loser" circle my head like flies, or perhaps vultures.

Even though both the unemployment and underemployment rates dropped slightly this month, they are offset by the fact that job creation is slowing, and that I need to take good hard look at what I've been doing wrong.