How can you claim to be in favor of giving people all the facts when you seem to want to ignore some very critical ones? Clearly, you had great success with this last approach you used, but you can’t say what worked for you would be the best approach for my aging father, who has outrageously high blood pressure and high cholesterol and a history of heart attacks and a bad case of IBS. Or my pal from work who just had a massive coronary at the age of 37. When you talk about “just the facts,” Jimmy, those facts ought to include more than just a menu of different diet options. They ought to include some of the medical facts about how people with different health conditions might be affected by eating particular dietary regimens. Which means someone would have to make the facts available to my father that YOUR diet would be “dangerously unhealthy” for him. Wait, where have I heard that before… ? Oh yeah, from the DOCTOR, who could medically evaluate him and determine that all that meat-eating that was so successful for you would rip the hell out of his bowel and leave him bleeding to death out the heinie, if it didn’t give him a fabulous cardiac arrest first.

And what is THIS: “Arguing the simplistic copout answer that people need to just eat less calories than they burn…” WHERE did you see her make that argument? SHE is the one who says that’s a simplistic copout that is used to demoralize and blame overweight people whose conditions are far more complex than that! She was refuting that nasty trash talk while you were still a 400-pound TARGET of it. And she did it without calling people liars or hypocrites. She did it with patience and compassion, and NO HIGH HORSE. Ever. That’s not her style. She’s not an extremist of ANY kind. She just keeps consistently and gently saying over and over again that it’s not as simple as “eat less, exercise more” … and then she explains all the reasons why not. And you take that and TURN it on her? What is up with that?

You couldn’t hope to find a more compassionate, better-educated, harder-working bariatrician than Dr. C. She stays on top of all the research, shares the latest with her patients and program clients, and constantly works to get the general public more informed about the difficulty of losing weight, from both a socio-cultural perspective as well as a medical one.

Why are you looking for a villain, anyway? Do you feel like you don’t have enough credibility based on your own success?

Good on ya, Jimmy for becoming a missionary for better living, but you have NO right to go around taking potshots at compassionate and responsible professionals who have devoted their lives to improving the well-being of overweight people. Dr. Cederquist is an advocate for various approaches, dependent on the particular health and medical profile of the individual patient. She’s not anti- low-carb or anti-low-fat. She’s not anti-surgery, where appropriate or anti-medication, where appropriate. She’s not about DIETS, Jimmy, she’s just about treating INDIVIDUALS … PEOPLE with more body fat than they want or is good for them.

It is flabbergasting, simply stunning, that you would choose her, of ALL people, to beat up on. Amazing.

EXACTLY, BamaGal! That’s my sentiment about low-carb–give people all the options clearly stated and defined accurately and then step out of the way.