Monday, December 7, 2009

Video Rant

So Angie likes to get me fired up, and she linked me to this article. Basically, from what Angie tells me, the author is a bigger girl herself. And really, my problem with the article is that she is against weight loss surgery for others. BUT THEN, it gets really good when people who do not struggle with weight offer their two cents. Not, granted...some of them are just idiots. And the author has a right to her opinion. But who don't understand the band misrepresent it on such a big level...well...someone has to say something. So I did. Right here in this little blog. Make sure you read the article to understand what I am talking about! Wooo, sometimes it feels good to vent.



AND...AND...Angie is right! Why such sad moppy people for the commerical. It's not a depression medication commercial! We need to start a movement.

31 comments:

  1. LOVE your eloquence! Thanks for all of us, now where can I send this?? Happy Tuesday Ames.

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  2. You rock! Awesome girlfriend...truly awesome!

    Just remember, L. Ron Hubbard told a lot of people that they were decendents from aliens. Just because someone says it, doesn't make it so. People should refrain from practising medicine without a license. It's illegal. One may be entitled to their opinion but an opinion should be evidense based and well supported by peer reviewed research. Otherwise it falls in the same category with side show Bob's snake oil that cures cancer. Enough said...

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  3. Love this! And, it got me all fired up too! Perfect way to end the work day :) The thing that gets me the most are those people who have never ONCE struggled with their weight and just LOVE to give their opinion on weight loss shit! Do not even try to give advice or have an opinion on which you know nothing about!

    I love how rallied up you got! Pure awesomeness!

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  4. I so love you, if for no other reason than you can read my mind. I am with you on this sister...preach on!!!

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  5. You what is extra funny - that blog that it was posted on, Jezebel - I wonder how many times they make fun of fat women or feature fat fashion...just curious...I stopped reading it along with a lot of women's magazines because I realized they weren't written for this woman!

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  6. oh that got me FIRED up!!! Were you able to send your VLOG to the author??



    http://betterbanded.blogspot.com/

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  7. Over here in Australia - well the West side anyway, not sure about East, we don't have these lap-band ads.. the most we have is some advertising (usually a smallish strip down the bottom of the page of the West Australian - our newspaper...) and perhaps you might see a poster in the doctor's office. I sat and read this article you had the link to - twice.. then watched the advertisement that you loaded - twice - and OMG what an eye opener.

    I loved that you got fired up about this... I truly do. Everything you said was true and doubly nicely said! It only takes one or two people to read the kind of misguided drivel this woman put out to put them off what might be a potentially life saving operation and jeez it gives me the shits!!! (and I cracked up when you said shits.. aren't we such the ladies!)...
    Great post and you keep advocating what you know is good and true.. I will keep it up at this end of the world - because girl, no doubt about it.. we love our lap-bands and no one can tell us differently.

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  8. WOOO! So glad I sent you this and got you all angry-like! I am going to email this post to Kate Harding, who wrote the blog article.

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  9. You go girl!! Who is this Kate Harding chic - can we start a smear campaign??
    I loved the comments people left on her article - seriously. Is the world full of such dumb-asses?

    Thanks for defending all of us who took the easy way out.....

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  10. Amen Sista!!! It is always easier to judge and to those who say the band is the easy way out they do not even begin to understand what band life is.

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  11. HELLZZZZ YA!...that was awesome!
    You said everything I wanted to say after reading all the comments..
    but could never.... Im a blogger not a fighter!.. lol.. I can never say what I feel...
    and your right...some people really do need to keep their comments to themselves!

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  12. OMG! I love it! I am glad that there is someone out there who has NO issue saying what they really feel! I always love listening to/reading your posts...you are ALWAYS so passionate about the things you write.

    You rock!

    We ALL rock! Those who have already 'taken the easy way out' and those (like me) who are working toward 'the easy way out'.

    Keep sayin what you feel!! I'll be there one day, right with ya! :)

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  13. HELLOOOOO Loved this! Even the husband listened and laughed with me.. cheering you on! :) YEAH YEAH YEAH!

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  14. YAY Ames! You go girl. Tell that bitch how it is in the real world. HUGS!

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  15. Wow! Great response.........I for one will never mess with you!

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  16. You rock, Amy!! What is it to anyone else whether we have a lap band?! Love your blog!

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  17. Awesome Amy... and THANKS! Mentioned in the last two posts... wow... I feel so special!!! :-) And I agree one hundred thousand percent. If you find the way for us to all share our thoughts with this author, who interestingly didn't provide her contact info, I'd love to have it...

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  18. BRAVO BRAVO...Standing ovation Amy *clapping hands*...well said... I agree with everything you said...and most people's comments or negativity towards the band comes down to ignorance and lack of knowledge....I myself once thought, "there is no way I was going to do surgery...it was the easy way out I need to harden up and do it the hard slog way (AKA traditional way)"(which of course never worked) this was more my own thoughts on me having the band not on others having the band...but that was until I did some research and learnt what it was all about, then I made an informed decision!

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  19. And another thing...

    I usually love Kate Harding, the author or this article. I have read her website, shapely prose, for a long time. I usually find her to be articulate and interesting. I tried to be a part of the fat acceptance movement. And it worked to some extent. I tried to dress fashionably and sexy, despite not fitting into society's perception of what a fashionable and sexy woman looks like. I tried to love myself the way I am. But I didn't feel good. Part of it is Healthy at Any Size. I feel unhealthy at my size. I don't think I need to wait until I need my mom to wash my butt I after I go to the bathroom (what happened to the poor woman in the story linked to in the blog post - hope that wasn't too confusing!)

    I think what the author either doesn't understand or doesn't enunciate in her piece is that most of us are not looking to be a size 2 - a size 12 will be fine, thank you!

    Also, I think one of the things she doesn't like is the advertising around lapband. I myself haven't seen any of the lapband ads, but see ads for medicine all the time, and I usually think they are inappropriate and make patients charge into dr's offices to demand expensive drugs they might not need. Just being honest here.

    Just my 2.5 cents!

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  20. that . was . BEAUTIFUL!!!! the article was a pisser, but what upset me even more were the comments on the article. i hate people who judge. mind your own business and let me do what i want!

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  21. Thanks for all your comments guys. From what Yana said and what Angie said, I have heard that the site is about fat acceptance and that Kate Harding is bigger herself and promotes loving yourself at any size...

    It was all just very interesting and I hope that people who are trying to decide if they need the lapband or not don't decide NOT just bc of the people that don't know what they are talking about.

    Thanks for your support ladies!

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  22. That was a great vlog! I'm late on the comments, but I love what you have to say and feel the same, in the south we have a sayin about everything, and one about opions that I particullary like is..." Opninons are like assholes, everyone has one, but I don't wanna see or hear yours!" You're great and I have found a home with all of these blogs!
    Tessie

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  23. Give it to her Amy! Give it to her! Your anger is justified and right. Love it!

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  24. I totally agree with you Amy! I was sooo pissed when I read that piece & especially after reading the comments to it, that I was looking for her contact information so that I could contact her personally & blast her too!!!! You go girl!

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  25. You Rock :)
    I believe that most of us chose to get banded to become healthier. I was 29 and morbidly obese - that scared the shit out of me. Yeah, I was uncomfortable in my clothes and afraid every time I had to fly that I wouldn't fit in the seat or that the belt wouldn't fit. But for the most post - I "Chose Life". My mother is extremely overweight and has struggled with her weight as long as I can remember and still is. I didn't want to do that anymore. And as for spending the money to have the procedure, well I was "lucky". My insurance company covered it - they would not have covered it if I didn't meet certain life threatening criteria. I am thankful that there was something out there to help me...

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  26. Love your response!!!! Oprah is seriously the best example of why diets don't work for most of us. Still fat after all these years of "Aha" moments!

    I have had a fleeting thought, in the past, that WLS is maybe not the most feminist thing to do - physically altering your body and all -- but is there any question that virtually ALL of us who get it had major health problems? Mine - hypertension, depression, high blood sugar, etc.

    And...I get the FA movement for people who are on the lower end of fat (not sure what that would be, exactly), but promoting FA to people who are 500 pounds is just ridiculous and dangerous. How many 500 lb people can actually be healthy? Zero is my guess.

    My Dr. actually used an even worse statistic when describing the success of traditional weight loss methods for the MO - he said 98% will fail on their own. That means only 2% succeed! So the real tragedy is that the diet industry continues to exist and be pushed on women when WLS is a known, successful method for losing and keeping weight off for the MO.

    Too bad, I normally like Jezebel.

    Thanks for your awesome rant!

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  27. You are my hero!! Thank you for doing this!

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  28. YOU GO GIRRRRRL!!!! I absolutely ABSOLUTELY love Love LOVE your blog!!! And THIS is the cherry on top. I will be saying the same exact thing to all of those idiots that tell me I'm crazy for choosing to have WLS. Much Love girl! Rock ON!!!!

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  29. The video is great, as everyone has already said.

    The only thing that I would liken this to is the fact that elective C-sections have dramatically increased in the United States in the last 10 years.

    Both my daughter and I would have died during child birth (as she got stuck in my birth canal and her heart rate accelerated and she would have died from lack of oxygen to the blood and I would have died because she was stuck in me or from the after effects of getting the corpse out - that sounds extreme, but think about even 100 years ago, how child birth was handled, rarely in a hospital as well) as well as my mother who needed C-sections for all three of her pregnancies and my grandmother is lucky she didn't die during the 4 pregnancies that she had where every single one of her babies got stuck and she had to be knocked out and the babies pulled out with forceps. We're lucky that only one of her kids had disabilities from the procedure of yanking him out.

    So, for those people who claim that "elective" weight loss surgery is so effing awful and that they're OK with it ONLY if the person has tried every single alternative and nearly killed themselves in the process (remember how many of us have done far more dangerous things like taking the diet pills, having eating disorders, starved ourselves, taken laxatives, etc) - how do they feel about Britney Spears electing to have C-sections because she didn't want to deal with labor or vaginal delivery? (This also includes her teen mother sister Jamie Lynn, whose doctors allowed her to have a C-section as a teen even though there were NO dangerous health factors to her giving birth vaginally.) What about the actresses who are 35 years old and rather than wait until they get knocked up (which might take a year or so and they just want to make sure that they fit their pregnancies into their work schedules - boo hoo!) are having IVF and now fraternal twins are becoming surgically commonplace?

    Are these people immune from judgment because they're famous? I find that amusing since we judge them on everything else and yet we're so happy to see them on the covers of magazines with their medically engineered children.

    Hate Angelina's Golden Globes dress? Don't fret! You can coo over Knox and Vivienne!

    It's so amusing what people decide is going to get their panties in a wad while everything else slips by without nary a peep of complaint. It's far worse to engineer human life or to decide that you want to preserve the elasticity of your va-jay-jay (even though there is little evidence that extreme damage is done during birth - and if you're sooooo concerned about that, DON'T GET PREGNANT!

    Oh, wait... if I tell them what to do, they'll get all butt-hurt. Meanwhile, they can keep telling me about how all I need to do is eat less and exercise more - all from behind their computer screens while they sit on their own asses and cruise over the internet.

    Amusing.

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