#1-800-get-thin

[knissamerica-blog]

When a dolphin dies on the beach and there are no vultures there to pillage its innards and peck out its eyes, does its death have meaning? Natural selection is blameless, right?

It's all good when it happens in nature, but when it comes to humans we run into problems. When is it too soon for the vultures to start their work? Pecking the eyes out of the living seems to cross the line. But, what about whispering dangerous sweet-nothings in the ears of those susceptible to outside influences.

Were the vultures who ran the 1-800-GET-THIN-affiliated clinics too aggressive? Perhaps by promising pardons to plump--aka morbidly obese--people--from their lives of fatdom, isolation, saturating sadness that seeps like oil from their pores--the vultures crossed the line. 

Would Darwin see seekers of the Lap-Band-surgery as adapters, with an eye toward self-evolution?

Perhaps he would. Though I'm not sure the family's of the five patients who died after surgery at the bait-and-switch practices of 1-800-GET-THIN would agree.

[curvynerd]

If you've not been to Los Angeles, you might find it shocking: every where you turn, massive, flashy, IN YOUR FACE 1-800-Get-Thin advertisements. I walk by a giant billboard every time I return home with my groceries (which means tourists on Hollywood Blvd. see it every time they visit the Walk of Fame). There's a stretch of SoCal highway where every billboard, on both sides, for several miles is a 1-800-Get-Thin one.

A 55-year-old SoCal woman died after lapband surgery, reports the L.A. Times. She was a 1-800-Get-Thin referral. Bet she saw these billboards, and the TV ads and heard the radio spots, and thought there was something wrong with her she needed to "fix."

Not OK.