If you want to read this article as it was originally intended, go ahead and click the link above. I just included what I found to be the most interesting points. I’m sure I’ll be called unsympathetic, and the emphasis below is obviously mine, but this is how I read this article:

WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH.

WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH.

“I’m a junk-food person and because I’m a couch potato I don’t like to get off the couch,” she said. “It’s also kind of just like my genes: Both my parents are heavy and that’s just the environment I was raised in.”

Now, she said, she is well on her way to becoming a healthy teen and adult. She works out playing the Wii video game and walks every day with her brother after school. She is eating a high-protein diet.

“This surgery is a tool in your tool box to becoming healthy,” she said. “It is not the quick fix. You need a lot more. You need to exercise you need to make the right food choices.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it does seem to me that surgery was a quick fix in her case. She went so far as to admit she didn’t like getting off the couch.

I just get so sick of reading these stories with the tone that we are supposed to feel sorry for the morbidly obese. Especially when they ADMIT that they are lazy and that, you know, losing weight is hard work. At some point you just have to decide what’s most important in your life: the comfort of junk food, or your health.

On a somewhat related note because it has to do with being active, do you want to know what the greatest thing I heard today was?

As I pulled into my driveway after a 16-mile bike ride, one of my neighbors was walking by and said “Hey Jeff, you just inspired me to get out on my bike.”

That makes me feel better than any compliment I could have received.