Well, you have more guts than "SparkleKitty", who did block me. I, like you, never block anyone. If I disagree with them I either just ignore them and don't reply or say why I disagree. You're right, you can learn things even from people you disagree with.

I AM concerned with having a productive discussion. It's the people here who jumped up here and shouted me down when I tried to do that. I did NOT come here to **** people off -I can here to deliver helpful information. It was taken in an extremely negative and abusive way. It's not my approach that was the problem, it was the reaction here. It seems people have so much emotional baggage around WLS that they can't really talk rationally about it. I answered all questions clamly, even the abusive ones, and provided a lot of information.

I was hoping to reach people who had not already had the surgery, but there don't appear to be many here.

Sorry about your dad. I'm sure he was a great guy. But his aphorism was wrong, sorry. That doesn't mean he was a bad guy. My dad died about 3 years ago. It really sucks.

I had to lost at least 200lbs. So far I've lost about 40 in about 3.5 months. No surgery, no "diets", no killing myself on the treadmill, no cost, no hassle, no giving up the things I like to eat forever.

I think that until you can provide the research that IF is as effective as WLS LONG TERM, then nobody here is going to take you very seriously. I've lost weight with IF, Atkins, Low Fat, you name it. I've kept it off for greater than 6 months even, but never long term. You can call me weak minded, duped, whatever you want, but the fact is, that I chose WLS because of the research that showed long term results. It's not an easy or light decision to make, and many of us wait years to make the decision, so that we can try one last method to try to get the weight off and keep it off. In the meantime, we face people like you, who tell us all the reason we are wrong, duped, shills. Yeah, may I suggest a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People?

I'm probably the best "qualified", of the current members, to answer this. When Eric started the site, in 1998? 1999? WLS was not at all as "In vogue" as it is now. When I joined, in 2001, we had ONE forum, and a chat room. PERIOD. We were all in those 2 places--surgery or not.

I find that Paleo blogs have great WLS-friendly recipes.