Attitude Tuneup Performed By Grandy

One of the blogs I follow is Grandy's Functional Shmunctional. The name caught my attention a year or so ago. I like blogs with weird names ever so much better than your ordinary Plain Jane-type. Susie Blathers On About Weirdness is more interesting than Sue's Blog. Call me crazy and dip me in garlic butter, but I'm just weird like that, I guess.

Anyway, a few weeks back Grandy started a weekly post called Sunday Stalker Spotlight wherein she interviews her followers and gives them a chance to talk about themselves. Ha! If there's one thing I'm good at, it's talking, so I rather enjoyed answering her questions. She was quite kind with the editing buttons and she let me ramble for a bit.

Grandy has a touch of the odd sense of humor that I find amusing, and while she's more succinct in her delivery than I probably will ever manage, she still keeps her topics varied. One of her recent posts was about having gastric bypass surgery. It made me stop and think about my attitude toward people and their health care choices.

I know several people who have had gastric bypass surgery, and before I read Grandy's story I would have been happy to tell you just what I thought of those people. Because my judgmental attitude can pop out at the most inopportune times, (with said attitude usually being accompanied by my unlocked and loaded mouth,) I could have railed for several minutes about how people should just go on diets and lose the fat. Then Grandy comes along, and tells us the multiple reasons she chose to have this type of surgery. She wasn't attempting to resemble Barbie - she just wanted to live!

So now how many of these people that I know have done the same thing? Sure, I'm betting that some of them might have had "lose 6 dress sizes" near the top of their list of "pros". I know that at least one of them wasn't enough overweight to warrant the surgery based solely on pounds, so her doctor told her to gain weight. I thought that was unethical, but now since learning more about the medical reasons why people might have the surgery, maybe gaining the extra 20 pounds makes sense.

Bottom line is - I'm not in these people's shoes. I don't follow them around all day to see if they're eating 100% healthy food. I don't know their family medical history, their stressors, their prognosis, or anything else about them. I can sit and watch the 450 pound man, carrying an oxygen tank, wheeze and puff up the 2 steps it takes to get to his table at Olive Garden. I can shake my head and think "Harumph! How many carbs is he going to eat today? No wonder he's so big!" - But my attitude stinks and it doesn't make me feel good inside.

So Grandy, thanks for inviting me over to your place. And better yet, thanks for encouraging me to reconsider how I view other people and remember that I just might not be seeing the whole picture. I'm going to work on living this lesson past today, and transferring it into other situations. I'm glad you're feeling better. And you just plain look good.