I built my website to help me reach my audience — for speaking, coaching, and writing. I hope the site conveys that.

Here’s the thing: I’m not doing that any more.

I have surrendered wanting to be a professional speaker. Having valuable information to share is absolutely no assurance of success.

I am not pursuing coaching clients, and for today, would probably not take one on.

Check the date stamps on my blog, and you can see how much I’ve been writing.

So why does my website still say that stuff?

Up to now, it would be wrong to describe this as sparring, because you have to have a partner for that. In the recent past, I’ve been opining, and someone whom I’ll keep nameless has been vehemently dismissing my perspective. Not just disagreeing, but dissing, and responding to claims I don't make and beliefs I don't hold.

OK, sure, it’s just another moment in social media.

But his last couple of comments have been worming into my serenity, until I decided today to address them. But I’m not just talking to him.

I don't want to be blogging right now, but I realize that I need to update the previous post, about my being in relapse, 'cause for today anyway, I'm not anymore. I can't have such a dangerously misleading headline being what readers see first.

For 46 days, I've been abstaining from foods and food behaviors that are unhealthy for me. In early December, I went away to Acorn Food Dependency Recovery Services, a Florida-based group from which I've sought help for more than 20 years, and I've been better since.

I’m writing it anyway, but I fear that this post will be a blog cliche: Writer posts often for a while, even a long while, but then fades away. Then she/he writes again, saying “I’ve been gone, but XXX happened, and now I’m back.”

I frickin’ hate being a cliche, almost enough to not even write this. But, here I am, albeit without any promise that I’ll ever write after this. But like every writer ever, I have something I think I should contribute.

This is a reply to Dr. Jon Robison, with whom I occasionally spar gently on the LinkedIn platform. I began it as a comment on the platform, but it said I’d exceeded the allowable character count.

The conversation began over a post I shared about a sugary-soda tax being implemented in Catalonia, Spain. His most recent comment was …

I spent a while with Sean Anderson, the velvet-voiced proprietor of Transformation Planet, last week, and this is what resulted:

IMO, you should listen just to hear Sean speak. He's got pipes! (Yes, he also has substance, tact, and sensibility.) Good guy, good talk.

... and I just don't know why anyone would defend a person's right to be live obesely.

This *isn't* me saying that obese people are bad. This is me saying I was obese, and there was nothing good about it. N-o-t-h-i-n-g-!

Even a quarter century later, I'm glad I'm not obese, and I'm willing to work against a return to it. It is easily(!) worth doing, and pays rewards every single day. 

This may seem pretty random, but I point you toward this post for a couple of reasons. 

First, it is, to me, a superior example of explaining esoteric math in a fashion that nonscientists can understand. It is very hard — I never really know how incomplete my knowledge is until I have to explain it to readers making no claim on that knowledge. IMO, George Dallas shows how well he knows his subject.

Shawna Pelton is a metaphysical healer and transformational coach who came to her work, as many in the helping professions do, out of the crucible of hardship. She’s a widowed single mom, whose partner died from addiction. Her training is incredibly diverse, ranging from the Global College of Natural Medicine to the Divine Living Academy. I found her to be a lovely, ambitious person eager to help others.

Australian political leader Barnaby Joyce (above) came across my screen today, and I couldn’t let him go.

An institute study argues that a national anti-obesity effort should be funded by a tax on sugary beverages, and Joyce decried it as “another moralistic tax.” [Link includes video of interview.]

Joyce calls the idea “bonkers mad” because it would create “massive problems” for the sugar industry. He says the Australian Tax Office isn’t going to make people lose weight, going for a run and cutting portion sizes will. You may be saying, “Yeah, so what? This is how conservatives react to this proposed public-health response to an evident public-health problem.” I would respond that you’re correct.

The reason for writing is to poke at this idea of a “moralistic tax.” There’s nothing moral about it. The ubiquity of refined sugar, most notoriously in sugary beverages, threatens public health. Substantial societal costs result from this threat, and it is the job of government to meet public-health threats.

To say that we should leave public-health threats to personal responsibility — now that's “bonkers mad.”