Fun With Richard Simmons!!

If you're over twenty and overweight, how can you not know Richard Simmons?

He is well known for interacting with people personally. As a matter of fact, Wikipedia has this in an article about him:

"Simmons is known for interacting at a personal level with the people using his products. This began when he started personally answering fan mail he received while a cast member of General Hospital. As a self-described devout Catholic, Simmons still personally answers emails and letters, and makes hundreds of phone calls each week to those who seek his help.He also talks to people on the air during his radio show, and holds weekly live chats in the "clubhouse" area of his website. His appearances also include a "meet and greet" time, so that people can speak to him one on one."

He always seems so friendly and inspiring that while I was still at home recovering from the operation I figured I'd go to his website and see if I could find contact information for him and send a message.

There was a webform for submitting an "email" to him. So I filled it in. I said that I had never heard his stance on weight loss surgery and was interested in knowing what he thought of it; I think I also plugged my blog somewhere in there too...okay, I really think I plugged the website. I figured it wouldn't hurt anything. Dude probably gets huge volumes of messages and mine was just one more bit of white noise in the background. That was weeks ago, I didn't think any more of it.

Today I opened my inbox and saw an email from "Richard Simmons."

The message said,
************
I am not a big fan of surgery as a weight-loss tool. However, I do make an exception when a person is so morbidly obese that their very lives are at risk. A lot of people who are not in that situation make the mistake of seeing surgery as a weight-loss tool believe it is going to be like some "magic bullet" and all of their weight-loss troubles will be over once they have the surgery. But the bottom line is that, even with the surgery, successful weight-loss is all about making important lifestyle changes for the rest of your life. You still have to do the work it takes to lose the weight and that's the bottom line. I do hope that you are still working hard reaching for your own goals and that you never give up on YOU!

Your Friend,
Richard
**************

I have mixed feelings about this. I think it may be him; he has a reputation for personally interacting with people struggling with weight issues. My wife immediately asked what I already suspected; what if this isn't really " The Richard Simmons"?

If I am to believe his public persona, his reputation, the long time that elapsed between sending the initial message and getting this one back as well as the vocabulary choice in the reply, I'm apt to believe it really was him. I hesitate because everything is spelled properly and sounds like proper grammar, which is normally a red flag that something is a boilerplate response; call it wishful thinking, but I would rather think he either has staff check for mistakes or he's just a smart guy.

So this time around I'm going to take a chance and believe this was him. It makes me happy to think so, makes me feel a little more inspired for the day! If it really was him, I think it speaks volumes about his character that he would take time out of his schedule to speak to some insignificant lonely voice on the Internet asking him an innocent question. Sometimes taking five minutes from your own schedule can make a big difference in someone else's day and make them feel as if maybe, just maybe, they're not as insignificant as they think themselves to be.

Thank you Richard.