Comments
Listed in chronological order. Newest comments at the end.

Or... How to Turn an Otherwise Pretty Girl into a Freaq

that's an extreme look. a little too much maybe.

wayne- might?

I'm with you, Zaphod.

very true freddie. they are all disturbing to look at. grotesque.

seeing someone work that hard to look so far outside the accepted norm is just odd. it is almost akin to being an anorexic. having a skewed body image of ones self causing one to go to extreme measures to adjust the image, and ending up at the far other end of the scale so to speak. they can do as they like i'm not judging, but i do not find it attractive either.

make yourself happy. congrats on all the hard work and if you are satisfied they ignore the rest of us. opinions are like assholes, everybody has one and everybody thinks everyone else's stinks.

...And there are very few occasions where it is appropriate to shove one in someone else's face.

Yeah, everyone was so much healthier before the advent of modern medicine!

Well, apart from the 1-in-4 children who died in their first year, the 1-in-8 mothers who died in childbirth and the 9-out-of-10 people who never made it to age 50. Which I suppose would include all those people who died from such dreaded illnesses as toothache, upset-stomachs (diarrhoea still kills 2 million people a year, but hey, at least a homoeopathic remedy can actually help here, if you drink enough to not dehydrate), cut fingers (blood poisoning, curse those evil big-pharma and their dirty antiseptics and antibiotics), measles (still one of the biggest killers in the 3rd world, perhaps they're not getting enough fresh air?), whooping cough (or not getting enough air, period), smallpox (remember that? me neither) and cancer (survival rates in the US are around 90%, in Algeria they're 40%).

People are entitled to their opinions, even if you or I don't agree with them. And some people in this big ol' world will not like how Hayley looks (and this would be true whatever she looked like), get over it.

Plenty of people don't like the way I look either, mostly women (think an older fatter Ricky Gervaise). And don't think that being this gross doesn't require considerable effort and dedication as well. I am sometimes up to 3 or 4 in the morning making sure I've packed enough alcohol, tobacco and calories into myself to maintain this appearance.

It's amazing to me how expressing an opinion publicly can lead to these kinds of diatribes. If Hayley was secure in herself and about her bodybuilding lifestyle, she would not have felt the need to come here and defend it. Obviously the opinions of people she's never met, who spend their time on a site dedicated to weirdness no less, mean something to her.

If you choose to make a spectacle of yourself, you should expect others to form an opinion about it and express that opinion freely. It would be no different than my watching a movie starring Tom Cruise and then telling people here that his performance really sucked. He's not going to show up here and explain that I don't understand his craft, or how much work he puts into each character and therefore have no right to judge. So Hayley, why did you?

Do what makes you happy, and don't give a damn about what anyone else thinks.

amen nethie. also, who knows if it was really hayley or just someone saying they are hayley.
carl, i agree with dumbfounded, site your sources. especially that little tidbit you threw in about most institutionalzed elderly dieing of med errors. i worked with the elderly for years and i still talk regularly to someone who does now. yes, there are med errors sometimes, but they are rarely deadly. most elderly in nursing homes die of age related health issues or whatever terminal illness that put them in the facility in the first place. you can call my experiences anecdotal if you wish, but 14 years in 2 different facilities is a pretty broad sample. especially concidering most of it was spent in a 242 bed nursing home. hygene has alot to do with better outcomes now, but there is enough poor handwashing to spread the occational nosocomial infection which is then handled quickly and efficiently with antibiotics. big pharma is greedy and would like us all on as many meds as they can make, that doesn't change the fact that those drugs do help people with a genuine health problem. you have to be a smart consumer in healthcare as in everything else.

Carl has twice put the very high infant mortality rates of the past down to poor hygiene. This simple does not stand up to scrutiny. Soap and water was not invented some time in the 1920s, yet the 1/4 mortality rates were in evidence even that late.

Sorry Carl, but doctors were washing their hands between births by the latter half of the 19th century if not earlier, and Dr. Charles Creighton's 1894 book A History of Epidemics in Britain discusses at length the impact of improving hygiene over the prior century had on the spread of diseases such as typhus and influenza (first identified and characterised in 1745). Good grief, Louis Pasteur, Joeseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis are all 19th century figures.

Certainly better sanitation and improved nutrition did their part, there's no denying that, but a much bigger impact on infant mortality through the last century came from the introduction of electrolytic/fluid therapies used to counter the infant acidosis syndrome and chronic dehydration, and from improved neotatal care - particularly for premature and underweight births. But by far the biggest boon, not just in infants but across the board, came from the introduction of antibiotics and vaccination.

BTW, Irwin Schatz's Lancet study was on men aged 71-93, see my previous comment on cholesterol as a CHD risk and age. And Dr. Debakey's 2000 study of patterns of atherosclerosis in the American Journal of Cardiology identified 5 risk factors; diabetes, maleness, hypertension, smoking and cholesterol. None of these factors was present in every case, but then no-one was claiming atherosclerosis has only one cause. Arguing cholesterol isn't a risk on such a basis is about as stupid as saying guns aren't dangerous because some people are stabbed.

Finally, I frequently change my perspective on things precisely because I do value being right, but I do so when confronted with real evidence, not on the basis of distortions, hearsay and opinion. I was for many years a scientist (and not, I would hasten to add, for a pharmaceutical company) and - to paraphrase a recent 'xkcd' comic - I didn't do science to prove I was right but to find out what was right.

I'm no fan of pharmaceutical companies. The marketing of Viagra as practically a recreational drug, and the broadening of depression criteria to help shift SSRIs are recent controversial examples that I personally think border on the reprehensible, but how does that invalidate the benefits of statins or anti-cancer drugs? Surely they stand or fall on their own merits?