Lipedema Awareness: Just Keep Talking

As Dorie the Fish would say “Just Keep Swimming”, in my case in order to spread awareness about Lipedema, I’ll “Just Keep Talking”, sharing my experiences and stories. Today yet another opportunity was presented to me, it was quite a whirlwind afternoon. At about 11:30 this morning I received an e-mail from James at the Obesity Action Coalition asking if I’d be interested in participating in a BBC show looking for people to share their story of living with obesity at 1:30 PM. I immediately replied, “Yes”…then I inquired about some details like “what’s the actual topic of the show?”, “who else was participating?”. Within minutes a staff member from BBC called me to give me more details, and to ask more information about me and my experiences with obesity. Oh and he asked if I had access to Skype, sure I do!

The show was BBC World Have Your Say and the segment was in regards to the story of Kevin Chenais, 22-year-old man from France who was stranded in Chicago because British Airways said that at 500lbs he was too fat to fly. Virgin Atlantic stepped up and flew Chenais to London, where he then encountered another travel issue. I was very familiar with the story, and relieved to hear he was finally getting help to get home.

There I sat in my bed, in my nightshirt, hair in ponytail, glasses on.

Skype means video, right? Ugh, I can’t talk about obesity from BED…what would people think? Probably nothing worse than they already think, but anyway I quickly got dressed, brushed my hair, and put some make-up on. Then another BBC staffer contacted me via Skype to test my connection and I found out it was going to be a radio show. Whew.

I was instructed that the host would start the conversation but that they wanted the participants to just keeping talking in reply to each other, no waiting on the host to call on me for my opinion just chime right in with my comments. “Is that something you’d be comfortable doing?” That’s something I do all the time!

So I had the pleasure of chatting with two new friends, Becky and Misty, both bloggers who, like me, embrace the word FAT.

Here is the link to our conversation on World Have Your Say: (our segment begins At 31:20)

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/…/whys/whys_20131120-1910a.mp3