What I see all around me is that people tend to selectively look at studies that say the healthiest thing for them is to opt out of whatever kind of exercise they like least. (For the record, I train with weights, do Bikram Yoga, run distances, and do intervals. And I wouldn’t quit doing any of them.)

By the way, congratulations for your success!

Cool site, by the way. I have a lot of pictures of me going the other way.

It’s hard to see how it meets any of his criteria for deletion, and yet it was and me banned.

Here is one I left on his post about moderation:

Well, this doesn’t actually quite explain your deletion of my original post.

After you had called me a sheep and implied I was a rube in a number of contexts, I simply suggested you were reacting with unnecessary anger. It wasn’t until you deleted that post that I brought out the doctor business.

In any case, think about what you are saying: You get to be as gratuitously rude as you like to commenters, but they must be only respectful back to you — and that is when you allow their responses to stand at all. My first post met none of your criteria yet you deleted it anyway, presumably because you were irritated by my points.

It is absolutely your site. You absolutely get to run it any way you like. The manner in which you do so will however affect your larger online reputation, and your particular approach strikes me as likely to get you known as a thin-skinned, easily-threatened bully.

I will be curious to see if this gets posted. Either way, I know you have seen it, and that is something. Also: The post of mine you deleted here is alive and well on other sites, such is the nature of these internets.

He responded fairly tartly that I was a sheep, should work for the government, etc. It’s on his site, you can look at it if you like.

I then tried to clarify my position a bit but he deleted my response. Then he banned me from his site. And turned on comment moderation to prevent, presumably, such alternate views as mine from ever being expressed in his sandbox.

I am a bit flabbergasted by it all — shouldn’t the self-described iconoclastic and alternative be if anything unusually open to contrary viewpoints? It makes me wonder if such brittleness extends to his interpretations of data, with any that does not bolster his pet theories deleted and then banned from his mind.

Anyway, my response was (with apologies for absent context:)

Good lord, surely Mr. Gautama also has something reproachful to say about such angry outbursts. In any case my message was less to you than to those who had just read your post.
Put too simply: In matters where we know little, fear of “being a sheep” can put one in greater danger than submitting to the consensus of experts. I did not mean to place the study you brought to our attention in such low company as known crazies like vaccine alarmists — they simply do an excellent job of illustrating my point.

This is good data. Perhaps more will come to bolster it. Just as likely the opposite will happen, or these results will be attributed to a cause that will surprise us all and vindicate aerobic exercise in the process. So, given a choice between trusting my life to a single study from one set of doctors or the combined wisdom of the entire medical field, for me it’s not even close. By all means hurl more invective at me as a result.

The above is a reconstruction from memory of the post you mysteriously deleted. Is no debate allowed here? Are all meant to kneel before you and lap up your wisdom uncritically? How very like a traditional doctor you turn out to be after all.