Since 2007, we’ve put our hearts and souls into finding men and women who have an inspirational story to tell and then we tell it. We do this because most of the mainstream media is not interested is smashing the ageist and debilitating stereotypes that pervade our culture.

And we don’t just regurgitate what we read elsewhere. We produce original television shows and radio shows, films and magazines. It’s an expensive and difficult labor of love. We’ve produced over 2,500 video stories, 1,000 hours of original television and 3,000 radio interviews. We’ve published magazines, written books and shot documentaries.

We have never once in the thousands of stories we’ve produced  given a hoot what someone looks like. We don’t believe in judging others because we’re all just trying to find our way forward. When it comes to aging, we all fight it, embrace it, celebrate it, disguise it, flaunt it or forget it in our own way.

We recently worked very hard to book an interview with Marlo Thomas to talk about her new book that profiles women who are reinventing themselves in middle age. Ordinary women that are trying to live extraordinary lives. Lives of purpose and passion. Lives dedicated to knowing themselves while helping others. Of course, we also talked about her tireless advocacy for children’s cancer and her amazing work with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Marlo is a positive spirit with a deep sense of social responsibility and has something important to say. To link to our interview with Marlo, we used a publicity photo that was provided to us and, amazingly, that sparked an intense debate on her looks and some anger towards us for focusing on somehow focusing on “ looks and operations.”

While we appreciate and encourage courteous and respectful discussion of any and all issues, it’s sad that there are those who without even listening to the interview, without even trying to grasp the obvious point, want to manufacture negativity and distract from a very positive and life-affirming message.

To suggest that our use of that photo implies that we’re somehow focused on beauty is laughable. There was never a single mention of beauty or looks in post or the interview.

We have spent years encouraging men and women to love themselves, to improve their health and to achieve their dreams. We have never focused in any way on cosmetic surgery or encouraged anything other than self-acceptance. We have, in fact, created over 50 graphics encouraging people to love the lines in their face and to celebrate and not hide their age. We’ve put together just a few of them in this montage to illustrate the point.

While we promote self-love and natural beauty we don’t, unlike so many on Facebook, judge others by his or her looks, whatever they may be. To those of you who would like us to not interview Marlo Thomas and not highlight her many selfless humanitarian efforts on behalf of others because she has had work done on her face, we’re sorry. That’s sad and silly. Please do, unfollow us. As the old saying goes when you let go of negative people, positive ones appear.

Here’s the interview with Marlo: