Diet

Diet = what you eat.

A weight loss diet is an attempt to eat according to the desire to lose weight. The prevalence of this desire lead to 'weight loss diet' being shortened to 'diet'.

I'm saying that, because some insist that this issue is complex is some way, it isn't.

To diet really, is to reduce calories, that is all it really means.

Whatever the outward appearance of calorie reduction schemes, they are all the same in essence.

This includes exercising to lose weight, the purpose is to reduce calories by spending or purging them.

Dieting is like going cutting down your hours at work and exercising is spending money freely to achieve the same end, to dig into your savings to relieve yourself of the burden of having reserves of cash. Mo' money mo' problems indeed.

Some will tell you that exercising is nothing like weight loss dieting; it is, or that it is healthier or has magical powers to slim you. It isn't and it doesn't.

This underlying model of calorie restriction extends to anorexia and/ or bulimia.
The first is starvation, famine, the latter is the same through purging.

Like dieting then like exercising to lose weight.

This is the model of weight loss that we are being asked to surrender to. All sorts of schemes have been thought up merely to facilitate the possibility of making this 'logic' check out. For instance, shutting the mouth- jaw wiring, throwing obstacles in the way of the life sustaining urge to eat.

Note this acknowledges we cannot stop it, so we must try to tire it out to enable our efforts to succeed. It's a bit pathetic really.

Jaw wiring is out anyway, now it's gastric banding/bypass. Restricting or cutting the stomach to the size of a child's, if that.

With GBS, there is an added element of bulimia through malabsorption, in addition to the threat of it through forgetting not to respond to your hunger normally.

After these operations, there are special diets, calorie reduction to add to calorie reduction, then there's advice to get active, more calorie expenditure voiding; repeat ad infinitum. The mystery is how people manage to retain any weight at all.

Pills have been created along this model, speeding up metabolism to nerve jangling proportions. This theoretically shouldn't happen, if fatness is caused by sluggish metabolism speeding it up should normalize it, but it appears to actually strain the nervous system, rather than correct a malfunction. It corrects theory and not the actual body.

This strain predictably causes a lot of the problems that being fat is supposed to, I'm sure there's something in that for curious scientists.

Lately, they've become less ambitious, resorting to tabs that can lead to anal bulimia, purging of calories by reducing the body's ability to absorb, usually, fat. Whether they are better than the laxatives sometimes abused by those with eating disorders is anybody's guess.

This is also part of the inspiration of advice to eat fibre, as the body cannot digest it, it has to void it, the principle is that it absorbs water on the way and between the two, speeds up voiding.

Respect for the body and human dignity has to be put aside when for when it comes to the goal of weight loss, the ends justify the means.

Whether we are trying to reduce calorie intake or watching those attempts founder on the equal and countervailing force- rebound, we are all just going back and forth, forth and back, it's hard to see where is the end and where the beginning.

The next thing to suggest that tweaking will fix this, is to form our lives around this dysfunction, or lifestyle change as it's called.

Don't hold your breath for a new age of elegance.