Command Control

FA people are not suggesting we have no control over our bodies or minds. Control is what it is not what its supposed to be. Having actual control means directing or being in sync with attaining your desired aim. Not just acting the part as if this will somehow conjure up what you want amidst the real anarchy you're generating.

Nor is being in control any guarantee of outcome.

The need for control is the core of us. To be without it or merely the threat of that can be distressing enough to prompt angst ridden, self comforting gestures of a performance control. If we can't have it or don't know what it is, we will impersonate it as a means of soothing our mounting stress.

Those with various eating disorders especially forms of anorexia, or people with OCD may feel what appears to be control over food or performance of other repetitive habits gives, gives enough of a feeling of control in the face of acute anxiety. They are both caused by and are the cause of pressure.

When the rest of us are or feel overwhelmed by things we too reach for what feels safe even if it is nothing close to a good thing. Often that need is the driver, the action just an outward manifestation of that need. 

Our minds refer almost fetishistically at times to things we associate with any performance of control. The military style rigidity of posture, tone or attitude, shows of force, talking loud, being harsh in speech and so on.

Controlling calories can be as much about anxiety displacement as anything. A sense of catharsis diverts us from the storms of response it triggers in our bodies. Those storms of response are marked as our inner fat self trying to retain control and we must repress it, rather than listen, respond or work with rather than against our bodies.

Calorie restriction is not in itself control, the chaos it causes is too overwhelming. It is more like an interruption and blocking of dynamic processes that are part of an innate and self regulating system-that is us. We don't direct the whole process from a notion in our conscious minds.

We get hungry when we lack energy.

Not responding to this only the surface appearance of control, the reality doesn't match up.

We have taken the point we are most conscious of-an  overspill of our current fixation on rational and logic as the highest of human thought. In this scenario, our minds become the ultimate director of our creation. Declaring it the creator of the overall dynamic of our mass and matter, rather than just a part of it.

What we've learned is the militaristic command and control model is not the only type of control. That it comes to mind most readily tells us about the societies we live in and the values they're based on. One that likes to deal with things in rigid and direct modes of punitive action. When that target is you it becomes civil war, victory and loss in the same site.

Weight should never require a militaristic narrative, as we know the body can regulate its energy, eating and weight very well. What is needed are ways to get it back on track if somethings derailing that. To find a way to link that with our conscious awareness-in a chain if necessary- to what we are not wholly in conscious  control the unseen metabolic pathways that operate on their own.

We cannot better them and the powerful defences that defeat our crude attempts at manipulation. A huge amount of wasted energy and will goes into trying to "stick" to weight loss diets, when we could invest that in areas less well defended. Working with the body not against it.

Like a rider on a horse or a surfer using the power of the sea to navigate balanced on a board.