Saturday 30 May 2009

Real 'obesity'?

A while back Sandy used a phrase that struck me, the "real obesity". This so goes against the image her detractors have of her, but it raises a point, what could "real obesity" be? I don't know what her answer would be, but I wonder if she was alluding to when the when the body's ability to regulate and maintain its weight seems to have substantially broken down.

As in the case of those at the highest weights.

That can include eating large amounts or virtual starvation, it can be at the very fat end yet also not so much. I've known of some slim people who seem to have it. They have minimal intake and/or don't even eat everyday. For instance, the type who describe themselves as 'forgetting to eat' until they start blacking out from lack of fuel. I remember one saying that she'd keep feeling faint and wondering why and have to think until she remembered oh, I haven't eaten since the day before yesterday.

I remember an Oprah show where there were a group of these people, though I think they made efforts not to eat. What was surprising about them at the time, was they weren't noticeably thinner than those who are also slim and eat normally.  Assuming it is normal to eat everyday, shocking though that may seem, who knows?

I think it may be about the mechanics of how the body regulates being put so off track, either physically (in terms of intake or both) that the person's body doesn't match their intake, their intake and/or weight are of epic proportions, or what they eat is so mind bendingly small that it is painful to contemplate.

What I find amazing is how little some can manage without their system going ape on them. It's when their ability to eat nothing matches their body's acceptance of this. It makes me think again, that those on either end of the weight and/or eating spectrum have more in common than they do with their specific weight groups.

I see metabolism as referring to and including the whole of eating and weight regulation together. Separating eating from physiological function is an affectation of those who insist weight can be (re-)regulated consciously through calorie regulation.

Every way eating weight and metabolism are described favours that model, shoring it up against reality which has not been kind to it. Eating both serves and reflects all our physical needs, including balance of nutrients and yes emotions, do they not happen in our bodies?

Singling out energy intake or output as if it was controlled separately as a  conscious fancy, like choosing what colour you want to paint your house is implausible, how would you consciously know exactly what amount of energy/balance of nutrients any part or organ of your body needs at any one time? Plus incorporating your energy expenditure into that equation? It's just not an efficient place to generate the urge to eat-the conscious mind, breathing wouldn't be either.

All your major organs have their own nerves which are connected to and are part of your overall nervous system in which the brain is the highest seat, why would information not be gathered and sent to it from all corners? Why would those nerves not register what is happening in the parts they are intimately connected to, but your mind further away would somehow know better?

That would be bad design indeed.

The control we have over our eating is mainly centred on how we decipher and carry out our impulses using the information we know about food and eating. We are responding to not initiating with the conscious parts of our minds as we've been taught to  assume.

Unlike commercialized sex, people don't sit watching people eating to get them in the mood, even though sex isn't a wholly conscious minded activity either. There's clearly much more room for interaction between our conscious thinking and the genesis of sexual impulse, than there is with eating, probably because, sacrilegious though it may be, we don't actually need to have sex to remain alive.z

There is a job to be done here and the 'obesity' field is not doing much thus far, more than go round and round its preconceived and failed convictions.

To work out what happens when this kind of breakdown occurs, at either end. repair and reversal should be available. This should be efficient and intelligent without any hint of moralizing but with the desire to relieve any discomfort and/or suffering, to exercise human intelligence for the benefit of humankind. It is an intellectual quest as this is about how human beings actually function.

As metabolic types i.e. fast/slow burners, muscly/fatty /large boned types etc., are distributed across the weight arc, separating them into categories would seem too obscure, there is much overlap of features between groups.

It also makes it harder to see what is normal and therefore what is pathological especially when it comes to fatness which has been labelled as intrinsically so.

What I suspect is that there are plenty of fat people who eat normally and are fluently active and people in other categories who fit the profile of 'obese' far more snugly than they ever could, apart from weight.

All this needs to be fully mapped out so that any genuine rather than assumed differences can be seen and similarities too can be acknowledged and crossed off as not the decisive factors in the creation of weight. 'Obesity' as a science cannot do this as this would require integration and constant comparison. Weight as a whole rather than in parts which may not describe function closely enough.

The 'obesity' conceit might have been worth supporting if it had taken the route of a proper science and had been scrupulously objective. If that was so, one of the things it would never have involved itself in would have been stigma or hate campaigns which would be direct and invasive intervention disrupting the integrity of its potential findings, how much would they be measuring the product of the campaigning and how much the actual human condition?

Indulgence in and lack of protest about this suggests a lack of serious intent with regard to proper scholarship. Only the dubious are happy to study the product of their own manipulations. In fact, I'd say that is a defining feature of quack science.

That and self perpetuation.

Thursday 28 May 2009

Poor old MeMe

Yet again an organ of the liberal intelligentsia plumbs the depths stepping into the intellectual vacuum that is the obesity crisis; in this case with one Meme Roth.

I had no intention of involving myself in the fracas she has caused with the latest in a long line of increasingly deranged comments. She herself said that the most popular reading of her is "silly c**t". When two words sum up someone so succinctly, saying anything further seems unnecessary.

However, her latest witterings require attention as they seem to have led to a spilt in reaction on the 'sphere.


The divide seems to be rage v. pity.

I'd have to go more with the latter.

I've no problem with letting off steam, but I'm starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable, with the personalisation of attacks on her. It needs to be remembered that her 'insanity', is the insanity of obesity crisis.

I have to bear in mind what our detractors often fail to, who is pulling the strings here? Not MeMe that's for sure.

All this shows is the intrinsic manipulativeness of the crisis, and those who've set it loose upon us. It is a mindwarp for all of us, it's shown us all up, MeMe's just another in a long line.

Whether it's the illusion of false superiority , or the good/ bad fattie conceit , those who insist that fat people are robbing them, through selfishness . It's lure is hard to resist.

Every one of us seems to fall for it's rancid charms in one way or another, it manipulates us all and presses our buttons, ruthlessly exposing our desires, our fears and resentments, for the benefit of those who are creating and facilitating it. The article doesn't give me the impression that it condemns MeMe. The writer says:

One thing to know about MeMe Roth is that she's not wrong.

How could she possibly be? That would make the crisis itself wrong and the writer knows it.

Given the offensiveness of what she said, she's given a very easy ride. The most pressure she comes under is for what she eats, the same scrutiny used to undermine the rest of us is used to undermine her as if it tells us more about the content of her character than what she has actually said.

One thing the writer has achieved is for the first time to make me see MeMe as someone who's being taken advantage of the same as we are, just in a different way. That's key to it's success.

As bad as what she said is, and the absurd ways she's acted up in the past, when I examine some of the things I've believed or done in order to force my body to succumb to thinness. I can't in all honesty say they were any saner or rational.

This is someone who has come to link sickness and mortality with eating and food, that's what we are encouraged to do, ask anyone with an eating disorder. It echo's the views of a lot of people from families where there is debility and sickness. It's something that's not often considered, what effect does this have on those who are observing the situation, how to they rationalise it?

I'm aware that there maybe an element of ableism there, but above all there is fear and the fact that people are channelling this into their reaction to the crisis, suggests there is a need to be addressed here.

Personalising the insanity of the obesity crisis in MeMe, is similar to personalising obesity propaganda in each and every one of us. MeMe's 'derangement' is the derangement of the crisis. It's not called that for nothing, it's a crisis of rationality if nothing else.

*Edited for clarity, only

Wednesday 27 May 2009

Sonia Sotomayor

Congratulations to Sonia Sotomayor she has been nominated for appointment to the US supreme court, which I've just found out again that it is the highest in the land (well, if you don't use it you lose it). I had to comment on what is for me a first, what appeared from a certain angle to be fat people disassociating themselves from diabetes, type 1 that is.

Ha! That's a turn up, its only ever been the other way around thus far. Predictably during the hoo-ha about her nomination, her plumpness was noted, although some dispute around the 'sphere, it's likely she scrapes the criterion for 'obese' or thereabouts. As it was also known that she has diabetes, it was assumed by many that she must have, you know, type 2.  The bad dirty type.

But no, she has type 1, you know, the blameless innocent associated with slim people type. As this was clarified was provided, the spectacle of fat people making it plain, type 1, type 1  occurred!

I'm sorry but that really makes me laugh.

The two both types I and 2 used to be seen as two conditions that had some kind of underlying connection, two routes to the same/ similar problem. Not so much now since one has become a "hot potato".

I do not relish hearing from the Type 1 crowd, ever. I used to be deeply sympathetic to their plight, it is a horrible sometimes seemingly pernicious. I can see where their fury comes from, but alas some of them have put a bit of a hole in that bucket through exposure to their really ugly jumping on the stigma bandwagon re type 2.
 
This is stupid because it is not helping them. Instead of shaming haters with what they feel is their ante up "Get the right kind chump" and in the ensuing silence "And I'm not impressed with your fat hating either which is costing us". That could have raised the profile of the condition and its demands off the back of the crisis, why not? Some good should come out of it.

Instead, they've chosen to try and join in whilst separating themselves, something which doesn't even sound workable. And indeed, it has been somewhat of a futile effort.

Cutting off their nose to spite their face, sorry to say.

Anyway, I wish SS continued good health and success in her new position, she sounds like an admirable and well balanced person with real grace.

Tuesday 26 May 2009

Fat and intelligence

Some studies are said to state a negative correlation between intelligence and fatness. Ignoring the hunters belief in their own impeccable objectivity, I still have to wonder about this. Whilst I don't believe for one minute that fat people are less intelligent than slim people (they wish). I do think the stress of the way fatness is treated can place undue pressure on your capacity to make good on the intelligence you do have.

There is also a possible metabolic aspect concerning the functioning of  the delivery of energy to the brain.

This is can be brought on by dieting, which cuts down the amount of ready energy available to your body as a whole. Though the brain is favoured to some extent, it can still pose a threat shown by feeling lightheaded and faint.
 
In the aftermath, it may not fully recover from that husbanding of energy. It makes me wonder of its implicated in certain mental crises such as depression and even psychosis, especially together with other sources of stress.

Up to 20% of your overall energy is used solely to fuel your brain and if fatness in part reflects changes in the body's ability to convert food into energy efficiently, the brain could be affected. I think it varies hugely, it may be filtered through genes, through your learning style and emotional history.

A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA indicates that two thirds of the brain's energy budget is used to help neurons or nerve cells "fire'' or send signals. The remaining third, however, is used for what study co-author Wei Chen, a radiologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, refers to as "housekeeping," or cell-health maintenance.

Electrical activity is the brain working, so this split is fascinating. I'd have thought that would be involved in every action it carries out including that of maintenance.

The position of being an 'obese' is itself an intellectual assault. Being one puts you in the position of someone with low intelligence or inexperience. You are expected to be told what you are.  Both acting out the part and the way others respond and talk to you. Ignoring what you say to the extent that it feels as if you haven't said it. Can become incredibly under stimulating.

The way people speak to elderly folk in a patronizing tone as if they are simple. There is a tone which people speak to fat people as 'obeses' that is reminiscent of those who have mental functioning problems. The construct of an 'obese' has no inner mind of their own. They have to be told what to do, what to eat, which a baby can do, by everyone else, rather than experts.

the position of repeatedly not knowing what everyone else knows is the position of someone who's mental functioning is low.

This produces an 'obese' tone that can make inroads into people's thinking.
 more capable of higher intellectual faculties.

Chilhood obesity

The number one issue for fat fighters is to preserve their bankrupt credo at all costs. As this is so far from the way things really are, this brings them down many dead ends. Only the ridiculous deference they've acquired manages to preserve their blushes.

Having failed with adults, because the dieting ain't it, there is a disturbing tendency for that force to re-direct itself to the innocent, children.

This is as much about our views of children as the hope of the future as it is about likelihood of success. Under the guise of early prevention-the idea that if you restrict eating and increase exercise early enough, you'll stop them becoming fat in the first place, or reverse it.

It might be more convincing if not for the fact that many of us adult fatties started off as fat children, who sought to lose weight. Through this, a few even developed disordered eating, because they they were almost permanently on a diet, those minority prone to this also developed eating disorders for similar reasons.

It is often ignored that some develop depression because of what I used to call "hibernation syndrome" or when the body adapts to repeated reduction by conserving its energy. The effects vary widely, we know for some, it can led to some sense of uplift, but for some, it's as if the brain seems to be cheated out of energy and one becomes fatigued overall including mentally.

The latter is unexpected and unexplored.

I don't want to be negative, I think children should not be discouraged from physical development. I say that as opposed to encouraged because, when all of us are born, unless there is something awry, we are active. Babies use up a tremendous amount of energy and are rarely still, seeming to be more active than adults even when asleep.

If they grow into children disinclined toward activity, one has to say they have been actively discouraged from it. Some are easier to put off than others.

To me, movement for children is nothing to do with 'burning calories', it's about developing your physical skills, the joy of overcoming a repeated set of small challenges and of feeling free in yourself.

When that is not available to children, neuroses can increase and become heightened among them.

Children should be left out of calorie/weight restriction efforts, full stop. Especially under the guise of feeding them properly, well duh, feed children properly and teach them basic cookery skills too. That's something to be ashamed society is failing at, not something to use 'obesity' to fix.

Everything they have, which really consists of one thing that people cling to like fury has failed. It's one thing to mess about with adults, but you'd think the thought of introducing it to children would make people pause. I thought it would and was one of the reasons I didn't think the crisis would reach this level-even though I knew weight would increase-nothing to stop it.

If there is a problem with a child's weight, then that is supposed to be what the study of 'obesity' is working out, if it isn't that needs to be explained. Our duty is to take care and nurture the the mental, spiritual and physical health of children and let the rest take care of itself.

Monday 25 May 2009

Virtues and Vices

We hear a lot  about our fat sin, but what about haters?

Lust-for glory you haven't earned.

Gluttony-for the pain of others.

Greed-stealing other people's stories, their lives.

Sloth-not bothering with repairing your own self esteem issues, within.

Wrath-anger released from deep inside from those you couldn't get at, emptied on people you can.

Envy-wanting to disturb the peace of someone else.

Pride-Slim's better than fat.

Those are the seven deadly sins. It tells you something that we rarely hear of their antidotes; the seven heavenly virtues.

Chastity-abstaining from trying to mess people up because their body doesn't look like you want.

Temperance- the ability to soberly reflect on all the facts, without fear or favour.

Charity-extending the belief that others know themselves as much as you know your own self.

Diligence- continuing to resist being wound up with authorities cynical falsehoods.

Patience-with the depth of your own ignorance.

Kindness-don't pretend that's meanness and abuse.

Humility-don't presume others haven't tried harder than you could ever imagine.


Sunday 24 May 2009

Jumping Jack Flat

ADHD etc, Is this when the activity of the mind i.e. thinking, cannot easily be separated from the urge to move? I'm wondering because I seem to have a bit of this at times. When my thinking gets going at times I just cannot sit down, I've got to walk around.

And the other way around, when I walk I can find my thinking at times becoming transcendent. It's odd because I spent so long thinking of myself as lazy.

In the end it turned out that I was more exhaustion with the negative way I'd become used to seeing myself that I was disinclined towards activity. This created an aura of aversion towards moving anticipatory feelings that it would be unpleasant and when I got through that I'd be engulfed by a sense of despair and hopelessness.

I'd built up systemic tension from my mind that I think spread to my body along the nervous system, to the point where repeatedly release over a period of years, began to change my mental as well as physical function.

It's then I became more aware of how much I can struggle to separate the activity of thought from that of the body and vice versa. It seemed to reveal it more.

I don't claim to have a deep understanding of hyperactivity, but I do know that as I felt more frustrated, suppressed angry and boxed in, I developed an "ants in the pants" syndrome and when my clumsiness got slapped down one too many times, I became demoralised enough to stop expressing myself physically as the mood took me.

I have always regretted letting go that way......

Weight loss diet and diet

I feel I have to keep using the term 'weight loss dieting' 'WLD'.
I've gotten into the habit of this because enough people find the use of the word "diet" interchangeable with its original meaning "what you eat". 

It's not really about semantics or pedantry but the resentment some have that no we are not all dieting because we have a diet, which is a biological necessity. Some want to engage in the usual list of distractions employed to prevent people from breaking away from the consensus of delusion that is the refusal to accept we've tried (people) and it's just not worked.

The experiments have been done, repeated and so has the outcome whether people choose to accept this or not is fine.

But they don't want anyone else to either because they feel its owed to them that everyone supports this fiction, not fine. That is why I say, "weight loss diet". To clarify, not that I feel its necessary, we all know what diet tends to refer to.

That I'm speaking of the thing that doesn't work, not the thing that is what we eat. The thing that is simplest to follow is our own tastes, experiences and inclinations. This of course isn't that simple the deeper you get into it, but it is as nothing compared to complexity of the one which curtails the outcome beforehand, rather than according to what you need.

Whether less or more.

On top of that its broken. What complicates, is not the idea of the discipline required, which is none, or the complex set of skills required to bring it to a successful conclusion, there are none, but it's intrinsic dysfunction, and the fact that it is based on fallacious reasoning about how we eat and how to intervene to regulate weight.

When you eat normally, according to your hunger and desire for various kinds of food, and yes that does include conscious reasoning that you could do with such as such kind of food, because you haven't had it for a while/ tend to need it at this time/ your granny always said you should eat x/ it is the food of your ancestors and you like to pay tribute to them in part by eating delicious grub/ you feel a little lacking physically or mentally/ memories ..... ad infinitum.

Although to be fair to fat fighters, describing yourself as 'being on a (weight loss) diet', fits the original meaning (what you eat). As once you've decided to go on a weight loss diet, that is what you eat (or are supposed to you.

OK to try and deal cut off endless "you do know diet is what you eat" yes we do know that, pass it on, I've developed this habit. Your diet is simply what you eat.

If you are on a weight loss diet, it becomes your diet, when that fails you're told to change your whole lifestyle in other words turn your whole life into a diet.

That's how crap dieting is, you're expected to simply surrender your autonomy to it and yet it still can't deliver.

Good/ Bad fattie

The good fattie/bad fattie dichotomy is one I've avoided as in a sense, it's a little unclear from my frame of reference. It's a way of epitomising those fat people who use healthy eating and exercise guidelines as a means of guidance on living their lives; good fatties.

Bad fatties in short, don't. They have lives, rather than lifestyles, they move around according to their own desires and tastes, this may or may not include the concept of exercise but the concept is part of a whole, not an aim in itself.

My history on this is mixed. I was more a devotee of healthy living in the past. I was convinced if my diet was good enough, I'd be healthy and become slim. It flowed happily alongside my self -hating and failure to lose weight, and my eating disorder which it just as effortlessly provoked as efficiently as any straight out weight loss dieting.

Which I saw through during my experiments with it between the age of 11 and 11. This seems odd now, but I thought of my problems with weight as a result of imperfect adherence to healthy eating standards and eating too much through what I finally could accept was compulsive eating.

It took long after I knew because it felt like an 'excuse' and that it might compromise my will to succeed.

As you can imagine, I am thoroughly unimpressed with any attempts to hide weight loss dieting-behind the euphemism of lifestyle and I was on that quickly due to my previous experience of having gone down that road myself.

In a way, those fat people who believe in healthy eating have much in common with the slim people who believe the same. Ditto with those who do not believe or practise these dictates-or feel they don't. Its important to make those distinctions because it doesn't make sense for people to call themselves bad fatties as that defines them according to dictates they don't follow.

I'm more sceptical about H/E folklore. I believe in achieving balance, but I feel the current incarnation of it makes promises it cannot keep. We are not owed health no matter we do.

Saturday 23 May 2009

Gastric mind band

I found out about this hereThis is as odd as it is amusing. I can't help but be interested as I've never understood why hypnosis was not more use in reversing weight, amongst other things. I've no idea why it cannot be used to reverse weight by just changing some aspect of its direction.

It has been tried, over and again, in extremely unimaginative ways (an overall problem) helping to enforce calorie restriction, to little avail, although it is always said to be effective, well isn't everything when it comes to weight including weight loss dieting?

A young celebrity claimed it as the secret to her noticeable weight loss, until she revised that claim later by saying it was actually a result of (eating) disordered behaviour.

What fascinates apart from the idea of a surgical procedure used as a prop, is the way the stomach, I assume that because we don't actually know what's going on inside their body. It could well be that some other part of the nervous system that is creating this effect, or some kind of change-that would be interesting.

As usual, the clients are the guinea pigs, no trials have been done, although the originators claim they would like there to be, to further its use. So any figures for any purported efficacy come from them and their paying clients.

The responses to link were amusing, an amount of people's noses being put out of joint. They deeply resent even the idea of fat people 'getting away scot free', even though that would be no different to being slim. Indicating again that this really isn't about losing weight/becoming thin or health, but hierarchy.

People really don't want fat people to become thin, the unlikelihood of it has definitely registered, they are happy for us to stay fat so they can (they assume) lord it over us. That would be an issue without the widespread pretence that we can easily become slim if we want.

That doesn't make sense either, but that isn't necessary when senselessness, goes unchallenged.

Don't forget also, the amusing re-assertion of all the 'skills' involved in weight loss. I'd forgotten just how much self-esteem people get from doing something that is perceived as difficult, even if its difficulty is really due to the sheer incompetence of design.

Part of being able to diet is believing that you are clever and specially skillful person. Very self flattering indeed. Whatever one's doubts about the source story, the idea is subversive in that it makes a mockery of all this self aggrandizing bullshit, and really annoys those who have chosen to use dieting and/or lifestyle change to bolster their self esteem.

That's what social strata's are all about, making some people seem as if they are doing way more than they are. Excusing the ill treatment of others, by insisting that their higherness is thoroughly earned. As if 'the right' to demean and harass others who do you no harm, could ever be.

This kind of story exposes their sense of vulnerability which is not so obvious when they scream hatred at fat people. They're asking all sorts of questions about it's safety, both psychological and physiological, something I've never seen before! One person even feared the potential mind control implications, citing a clockwork orange, I never even heard that from others when talking about weight loss surgery.

The power of positive thinking

Positive thinking, wishful thinking of "The Secret" kind has been thoroughly debunked by those who see it as representing the infraction against good sense that is the common or garden positive thinking model.

Amusing that weight is used as the theme to attack "Secret" blather in the linked article, pretending there's a separation between legitimate and illegitimate ideas about weight loss, playing to the fiction that the former is readily evident in reality.

Creating false hope for the powerless putting too much pressure on them to achieve what is not likely to be possible, often when they are least able to make room for disappointments, is exactly why positive thinking has a bad name in high thinking circles.

Yet, those same people have no problem when similar guff is via the Vegas odds of weight loss dieting "success". Somehow all the punitive faffing around of dieting, which looks absurd compared with normal eating makes it alright, because you're doing something.

The realistic assessment of the probability of a desired outcome affecting a rational persons expectation flies out the window then. That it has failed, demonstrably and repeatedly should remove any doubt that it is at best a long shot. Ignoring its often punishing nature and offshoots of disordering  balanced eating rhythms triggering eating disorders in the susceptible.

Refusing to accept this epitomizes wishful thinking-we are not talking about stopping people from dieting, that's up to them, we are talking about putting it across in its true light of probability of success.

We have the right to indulge magical thinking ourselves, but not to impose it on others, certainly authority should step off that.

Blaming the failure of dieting on "having a negative attitude" rather than its intrinsic dysfunction is the definition of how the extremes of all or nothing thinking replace action that is genuinely positive and sustainable.

That is exactly why many hate the creed of positive thinking, it replaces the practical and possible, with the impractical and highly improbable.

One has to question anyone who haughtily rejects positive thinking as the habit of a unrealistic small mind, yet visits that often through the weight arena and is sometimes even more credulous about it than those who look through this lens in general and at least has a chance to modify their stance through variety of application.

Because its failure is so extreme so pronounced multifarious and evident, dieting cannot progress anywhere. The refusal to accept this reaches a point of delusion, it has to. You cannot advance to a greater sense of realism with it, you either suspend reality or you do not.

More than likely you'll become more demoralised by repeated failures and the physical toll on your nervous system, which includes your mind posited as your own personal failing. And that will be pointed to as your "negative attitude" and of course why you 'failed'.

The next stage is to screw together the courage to stop, against opposition.

Belief in the power of positive dieting, nullifies rejection of all but the wilder shores of positive self delusion that has become an opportunity for a kind of cut rate intellectual snobbery that the "elite" accepts indirectly.

Open embrace of positive thinking is somehow vulgar than a scienterrifically backed version. Suggesting that we all need to find a way to stay in contact with it, including those who disdain it.

Being open and unequivocal about the belief that your attitude to things directly controls outcome makes you a fool, but if its dieting?

Other way around.

Thursday 21 May 2009

How I love the intelligensia

They aren't in a position to tell us what reality is for no reason, they have skills and strategies. Ever conscious of extracting cash from the honey pot of grantopia and recognising fat people's tolerance of being public enemy no 1.

There's an off shoot of the crisis that has come to my attention, studying and documenting stigma against 'the obese' or hatred of fat people to the enlightened. This is just a fatuous as it seems, it was started from their quarters are they studying themselves? Or how the power of influence can be misused?

Because someone should find out just how many other instances there are of them using their authority to wind us all up, setting us against each other as enemies. It's not as if no-one could have known the effects of stigma on a population before this.

Or perhaps its rare to see one unfold before you're eyes, "Look at me mum, look what I can do!", perhaps an equation can be made, x amount of stigma = y effect on HB. The amorality of science indeed.

Science in the form of 'obesity' is about giving people of a certain class who wish to study, something to study. Clearly the assumption that its the other way around is pure naivety. Creating your own vehicle and persuading people of its acceptability? Now that's power.

Without the burning intellectual curiousity the urge the need to know, having something predictable where the all the answers are known -fat is bad, dieting is good and works-has to see you through.  Having no inclination to know, confusion and not knowing quickly becomes mentally intolerable.

Well played! Perhaps they've missed their true calling as life coaches, (or have they?)

All this feels typically pointless, a crisis where those involved spend the whole time studying what a crisis being fat is as if its trying to convince itself, is now studying its own handiwork, because what, better next time?

Fat people don't need them to study stigma, they need the to call off their dogs.

Tuesday 19 May 2009

Little interest in weight loss diet 'success'

It's strange the way you lose interest in weight loss diet 'success' once you get off that treadmill. I was amazed the way people found this rude. I suppose it must feel short when you are so used to connecting with people over this, receiving the opposite instead.

A lack of interest. Just goes to show you just cannot predict everything. I just didn't think it would matter. That it would be seen as everyone making their mind up about what they think.

Its also made me realise just how much people think that collective interest and 'support' helps them. I find it hard to believe it does. Perhaps being calm, less stressed in life will help increase your tolerance for what dieting can make you feel. But I really think this is the displacement of hope.

Making good the difference between the set up of diet success versus the reality of diet failure makes people look for things to increase their chances of success. A little bit on from a lucky rabbits foot.

Lucky


I have a blessed nature in that I'm not much given to envy, don't much see the point of it.

I've never seen slim people as lucky. I see them as different, even when I was trying to lose weight I thought why were they there and how could I get there too. I assumed that I had the route-healthy eating, or lifestyle change as it's now called.

I tend to feel a bit odd when fat people say that slim people are lucky, what about our luck? If you are healthy what about that? I've been blessed with what I consider to be health and I've always been grateful for it, even as a child. I don't think I had a day off for illness in the whole of my secondary school time, 5 years.

I think also of what it says to say this to slim people, it seems to be a denigration of your body and if you feel discriminated against, why would you not stop and ask yourself, what makes them lucky, exactly? Some feel that, "they can eat anything they want", so can most of us and it wouldn't make a real difference to our weight, if it did, you'd have to figure out why

I don't want to eat endless amounts for the sake of it; I feel it's more about freedom from the burden of having to fight you hunger drives. A battle that will be exacting painful and costly.


I just want my needs to match my hunger.

It's also funny the difference in the way we see things, in the end, I'm not convinced that slim people are genetically determined to be that way, except possibly a minority.

I think that most of our bodies work the same way. It's just that something has prodded it towards fat or thin and we don't know what that is nor can work out how to change it.

Seperating weight loss from weight loss dieting

Is it possible? I think so.

Weight loss is something that happens to us all the time and weight loss dieting is something we direct consciously to achieve weight loss as a side effect. The two have been fused tightly together in an act of collusion between the slimming industry and dieters, to help them hide how bad diets are, but even more to aid adherence which is the greatest difficulty with the weight loss diet plan.

Our built in resistance to them starts from the get go.

If you kid yourself that the only possibility ever of weight loss is dieting, it will help to shape the way you see weight loss as painful, requiring tremendous conscious effort and so on. The attributes and consequences of calorie restriction become those of weight loss and everyone likes it that way.

Basically, diets fail because of the incomplete understanding of the way human metabolism works. I think that fat acceptance should go back to a more honest understanding and base its views on that, rather than come down against weight loss because the two are seen as inseparable. We don't need to be controlled by this mentality when we are no longer defined by it.

That only serves the interests of those who make money out of diets because then no one questions why weight loss should feel bad at all. Which would be a powerful question for them to answer and might get people thinking.

Sticking with this consensus lets the slimming industry and its advocates off the hook for what is quite immoral behaviour.

Fat acceptance going along wholesale with bankrupt notions of from the slimming industry is weird, we should question everything they say, even if it seems to make sense, on general principle.

They have told so many falsehoods I am very sceptical of anything they say. It is always about trying to make their "product" make sense, which it does not without a whole world of fibs surrounding and supporting it.

We've separated eating from calorie counting, movement from punishing exercise, so why not weight loss from weight loss dieting?

Sunday 17 May 2009

Nocebo

The placebo effect is basically refers to the capacity of the body to respond positively to positive expectation. Usually the scenario is that one's symptoms will be alleviated by some medically related, but chemically inert prop-such as a pill-usually on the say so of authority such as that of a doctor.

Nocebo is exactly the same phenomena except when that expectation is negative. For some reason they are split into two as if they are different things.

The purpose of 'obesity diagnosis' is to be a nocebo effect. It is classified as disease, partly because science has no real answer to it but equally to ramp up anxiety about it, rather than because what is it merits that definition, which is the usual reason to define things.

It is meant to manipulate you mentally into feeling as sick as you can feel or even be, in order to fulfil the pre-destined diagnosis, such is the belief that it must be true.

How much this actually costs fat people's health is anyone's guess.

Friday 15 May 2009

Get over it

Just saw this article via the rotund.

It's a shame that someone fair enough to ask for a response from the authors, cannot invest their post with the same spirit.

their book, flies in the face of everything we've been taught about weight, health, and the root causes of obesity.

Do I detect a note of mindless appeal to authority courtesy of logical fallacies for beginners?

The book in question is Lesson from the fat-o-sphere, by Marianne Kirby and Kate Harding

To write "fat can be healthy" reads "almost like libel" is a supremely odd word to use, I put it down the the shock of hearing anyone counter cosy propaganda. Hence the passivity behind "We've been taught", yes but what do you think?

Is every fat person you know, 'unhealthy'?

What I don't get is why people don't want to fess up to wanting to believe it, leaving it unquestioned for that reason. Reality should undermine it constantly, unless you somehow know or have never known any fat people. Or have never been to hospital and wondered why slim people seem to make up a disproportionate number of the patients, even in places where you'd expect fat people to over represented.

Consent

Consent is mainly seen as an either/or thing. Lack of it breaks the chain of wanting something to happen and it happening introducing the invasiveness of something happening to you, against you.

What is harder to consider and sometimes reconcile is that grey area where consent is compromised. That is when you consent on a certain basis you believe to be true which turns out not to be. And if you had known the full facts or truth, you'd not have consented.

It's an occupational hazard of life to a certain extent. We cannot always know the full facts or know everything in each others hearts. What we truly want can become obscured by the internalization of supposed to's and should's, whatever our place in events.

That doesn't make it any less painful if it has crossed a boundary of belief dear to our hearts.

Part of the sadness of obesity is that many of us, did not consent on the terms sold to us. We bought into self improvement, not self hate or annihilation, that's important,  because its assumed we hated ourselves then acted on that, when it is far more the other way around.

Even those who do not/did not hate themselves have often developed a view of fatness where the normal rules don't apply. They've imbibed the 'segregation' of fat people necessary to create our fatness and created by our inner 'sinfulness'.r

We believed we would eat better, not develop disordered eating and eating disorders. We thought we'd heal our relationships with our bodies by losing weight. As that didn't happen for many, permanently any way, that price of that was decline and continued alienation from self. Whilst we were looking the other way, intent on proving to ourselves and others that we were good people and would not give up.

My basis of assumption enabled by my desire to be thinner and my belief that I could raise the odds of successful weight loss in my favour if I tried harder or hard enough and ate a perfect healthy diet.

I am in part to blame for that, no doubt. It is also true that if not under the influence of an atmosphere created by insisting certain things were true when it was clear to many they were not, I would have acted differently.

Certainly I would not have done myself so much damage by repeating failure over and over. That wasn't for free. I feel the attitude of falsehood to manipulate fat people around dieting and weight loss, but even more the effects of pursuing it via calorie manipulation compromised our consent. In fact I know it did.

It altered our attitude to our bodies, changed the meaning of us to ourselves and the actions of cals in/out altered our consciousness. Anorexia is a distinct genetic condition, that however doesn't mean the tools of an early form of it are harmless. It is a continuum and when people speak of the 'mental illness' of AN, they are speaking of a more acute form of what has happened to most people who diet, regardless of weight, especially repeatedly.

No body cared to monitor that, as our assigned original sin status blocked that. We could be blamed for everything that didn't go to plan rather than the effects of what we were doing assessed objectively by others not involved, coolly and rationally.

The careless disregard of us has wasted opportunities to learn and move on to better and greater knowledge. We were one ginormous multi nationed experiment. One of the greatest spontaneous ones. Anyone with any intellectual spark amongst the authorities could have used that to learn which could have at least salvaged more from what we went through.

The aim,  was just to keep us repeating it indefinitely putting any costs to us down to the pathology of our obesity.

We also wouldn't have been so hard on ourselves if we'd had a more realistic idea of what was possible, probable, likely and that would have saved a lot damage.

I now know I could have reconciled myself to the way things were better than I would have assumed and that makes me sad for all of us in a similar position. We deserved better from the people we listened to.

Eat less, do more, eh?

Thing about eating is it can be used as a metaphor for the way our minds consume information. In that case many people do need to eat less of the crappy information thrown at us by the confidently fanatical.

Ditto needing to "do more";  more thinking for themselves that is.

There is something so passive about the way we just get on board with a lot of scare tactics as long as sacrificial scapegoats are offered up in the mix. To the extent that this response is out of keeping with the message of someone telling others to be more active.

Rather undermining the message that the cause of the 'disease' is inactivity. 

This tension repeatedly appears.

We are told what to do and we do it, because we are told, yet that is supposed to be the exact problem of the age, that we are told to eat x and y and we do, because we are told.

Even though the demeanour is often proud and chests puffed up when delivering this coup de vérité, like that of a young child repeating their parents instructions none of this was thought up by them. Hardly indicates a self contained and vital countenance. Just passing along what enters through one end like a part of the digestive process.

It's already been chewed and turned into mental gruel for easy absorption for ease of spoon feeding by those wishing to assert their own disorder as the standard by which we should all be (ill) judged and served by.

Getting away with it too, thus far because more of said people will not do more  questioning and inhale less guff.

Why is 'food addiction' so annoying?

Eating is a necessity, we are designed around that fact. As it is an imperative with loads of defences and probably at least a few plan B's, we shouldn't expect it to be all fluffy clouds and rainbows all the time regardless of circumstance.

That is yet again imposing the normals eye view and their shock fear and disgust on people who actually have to deal with the problem at hand. Turning themselves to into a hindrance rather than a help.

Addiction cannot rival eating as a necessity, regardless of what some addicts may feel. Addiction is a pathological or dysfunctional state, whereas eating is undoubtedly a good thing, despite what some nutritionists and fitness experts may like to imply.

A quart cannot fit into a pint pot.

Eating may sometimes be a bit like addiction but this is mainly a superficially in the main hyperbolic reading of things based on the far greater kudos given to addicts feelings of their condition. Something denied to fat people in general and with eating disorders. Really it is addiction that is sometimes a bit like eating which makes more sense.

Fat people with eating disorders crave and envy that kudos, but I'm sure it was hard defended, not given up. Fat people need to realise they must defend and define themselves if they want respect, they do not. And I doubt they can borrow that respect from others.

I find their envy and desperation of everyone from addicts to anorexics deeply annoying. If less time was spent play acting that certain eating disorders were bad as others, that energy could be invested in building the missing self esteem they so crave and think they can only channel from others.


As eating is inbuilt it can only increase or decrease in scale and scope-it is designed to vary according to our needs for energy and other nutrients and our ability to provide food for ourselves. We eat from the environmental surround, if that is inhospitable, it helps to be able to have a massive drive to eat that will kick in pretty quickly, so our tribe can gather itself, if necessary to move to more hospitable climbs..

If not, by the time we felt a sense of urgency, we'd lack the energy to do something about it.
It has secondary uses and that is to defend our mood, to prevent it from sinking to a low ebb, which can also threaten life in a different way.

This secondary purpose of eating is where 'addiction' starts getting thrown around, unjustifiably. The point about this defence is it is supposed to be temporary, to give you a chance to deal with underlying cause. The point is if you cannot or will not address it, or you do not know what that cause is, apart from spontaneous resolution-which is often how things are resolved, it is likely to continue and progress.

You have to question the favoured approach which is avoidance of eating, rather than reducing or normalizing the signals and/or resolving underlying questions. If you are being attacked and are shielding yourself, its not surprising that prizing away whatever shield you can grab hold of is likely to create and instinctive resistance in you.

That is seen as 'addiction'. It means that the incompetence of the approach is overlooked as it is deemed almost morally right. Change cannot occur as that often comes from thinking about why a modus operandi is unsuccessful.

Although the so called addict can always be a failure the professionals and their approach, never can. They are bullet proof.

Fatness as a disease- form over content

In order for us to get a handle on our issues dilemas and problems, increasingly they are being turned into diseases. The magic bullet to cure (real) disease has worked to such an extent that it is being reversed to if you have a problem, make it a disease and a solution will coalesce around it, somehow.

In fact the disease is being so loosely applied now that it has gone from distinct pathogenesis of an attack on the body or internal dysfunction, to a self created quasi imaginary state that somehow cannot be cured by the will that is creating it. Yet somehow will is the cure along with abstinence which isn't actually anything as such etc.,

Stupid, because its use is now applied to whenever the professionals have no answer for, none of which meet a meaningfully scientific definition of disease.

Fatness is of  course a prominent example of this. It has been classed slyly as a disease not because it meets any genuine definition of that, but more to try and 'fix' it according to how it would be if it was a disease.

In other words, wishful thinking on the part of the professionals. They've never really come to terms with their lack of success with chronic complaints compared to ills that have a pill. Now they've stopped admitting they are somewhat impotent, they're egos can no longer take it as diseases of survival appear to be a greater threat than diseases contagion.

By crowbarring chronic conditions and disease into the contagion model, room has been left to insert things the medical research community are looking at incorrectly. Failure can then be put down to disease rather than incompetence.

This turns illness into a cultural signifying to placate those who want some acknowledgement of their situation, to relieve what can be the extreme pressure of not having a solution. iow, diagnosis-real or otherwise, shuts people up. Gives them something to cling to.

That is extremely important, but it shouldn't be necessary to do it this way. We all have to accept the limitations of current knowledge. But somehow 'prescribing' calm down won't cut it for either.

Ritual satisfies more.

Thursday 14 May 2009

The Venus of Hohle Fels

This article article about the Venus of Hohle Fels, made me laugh out loud today. It illustrates how the porn generation's fixations are now penetrating (yes) even the halls of academe.

A piece of Prehistoric pornography carved from mammoth ivory at least 35,000 years ago may be the oldest known example of figurative art .

The latter is what I would have called this Venus, but I'm still back in the days when this sort of thing was called a 'fertility symbol', now the Rubicon has been crossed, the mere depiction of the female form =porn.

This not only seems to have gotten everyone a bit excited, ramping up the language in the usually pretty sober house style of the newspaper, it also seems that these boffins have not encountered fat ladies with their clothes off;

The female figurine, which stands 6cm (2.4in) tall, has outsized breasts, huge buttocks, exaggerated genitals.....

Yes, she's a fat woman.
.....and open legs.

She's a fat woman, standing up.

Pish to detractors who say, 'there never used to be obesity', for the 40 millionth time

Dr. Nicholas Conrod, (deliberate misspelling) gets excited too;

"There can be no doubt that the depiction of oversized breasts, accentuated buttocks and genitalia results from the deliberate exaggeration of the sexual features of the figurine.”

She's a fat woman.

Not to be outdone, Paul Mellars an Oxbridge scholar no less says;
“The figure is explicitly — and blatantly — that of a woman....

The mere depiction of a naked fat woman is, explicit and blatant? That doesn't sound good to me, but, now I know how somebody whiled away some of those lonely hours, he continues;

....with an exaggeration of sexual characteristics,

Some girls are bigger than others.

.....large, projecting breasts,

Rack o' doom , bound up to make 'em stand proud. Maybe the artist had a specific lady in mind, maybe a S.O. who liked to, role play.

....a greatly enlarged and explicit vulva,

Hey, some of us are bigger down there, like some men.

....and bloated belly and thighs, that by 21st-century standards could be seen as bordering on the pornographic .”

Possibly, if you've tossed yourself senseless. .

Maybe it's the fact that our Venus has no head, in it's stead is an eyelet that, as the article says, looks like this was actually worn as a pendant. Liked to carry Venus around everywhere, awwwwhh.

Wednesday 13 May 2009

Super perfect people

Absolutely super perfect people.

Have you noticed how everything 'fat fighters' believe totally venerates them in every way whilst at the same time doing the opposite for fat people? They present themselves as the epitome of all that is disciplined responsible and self-controlled. 

Even when they err, it is to show that they will overcome. They barely have a bad word to say about themselves, on anything at all.

They are perfectionists, in their vision of themselves. They cannot even tolerate moral imperfection of their own hating, their 'fight against obesity armageddon' is about health and it's moral.

It would be dubiously pleasure seeking and therefore morally suspect of them to make it about the sheer joy of hate, or about looks though they rarely refrain from throwing in something about the offensive appearance of fat bodies.

Rarely refrain is a good phrase for them for it is rare indeed for them not to tell everyone every piece of food they've ever resisted, even if it was just a passing thought. So say they. They also feel that they are being dragged down by those they've defined as their opposites.

I always wondered how eugenics could have disappeared from view after a history of it bobbing to the surface. As we are now our own creators, our own little gods, we can give birth to better and better versions of ourselves. Acquiring brand new bodies you often hear stories of triumphant fitness use that description.

Even those trolls who make it all about sex are more capable of being honest it's about what they find attractive.

Morally perfect, perfect in health and motive- we know because they tell us so all the time, being bankrupted and dragged down by the filth and scum who simply will not behave. Yet in even our soft attempts at defending ourselves we are dismissed as biased.

It's interesting that so many of a more progressive hue also seem to share that sentiment, they too are feeling the burden of 'paying for' all those incapable of behaving rationally. Everything would be OK if we just behaved reasonably and according to logic. 

Far from being stoical and self-denying, the healthy lifestyle movement is a self-referential self-aggrandizing cult, that indulges without cease in raising itself up at the expense of others. It is not enough for it to be positive, someone has to undercut because that's what they think, know it takes to raise them up.

Low self-esteem abounds

Reading the comments after an interview with Marianne and Kate regarding their new anthology . What's striking is just how singularly favourable the fat fighting views are to those who hold them.

According to them they eat perfectly, are self-controlled even in the midst of great temptation, are moderate, responsible, wise, judicious, moral, etc etc, the list goes on and on.

Fat people on the other hand are the epitome of all that is rotten about humanity etc, etc, the list is pretty long there too.

And yet, they're never satisfied and are often angry, to the point of being full of hate.

What this shows how the privilege of thin is a twisty mirage, and ultimately that pursuing too much self esteem and too little, ultimately end up at the same place.

It's not a fat tax, it's a shame tax

Luckily Ryanair's publicity seeking 'proposal' has foundered under the dim light of a smidgen of common sense.

Even so, it still managed to be an unnecessary bit of unpleasantness, that merely brought out the worst in a whole lot of people who should know better.

One point I'd like to make though, is this kind of thing is not a 'fat tax', it is a shame tax.


In this case, it was proposed for those who are fatter, not all fat people.

Presumably, they are expected to be a softer target, more likely to pay their shame penance, quietly, it's a form of blackmail. From what I've experienced from others in fat acceptance, they shouldn't be too sure of themselves on that one.

One of the most beloved themes of the hating chorus is how fat people are thieves because somehow we are costing them money.

When truly, one of the purpose of shaming anyone in a societal context is the extortion of money.

And yet fat people seem to be paying up left, right and centre, sometimes with little way of opting out of it.

Next time, ask us who we don't want to pay for, I would start with anyone who wants to cultivate prejudice, let them pay for it themselves.

Saturday 9 May 2009

I used to be a good person!

When will mainstream people see it from my point of view. I used to be one of the good people, dammit.

I used to be seen as a polite soul who was the sort that kept the forces of incivility at bay. Now I'm part of the rampaging hordes, destroying the earth and civilisation as we know it.


Now I'm a brigand and a thief to boot. How did this happen?

Yes I'm fat, yes I know that's 'bad', but I thought I get some points for trying everyday for decades to stick to a lifestyle change programme.
Not so, alas.

I finally realised the full horror of my situation, I'm irredeemably bad, because I've failed to become thin.

Will somebody please recognise that I was not designed for this. This was not in my plan.

I was a nice person, I expected to continue to be a nice person, unless some unforeseen corruption lay ahead.

I've not prepared for the life of a rebel, it has been thrust upon me by those who will not be placated by my plaintive pleas that I've tried my best, my hardest.

I've no choice, I've just got to somehow cobble together a new act of resistance, cool insouciance and a calm arrogance that is unshaken by rank. I used to respect authority.

I wish I'd known this when I was a child, I could have had game, as our American friends like to say. Instead I was wasting time on futile attempts that pleased neither myself nor my tormentors.


Shit, bastard, bitch.

Well, it's a start.

Friday 8 May 2009

The mysteries of loss and gain

This is not about whether or not weight loss should/ shouldn't be desireable, or whether it is/ isn't. It's about why it should be thought to be impossible.

We are living in a world where impossibility is becoming increasingly difficult to call yet somehow in all the things ruled out civilised weight reversal is the one. I'd have thought it would be time travel myself.

Although widely disbelieved weight gain is mostly a spotaneous response, whether influenced by genetics or not. The trigger can be hard to pin down, whatever, it must occur to some kind of pattern and seem pretty efficient and in the main pain free when it is.

That means there must be an opposite with the same or similar qualities of ease and effciency, yet we are told there isn't by those who claim that the opposite somehow manages to be so ineffective, uncomfortable, painful at times, unless your body is willing to yield to extreme mostly unsustainable actions.

That is wholly unconvincing in my view.

There doesn't seem to be any general explanation given for that wild diversion, it is just asserted that it must be so like Moses coming down from the mount with the commandents set in stone.

What a con.

If they cannot be bothered to find out what creates gain therefore loss and/or vice versa, or don't like the idea, let alone the prospect that we could take our weight down as easily as it tends to go up, why don't they just say that?

Oh sorry, who am I kidding?

Thursday 7 May 2009

Consent

Ever noticed how little choice or consent is involved in a crisis that sets itself as up against people's choices?

It is 'obesity science' that first of all defines what a fat person is and does, we have no say in that, we can only agree, with it, we have no choice to disagree as that is posited as our pathology. By rights unless we agree with the definitions pressed on us, we cannot be held to account for anything that flows from that.

Obesity and it's accompanying fat hatred functions much like a religion, it's like people use it to remind themselves of what is currently considered to be moral and work those ideas out through it and their reaction attitude to fat people. Like with soap operas.

As we know, in free societies we have freedom of religion.

It is insisted that humans through the conscious part of our minds control our weight. A sort of will to power ideal. We have not said we have no control, but that not by the route given to us or they'd have worked when we tried them so repeatedly and conscientiously.

If that is ignored, as it is, the outcome of that route is no longer anything to do with us as we do not consent to that route or treatment as it is laughably called and everyone has the right to consent to medical treatment as long as they are of sound mind.

Notice the loophole created by treating us as if we have no minds to be sound or otherwise.

We don't consent to what we know is a bad treatment, we do not agree that fatness is a routine choice to overeat out of desire for pleasure or comfort, if it is the latter then becoming more comfortable should be the 'cure' and weight loss will follow it its wake.

No need for any diets.

Non-detachable

Not being an expert in air travel to put it mildly, it strikes me that the current fuss about the size of airline seats has come about despite fat people's shame and guilt about not fitting into seats designed without regard for actual people.

So many have complained that about being squashed by fat people who don't fit into the seats assigned to them that the airlines have found it politic to propose a fat person surcharge, making them pay for two seats instead of realising that seat shrinking has obviously gone too far.

Both slim and fat want the same thing, bigger seats. Unfortunately due to the cult of fat hatred, this has morphed into tax fatties or throw them off the plane, i.e. punish them, in the guise of social good.

This has obviously gotten out of hand if a number of their passengers can't fit into these smaller seats, people cannot detach bits of themselves.

Common sense dictates that which can be jettisoned, should be jettisoned. That is the junk that people insist on taking with them, why does so much unecessary junk have to fly?

People are always complaining about how the airlines are no good at transporting their belongings, so let someone else have a go, namely railways, for instance, maybe they'll be able to do a better job.


Limit maybe to a bit of hand luggage, that's it.

The savings in space can be used to re-configure the internal dimensions of the plane.

We can have new style planes that take account of both height, weight and PWD, people first planes, great.

This is an opportunity to improve flying conditions and take better account of human needs. It also exposes the innate regressiveness of fat hatred, we should all be in this together, not setting thin against fat in ever decreasing circles of bitterness.

The interior of planes should be designed as much around actual people that use them as possible, wow, there's a novelty.

Wednesday 6 May 2009

All or nothing

A lot of the point of isolating fat people in hating is to avoid everyone having to make changes. According to the obesity crisis logic we are fatter than 30 years ago, our environs have become increasingly 'obesifacient' (meaning tending to fatten) fast food,  de-prioritization of physical activity in schools and out and so on.

Yet from the start message from everyone else, including those close to us has very much been do it yourself so we can be left out of it. A lot of the rage is the fear that we'll all have to do the same things and certain things will be less available.

The inference being, we're "unlucky" (to be fat) but they are not and healthy living is a punishment for being fat, although others kid on that's how slim people live anyway (so why resist what you're already doing with such primitive fury then?) If it was the case they would not treat us as if we are in danger of spoiling their party.

All diets are equally useless- not that this will make any difference people will still act as if one has magical properties over and above the defining basis of calorie reduction. So, a new paradigm is being  called for, what is that?

Why the whole community acting as a body, rather than personalized in a fat person. The very thing beastly behaviour has tried to see off.

How ironic. After all this fussing and fighting with us, some are finally recognizing the obvious. That if you feel society is going in the wrong direction-and that is causing/ promoting an undesired effect (their argument)-do not continue that route because it's more desirable to blame individuals. Then you pressurize them to re imagine actual societies live in there, whilst living in the here and now, as you continue to do the things, you say support their condition.  Brilliant.

Even though clearly seduced by the ease (laziness) of trying to bully biology, by personifying it as fat people, then bullying us, as stand ins, in the end it seems you actually have to reverse things for everyone. Change the whole environment, rather than the internal one.

there would also be steps you could take to alter your environment, like making healthy foods most accessible in your home, joining your school’s wellness council to advocate for changes, limiting the number of televisions in your house, lobbying for improved sidewalks in your neighborhood….

 In other words, hey society; stop and reverse.

Of course some aspects of the environment are a lot easier to *change than others, but the point is that diets often fail because of the environmental obstacles that exist. We need environments that support our healthy aspirations, not hinder them. Perhaps if we all redirected our energy from following fad diets to changing our environments, we’d actually get somewhere.


Yeah, wishful thinking, diets fail because they are badly designed, full stop. However, there's no doubt that given the unprecedentedly low standard by which we measure "improving" on its abject failure, its easier to stick with a diet/ healthist mentality if your whole environment is that shape.

It mimics naturalness and frees up a bit more energy to fight through its fatuous design a little longer.

* Harrass

Sunday 3 May 2009

Do we produce fat cells independent of intake?

This is a really weird question which I feel almost embarrassed to ask, I'm not entirely sure what I'm asking. I think its can the human adipose cell, which is the fat cell we think of, somehow store or accrue fat and enlarge itself, or multiply from more than the energy coming into the body, i.e. some internal displacement or process?

It sounds an absurd question to ask but you have to wonder, how can a body get so large without taking in commensurately huge amounts? Or just as much, how can it take in huge amounts without even becoming fat, which is the other side of the previous situation?

Someone who weighs hundreds of pounds may eat 2/ 3 or more times the recommended daily amount of 2,000 calories for women. Yet there are people who eat that and are slim and upwards, certainly often they weigh far less. Although the biggest may be more likely to be the biggest consistent eaters, that warp and weft, eating lots and a little, is itself internal.

That is, very few will keep eating thousands of calories everyday, purely out of habit, whether intake varies or not is about demand.

What is capable of producing such a seemly divergent scale of outcomes? Is it only the ability to convert calories, rather than some kind of displacement of energy which is then converted and stored?

It is said that calorie intake corresponds closely to weight, but then it is also said that diets work and frankly if such a lack of perspective can dominate on something as easy as that to work out, nothing said by that same mentality can be taken on face value.  No-one on board with that can be really be trusted on any facts which happen support their view, or should that be the opposite, as supporting their view is their overweening urge, they can only be trusted to be true to that, even if they wanted to be fair?

Then there's output being an influence. We are told inactivity=weight gain. But I'm a little unsure about this. Hunger is related to your physical energy needs. It follows that inactivity should adjust that need (downward) accordingly, so weight should be neither gained nor lost. If activity has such little effect on hunger, how can it said to be the reason a person is fat? And if you're full of energy, from food, why would you not feel energetic, in the same way you tend to feel depleted when you are hungry and in need of food?

For instance, when people have a hospital stay, even though they tend to be far less active than normal, it's not known for making people necessarily gain a whole lot of weight. People say that's due to the (high) energy demands of healing, but emotional crises also seem to require a lot of energy without seeming to use up a lot of it, ergo, people can put on weight. Their body seems to demand energy its not using, is that a security thing? So it doesn't run out, a just in case measure?

Often, people who do a lot of exercise stop and put on weight-then return to activity and lose weight-becoming another calorie manipulation poster child.

But rarely do these people wind down their activities slowly, to nothing, the reverse of how they tend to progress into more and more activity, how do we know what would happen if they allowed their body to adjust at its own speed?

I'm drifting, from my original question, can/ does the body turn energy that is not purely from food intake into ( or add to existing) fat cells?

I'm sorry; but.......

For years this has been a favourite of fat haters, it usually prefixes; if you use less than you take in, you'll lose weight.


Well I've got some news for these types, here's my version.

I'm sorry; but, I'm singularly unsuited to calorie manipulation.

I'm sorry; but, if people diet and end up more or less the same, diet's don't work.

I'm sorry; but, things don't work the way you want them to work out, just because you want it, bad.

I'm sorry; but, when any activity that is labelled 'exercise', it quickly becomes boring and tedious, even if it wasn't previously.

I'm sorry; but, being told what to eat, is dependency .

I'm sorry; but, there are different forms of (self) control.

I'm sorry; but, I don't need a religion, even if it's non-theistic .

I'm sorry; but, medicine can only be practised by consent .

I'm sorry; but, practising medicine on a body, doesn't make that body your puppet.

So there.

Friday 1 May 2009

Health is a moral issue

Rejecting the intrinsic morality around human health because 'unhealthiness' has come to mean 'immorality' and used to attack fat people turns refutation of bogus moralising into an unnecessary untruth.

Health is a moral issue.

The way societies are arranged affects the health of those who live in it. The culture, myths and ideas of a society all shape the health of its inhabitants, often in ways that are hard to see.

There is a sense of responsibility, charity for the health of not only ourselves but others, this is coming under attack due to rigid assumptions that turn into attack. That's about bad motivation, rather than intrinsic to giving a damn about other people's health. It is bad for us as well as those suffering to ignore distress and pain.

It’s because that is such an important theme that those who attack fat people think they can use it as a cover.

We often give too much ground by accepting the premise that the healthist definition of health is an agreed truth. By not objecting to that, we tacitly agree that it is right, in saying “health is not a moral issue” we accept it as the one.

 Its narrowness is its central problem. It leaves out the fullness of what affects our health to focus on specific concerns mainly eating exercise mostly because they are easier to measure than how much control you have over your life, which has been shown to impact significantly on your well being. Feelings of powerlessness can break down the mind, leading to a state called “learned helplessness” which can actually become debilitating.

Both the usefulness and the truthfulness of the healthist approach should be questioned as a direct truth. It contains too many assumptions i.e. that there is a universal perfect diet or that if you eat according to its dictates you cannot become fat.

Fat healthist disprove the latter.

If you reject this and are not against health, why accept it as definitive? You might as well go the whole way and describe an alternative. I feel a more holistic and broadening of the term “healthy” should be restored and added to. Things like art, education, self expression and identity should be seen as part of the fabric of our mental and physical health.

Supporting or indeed undermining it.

Fat acceptance could try to describe how people maintain and support their existence whether fat or thin. What we have learned from being targeted and attacked is how undermining that can be without adding positives, it therefore doesn’t increase health. Using particular standards as the only way to support one's health and framing any possible other way as "failure to do what's good for your health" an attempts to deprive people of the ability to consider whether those measures maybe unsuitable for them, or even, not particularly healthy in their actual as opposed to imagined effects. Eating vegetables and aerobic exercise regimes for example, rather than keeping busy and engaged, committed to things where you feel you are achieving something.

First we are convinced that we are incapable of maintaining our health well or to the best of our ability, we are actually incompetent at best and self destructive in the main. This is demoralising and upsetting, but that's okay because it can be identified as your "unhealthiness" which can be lifted when you do as your told, contriving an increase in "healthiness".

Trying to pin down an actual example of a healthist definition of an actual existing healthy person is tricky as few seem to be able to meet its standards in real life, we are all failing somehow, not in a good way where we raise ourselves up by reaching for something just beyond our grasp, because “failure” means we cannot relieve our shame.
This makes it easier to insist fat people cannot be part of or interested in health.

We all cede control to this pandering to an unjustified sense of self importance by not asserting everyone's right to at least state rationale critiques and alternative views.

Because of this and more we do reject their take on health to no little degree on moral grounds, it is elitist in a bad way and seeks to turn health into a class marker a punitive time wasting energy draining shame inducing alternative system of justice of those with the audacity to not meet abstract and exacting standards.

"Health" campaigning which trades on aggression and bullying is too excessive in its meanness to really feel like an aid to well being, ending up feeling more like an attack. It's also genuinely lazy through its lack of care of people preferring to force shout and scream rather than to learn and understand. 

It's desire for simplistic rigid answers insists on a security truth can't deliver.