Efficacy

The efficacy of a treatment, remedy, medicine and so on depends on the ability to take or tolerate it. As much as its actual potency or lack of it. If you cannot complete the course, then its obviously falling short and needs a redesign at least.

Nothing to do with morality. Anti-biotic medicines work the same on lawless as the law abiding. Those deemed good or bad. Nor does efficacy depend on being deserving or undeserving. If you break your leg messing about or in the course of saving puppies from drowning, the treatment is the same. Or according to the requirements of your injury.

Medical need is the only judge when it comes to medical matters. What's being said here is not that fat people can never become slim and stay that way. It's that weight loss dieting is intrinsically unsustainable for the overwhelming majority of people and that's a feature of the way our bodies function.

On the rare occasion that it is, it won't be down to greater or lesser "self control".  Its a biological anomaly that cannot be generalized.

The famous 95% of weight loss diet fail is a probabilistic figure. Every attempt at dieting has a 95 % likelihood of failure. I don't think that means the same as out of 100 people, 5 will succeed at dieting. It means every time you diet, that's the chance you have of sustaining it to something approaching slimness-if you're fat.

Anyone could theoretically have a very small chance of success and a far larger one to fail at any attempt. It is possible for some element of spontaneous metabolic adjustment  to make a difference at any time in any person, whether they diet frequently or not.

'Morality' is a total irrelevancy when it comes to a medical treatment. This kind of thinking, plus such as, you have to be positive, if you don't believe you can't do it etc., is the hallmark of quackery. We're told diets work if you 'stick' to them.

It happens that the lack of sticking to weight loss diets is a product of their intrinsic dysfunction. Even if this were not so, there has to be a realistic assessment of probable chance of any measure. Not pretence based on assumption.

Theoretical efficacy is just that, theoretical-unless it can be made actual. We have a whole raft of clinical trails and tests for medicines and other treatments to confirm hypotheses. When you want to change A and you apply agent B to it. The acid test is whether A changes (in the way you require).

If it doesn't, no excuses are needed, it doesn't work. Take it from there, find out why it doesn't work and that might lead to you find out how something else could. Or don't, it's up to you.

The fat is/isn't 'healthy' thing

There are two main types of people in this, the healthists, and the rest of us who aren't. Some of those healthists are fat and some aren't. Some fat healthists are to be found within FA, some not. Some non healthists are also within and outside fat acceptance.

I will not stoop to calling myself a 'bad fattie' even in jest because it validates the healthist premise, if you validate it, live it. If you cannot/ will not, you either don't believe it or need to question your belief, either way, why define yourself in terms that you don't speak to you? I am not a 'bad fattie' because I don't romaticise the fact that I just don't believe in it, it's not applicable to me, mostly. It's like I wouldn't call myself a 'bad moralist' for not achieving the sanctified 'moral ideal' of thinness either.

Healthism in essence = A, B and C are 'healthful behaviours', if you do them that means, you are healthy. You are literally doing and creating health. I can see why it's attracts in this era of self actualisation.

At some point, a conjunction between diet believers trying to prop up their defunct credo switched to 'it's all about health' and healthists making thinness=health. They like to keep up with the latest health trends and dictates and the medical professions, doctors especially are hugely influential. This means that when the medical professions bought into the conflation of thinness with health- some say it was aimed at healthists or the 'worried well' of which they are a part- they went along with it.

Meanwhile fat healthists, who connected with the same healthy eating and exercise messages as everyone else, did A+B+C and liked it. They didn't become thin they remained fat, but they liked doing the behaviours and bought into the idea in it's original form-A+B+C = healthy.

The clash in short is A+B+C= healthy versus A+B+C= thin-healthy.

There are other definitions of health, the original medical one, the absence of disease. A lot of people feel that's too negative but it's hard to beat for making sense.

There is another one within medicine itself where if you have a chronic medical condition and doctors feel you are complying with their instructions and if your body is responding well, they'll call you healthy.

There's also the growth of the ideal of preventative medicine, which is represented by numbers. That is mainly blood pressure, cholesterol level, etc. These are said to be proven by medical studies to be linked with health outcomes, both good and ill at certain levels or numbers. There is conflicting evidence about this though.

If your numbers are said to be within the healthy ranges, then this is another way you can say you are healthy, although again, those who believe fatness is incompatible with health, dispute that this is a false when it comes to fat people who are a(nother) disease waiting to happen, thereby undermining the fundamental basis of these as indicators of health, as a whole.

I got the message too about what was defined as a healthful diet would =slimness and/therefore health. Health was like a big overlord telling me that the massive distance between me and it represented the true depths of my inner corruptness. There's me scrambling desperately flailing arms outstretched trying to get to 'Health-thin'. Couldn't manage it. Felt bad about it.

I could however state that I was healthy in the past medical sense of no apparent diseases, I saw this as an inheritance I was desperate not to 'squander' it due to my fatitude. I wasn't worried at all because I knew that no matter that I fell off the horse every day, every day I got back on and would tame the beast eventually by grinding down it's will.

Instead I ground down my ability to keep repeating the error.

It so happens that past the age of early childhood infections, I have had a pretty sound underlying physicality, though any possible complacency has been punctured by the endless 'obesity related' list and it's constant repetition. That has ended any sense of security that many haters wish ferverently to cling to. And the fact that I saw weight loss-that I didn't achieve- as part of my healthy quest.

The upshot of all this is I would never say, 'fat is healthy', because it's outside a meaningful understanding of health that refers to my understanding of it. It's refering to a position I don't operate from. It's not that I don't think there are things that tend to toward and against promoting health or more specifically well being, it's just that I don't feel it describes how I feel on any real level, mostly. My experiences have alienated me from it.

So I leave it to healthists-fat and thin- to slug this one out, they can relate.

Dieting death cult

So in the aftermath of the nightline "Is it OK to be fat?" episode. An embarrassingly presumptuous question to type out, granted. I was struck again by the mindset of MeMe Roth. Over and above her food fanaticism and rampaging fat phobia, I found her attitude towards her own family deeply odd.

Macabre, yet strangely unreal, as this whole crusade feels.

One the things she and others keep saying is that she hates this culture of giving up. Usually we answer that we haven't given up we're embracing a different way etc. Cool, but for me, that doesn't sufficiently hand it back to haters, because it is most definitely they who've given up, in more than one way.

Claiming something that has not worked to any large degree will start working apropos of nothing-through sheer repetition, is giving up on reality. Moreso, moving on to the prospect of finding something that actually might.

The way conservative types have become so frustrated in their inability to impose mindless obeisance to authority on the world, in an era that depends on endless innovation for personal survival has become a particular bane of fat people.

As they latch onto fat people as an avenue to play out their thwarted ideological frustrations, overlooking the fact that we've already epitomized exactly that.

Or perhaps its the other way around. They know this full well and wish to take advantage of the culture of denying reality to dodge this undermining of their fundamental belief system. That we all benefit from strong-i.e. brutish abusive, 'discipline', not matter how punitive and minimal in positive return.

Certainly, that is a giving up on a critical appraisal of your stance.

When she spoke of her family members who'd had succumbed to the dread obesity-her father's 300lbs and cannot run around like he used to and in her mothers case, diabetes. No one asked MR if she thinks it's OK for her folks to die because they cannot or will not do what she's doing, though she has rubbished them for this accepting that if they die they die. Even though she never says that they've been anything less than loving and supportive of her. 

I find her attitude genuinely incomprehensible.

She's certainly written them off.  Left them for dead she has. I wonder if its the dieting that makes her this angry.

Yoga

I do not consider myself to be an expert in yoga, far from it, but my ears always prick up when people dislike yoga intensely. It seems to be about the way it makes them feel. I understand. Watch makes me wonder is whether that's so much the asanas or that they bring the feelings we store in our bodies rudely back to our awareness.

A bit like the mental experience of revisiting the sight of a bad experience. It's not necessarily the place in itself, but how you feel about what happened there and the fact that it evokes those memories.

You'd want to stay away right. Perhaps though if you're with someone who you really like. One of those who can get you to shift your mood or attention. Then maybe, you could work through those feelings due to the introduction of different more positive feelings. Greater remove, analysis. Even just being more relaxed whilst feeling those feelings.

The dissipation of enough tension can at times do wonders.

For me, yoga is as much about principle.  

The use of breath. 

Breathing to release tension, relax and in motion. Breathing to release imagination, using that to increase the flow of energy.

The hardest thing for me is that moment when you are so stiff that you feel unsafe. Like some muscle or other's going to go pop or break! I've been known to give up. Especially when time after time, nothing changes. But if I prepare enough and am lucky, I've sometimes experienced the yielding that comes when the body lets go, with such elegance.

Like a flower opening.

There is no feeling quite like it. 

And guess what? It's made me just a little bit braver.

Ejector seat

I've had virtually nothing to say on the whole Kevin Smith got thrown of the plane furore.

To be frank, I felt no real emotional involvement whatsoever until I read this.

The story of KH's sister racing to their mother's deathbed by car, because of not wanting to deal with airplane trauma was truly shocking, that's what makes this whole thing real for me.

One point being missed by fatphobes is that 'watching your weight' can look like Kevin Smith. Because he is fat it's assumed to be a weight loss refusenik, when in fact he has in the recent past seen himself as someone who can lose weight .

Whilst I applaud anyone's raised consciousness I'd actually like him and others to begin to make connections between his attitude towards being fat and the contempt with which he is being treated. I'd like him to understand that his stance of appeasement doesn't make any difference to the way you're treated or indeed encourages this kind of dismissal. I just feel like hanging back making him a spokesman for FA, for now.

I don't know if he will see it as another pressure that doesn't necessarily reflect how he feels. However disingenuous that accusation is when thrown at us, I want him to come to it on his own terms. It's one thing to complain about ill treatment and another to join the dots and reject certain positions. From past experience, I'd like him to come to that understanding in his own time, rather than feeling like it's been foist upon him.

A binge about BED

Just seen this post, the discussion is interesting and shows yet again how proprietorial people feel about what is effectively a squatter in your house(your mind/body). It's interesting that this remark irked several commenters.

But binge eating is also a normal behavior

Too right, it is. Say it again, also, not only. The trouble with calling it 'binge' eating disorder, is it reflects the overall anxiety about over consumption, rather than being an adequate descriptor. It misses out what is almost inevitably the other side of the binge and that is the restriction, or even the mere threat of it.

The thing that joins virtually all forms of eating disorders/ disordered eating together is attempts to regulate either weight and/or eating. Though not an exclusive cause.

Eating is a vital function, we cannot do without it. That's obvious although it's a tribute to our current thinking that some people will actually argue with that.

The importance of saying that is if you wish to gain a proper understanding of any disorder of this kind, you must start from there.

It's necessary, therefore what happens in the body and in nature when something is necessary, it tends to have a lot of build in defences to ensure that it is carried out. As opposed to habits that may be important, but it a state of emergency, can be forgone.

Eating is not one of those things. Therefore the defences build in are not just at one level, they have the capacity to rise and increase to take account of the potential circumstances that can occur, such as starvation in the midst of nothing.

These has to be capable of being so powerful, as a last resort especially, that all other things pale into insignificance beside the overwhelming need to get something to eat.

When we are no longer used to this kind of lack, this kind of emergency, when we are used to if not plenty, certainly adequacy, then we may come to believe that eating signals are relatively gentile and polite.

This is an assumption too many are making, this is encouraged by the prissy attitude towards food and the elevation of latent disgust around the act of eating-that seems primal and base at times. There's a part of all of us that is sometimes disgusted that we actually have to perform the function of eating. Whether it's other people's table manners or foods that we hate, ever lurking amongst the potential for pleasure is resentment of having to do it, of feeling beholden or dependent on it. The fact that if we don't, pretty quickly, we will be ordered around by it and have to do it's bidding. Hence we seek to 'control' it, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's the crude way we often try that does us no favours.

The necessity of it means when our appetite and hunger setting rise up-when provoked by lack or the threat of it- we are very shocked to our 'civilised' core and often are hugely offended by it. We come to believe that a higher setting of hunger is somehow irrational, as we are at first overwhelmed by it and then ordered around like servant, and so it therefore qualifies as mental illness.

But if our bodies wish to evade our attempts to starve it into submission, in some cases to a point where we may damage our lives, what better way do we think our bodies can signal this? By psychic e-mail?

It's pretty clear, ramp up the signals, and eventually at some point, most people will crack, if they don't- if they are the inevitable outlier in their capacity to resist or parlay their hunger in some way- they'll almost certainly wish they could have.

The mental illness frame tends to just add fuel to the fire, and doesn't lend itself to effective way of looking at it tending to send people in the wrong direction and delaying effective remedy. Except in the case of anorexia, which is a far more acute disorder than the others. And no, that's not an insult or a downgrade, this is not something to get competitive over, consider yourself lucky that you have not succumbed to it.

I am not trying to minimize the shock and trauma of eating disorders and their effects, however, they are often caused by our own actions.

That isn't the same as saying, we asked for it, anymore than someone messing about on the piste who breaks their leg is asking for it either, however, actions taken may well have lent themselves towards having an accident.

Likewise our sometimes ignorant and reckless disregard for the sophisticated and yet hugely powerful instincts to nourish and replenish our bodies, our very lives, leads our vanity to take over thinking that we are in full control when we meddle and disrupt our eating and hunger mechanisms for the sake of 'health' or vanity.

So, bingeing can be and is normal, it is also usually the other side of restriction (or lack), it should be called restriction rebound disorder, because usually, that's what it is.

*I've edited this, because, hey; it's better

Corrective

Simon Jenkins has written a corrective of the arrogance of scientists. He's had the bare faced nerve to remind some of the more insecure of them that they're human beings. As opposed to the masters (usually) of rationality too many of them fancy themselves to be.

He stated basic and evident fact, that a lot of scientist aren't very bright and plenty of them are impatient with the very method they claim ownership of. Presuming as they are so brilliant, others must not know what they know can leave a person exposed.

Being expected to flatter the is one thing. Being expected to pretend we are so much more stupider than we are, becomes intolerable. Some clearly think it's unseemly of us not to wait from them to give us permission to think or to notice anything in the world around us or in our own bodies.

There is no failure, only feedback

Liver disease scientists look for ways to remedy liver conditions.

Lung disease scientists look for ways to remedy lung conditions.

Obesity scientists look for ..................... what exactly?

How many ways, fatness is a boo boo? How much fatties really should be quaking? How to perpetuate obesity science for the benefit of those employed by it?

Not the last one, that would be cynical. People like that are in it for the good of humankind.

Either way, the 'purpose' of obesity research doesn't seem to match the others, does it?

You don't have a dog and bark yourself as we say over here. Scientists are the dogs by the way.
If any of them wish to 'cure' fatness no one's stopping them. There has never been a point at which I've doubted for one second that the human body can shed weight as easily as it can gain it.
When you look at what the body can do and does, the way it forms and grows, all to a plan. it doesn't begin to be plausible on any level that a body that can gain weight, cannot lose it. For each and every force there is an equal and countervailing one.

That doesn't tell us whether its an opposite route to the original one or by some other pathway/s entirely. Just because you perceive one way, doesn't mean you can understand the other merely by reversing it. Brainy people know that better than any of us.

In fact, such is the response to induced weight loss by the body, it throws doubt on whether the route of weight gain itself is exactly as we think. It makes you wonder, is dieting the opposite of the way the body gains weight gain at all? Surely it would work better and be less painful if it was? I mean, think how painful weight gain is for most people most of the time; then think of dieting.

We are talking a chasmic difference.
How many gain weight in the Morgan Spurlock way, using his conscious and deliberate feeder diet? Beforehand, Spurlock had spent years on what was (for him) a highly restricted diet. Not wholly according to his own desires according to him, but to fit with his partner who is vegan. He planned his eating beforehand, based on dictates other than internal ones. To find out what would happen. Apparently he felt like really bad. It just so happens weight loss dieters don't feel to good either when they override their needs and requirements too.

No shit Spurlock.

Oh come on, it had to be done.

I wouldn't like to speculate. Moi? What I do know is if you try something and expect it to work and it doesn't. You find out why and use that information to take you toward what does.

If you are not doing that, if you behave like someone a in such a state of shock who can only repeat endlessly, it must be right, it just must be.

You tend to be seen as out of your gourd.

As the man said, the definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. If you are presenting what doesn't amount to much as that which amounts to what you want, you are presenting nothing by making it look like it is something. That's the point where you show you've accepted failure.

So when people talk of 'giving up' and 'failure', the only failure here, is the refusal to accept the truth, as it is and move on to finding a legitimate way to connect with that. Instead you keep the cycle of failure in motion. Nobody who's tried a diet, or attempted to try or who's tried 'healthy eating' and couldn't hack it, is a failure. Not at all.

Shocked by fat fetishization

Thanks to Bri, I've come across this odd piece that reveals yet again that when fatness is not defined or informed by fat people or rational observation of us, it's all about those who are defining it.

Their preoccupations, their fetishes. Their creepy untrammelled unconscious that they usually keep repressed, maybe they don't even know it's there. Maybe it's even created by the decision to yield to fat phobia itself. Liberation of that subterranean hinterland is rarely pretty. But when this kind of crap is aimed at childhood, or those barely out of it, you wonder why these people don't remember themselves a bit more.

Their unprompted unconscious is showing a lot more than we want to see. Whether it's paedo appraisal of every aspect of a children and youngsters physiques, usually by women, presumably feeling they can get away with this sort of nonsense due to the apocryphal pretense that we can hardly be interested in the barely legal and stuff like that.

I actually feel that it is fat hate spreading to various areas of the mind, on the power of it's own momentum and the nature of sexual desire itself that promotes this effect and it's voyeuristic compulsions.

It's funny, she did seem to feel a little bit dirty about it too, describing herself as glad that the object of her affections hadn't notice her gawk eyed lasciviousness of the youngster she was observing, rather than a sudden awareness of the power this unexpected re-route had over her.

It gives a whole new meaning to the expression, "fat porn", which is supposed to be those weight loss programmes on TV, clearly those people don't get out much.

She actually manages to inveigle the reader as a co conspirator with her "attention to detail". I feel like I'm seeing a part of her I didn't really want to see like if she just posted a picture of her naughty bits.

First the drooling set up;

She was sitting with her back to me as I entered the ice cream place with my kids. She was very big – most likely not just medically overweight, but obese.

I think it's because she tells us three times in succession, what a big girl she is, that it reads like the set up to soft porn.

As she was waiting to buy her own crackscream, she surreptitiously glanced at her, again.

The author tells us how young and nubile this young lady was. About her fast mouth and her extra large cone in one hand. Oh, stop it! 'Feverishly texting', because how often do the youth text at more than a older person's snail's pace?

Then we start getting towards the money shot;

'She looked almost drugged – drugged with sugar I guess.'

Oh, by no means Mz Thing, it's you who sounds drugged and hypnotized. I bet when you managed to tear your eyes away they made a noise like breaking suction.
In the tradition of this kind of thing she has to flog a stereotype, she tells us of the orgasmic level of pleasure us fattez get from eatin'. Facility with hands also gets a special mention.

It was obvious that the eating and texting were giving her intense pleasure, soothing her.

Oh, rilly?

Well do me a favour love, buy an ice cream and pleasure yourself, see how long it takes you not to be able to eat then tell us that orgasm is compatible with eating.

It's a little unnerving if young fat people, especially if made shier by their fatness, could be subject not simply to disapproval, but the projection of this dubious kind of gaze, but I suppose that this kind of thing maybe inevitable. That doesn't make it any less edifying.I kept wondering why people keep mentioning their sex organs when it comes to any discussions around fatness.

It's always the excuse that it was the other person, never you. You were just "innocently" minding your own beeswax.

Unfortunately our intrepid authorette remembers back to this little episode as a cautionary tale, when thinking of fat acceptance. (your guess is as good as mine).

If you're feeling a bit queasy at that thought, you are not alone.

And if anyone knows the secret of getting a textingicecreameatingorgasm.
Feel free to share.

Cutting children

Over at BFB This story.

The teen, who became obese after surgery to remove a brain tumour, cringes as she recalls the humiliation she felt when she couldn't fit into the chair attached to the desk in her Grade 9 classroom.

The girl in question, Stephanie Atwood, was 9 years old when she had surgery to remove her pituitary gland which had been damaged by a tumour. The article says her body no longer signalled fullness and she became hungry moments after eating. If that's the case, and that's the whole of the problem- she weighed 348 pounds by the age of 15-why would baratric surgery be the preferred treatment? Why's there nothing to resolve that particular issue?

Cutting people can relieve a burden of weight. Indeed Stephanie says after losing 100 she feels as if she "got her life back", but what about that symptoms? People get to the point where they just have to rid themselves of some weight as the effects on their mind are becoming intolerable. She is now 18, and spoke of how she was ostracized and her social circle shrank due to her fatness.

When she should have been able to enjoy feeling glad to be alive, like a survivor, she had energy drained through feeling abandoned.  Equally though, what if this symptom cannot be tamed by cutting? And why is this an acceptable standard for children?

A group has been formed to cope with 'demand' from children. It's called, STOMP which stands for SickKids Team Obesity Management Program. Yep, you did just read that. A good doctor involved understands just how we might feel about it. He says that those against cutting children into thinness, haven't met them.

They have to understand that obesity is a disease like any other. No, Dr Langer, that's just where you are wrong, for many reasons, but the number one being that with other 'diseases' science and medicine are  focused around finding things that 'cure' or reverse those diseases.  Rather than what fits into a rigid ideology of what kind of solution that must be.

I have said times without number that I don't have a problem with weight loss, so provide it. Instead, you provide a variation on the failed energy manipulation. And that's why you're cutting up sick kids and I don't know why not even that moves you.

Their care will be overseen by an interdisciplinary team made up of a dietitian, psychologist, exercise therapist, nurse practitioner and endocrinologist.

That's five types of professional. Excluding surgeons, doctors, etc., Rest assured that this will be offered as a last resort;

Surgery will be offered as a last resort only to severely obese adolescents who can't drop pounds despite counselling, diet, exercise and medication.

So after all this, we'll just cut you into it. Dr Jill Hamilton the director of the programme says;

"We really stress that the surgery is a tool, it's not a fix,".......patients are expected to stay in the program for about two years during which time they must attend support groups.

Well, support is a good thing, I daresay these teens will need as much as they can get.

"I was at a dead end before the surgery ... For me it was a life-or-death situation," 

Can't argue with that. It's the adults who need to do better than this. 

Stasis

Believing that you don't care about your health, is demoralizing. That its not from your own assessment of genuine internal feelings but being convinced about it by those you trust with your life turns you into a sucker.

Though you may not be consciously aware. There's a part of you that knows the score. Therefore there is an internal sense of opposite understandings. This can create a yawning chasm between what you want to do and what you can do. And there you stay, alienated from your own physicality and putting into effect positive change that could stick.

It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks of those changes, it's the fact that you cannot do what you want to do. That you should start from you because you are important enough for that.

The 'diagnosis' of greedy and lazy actually acts as a kind of rationale or excuse as those who taunt fat people like to state.

Rather than being able to perceive and perhaps deal with the real barriers. 

Hate doesn't work?

I'm afraid it does.

Lovely fragrant Golda Poretsky tells us it doesn't make your health better, true, but that's not really the point.

We are talking about facilitating weight loss dieting.

Notice I didn't say facilitating weight loss, as we know, weight loss dieting rarely can deliver that on a permanent basis.

Self hate takes the horse to water, but can't make it drink as the drinking part would be the WLD efficacy.

When we aim for something, our able servant the brain attempts to bring that about, often in the most unpromising of circumstance. This is what it is built to do, just like your heart is built to beat.

When we push it to attempt things in ways that are not conducive to delivering our requirements, that pressure pushes it to do some strange things.

For instance, if you've ever had a crossword habit, you know that when you can't answer a clue, you urge your brain on, hoping that it has gone blank because it's searching your memory bank for the answer, rather than you just don't know it.

At some point you'll find that if it's the latter, your brain starts spewing up all sorts of words that you know cannot possibly be right. It's been forced to resort to the fantasy of supplying the right answer as opposed to actually having the right answer.

This is the famous fat people don't know what they eat line. Several studies show that fat people underguesstimate what we eat more than others. This is supposed to be significant because diet didacts insist that knowing exactly how much you eat is the key to being and becoming thin.

Leaving aside the fact that the body calculates it's own energy needs on a moment to moment basis without any conscious input. I mean how are we supposed to just know how much we need to correctly replenish our cells right now? If I had to think about that, how would I be able to think enough to type this?

The disparity they are observing is that the more pressure you put on yourself to deliver weight loss through a means the body is designed to fight off, ferociously, the more the brain delivers up the illusion of keeping to calorie restriction as opposed to actually achieving it, which it is designed to thwart at almost any cost.

Fat people are no less aware than anyone else of what we eat, if we subject to the same level, or lack of pressure they were. Certainly a lot of what slim people say about 'why' they are thin is highly suspect as they are subjecting themselves to a similar level of pressure as fat people, just in a different direction.

Having taken the cals in/out bait they have to see themselves as diligent, how can you say, people are fat because they don't pay attention to what they eat and then be thin and say you don't pay any more attention to what you eat?

You have to assume, to feel that you are, and the brain will step in with a bit of conformation bias, a bit of overemphasis of whatever activity level you think you are reaching and bingo, you've got a thin person who watches themselves like a hawk.

The underlying basis is the same, shoring up calorie monitoring as viable weight control method.

Our assumption is, we internalize fat hatred and then attempt to escape this bind with WLD.

It would be more accurate to say that WLD only begins to make sense in a context of self hatred yourself because that is the context most conducive to self abuse. This surround hides and numbs the discomfort and pain of attempting to starve yourself, the point of pain is to prevent and/or limit damage.

There are variations, some are able to diet with equanimity, at least some of the time. However for most of us, many aspects of trying to lose weight via dieting makes lowered self esteem an inevitability.

That is why we are told straight up that we should hate ourselves and be ashamed of ourselves. Everyone knows that hatred and dieting have a symbiosis and that's not limited to fat people, it's available to anyone who involves themselves in this habit.

That also is a big fuel for fat hating of others. I don't know how much this perception was instinctive or planned, but the fact that every weight group has been roped into the necessary for self denial and calorie consciousness is why anti fat hysteria has managed to reach this peak.

Without it, it's hard to see how fat people how an abstract hate could penetrate the abject indifference others would feel about fatness and fat people. Underneath it all, people don't give a fig about fatness and fat people, in the same way most of us don't give a fig about dieters and dieting. Venom of this pitch this to have a context and roots.

Big fat lies

There I was minding my own beeswax then I happened upon this. I don't even agree with all of it, yet no sanity watchers points required, even the comments are somewhat muted. As the writer Hannah Sutter shows it is entirely possible to discuss the area of weight, diet et al in a perfectly civil manner.

Undoubtedly this is something to do with the fact that she directs her disappointment at the government and politicians, rather than the sainted medical profession.