Munch

After the low standard of obesity related research it's refreshing cleansing at times to view things through the eyes of intelligent curiosity rather than the distorted lens of pre-ordained conclusion.

Normally I wouldn't have watched *(there's a shorter linked clip below) a programme about the effects of cannabis. I happened to see the start and was drawn in by the feel of it plus some nice looking computer animation involving the brain.

It used this to show how cannabis affects the brain especially. One example followed the ingestion of cannabis through food. It's most potent chemical THC gets to the brain entering through the bloodstream via the walls of the small intestine. It goes up the spine through the back of the neck, into the brain and on to the cells of the hypothalamus a gland in the brain which the programme narration said is the "control centre" for hunger.

It's featured in this *clip by the way around 3:30 minutes in, it goes on to say that the THC locks on to the receptors of these cells and floods the cell bodies with messages to seek out food.

"Whether they are hungry or not. Most people just call this the munchies and...."

.....they are almost impossible to resist.

Try to imagine such a clear non-emotive conclusion being reached if cannabis was associated with fatness. Then give up quickly, because you barely can. It would be tripped up by the fixation on fat people as eaters, we are nothing if not that preferably 'over'. That lack of clarity is one of the ways many fat people are dogged by the underlying sense that thin people are real in a way they just aren't.

That's the irony at the heart of the "real women" debacle and helps to explain its traction amongst some fat(ter) women.

When things happen to thinz, they happen to real human beings that goes without saying, when things happen to fatz, they happen to the 'obese pathology' not a real person.

This for me is what accepting your body is really about, recovering that sense of yourself as real, as a unit of humanity in which humanness can be observed. Rather than being distorted to serve the needs of a caricature.

It's about wanting to be able to take your reality for granted enough to have a clear idea of what can be understood and what's left to find out.

To emerge from the fiction of fatness, which makes our more complex and human reality seem like the lie.

The munchies munchies can be recognized because it happens to real people, note this link conflates fatness and desire to eat and doesn't mention it potentially being applied directly to those who've lost their appetite through illness or treatment of illness.

This flooding process which produces an overriding desire to eat might well be occurring during the compulsive eating process or hyperphagia as its called. I just found out today.

And this poses something I hadn't considered before, the signal that tell you to eat or get food is not as one with hunger. Which gives a way of grasping why the assumption that CED is about pleasure is not often correct.

So obvious when I think about it, that must be part of why anorexics can feel the pain of excruciating hunger and yet feel totally unable to eat. A disconnect has occurred between the hunger and the imperative to eat. I think of hunger as an all body process which collates its findings so to speak in the conscious brain, rather than them originating there as we are told.

But it didn't occur that this conglomeration of information trips something else that is not an extension of it.