Wednesday 29 May 2013

Not Opposite

Despite mathematical sub literacy; see, I can't even feel the term innumeracy, actually that's correct. I can't always read maths. I have never gotten on with this courant use of 'binary'. To mean  erm, polarity. Binary has nothing to do with polarity. It's actually a digit system, like from 0-9, except it  goes from 0-1. That's either mind bendinginly complex or too simple to be believed.

I'm feeling the former. There has always been something awry about being a versed in a number system of ten numbers, ergo seeing one consisting of a 'mere' two= 'opposites'.

Kind of embarrassingly parochial wouldn't you say?

Polarity is opposing forces that are magnetically linked. Our minds often default anything thought remotely to be paired thus. And like a double ended pen. Whilst you're concentrating on writing at your end, the other is writing the converse, in the air.

We think of a construct and write it's opposite through that and vice versa. Perhaps we assign either to some trait or other and fuse them. Fat and slim (some say thin) have become opposites. Saying it like that, the error seems obvious. Yet it appears to have happened without stating it openly. Just like the misuse of binary systems.

I have never gotten on with this. I am a fat person. I do not identify as fat, well, not in a way that separates me in an oppositional manner from being slim. Slim people are not opposite to me. I do not feel this. I have not bonded to identifying the experience of fatness as writing slimness as countervailing it. 

This is good.  I'd go so far as to call it excellent.

When people talk about being a slim person, I feel they could be talking about me. If they're not, it's a product of differing treatment and experience. Originally, a lot of trying to describe fat experience is wanting to offer slim people some information about themselves. Who said "Nothing human is foreign to me"?  (Terence)

"Fat" is "slim". Pathologizing fatness, this is dodged or goes unnoticed. Indeed, many slimz tell themselves off, by shouting things at fat people. Whereas fat people tend to shout at ourselves. Like when slimmer folks "feel fat," Fat people feel this-if we do-about our actual fat selves. We do not insist we "feel slim" to say we feel crappy.

Things that are undesired can be called "obesity related", nothing to do with slimz. So no flies on them. Except there are and some part of them knows it. Which pisses them off no end (with us).

Differing experience plays up different features of our humanity, making it so richly felt in others, that they can transmit it to us, is so real and complete a way that it becomes more than a passing thought. Or a shallow observation.

'Obesity' degrades the humanity of fat people, in doing so it degrades the humanity of everyone else too. Not only in agreeing to such nonsense and that there could be a reason,  but also regardless of the costs to them and everyone else. Does it need saying that this reveals a depth of self contempt? Things we need to say need to be heard by all because they make up part of our collective consciousness of being this funny animal we call human.

Or metaphysics as some might call it.

Slimness has tried to take over humanness and officially evicted fat people from sharing in that. The effects of this are as invidious as the origins are misguided. Defining fatness as bad for fat people, effectively posits fatness as something that happens to a slim body. Which simply is not only stupid, it undermines people's sense of self.

Which enables the docility and passivity many associate with their view of bovine fatness. They may not mind, thinking they're oh so separate-such is the fatuous individualism that has taken hold- except across whole populations, trust me, it brings us all down.

The notion behind this is deliberately not stated as, fat people have worse outcomes that whomever. If that's what people need to propose, they should say it. The endless, praise, complement and often worship of slimness through critiquing fatness (as oppositional) isn't good.

I can't hold with all this. That's my fat acceptance. I accept, I recognize I am human-for "fat" read human if that makes it easier. And that no one else needs to define or confirm for me thanks. Due to knowledge of ones homo sapience being intrinsic and all.

Friday 24 May 2013

No Questions asked, No answers to give

'Obesity treatment' continues to be even more scant than long term weight loss dieting "success." To illustrate what this means for those looking for real answers. See the story of Falicia and her mother Earlene Johnson. Who just wanted to find out why her eleven year old daughter is 400 pounds.

You'd think that would be a reasonable request. Concerned mother who's been following the rules since 2007 wants further inquiry, resolution and probably reassurance from specialists. Unsurprisingly, beyond the usual diet and exercise. Nothing doing. Ms Johnson and Falicia were referred by the child's paediatrician to the ironically named Children's Mercy Hospital. Where they offered her succinct but utterly useless white coat fat phobia.

They believed Falicia was eating too much and that her mother could stop it. Trans. we have nothing and we're going to make someone else feel bad about that.  I have to commend the mother on her calm approach, it's a priceless gift for her daughter.



The hospital effectively failed child and mother. Refusing to do any blood work-though Falicia has had plenty and has been well monitored-to try and find a cause once and for all. Now the story becomes odd as next day, the mother was met by Missouri's child services. The hospital had apparently "hotlined" her claiming her daughter had a disease called "blout"(?)

Something that doesn't appear to exist in humans.

Either way, they'd effectively refused to investigate. A later one showed the child's blood sugar and cholesterol to be in the acceptable range.

The point of this sorry little tale is we cannot get beyond ELDM even for the sake of the children. What's worse of course is that this hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Once accused it is virtually impossible to refute. Which is supposed to take it outside the realms of evidenced based.

[I'm so diplomatic today!]

Even if that assumption has validity, you're not out of the woods. Excuse the usual inflammatory reporting here, it is unpleasant.


Now it's clear seven year old Jessica has both the issue of speedy weight gain/high weight and dysfunctional appetite and hunger signals-which simply aren't switching off despite being responded to. That is incidentally, how we all eat. We respond to our hunger and appetite signals, that's what they are for. If there are too many, or they're constant and unresponsive to eating, that is what needs to be addressed. If only to relieve perpetual torment.

If you haven't experienced this, do not imagine the rubbish you hear about 'food addiction' or binge eating describes this properly, or just how unbearable it is. It is some kind of imbalance in the brain and/or nervous system.

Jessica was taken into a paediatric hospital and put on a strict calorie controlled diet and exercise programme. Under the aegis of child services. 

Here's a follow up to that intervention at an 'obesity' clinic.



So problem solved.

Except it isn't. All that happened is one symptom has been removed-weight. Though relieving the weight on her body. It also leaves behind 20 pounds of loose skin-which she will be operated on to remove. It is assumed that's a product of weight loss after the stretch of higher weight.  It's more a sign of the shock low energy weight loss dieting is to the system. Making it an apt metaphor. What has shrunk the body has left the underlying equation the same. Just taking up less space, within its larger creation. 

Leaving the poor person to do a whole lot of teeth gritting. Forcing herself to exercise 5 days a week, forcing herself to eat less and to not eat certain things. Walking through a ceaseless mental forest of an ever present urge.

Her malfunctioning high appetite and hunger are left intact. How to convey this, ever tried to stay up all night? Ever get to the point where it becomes excruciating to remain awake and it's second by second effort of concentration and will? Imagine feeling an urge that strong all. the. time.

Would you deem that 'addiction'? No, it's an actual imperative to do something, not a deficiency. A basic visceral urge like, a phobia-which isn't a normal fear, but sometimes kind of worse and more pressing.

Addiction is a craving for something your body lacks. Not drugs, but the pleasure or reward chemicals your body reduced the function of, when they were being taken in an artificial or outside source habitually. To stop you overdosing. People want the drugs because their system isn't recovering.

The reasons behind seeing this malfunction as 'addiction' are why poor Jessica has nothing but some pills-yet another junked up child courtesy of  'healthcare'- to try and battle through a constant pressure. It's the kind of pain that doesn't hurt like a cut, but that takes you to the edge of your emotional endurance nonetheless.

That's why she cries out. You can see what her mother was responding to. Luckily the people at the clinic remained strong and set her straight, by the admirable 'discipline' of not giving a shit.

I cringe at the thought that these kinds of pills will do anything to deal with the problem. You can cheat neuroses like depression to some degree, but not a mechanical failing like this. Where real understanding i.e. science is required.

This is why I get angry, because children like these get caught up by this mindless zombie cult of the obesity void. They should have been able to depend on us grown ups getting our act together by now, instead they have to inherit this fiasco. What has to happen, what do these children have to go through, before it is enough?

By now, there should have been major investigation into how to switch these signals down. If they had, Jessica and others like her would never have reached the point she did.

By now there should have been a thorough mapping out of how human metabolism functions.

If the desire to help was there it would have produced something by now. To do that you have to recognize what you don't have. Many eyes are stuck on the magic bullet legend. But it's the caring for people, continually trying to meet their needs, that has so often given medicine direction and ideas.

Without that there's what? The hatred of fat adults, is one thing, but transferring that to children is unconscionable. The indulgence ought to be put aside for them. But the health establishment simply will not. Instead of reporting parents to child services, they should be reporting "obesity science" to some authority for being uselessly irrelevant and out of touch with actual needs.

Look at what other fields have achieved in the time wasted on one punitive, ineffectual strategy. How long will this go on?

In my case, which wasn't as serious as Jessica's appears to be. I was lucky to stumble upon an answer by mistake. After I took up meditation and other calming techniques for symptoms of anxiety that were threatening to overwhelm me.

I do not extrapolate for the heck of it, but I'm pretty sure this strongly suggests that it is possible to find some predictable, repeatable, in other words scientific way to reduce excess hunger and appetite signals significantly. Without drugs.This is systemic imbalance, not acquired habit. It is not caused by food. It is the mechanics of the nervous system and it's affect on metabolism. There is hope, there are answers.

But only if science actually bothers to look.

Friday 17 May 2013

Fat People as Personification of Bingeing, part 1

Whether it's those thin/slim anorexics who use "the fat person in the mirror" as a metaphor for why they're starving.  Or the bitterness of people who see fat people as representing the thing inside them which made them fail to become anorexic.A certain type of slim person is still using fatness and fat people to express their personal psychodramas. If this unpleasant interlude is to be brought to a close, this kind of appropriation needs to end.

Teevee presenter Mika Brzezinski is a warrior against 'obesity'. She neglected to tell folks that she's had bulimia for years. In her mind fat people represent her urge to binge. I'm serious, the construct says so. Yet, the truth she represents runs counter to this.

That some slimz can out eat most fatz any day of the week. Mika roped her friend Diane Smith into a joint effort, her to stop bingeing and gain 10 pounds and be "okay with that." (All about weight). Diane who'd gained 100 pounds in the 15 years of their friendship, was to lose 75.

"Weight problem" i.e fatness = Eating problem kind of sums it up. Apparently Smith was appalled when she was call F-A-A-T by Brzezinski. She even used the word zomgobese. Brzezinski made big play of the beloved denialist trope when Smith's idea of herself was more than likely formed when she was slim. 

We'll forget that if the usual assumptions are true, the remedy would have been the same for both-stabilize eating-desired results follow. Rather than one swapping an ED for normality, the other a perhaps ED-I can't tell-for the impersonation of another one.

That's not nitpicking. People keep theorizing the 'cause' of fatness, yet can never demonstrate this through reversal of said 'cause' rolling back fatness. Dieting's indicates another fail.

By casting fat people as disease, "obesity" casts us with the uniformity our brains associate with disease. In the minds of those who accept this definition, fat people become one (fat) person. What goes for one, goes for all. Hence this absurdly unscientific, if one fat person can become slim you all can. If one fat person can sustain a lifestyle ED, you all can!!

This is as ridiculous as presuming all slim people have binge eating disorder because Mika does.

From Brzezinski's book;
How does a person who is not overweight write about her lifelong obsession with overeating without sounding like a narcissistic, woe-is-me skinny girl.
How about just telling your story? I eat like a fat person is supposed to, yet I'm not even chubby. And it's nothing to do with self control. Unless that's what you call bulimia, which let's face it, many do secretly.

Well, what do we expect? You've got the requirement to become or remain slim, with the emphasis in recent times on "because it's healthy." That puts pressure on people to do it in a healthy manner, which is even less efficient than unhealthy ways, making it harder to admit what might be going on.

Appetite and hunger can easily become levers for the body to maintain mental/mood balance in the face of stresses that threaten to sink your mood regulation. She seemed very nervous in that interview, still full of disgust from her rather amusing "Nutella" story (plz, it's not crack). All she was describing there was the product of the suppression of this lever, without resolving any underlying issues. Yet she was talking about how it felt like "addiction."

The capacity and power of appetite and hunger is not just as we see it. It's capable of far more than that if the trigger is there, or our system is sensitive enough. Proper scientists, need to deal with that and we need to learn to learn techniques to manage our internal stress and anxiety as a part of our mindset, like bathing every day. We definitely need to teach them to children.

Monday 13 May 2013

Losing the biscuit gambit

the plate of biscuits lands like a gauntlet on the table. If I decline to eat one, I am a calorie-phobic priss who's terrified of displaying weakness in public. If I eat one, I defy my burgeoning rep (thanks to the previous profiles) as an ascetic, and I am a liar: lose-lose.
The cals in/out trap inevitably spreading its tentacles to slim people. We said it would didn't we? So many thought they'd be immune, due to the status of slim. Alas, overspill's a bitch.

Once you accept weight as the direct product of energy intake defined as conscious choice, all weight becomes a choice. Eating or non-eating act comes under scrutiny to a point where it becomes suffocating and curiously undermining of your self expression.

Having been used to at least the idea that judgement on you is somewhat affected by what you say and a clear reading of what you do. It's a strange reversal when the narrative assigned to your body get in first all the time. Acting as a slow growing barrier between what you would like to project and what others would project onto you. Skewering the balance against in their favour, silencing you without necessarily telling you to shut up.

The complete disassociation from fatness and fat people means other people become disconnected from what they are potentially accepting about themselves, through other human beings. The mechanics of divide and conquer.

Shriver herself has overlooked a hell of a lot to get to the point where this was the lightening rod for her to come to a greater realization about weight, because she felt it personally. That seems like a waste to me, especially for an artist.

My biscuit or cake gambit and a lot of others is the giving "permission" to eat one. Others assuming fatz must want to eat constantly, which then enables them to eat things they feel they should resist. What these people cannot do is to eat them in front of a fat person, if they aren't.

I got a death stare over that once from a slender woman this way.  I'm not blaming her. But would she any more than I have thought the overspill of a crusade against fat people would cause her to stare at some fat woman rigid with rage?

Fat people's whole life have become LS's biscuit issue. The crumbs have been going down the wrong way for a long time now. That's why fat acceptance, debates around beauty don't mean diddly compared to this. So let's please stop defining people as disease, so we all can at least know what we're signing up for.

Thursday 9 May 2013

Trigger Warning: Dieting

It takes a gainer to tell us something of what (weight loss) dieting would look more like if our view wasn't distorted by it's valourization. To the point of replacing ideas of what normal eating is like.

Tammy Jung is force feeding herself to gain weight. Her goal weight is 30 stones(420 pounds), at the moment she's at a paltry 250 (what a slacker). Well, she as a teen she was 8 stone (112 pounds), played sport-football and volleyball.

She always "felt fat", not good enough that is. Now, she is fat-if she can maintain it and whilst she doesn't feel good enough-yet, she does feel a sense of contentment. "Womanly" in fact.

Sport probably helped sharpen her competitive instincts. Teaching her about how pushing yourself through discomfort and pain barriers can feel like a noble end in itself. Encouraging discipline and sticking to your task, till the bitter end.

As well as building up quite an appetite to follow through on later. 

She weighs herself twice daily, using the readings to inform the balance of what and how much she'll eat subsequent to that. For instance, what she'll have for breakfast. Portion control is a must, as opposed to just mindlessly being in line with her needs and responding to them. Just like any other successful weight watcher.

She has to keep a keen eye on the scales, keeping track, making sure to catch any potential reversal of her sense of achievement.

There's always lots of pride available from exercising power over nature, in the form of changing your body through the management of your intake. You did that! All rather uber frauen. You didn't just leave it to chance.

Suspending mere need for a greater goal is a question of delaying gratification.

And don't forget the potential for drama too.  The suffering of having melted ice cream poured down a funnel to your throat.

Not because it meets your needs, but because it goes down when you can't eat any more solids. I think that's a tip!

Her boyfriend adores her at any size, so long as that's big. And is fully supportive and involved in helping her police her diet, to the point of seeming to be the principle food buyer and preparer.

Well, she has other things on her mind, like performing the intricate mathematics of her calorie intake and maintaining her man pleasing figure. Her diet is very expensive, costing as much as £70.00 in specially prepared food (take out).

Her doctor doesn't approve, they tend to object to dieting as we know.

She has been entrepreneurial enough to produce on-line video's featuring herself, doing various things, like ingesting calorie dense foods for the edification of paying BBW fanciers.

Jung did not indicate her regime with regard to activity. So the article was far from comprehensive. Though she was shown lounging around, she failed to show sufficient effort in moving around, so she could be missing a trick there. 

Wednesday 8 May 2013

Professional Niceties

Asking the question;
Are doctors nicer to patients who aren't fat? 
Is all very well, but it's really about maximizing their ability to practice medicine.The problem with their professional sulk about fatness, is that it can get in the way of their professionalism.

It also reduces their own satisfaction, it must be galling to have contrived to feel someone's taking up your time unnecessarily. That only adds to fat patients original sin;
......doctors are trained to deal with immediate medical problems that have specific solutions, like a pill to lower blood pressure or emergency treatment for a heart attack. But obesity is a far more complex problem that isn’t easy to solve, and that can be frustrating to doctors. “When we can’t fix what is broken we tend to behave badly,” he [Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Yale-Griffin University Prevention Research Center] said.
It's been noted. Along with seeing the bulk of patients as more difficult to examine, handle and perform surgery on apart from the highly profitable weight loss surgery where there's understandably a more "we shall overcome" attitude.

We've so taken for granted the emollient of professional sympathy, that it seemed just to be about being nice.

I was brought up with the idea that doctors would treat murderous dictators, serial killers, anyone, about all, it was a case of ethics. They'd sworn an oath to uphold this. That meant something. Compare that with their resentful fat phobia.  

It should also be remembered that this is not about "general attitudes". The people in white coats helped sell this to the public on the back of their unquestioned gravitas. Whilst I have little patience with fat phobia, 'blaming' fatness on the fat public and fat phobia on slim hoi polloi is a pretence I'm prepared to enter into.

This is a subtler aspect of the attempt to set up the mythical fat v slim battle, many in authority are desperate for, to obscure their own cynical misbehaviour.

Divide and conquer, always.  Slim folk from around your way, did not invent 'obesity/obese'. And we all know  that.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

Amour Propre, Amour de Soi

Amour propre is the self esteem that comes through the esteem of others. It's also more popularly refers to the image or reputation for esteem associated with those with higher status in society. In essence though, it refers to regard one gets from others and then feels oneself.

Armour de soi is literally, love of self. It is innate self regard. We are born that way. Our regard for ourselves is fused intimately with our existence and is indivisible from our awareness of that. Just like other living creatures. It doesn't occur to us to not like ourselves.

It doesn't actually feel like romantic love, which is often a false and hyped up idea of what love can be when mixed with sexual desire and some other stuff we won't go into here. 

Human beings especially seem to be made up of both inside out and outside in self love. Though it seems to be observable in (other) animal kingdoms.

What we learn is not so much to hate ourselves, or even to love ourselves. We learn to put things in between our inner self love and develop an armour propre. And they either support or cause our ability to heart ourselves to implode.

Too many clauses in the way of what just was, before.

We do need to learn to defend that self love from attacks not all of which by any means come in hate. And moreover, when the inevitable fall from the grace of self love is pressing enough, we must learn to repair and restore it.

It is a strange feature of our modern era that amour propre seems to have outstripped the latter to such a degree that the latter is dismissed by some as almost mythical, 'fake' or even oppressive imposition. This is a product of many influences mainly commercial inclined. Here provides a steady stream of routes in which to love oneself from the outside in.

Fat people who have other social value are learning what those of us accorded less all round have had to realise sooner. That a revival of the amour de soi is indeed possible and inevitable once ones amour propre is trashed by all and sundry.

You can see some of the above reactions are what can occur when the fat, nor other imperative isn't present. The cultivation of amour de soi feels somewhat artificial, irritating, if not down right vulgar.

Some of it is class. Middle class self regard is rigidly regulated from the outside, in the groupings they form together. Amour de soi, associated as it is with our original 'wild' animalistic lower status can feel almost grotesque in comparison to the subtle internalized cues of bourgeois esteem.

Self love, does not have to be perfect, nor can it be. We humans have not evolved to that point. If you participate in society's built more on AP, you can't expect to transcend that wholly. But changing the balance in favour of A de S is perfectly legitimate and does not need to be justified or even explained to anyone who doesn't feel the need for it.

That's sometimes how it is when you're not seeing things from the same angle.