Weight has Purpose

Looking at this rather predictable effect of increased alcoholism after surgically induced weight loss (or should that be thought of that as tissue loss?) One has to wonder how much restricted access to scientific findings-too many paywalls-is affecting scientific knowledge amongst scientists;

A small group of scientists gathered last week at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to share ideas about a medical mystery: the increasing evidence that some types of weight loss surgery affect not just the stomach, but the brain as well.

That last line is a bit of a doozy. The stomach area has the second highest concentration of nerve cells outside the brain. So what "increasing evidence" would that be when this has been well known for aeons? And indeed that last link reflects the fact that it's been known of in far Eastern and Ayurvedic medicine. It even affects their attitude to posture, you can still see this.

I also get a bit agitated when clear leads are given by human anatomy. If you scroll down to the third square, you'll see a simplified illustration of how the spinal nerves are connected to organs and to the brain. Is that unconvincing?

If you take the blinkers off and recognise fatness cannot be understood in terms of pathology, any more than slimness could, you'll attain a better grasp of the situation. As I've been trying to point out since I got to the fatsphere, one of the reasons people fatten is to buoy up your mood and stop it from sinking (and you with it). I think of this effect as like a lifejacket stopping you from sinking.

It can use appetite, hunger and/or weight itself to achieve this effect, whatever's necessary. If a change of eating isn't, then your eating will hardly change, if at all. This is an adaptation to keep you afloat whilst you resolve whatever is pressuring you. Often that is a matter of circumstance, environment, upbringing and so many other factors. Your body often stabilizes at a certain point. What folks think of as their setpoint. It's intriguing.

Don't think of this as either/or. Some people are just genetically predisposed to fatness full stop. In some, they're predisposed to this particular kind of physical adaptation. Sometimes it's really anticipatory or hair-trigger as I used to call it. Before you even feel remotely stressed, it has anticipated potential trouble. For others it's more when you are under palpable strain. There are also some who have more than one of these factors, sometimes to the upper most degree. Those are probably amongst those who reach the highest weights.

For others, it doesn't seem to come into effect, they remain slim or even go the other way and lose weight. If their situation isn't resolved, or doesn't spontaneously resolve itself-which let's face it we all count on hugely-then their system may go on another stage which could be anything from an acute neurosis, to some kind of substance abuse.

If you deflate the "lifejacket" then some people's system will continue on the above course. Genetic links between fatness and alcoholism have already been noted. Alcohol is digested, it is partly a food so it can play a role similar to having fat stores because its so readily converted into energy, it removes the need for energy backup!

It's not unheard of for some families to have fatter members alongside slimmer alcoholics. It's interesting that fat people seem more likely to be teetotal. Though I've had a few go's, I've never taken to booze. I've had the feeling that I would have been a prime candidate for heavy drinking if I hadn't been fat. But who knows?

Anyhow, fatness can be a dam or barrier mechanism, in some people. If dieting wasn't so ineffective, this would probably be more clearly the reason why some are dietproof. Finding it even harder than most to lower their (food) intake at all. Regardless of how much/little that is.

And this is part of what gets crudely posited by a fat phobic mindset as 'addiction'. As I used to say, if you're in battle and someone's trying to take your shield, you're bound to instinctively tighten your grip. Because people don't recognise fat people's humanity hidden under their fatuous disease assignation. This kind of nuance doesn't appear to matter. The impulse is to crowbar it into what's gone before, even if that's mythical too.

It is fascinating. But it is not 'addiction transfer'. It's more getting rid of a barrier to going to to possibly develop some kind of substance dependence. The difference is fatness is spontaneous. The body does it itself, a bit like a magnetic field drawing iron filings. The magnetic field is the conditions your body finds conducive to altering weight.

It's interesting that when you're able to see beyond obesity dogma, even a bit, you begin to grasp this;

We don't, for instance, label drowning a disease. It is, clearly, a legitimate medical condition—worthy of treatment and insurance coverage. But the fault lies with the situation, not with ourselves—in the sense that human bodies are simply not adapted to spend too much time under water. Obesity is the same.

 Now, whilst I wouldn't make that comparison, you can see David L. Katz has reached for a similar metaphor. For me, fatness of this kind happens to keep you buoyant and when it's deflated, that's when you start to drown, or at least, require other means.

In a way you could replace "human bodies are simply not adapted to spend too much time under water." With "spend too much time under certain levels of pressure." Or with overall mood under a certain level.

This could have been looked out for, if people weren't busy insisting fatness is all bad and has no positive use. That it is merely the outcome of excess eating, that the body could not have its own plan to alter it's own function to use fatness for a purpose.

Labels not Beliefs

Responses to the AMA's recent decision to make the pretence that people are disease, official, have caught me off guard.

The thing that's causing the most brain freeze is the realisation that people who call themselves "humanists" or atheists, have no opinion. Or are indifferent, are not in anyway philosophically, metaphysically or intellectually engaged.

HUMANist, get it? As in human. This is from a humanist website;

a commitment to the perspective, interests and centrality of human persons; a belief in reason and autonomy as foundational aspects of human existence; a belief that reason, scepticism and the scientific method are the only appropriate instruments for discovering truth and structuring the human community; a belief that the foundations for ethics and society are to be found in autonomy and moral equality…

I've never been able to identify as a humanist though I am. This is just confirming my suspicions. What's to it really?

Those who are not religious have available to them a rich ethical outlook, all the richer indeed for being the result of reflection as opposed to conditioning.

Ha, ha, ha, dare to dream AC Grayling!

The first definition on that website was ominously "trusts to the scientific method". Sadly, this has tended to dim my mood in recent years. When it comes to 'obesity' as too many of these types have failed to properly balance that "trust." So much that a distant echo of science will sometimes do. See how easily our mind formulate worship?

Allow me to assist the chronically underwhelmed. Part of the recent fuss from British, US and other psychologists about the recent DSMV update, was the categorization of grief, as mental illness. Rather than a natural process of bereavement. So that it can be "treated." Medicine is truly becoming a replacement religion.

They were upset that feelings were being pathologized.

So how is no one exercised by the idea of humans being pathologized? It's like a palimpsest- a copy without an original. That three letter word F-A-T or is it the five letter one O-B-E-S-E? It's like mental delete button. Make no mistake, we aren't talking about a facet of you that can be (somewhat) divorced from your being. As bad as that is, we are talking bodies. I know people think you aren't your body. Whilst I appreciate the metaphysics, that simply isn't true. Anyway, it's not the point.

If pathologizing emotions exercises instincts on a visceral level, how can pathologization of all bodies not? And what about the psychological implications of that? One of the sponsors of that i-petition? "Society for Humanistic Psychology." Cute.

I felt the similarly about feminism and fat women. Leaving aside the desire to be thin, the fat phobic misogynist disgust of the (fat) female body as an accepted universal symbol of female self disgust. Or that this was deemed an appropriate way of just possibly increasing the chances of thinness.

No, what really got me was none of them seemed to have any real suspicions about such assertion of women as barely sentient. Incapable of understanding simple instruction such as ELDM (eat less do more) or as incapable of understanding their own actions.

And here's a big clue, from a bunch of patriarchs dealing in the most rigidly infested eau de bootstrap reductio ad absurdum rationale. I mean, you are "responsible" for the design of the way your body functions? You don't have to find out how it actually works and work with that?

At the same time its okay to believe you can't control your emotions, negative feelings, anxiety levels?

If there aren't enough clues there, then I've no idea what feminists actually believe in. Certainly "the radical notion that women are human."is still too radical for them. You'd think they'd want to know that.

This was on top of other things, but it still caught me by surprise because weight seems such a trivial thing, that I was totally unguarded about it. And when you're that way, your rationalization process is on standby. Like it or not, that rationalization saves your beliefs from fatal disillusionment. I thought, this is so trivial, we'll all just discuss it and work through it.

So it is with this. Except I can't say I really care. I already know better than that. It just indicates yet again that many people are carrying labels without belief. None of the elders of the tribe told them to be outraged, so they don't have a scooby. Fatz obviously don't count for human so nuts to them.

Mere emotions or responses declared mental imbalance creates real resistance. The people who generate them, nothing.

Labels not beliefs.

Ladies and Gentlemen

Okay, I decided I wasn't going to comment on this. "Blurred Lines" harks back to an old lyrical theme. Complaining about the effect patriarchal double standards have in putting women out of sync with their (true) sexual desires. Revealing the room that leaves for projection of exactly what those desires might be, too.

It's from the partner's point of view. As if it's the fault of the woman rather than her adaptation to society's rules. In this case, it's a man, I wonder if many a lesbian could also sing a similar tune, though it'd be expressed with differently no doubt.

A tad pompous I guess, but sometimes one has to be brave.

Anyway, the "blurred lines" concerned are the woman's internalisation of the Madonna part of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. The clashing of her actual desire-which according to the narrator is more in the much admired but at the same time despised "whore" direction.

i.e. she wants to get down, but doesn't like the implications of that. This is doubly useful. It can be a (man's) rationale for a woman not living up to expectations/wishful thinking and a way of her refusing (further) sexual advances in the first place.

Imagine if you fancied doing some press ups. I did say imagine, lol. You'd just make sure all was well, you had a space and ground that could support you etc, then just do your press ups right? You wouldn't think oh, just getting down to press ups like that, merely because I feel like it, means I'm dirty and bad. Rather than someone who just wants to get take an opportunity to er, get active.

The source of the wrong kind of friction is, how reliable is this narrator in divining the woman's wishes? He does warble about "The way you grab me" "Go head get at me", rather than say, "The way you look at me" or, "The way you were flirting with me", i.e. the way you are being polite and nice like ladies are taught means I say you want to do the vertical boogaloo with me.

However, the point is this is deliberately intended to push feminist buttons. It moans about the way women dress as being too provocative for a red blooded male to handle. And adds, "Just let me liberate ya".

If this baiting was too subtle. Singer Robin Thicke said in an interview;

People say, "Hey, do you think this is degrading to women?" I'm like, "Of course it is. What a pleasure it is to degrade a woman. I've never gotten to do that before. I've always respected women."

[My emphasis]

Now this is the sentiment that really caught my ear (call me bored/cynical). When I first got to FA I lamented being the target of this very kind of impulse. Whilst others tried to insist other women, feminists included indulged in fat hating due to "brainwashing." I felt, witnessed and experienced that the above was exactly the true urge at the heart of all this, i.e what a pleasure it is to degrade human dignity.

Anyone's really, especially whilst retaining or increasing your own. At their expense. With the permission of often them and authority. One doesn't pass up an opportunity like that easily.

And the video? Well, that's a lot like it is to be fat in a system designed for slimness as the dominant expectation, emotionally stripped whilst everyone else is fully clothed. The interviewer added;

Calm down, folks, it's a joke and everyone in the video is in on it. Thicke's a real Southern gentleman and his soul's as good as his hair. 

I'm not pointing this out to excuse Pharrell, Robin Thicke et al. It's just so people can better connect with the impulse under the lens. We do have the urge to degrade our own humanness, so the question is why and what do we do about it?

Helpful as ever. Well, I am a laydee.

[The most repellent thing about this effort for me was the state the "Southern gentleman's" section proposed to leave a certain part of the woman in question's anatomy. Eurech.]

Human Related Conditions

AIDS was spotted in the west mainly in gay men first. It was referred to as GRID, or gay related immune deficiency.

That was before the syndrome was found to appear, more than initially, in those who had varying sexualities and were of different sexes. Scientists proposed the name was changed to AIDS as they were concerned with the accuracy of the name.

Can you imagine that? Scientists being concerned with accuracy in naming things. Sheeeit. I notice too reading that piece the difference it makes to be a person who has a disease. Rather than being defined as a person who is the disease. There's a sense of objectivity created by that distance. Not to mention the difference it makes to study cold hard facts, rather than corralled within your rigid ideological suppositions.

The guesses about the source of AIDS; seminal fluid entering the blood stream, an effect of sexual stimulants seem almost quaint now as things have moved on. Science that moves zomg! It's refreshing like, erm contact with real science feels so different from relentless scientism.

Obesity related;

Any condition linked in part to obesity–eg, cardiovascular disease, gallbladder disease–cholecystitis, cholelithiasis, gout, adverse lipid profile, ↑ post-operative complications–poor wound healing, insulin resistance, HTN, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, abnormal GI transit, colorectal CA, strokes, PE, poor wound healing, atelectasis, hepatic steatosis/fibrosis, psychologic disorders.

Conditions none of which occur only, or even nearly so in fat people has become dominant to the point where these actually human related conditions seem to occur only in fat people. Due to fatness. The element of wishful thinking is palpable (which is thrown back as an accusation fat 'denial'!) Fat people are people, who can have x problem is becoming more obscured by 'obesity' conflation as pathology which generates more pathology.

Nor are these things-in public at least-used to build up an overall picture of the variety of metabolic function, good and bad. Which could then be sought in other weight groups, who knows what we could learn from building up a full picture of metabolic function? Instead it's all bad, bad, bad.

Well only disease can be all bad like that.

Any condition *linked in part to fat people. All these conditions are linked to people aren't they? Can you imagine privileged gay men, scientists and doctors allowing them to get away with that? No chance!

Another peculiar thing about that is the message it gives about the importance of elevated risk.

If they'd rather put the stress on fat people, even as a buffer zone for others. Then there's a clear reminder that saving stress on people is usually more important than worrying or undermining them mentally. ie. Above all do no harm.

It adds to the sense that we are not only being attacked but there's a distinct desire to inflict actual psychological damage, to make match that with the unpleasantness of a life built around trying to become an anorexic. So not doing something harmful becomes as unpleasant as doing it.

Some would of course put that as incentivisation or motivation given something good draws through it's attractions. We know from experience that this has its own price for us all too.

* I'm sure there's something in hearing, balance brain circulation issues, but what? Who cares right? The point is, it baaaaaad and we can slap in on fat people, build up the scare [also associated with brain circulation issues] and put the fear up 'em. End of story.

The underside of suicide

A magazine aimed at wannabe arch youth has published a fashion spread featuring dolled up death scenes of women writers. They all but one committed suicide.

Bad taste at least, for some outright dangerous. The latter due in some part to the often barely sublimated allure of suicide. Always a distinct tang hanging around thinsproana.

Thing is, being a fat person, other attitudes to suicide are regularly on show.

In a sense one can view the 'obesity' cult as fixated on death. Leaving aside its hysterical promises of sickness and doom, its trojan horsing of a screwy worship of anorexia, there's its attack on mental health. Seeking to invoke a state where self harm is no longer a change of mindset. This is its primary lever of persuasion.

Its back up enforcer, stigma has inadvertently liberated a lot of our underlying attitudes to things that have otherwise been tidied up. Superficially at least. In the case of suicide, this may be confusing, given there's still said to be a great stigma left about it.

Fat people are regularly told that they are suicidal. Indeed, if you're one of those people who accepts the usual 'obese' definition of willful self abuse, it's hard for you to see being fat as anything but a reckless disinterest in your own well being.

For being seen as in this way, "suicidal" we're told therefore that we deserve to die or perhaps don't deserve to live. Oddly, the same question does not seem to have been asked recently of those who actually attempt or manage to commit suicide. Indeed the idea of the question made me giggle a bit. I know, my bad. It's just such an obviously inappropriate thing to say, that my mind doesn't travel to anything connected to the act.

That must be in some part a tribute to dissemination of the cry-for-help motive.

Yet, this is not usually applied to fat people, presumably folks know full well, they're speaking for effect. So why would they use suicide in this way? It most surely framed as some kind of insult. The suggestion is someone's misplaced their will to live and that's ridiculous of them and punish worthy. It's hard not to see that as some of the stigma mentioned.

It sometimes catches my mind out when that is juxtaposed with a more generalized concern about invoking suicide. I find myself distant and perplexed about the worry of the inducing suicide by "glamourizing" (weasel alert) it.

I know impulses are induced in perhaps in varyingly susceptible people when they connect deeply with someone else. Certain musicians who are no longer with us spring to mind.

Yet those who have a less than discernable desire to end themselves are felt to be fit to have their will to live undermined for the sake of 'health'. Context is all, but that still doesn't make much sense in my mind. Except to say that it is a statement on those who are seen fit to preserve at all costs.

Exposing those who are seen as less so.

Fat Rights

I find the idea of fat rights to be oddly contrived. Surely it's a case of human rights or more likely in this case, courtesies extended to all? Even in the case of fat people, we are on the medical shit list, any rights are being impinged upon by that.

This bypasses a more direct attack through politics. There should therefore be a discussion on how much power the medical profession should have over anyone's life. And how much ability scientists and/or researchers should have to redefine you out of humanity. And indeed to redefine your sanity out of existence.

To re-classify you as a disease class of leechlike vermin.

How much veracity should their systems of classification be expected to have? Should things like the convenience of medical insurance be any part of that? If they get it wrong, who should be responsible for checking that? Should they be able to label your body and your character guilty without a hearing? Should your body weight alone be allowed to define the level of your sanity?

The professionals used to say, ask the public. In this case, we are the ones who have been silenced by their ideology of disbelief. They've undermined our integrity and their chosen beliefs requires it.

These are really important questions. Those who feel untouched by this ought to consider what they'd do if they were sandbagged like this. Or do they feel it couldn't possibly? I'll let the into a secret, neither did we. 

Those accused of crimes can usually expect to be tried by a jury of their peers. If we are to be found guilty-by-body, taxed and fined, should we not be entitled to defence against the might of a system that has the power to condemn many of us to torture by withholding of treatment or ultimately death?

Are people comfortable outsourcing such powers to the medical/ scientific professions? In what way are they accountable?

Either way, these are questions for everyone. Those who see this as a fat problem are living in a fools paradise. The attitude these professions have toward fat people is the attitude they have to all lay people. Slimz who think they're beloved, merely because they're slim are simply fooling themselves.

The opportunity to unleash this frustration knocked because we've been and continue to be so accepting of it. I know people will say this is unfair and puts the burden on us, if so, would that make it less true?

The point is, other people do not accept or even actively reject this kind of treatment and that seems to be the decisive factor in this case.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The responses we have can be shaped by cultural legacies. Women's rights, Gay rights and so on. There were of course no "Black rights." The struggle for US Black people's inclusion into the basic civil rights of their country was rightly called "The Civil Rights movement." Black People's exemption meant the concept as a whole existed effectively as a system of privileges that could be withheld at the caprice of power.

Therefore there were no civil rights, only assigned privileges, until Black People could properly participate. 

In the end, there are no women's, gay or any other specialist rights, there are only human rights. And their extension to all human beings.

Empty Rhetoric

No more of this nonsense;

Imposing the same strict restrictions on unhealthy food and drink as tobacco will curb the country's obesity scourge, an Otago University researcher says.

Says a professor of marketing. Mind you, I'm not a snobby about sources but it might explain why this (ir)rationale is attractive to this prof. This nonsensical line is  of course being peddled a lot right now and it will not do people.

Food simply cannot be turned into cigarettes;

"Tobacco is a very unambiguous product because it is uniquely harmful - some foods are closely analogous to tobacco as they offer no nutritional benefit and the research evidence suggests changes in food supply, particularly the widespread availability of inexpensive, palatable, energy dense food have contributed to, if not at least partly caused, the rising prevalence of obesity.

Balls.

Yes tobacco is "unambiguous" in the way it taxes the body, food isn't. The psychology behind smoking is another thing altogether and that has been erased to make smokers look like self destructive idiots. In order to shame them to stopping-let's face it. Having said that, there is no known part of the body nourished by tabs, yet sugar provides calories, which are the primary nutrient human bodies need.

In fact don't all beings require energy of some sort to exist?

It is not the only nutrient required, but it is required. You'll exist a whole lot longer on honey than on vitamin pills. Oh and to the silly response that not all food is necessary. That misses the point. We are designed around the necessity of taking in energy, pathologizing any aspect of that is as senseless as it is superfluous.

In order to make this kind of false equivalence-a ubiquitous big bear of the whole crusade-one has to pretend food is something other than it is, and human beings are other than they are. No thanks. Your stupid is your own, do not impose that on others.

We can see how bad it gets when we ignore human nature with something that's not necessary to life, like smoking or drugs. How much worse still with something that is? What is the point in shaming food and people for consuming it? That achieves something similar to shaming sex and people's sexuality and sexual organs, possibly worse and more destructive.

I'd advise people to read testimony from, for example, PWA who feel repulsed by human dependence on food. We simply cannot regress human knowledge for a supposed health campaign that has already had a tremendous amount of influence and failed to show anything but introduce new problems.

If you want people to reconsider drinking their calories, campaign on that. Note, it would have been better never to have mis-labelled liquid food as, "empty calories." That's exactly the basis on which they've been marketed, as a substitute for water.

When I reminded myself they were food years ago, my attitude to them did change subtly. I did start feeling it was okay to insist on water, even when greeted by perplexed reactions of how can anyone turn down this lovely soft drink for boring old water?

I'd often felt it odd to drink food with food and at times did crave water instead as it was tasteless and would not undermine my appetite for food I was more interested in.

It was more about matching my appetite better. I prefer to eat my calories. I'm not even a fan of soup!

Now if these people insist on interfering in people's actual choices, rather than anything hard like dealing with underlying problems in economies and food environments, then they should operate on an honest basis?

Those who  insist on tinkering have a duty to make any campaign enlightened, positive and above all empowering. Because we are not dealing with acquired habit. We are dealing with appetite which is an innate part of human functioning. They cannot and must not pretend otherwise.

The campaign against smoking is hardly a model for that. The decline in smoking is not the same across the whole of societies. In those under most pressure the least. So I personally am not overly enamoured of ignoring this.

Carelessly adding more stigma to the already stigmatized is an abuse of power. If you can do nothing to help don't make things worse. Theses differences become a reason to further pathologize and discriminate against people who are even less shielded from the idea of themselves as lacking control. Invasive micromanagement of their lives is waved around.

If you wish to make inroads there, you need to meet the human need to be uplifted and enlightened. Reason must prevail, not the ceaseless indulgence of the food cults and their dubious beliefs.

People are Disease

So apparently, the AMA-the American Medical Association has decided to pretend that being fat is a disease. The motivation for this is the deeply scientifically medical factor is insurance reimbursement

iow, so that doctors can get paid for dispensing their "obesity related" quackery. Further evidence if it were needed that it is this element in the medical profession -not the preferred baddies the slimming industry-who are amongst the most responsible for spreading fat hate.

And now they want to get paid more for this and turning all sorts of nonsense supplied by their class cronies onto fat people. Turning many more of them into the ranks of the prescription pill poppers no doubt."But it's for my disease of meeee!"

Well, it works for the supposedly svelter middle/upper classes. Which might be fine for neurosis. But weight isn't that. Changing it requires actual scientific progress to be made in the mechanics of human metabolism. Not the usual flummery one can get away with when it's about things that have a significant direct conscious input. Like thoughts, moods and levels of anxiety etc., Something that those in the field are crying off because weight is simply too objective in outcome to fudge with subjective feelings of "It's doing me good because I feel better." Instead these medics sought to;

"recognize obesity as a disease state with multiple pathophysiological aspects requiring a range of interventions to advance obesity treatment and prevention."

Yeah, if you insert people in place of microbes, bacteria or virus strains. And turn their lives into an unfolding of the life cycle of disease contaminants. Describing that in a biochemical fashion. Life does indeed become multiply "pathophysiological" in aspect, even if it's just human biology, in action. In a fat person.

As usual, it's all assertion scant worthwhile evidence. Cheekily claiming this will lessen stigma is typically sly, that could decrease in an instant by telling the truth about the results of calorie restriction and what we know about metabolic function.

This result went against the AMA's own experts in science and public health, who took against this contrivance. Amazingly, they summed up everything in a throwaway line;

..........the currently prevailing definitions of obesity do not specify its underlying causes.

That is virtually the whole of it. Fat people are human. Disease is illness. It has causes. It has aetiology. A route map of its development. It is intrinsically pathological. Being fat isn't. I have always said, 'obesity' has no aetiology, except perhaps the 'obeses' bad character. It claims deliberation, where there is none. Obesity wallahs have not identified a disease, they've pointed at people. At their bodies. That isn't good enough.

Not all doctors were on board either. How noble you may think. They're disgusted at the idea of representing people as disease. They recognize this crosses an unacceptable line. Humbled by the realization that they have no right or authority to alter the status of human beings. No wait, it's due to that potentially being discourgey of our motivationalism. Boooo. Back to the same old nonsense that weight is some kind of neurosis.

It reminds me of the recent row about the latest DSMV. UK psychologists objected to human expression of things like grief being defined as mental disorders. How damaging they felt that was! Yet there's nothing to say about the psychological effects of undermining people's humanity in this way.

I have always found the lack of comment from others the most shocking of all. Especially when they then go on to protest about the same things said in other contexts. I shouldn't be though.

Now that I mention mind doctors, the same kind of scientism used to define the mental health of people in general is being piggy backed to alter the impression of the state of fat people's mental. I've never seen more linking of 'obesity' to psychiatric categorisations such as ADHD, BPD, OCD, anxiety disorders and even things like alcohol abuse.

You'll note these "emerging links" come by targeting specificity, fat women, fat men, men who have x issue in their childhood, the fattest white women and so on, (though the drugs prescribed for these conditions are not implicated as potential triggers for weight gain). Only things such as "impulsivity" probably disenables fatz to follow weight loss diets. Not our defences which thwart them in virutally all people.

All headlines are about 'obesity' linked with so and so though. It's clear that overall, fat people cannot be demonstrated to be any crazier than the acceptably weighted. This is a pisser when you've presented people as inferior and unable to cope with life because they're emotionally stunted.

They finally got round this by deciding if one 'group' of fat people can be found to do/have more of something than the overall or comparative group of acceptables, that counts as a link.

That's overlooking the fact that fat people are actually erm ya know, people so everything turns up in diverse groups of people. This is pish. And suits the purpose of continuing the perpetual cycle of going round and round in the predictable circles of hades that is 'obesity' rationale.

The intent is always to make doing nothing look like one is doing something. Things must stay the same, except, the mounting effects on fat people.

Straw Galore

A really tiresome aspect of fat acceptance is being accused of things you hadn't even thought of saying. Your numerous detractors insist, you are saying x and insist on arguing with that come hell or high water, no matter what you are actually saying.

They've just gone ahead and made their own leap without bothering to check with you. Because you're figment of their imagination anyway and they know everything about you better than you becoz um....... scienzzzzzzz.

Their defence mode is creating strawmen and burning them, using smoke to obscure the reality they decided to part company with.

Whilst watching some of a filmed talk given by a bariatric surgeon, he insisted that if you're in "positive energy balance", you'll gain weight and if you're in "negative energy balance" you'll lose it. Fine. He then cited thermodynamics, describing this as "inviolate". 

I found his use of the word "inviolate" provocative. As it digs up the tired old manly defense of the delicate maiden of physics to try throw that over the failure of calorie restriction.

What a smug twerp.

See, this inference that the persistent, overly demonstrated failure of calorie restriction dieting 'violates' physics has always been so much goat faeces. A consistent, predictable reality cannot usefully be described as violating the mechanics that it is evidence of. That underpin it.

It's more likely that it is the maintenance of calorie restriction induced weight loss-beyond a certain rather low point-that really disregards the thermodynamics of our body's own maintainence of its energy balance. Trying to put it into negative energy unleashes the counter drive towards as positive an energy balance as it can manage, given it's being shortchanged of resources.

And in the end, that clearly wins out most of the time. Equilibrium is restored more or less to where it started. That sounds like physics to me. It's mechanistic, the suppression of energy causes a reaction seeking to minimize and counter it.

The human body's self regulation of its own matter is defeating what is really an attack on the body's own tissue. In this case its adipose tissue. That is part of the body's defence of its own self regulation process, not somehow outside it. You can't just waste energy stores without disrupting the communication between the nervous system and your body's own matter. The conscious mind hardly takes care of that.

When you attack energy, in the form of cells and tissue, all you do is provoke the defence of it. And that's why calorie restriction is so hard dysfunctional actually.

Weight loss itself isn't "hard", we just don't know how to trigger a sustained amount of it, in the right way. Anything can be seen as "hard" if you don't know how to do it. In this case, we know the body can and does lose weight with no ill effects whatsoever. That proves it is not hard when you know how.

We don't. All we only know how to starve in order to try and deplete energy stores, which isn't the same thing.

The Arc of Weight Symmetry

When it comes to a tricky perception shift, I'll take help where I can get it. The story of Taryn Wright which points to what's missing from our learned purview on weight. Here's a woman that went from slim, fatten, then became slim again.

What's unusual is the way says her body became slim again. It was the way virtually everyone gains weight, backwards. Like a movie rewind.  Her weight literally, reversed itself, triggered by a change in circumstances, as a consequence of underlying change in her metabolic functioning.

This is what I have repeatedly said. Weight should come off the way it comes on, spontaneously with no more than the minimal actual effort due to reversal being consciously directly. That isn't the case with most gain which the body leads.

It's just that in western model countries, this hasn't been (re)discovered.

All the weight loss dieting, calorie restriction, proto anorexia/orthorexia as lifestyles, good food /bad food fixation nay obsession, with fitness, exercise bulimia, operations, pills etc., are all substitute for this kind of underlying resetting of function.

Which is and should always have been the aim.

When Taryn met her then future husband-to-be, she was slim. Her body gained slowly from the engagement, from what I can tell. She got married and that gain continued. She spoke about her feelings during the marriage, she felt cast adrift from her previous life-which she enjoyed-and felt trapped in her sense of isolation.

During this, she said she did the usual drill fat people endure of weight loss diet fail. Then after getting divorced, her underlying function responded and altered on its own. This, change her habits and the way she felt in general.

Ironically, her body seems to have slightly overshoot it's previous starting point. How often does that happen the other way?

Isn't that the exact same narrative of most people's spontaneous body led weight gain, in reverse? You realise you're gaining/ have gained weight. Perhaps your habits change or they don't. Perhaps you feel a change in your energy, up or down, perhaps not. This is interpreted as leading and causing. But this demonstrates what many of us have noted, it's the other way around.

Because your body is operating more of it's own volition, given whatever may or may not be triggering it. Behavioural change is merely the more outward expression of that underlying shift.

And that's how it should be reversed too. Your body should lead and your behaviour, the outcome of that underlying shift. Instead, we've been stuck with the punitive disordered system by the reign of fanatics.

Taryn's reversal completes a perfect symmetrical arc of weight gain and loss, that is the same backwards as it is forwards. That makes total sense. This has always been a MIA factor when it comes to metabolic function. Instead, the obsessive focus on attacking adipose tissue, doesn't match the smooth holistic spontaneous gaining process.

Using the body's ability to alter its own function efficiently is the only worthwhile and viable way to not only alter people's metabolic function. But also to treat metabolically related ailments and even mental health conditions, without drugs. There's even a possibility of it leading to ways of reversing certain processes that create organ damage. And less importantly, their weight. 

Finding ways to direct this with our own minds would make it accessible. Look at the mess created by using food and activity as the route. Look who it leaves out, those most in need. It is and always has been an indulgent disgrace. 

Some have asked, what if a slim person has the same metabolic problems as a fatter person? How could they benefit from this kind of underlying shift? Our idea of conflating weight with function is suspect. Probably, the slim person's symptoms would improve, without them losing any real weight. Or perhaps just minimal few pounds.

As that aspect of their function has not been invoked, there would be little or nothing to alter.

Human metabolic function is like a recording studio with all its faders and buttons. Adjusting the various switches makes the same musical arrangement sound different.

It' s like part of a menu of effects, dependent on individual make up, circumstance and whether the condition is genetically inspired or more environmentally prompted. Or all. I suspect those who get to the highest weights have a multiple combination of factors. Genetics, on circumstance, on individual responsiveness, on environment and etc.,

The point is, this reversal is gentle and unobtrusive so it will not be destructive in the way the calorie restriction , attack tissue model has been.

People deserve nothing less.

immateriality

I used to say fat people were defined on paper. Written in hostility, by others. We have been turned into an idea of a person, that replicates. An epidemic.

Often this is deemed dehumanization. Dehumanized, what do we mean by that? Less than, below human, sub-human?

The reaction to us in meat space and even on-line is often one of pronounced over sensitization. The contrast between the definition that has taken root, which is an idea (not a person or being). Versus an idea-come to life.

The shock of this.

An idea come to life is shocking. Life where there shouldn't be appals. A computer that thinks for itself. The robot with it's own consciousness that take over and enslave mankind. It disturbs our idea of inanimate. Of a consciousness that by definition doesn't exist, that is immaterial.

The root of the idea of fat people as disease is in people's minds. As an idea, we may become immaterial. But the idea of us, the ideas about us.... come to life............unnerves.

Paradigms

Just about the hardest thing to get through to anyone, regardless of size is that fat acceptance is another paradigm. It sees weight from a different view, one that involves the subjectivity excluded from the 'obesity' crusade. Fat people's that is. There's plenty of course from those who aren't, in fact, it's all about theirs.

Now subjectivity is the not the opposite of objectivity as is often promoted. It is the other end of the same rod. The former being, internal experience and/or observation, the latter experience that can be externally observed or perceived.

When you perceive an experience internally, that can be seen from the outside i.e. sneezing, it just either end. Your perspectives are different but they can enrich through adding dimension.  They aren't in competition with each other.

We are all taught from a basis of calories in/out and that this is an objective reading of the biology of size. Argument with this is set up as a dichotomy within that paradigm. When in reality, the basis of fat consciousness operates outside the paradigm. The subjective requires fat people to have human consciousness, turning people as disease in that framing, is hardly that.

What further complicates is, we are all taught this. This means fat people haven't yet developed a full picture of fat subjectivity. Fat people were just an extension  of the exclusion of what turned out to be, their own personal subjectivity. This is a point many don't get. Along with many fat people, they act/ assume that whilst our subjectivity was erased from the common discourse, it went on inside our own heads nonetheless. Just like many other groups who've been far more ill treated than us.

What's so extraordinary about fat people, is that it really doesn't seem to have, not in a cogent and fluent way. We literally had to flattened our own internal stream of sensory reality. What I'm not entirely sure is how much can be recovered when the situation less repressive enough to be conducive to those memories and feelings popping up.

We had to do this not simply because we were following orders from outside, but due to the fact that 'obesity' is disease without aetiology.

The idea is, fatness is a product of a consistent series of desires to 'overeat'. This makes your size a conscious product of that and therefore a conscious decision. This mind that I'm using to work out my thoughts and what to type, plus to type it, is where my conscious desires are.

But that part of me has never desired to be fat. So your common or garden fat person has a problem. The aware part of them has no recognizable desire whatsoever to be fat. Nor even to eat "too much." Yet somehow we still are (fat that is). So we have a conscious will, that we cannot locate anywhere. A will that is non existent in the only place we know conscious direction existss, our conscious mind.

Of course eating is decided in response to hunger. Like the urge to sleep does for sleeping. The only point of hunger is to signal the need for energy and that is inbuilt. It is not a decision. So again, you've got the idea of will imposed on something that isn't willful.

Anyway the upshot of this inscrutable void is that in a way you have to leave yourself. Psychologically, you must abandon and detach from yourself, rather like you have to disassociate with anything to do with fat or fatness and therefore your own physical manifestation, or body as we like to call it. Because the cause is somewhere inside you, that kind of is or becomes you, once you've accepted the accusation.

You can see, this is really a view from the consciousness of someone for whom fatness is overwhelmingly foreign, i.e. a slim person. Except it becomes your own. You are mentally taken over by this impression. It's hard not to laugh when it is then suggested, fat people are less intelligent.

If you don't know you aren't the 'cause' of your fatness, its not surprising you don't quite realise how much this has suppressed your actual experience and how much this is missing from the whole picture. It's not helped by the fact that you're told the reactions of your body to all this pathological infraction is your unlocated sin trying to regain a hold of you. Or that fat people's subjectivity is fighting for the desire to kill ourselves with cake.

That's why I say, there is something of the occult about it all. An invisible fatty demon is possessing you, and you must fight it with the moral strength blahdy, bleeeeerrrggggh.

Anyway, this means fat acceptance ends up dominated by the psychological aftermath of this, which is a back and forth within the dominant paradigm. It setting up various abstractions; "fatness isn't healthy for you". Utterly meaningless unless its basis is your self dispossession/ an outside view which of course it is. But as you are trying to re-gain your subjective grounding, reaching for a suppressed and flatlined consciousness, how can it make sense that your body is "unhealthy" for itself?

How can you "answer" that? Indeed, how is it even a question?

It's as invisible as the exact local of the aetiology of 'obesity' as somehow your will, that isn't.

Fat consciousness inside or outside FA, is not an argument with the crusade, how can it be when it's necessarily excluded from its terms? If fat people exist as conscious people, 'obesity' could not have been established. The purpose of that construct is to define consciousness out of people. If it did not, what causality would it pursue?

Touch!

People are beginning to catch on it seems. And few things are more likely to enrage than a flagrant attempt to talk people out of abilities they may well have in abundance. No one likes to be told they what they do and don't have based on something as irrelevant as size. No one wants to be locked into that prison of believing you aren't capable, without any legitimacy. 

More even than the untoward projections. Here we have the usual insertion of the overweening obsession with food and what fat people must eat according to the restrictive mindset, but also, trading on the pathetic "willpower" defence of the arc of uselessness that is WLD.

Of course if Miller had so much power of will, he'd have kept it locked himself. Reminds me of the feeling I get when ubiquitous hate comments have to be deleted by internet moderators. Lecturing others on their lack of self control is a way to lose your own. It makes people feel above reproach and the restraint to make their point civilly.

Such banality is also a sign of someone who's not thinking. Does Miller really think there are no fat people who managed to get PhD's? How would he explain that and the necessary gullibility of bigotry that will believe anything to try and justify it's own loopy hatreds?

Discuss.

According to his seat of learning, evolutionary psychology (I'm saying nothing) in which the fittest are supposed to be on top due to their innate superiority. In this case that seems to be superior bitching.

How unromantic. Other people aren't supposed to fix it for the 'best' through self annihilating role play. That rather undermines the metaphor of the naturally cream rising to the top of the hierarchy. Seems he believes that has to be contrived. How does that sit with underlying principles?

Incidentally, this clown has claimed to have provoked this kerfuffle for a project. He didn't mean it and unlike fatz, he doesn't expect that to count against him. He's away right now probably trying to work it out.

If he manages to pull that off, I can't say I won't have a sneaky smile.  

Predatory Fast Food

I feel strangely out of my depth in these kinds of conversations. Horror of horrors, I have to rely on the crapulent prism of torrid food neurosis, to give a picture of the food situation in the US. I must say, that's no place to be.

I can't relate to the narrative. I feel there are things missing from it. My experience differs and I'm not American. I know there are food deserts, I just don't feel that's the whole of it. 

No matter what, I always try to understand why people are saying things the way they are, because that can sometimes tell you most of all.

Personally, I never felt the fast food industry should be able to shape children's minds. I was always unsure about things like fast food in children's hospitals and vending machines in schools. I just don't need any wackdoodle theories about mad scientists creating addictifying foods to enslave humankind.

Like drug dealers.

Nor do I recall, anyone asking me, or any other fat people about the spread of fast food. It wasn't up to us. I'm not declaring innocence here. There has never been a point where I've felt other people really wanted to halt this, especially, not in low income areas anyhow.

Slimness has become an identity, a construct and part of that is the presumption that merely by existing, you are doing lots to create your size, like your own personal godette.

This means a lot of slim people are disassociated from the reality of fatness. Which is that it is a spontaneous adaptation of your body that is usually not directed by your conscious mind. The upshot is, your body can blip and slip back and forth with making the sort of effort a lot of fat people don't even see as effort. Trained as we are to discount it.

But if your body enters a decisive shift, "discipline" real or imagined means surprisingly little. Though people might have made some noise about the spread of convenience foods, it nowhere near reflected their obesitee hysterics. And in the main people have been rather receptive to fast food and welcomed its advance, especially if they didn't feel weight was an issue for them.

And frankly, I really wish the current narrative on food, didn't make that seem like some kind of misdemeanour. Most people see something in this food. Everywhere, around the world, it sells. People newly arrived from every culture on the globe get a taste for it, the same as everyone else. In a way, it's become a communal experience. To the extent that being denied it feels like being left out.

There's something universal in its appeal. Why create shame around that?

I'm sure that's some of the reason why people allow their children to go. How many times can a parent say no? I'm not sure if I've heard this or not, but there are influential people in any particular group and if they're sold on it, that often influences others.

There's no doubt that many food industry indulgences fall in with typical senseless profiteering that only counts the cost of  the bottom line, ending up by consuming itself. It's hard to see how not eating the crappier offerings of the food industry isn't the best way of bringing them to heel.

When you go to other countries, you'll find certain processed products taste better. The manufacturers know folks wouldn't buy any old shite. It seems due to the peculiar taste buds of the certain countries which generate a lot of this blaming and hysteria. Both the taste fail and the lack of proportion about these foods are intimately related.

When some companies reduce the laughable amounts of sugar and salt they pad their products with, people rarely seem to notice or bother.

And the idea that fat people are blaming fast food for their fatness? Firstly only those who feel fatness is blameworthy can blame anyone or anything. One can be curious about the interaction between our lives and the size of our bodies outside 'blame'.  Second of all, the overwhelming majority of fat people blame themselves and always have done. And it's about time that was fully acknowledged.

The glib insistence that poor people are fat and it's attendant "not knowing about nutrition" has also obscured things. Recap on the streets of London whenever your out late, it's remarkable how the youths and kids you see are almost always slim if not thin.

Often they're raised in the way all kids used to be, let out all day, except; a) they're out later-to varying degrees. And b) the context has changed. As other children have gone indoors, the mix is different and the streets in general more edgy, a side effect of car ownership. That's now seen as bad parenting of course.

The most widespread plumpness/fatness, doesn't fit the typical class stratas. It's more certain sectors of the more stolid/aspirant working class plus struggling lower middle class people. The kinds of backgrounds people like Jennifer Hudson, Regina Benjamin, Adele and Kate Winslett grew up in.

They seem to be plumper than other working class folks, who sometimes show a different mentality. A more free range one. Yet no one points out that it seems rather successful at producing slimmer kids. Including all the way to actual erm, clashes with authority. 

If you think I'm making a crude point about criminality and slimness, nah, that would be the 'obesity' crusade's way of doing things. I'm saying aims, ambitions- attitudes may well tell on our bodies, just not in the simplistic ways certain weight ideologues want them to. Our internal and external lives are bound to tell on our metabolic function in some way, we are maintained through our metabolic function. The basics of which are building up and destruction of cells. 

Middle income people are the most overweight and eat fast food more regularly than anyone else. In contrast,  80 percent of those with low incomes cook at home at least five times a week.

This tally's with my experience and many around me. I was brought up by a mother who cooked mostly from scratch. The weekends were often given over to cooking. She did shift work too. It dishonours her efforts when people including some in FA blather senselessly about poor ole po' folks who don't know nutrition like middle class folks.

Many of whom have proven they can't even define food properly. "Non nutritive food" and "empty calories" being of the more mind numbing examples of this. You don't need to 'know nutrition' to prepare or have balanced diet. Familiarity with things that grow from the earth, land and sea and how to prepare them will do.

I was beginning to wonder recently whether there's a certain amount of time-generationally speaking- where if you lose touch with growing food, the desire to eat it erodes. Certainly one of the best ways to get children to try produce is not by turning that into a dutiful chore, but to teach them to grow and prepare it. Another thing that was taken out of schools.

This is why I still can't raise much enthusiasm for food campaigns. My heart has taken a pounding having watched all of this unfold. Things that were let go because certain children especially were not deemed valuable enough to warrant it. The effects on people's skills were inevitable, that made no difference. So hearing people get all outraged because of weight, makes me feel oddly distanced.

Most of this happened after the 'obesity' noise started.

Even if people could be bothered to give a damn how could they get to the point of action when, it was all about weight and that's down to the individual right? If all these-and more had been been kept- the situation in terms of healthy eating would be so much better. The mental health of children would be too, given the palliative and I believe spiritual development of children running free, having lives that aren't micro managed by adults.

I don't wish to romanticise, there were problems with things like bullying, accidents and dodgy adults. People detested the rather primitive PE that forced them run miles in the cold. That definitely contributed to a deep desire among many parents to spare their children the indignities they'd suffered. So why isn't that mentioned?

Some of that applies in the US, some of it doesn't given the fears about safety and the size and scale of the country.

But culture changes and things could have been improved. Child slimming efforts are no replacement for all this.

In the US, the poverty=fast food has never quite convinced. I cannot completely discount it, because I cannot get enough of a sense of what's going on. There's something missing from the puzzle and I can't work out what that is. A low income mainly puts pressure on variety. Over quite a short period that can make a difference, let alone year after year.

I feel like Black People in the US ate/eat similarly to Black people in other Diasporas. The change seems to have been more recent, like in the last two or three generations especially. And that overlaps with the most chronic soul grinding hunger for many.

It's hard to see how the current attractions of fast food are not somewhat bound up with the collective memory of that. As well as things like the joy of being served. The relief of not having to arrange a meal yourself after a hard days work. Or even, when you have nothing. It can make you feel better able to stay more relaxed if you don't have to worry about meals. Things like this are important.

I wish people were able to speak about things like this if that is part of the mix. I'm not discounting the power of suggestion, through advertising. Especially the bombardment in the US. We are quite often quite suggestible when it comes to food, adults too. But, it would be nice if Black people-fat and slim, were allowed to have a discussion that wasn't an attack on them. To be imperfect without it seeming just incompetence, neglectful or self abusive.

That we recognise we are marked by circumstance, that put paid to the best of intentions. That perhaps this is a learning opportunity for us all. That blood 'obesity' crusade is not conducive to honest exploration of behaviour for anyone and that gets on my nerves.