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.