The macronutrient whirl

Too much fat, causes fatness. Fat's bad for the heart. No, a largesse of weight is caused by too much starch. No, not enough protein. No, too much sugar.

That's where it is now.

Been here before.

Round and round and round the macro nutrient wheel. In a dizzy whirl, never really getting anywhere.

Fat. Carbohydrate. Protein.

We have to keep going round and round in circles, just like we go round and round in weight loss dieting circles. Rooted as we are by the insistence that this is the answer. Dietary manipulation is the key to weight.

It causes all sorts of distortions. Rotten and absurd constructs like "food addiction," people as disease life lived as a treatment for the disease of existence, eating disorders as the treatment for eating disorders. All either created or shored up by the insistence that eating the right make up for foods, will lead to trim.

It sticks you in a corner and means you cannot get out of it. So are condemned to keep rustle the objects there. Picking things up and putting them down, like someone who's lost something they cannot find. 

But you know what? Even if this was the answer. Since when does there have to be one answer-for those who need/want it?

Why has this particular avenue become a monotheism?

A Grip on your Heart

There's a saying, the best way to create a bully is to bully someone. Equally, the best way to learn to be victimized, is to bully others yourself. Watching them for the signs of your impact of your actions on them, unwittingly trains that aspect of your own consciousness. You become ripe for someone else to exploit that in you.

The reverse of that is also true. Defending others from bullying trains your own defences.

You'd be surprised at how effective that can be. Seems, fighting back is more effective, from being in the ring for others. Defending others exercises your own defences.

It's harder from a standing start, let alone being wrong-footed by a sharp change of direction. The reason why I was so ready for FA, was not because of self absorption, in some ways, I wish! It was because a lot of the themes I speak of, I had witnessed in others before 'obesity' reached it's current pitch of impacted almost banal disdain.

Whether through race, sex and class. A lot of the consequences of its themes were not wholly unfamiliar. 

Even on a lesser more simplistic level. I'd noticed the way others on the medical shit list, i.e. drug addicts were pathologized. Then had many of their thinking, reactions and behaviours, pointed out as evidence of their innate pathology. Yet, a lot of this turned out to be just them displaying the human nature that's in all of us.

Sound familiar?

I noted the overwhelming defensiveness of "normalcy" which increasingly seems a construct born of the kind of big tent conglomeration of factions you see in political parties. What's surprising is its viciousness. Being "normal" is seen as boring and everyday. Underneath that, it reveals itself to have a vicious and visceral thuggishness, violence generating, constantly on the prowl for potential threats of revelation of its not quite so natural as all that -ness. Many artists have explored that in books and films.

I'm sorry, I drifting a bit into the purple.

People are slowly beginning to wake up to the implications of 'obesity' or, defining being human as a disease state, whether they realise that or not. It's a cliche that the way unchecked power can manage to get one over on people, is to start with those who are seen as worthless and deserving of any old treatment.

One of the many downsides of creating excessive and unnecessary social hierarchies is that authority's bad behaviour cannot be so easily seen, let alone assessed until it gets to those who's value is taken more for granted. At that point, much time has been lost-if it isn't too late. Even then, the ability to return fire has been stifled, if not stymied.

The American Heart Association just published new set of guidelines for defining risks of heart disease.

After another group of medicos defined humanness above BMI 30 as disease. The AHA are now staking their claim to interfere in people's lives on the pretext of prevention. As fat activist types have repeatedly tried to point out, heart disease as "obesity related" is disingenuous. This is where  'obesity', heart disease collide.

Apparently, hyping up risk to brand people as sick, in order to gain a control over their lives, thoughts actions and behaviours, is somehow a bad thing. Imagine that! It isn't when its people you don't care for. It's increasingly clear that between the grotesquely indulgent hate-fest that's been going on, no real discussion has been had about some of its more major themes;

• Using health dangers, realistic or contrived to gain a hold over people's lives in a way that is as invasive as any devout religion.

• The seeming irrelevance of basic notions of medical consent

• Reckless hyping of health risk, use of panic to unseat people's ability to engage with information on a rational basis. iow, getting people to act from a place of fear rather than reason. [Often by trading and manipulating deepest fears].

• The undermining of  the promise to "Above all do no harm."

• The ability of science and medical professions to bypass public accountability and eschew consultation

• Turning the process of being human, from biology to behaviour into disease processes

• The increasing blurring of sanity with insanity, health with ill health

• The use of the physical/physiological to define character, morals behaviour and thinking

• Framing illness and disability as individual choice and as cost

• The reintroduction of sickness as the wages of sin/incorrect behaviour etc.,

• Turning human behaviour into something that can or should be dictated to by med professionals

• Infantalizing adults with the irresponsible bandying around of the mis-used terms such as 'addiction', 'illness' 'disease'.

• Pathologization of childhood and children through this

• The irrelevance of privacy, from employers, society in general as well as other professionals

• The promotion of disordered eating and eating disorders, mutilation, drug dependence.

•  Being judged in a legally binding manner outside the aegis of jurisprudence, therefore the absence of access to professional, expert defence

• The taxing and potential impoverishment of you on said basis

• The pathologization of human basic needs, food, eating, and so on.

• Depoliticization of inequities and social pressures. Re-framing societal hierarchies as individual concerns i.e. things out of ones control, being defined as within ones control and the responsibility of those on the receiving end. 

Some of us have tried hard to get a discussion going but our spoiled identity (shockingly so), got in the way. When you are the disease, your voice becomes obscured to the point of silence or are perceived as an atonal whine of pathology. Now others are getting to share in such attentions.

We shall see.

This is happening in America, so I should feel removed by distance. But it's not that simple. These kinds of decisions creep elsewhere, insidiously. The places where discussion usually happens are still stuck deep in the cult of anorexia worship and 'obesity' quackery of the crudest kind. Little to no worthwhile discussion of this has been able to happen. No deviance from the 'obesity' construct and its trail of false or inflated pathologies is permitted or able to occur in terms of where people are psychologically.

Which means that this sort of thing flows into that.

I am feeling tired of this shit right now. It don't think I've ever experienced a situation that's so easy to grasp, so easy to stop from getting out of hand, where it has been made almost impossible-artificially so-to get people to consider the implications of the direction this is all taking.

Right now, I just don't care. I feel, to heck with it and everyone concerned.

Shadows

It's the 30th Anniversary of the US publication of a book called "Shadow on a Tightrope" this Friday. For many its an inspirational and seminal FA text. It's a collection of all sorts of writing, personal testimonies to poems on being fat. I got a hold of it at some point, it wasn't for me to be honest, but its worth a look. Maybe I'll peruse it at some point.

I do remember reading a horrible piece that felt like it went on forever, about a woman who had, I think, more than one weight loss operation. In those days, progressing to a figure of 1- 2 in 100 deaths-post surgery had yet to be reached.

It was horrible in so many ways and totally convinced me of what an insult "weight loss surgery" is to human beings. Even writing the term disgusts me, surgery for weight loss. Unbelievable. There's no doubt in my mind that there are potential avenues (always have been) for reversing or advancing weight. Such as manipulating gut bacteria. The issue with that is the same as that of calorie restriction; homeostasis overruling it. However, barring any problems with infection, it doesn't hurt, seek to attack the body, or cause pain. I really don't give much of one about those who think everyone should just live with being fat or thin. That's not really for anyone else to say.

The problem as I keep saying is the calorie restriction/wastage strategy. 

Not only that, it doesn't make sense. Human metabolism is a biological function. Understanding it and being able to manipulate it must occur, even if weight woes didn't exist, because of metabolic disorders like diabetes-all types, PCOS. And even mental disorders from neuroses like depression, to eating disorders. Even psychotic conditions too, given some anti-psychotic meds can also cause weight gain. There's no doubt that there's a relationship between metabolic function and mental health. Understandably, as its the basis of our bodies regulation and restoration of our material selves.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's potential for some resolution for something like alcoholism perhaps some ideas on correcting the underlying dysfunction of drug addiction too. Because that's caused by the body's reaction to ingesting an external supply of chemicals (drugs) that it makes itself. The body reduces production, to avoid overdose-when drugs are taken.

The key to reversing addiction more successfully, is to get the body to restore normal levels, which may have been compromised slightly in the first place-leading perhaps to drug seeking behaviour in the first place.

Alcoholism is different, but there too, metabolic rebalancing could assist even the more chronic and intractable cases. Anyone who's seen long term alcoholic decline even its dementia knows how much suffering that could end.

For many, especially the archetypal story of a traumatic upbringing, it's really a cycle. Manipulation via nervous system and/or metabolism, could aid recovery from such and other kinds of trauma. Grief that becomes impacted and even things like PTSD.

I'm getting ahead of myself, but the point is, metabolic function is either resolution or a stepping stone to getting closer to resolutions of many conditions as it is central to maintaining our existence. As you know, sometimes, a development doesn't in itself provide answers, but becomes a stepping stone to putting you in a position to see what you couldn't see from your previous position. Even if you cannot quite reach from there.

So, the idea of treating being fat as like being gay in that it's offensive to even go any where near changing it has never been tenable for a second, though I understand why some feel that way. And shocking though it may seem, I'm not even convinced gay people will avoid options on that score either.

It just doesn't work like that. Things are discovered often because they're needed for something perfectly innocuous or righteous, only for the underlying mechanics to be applicable elsewhere. Because guess what?

Biology is biology and it doesn't give a damn about any ideology of offense. No matter how justified.

Peekaboo!

Reading around things like the NSA, wikileaks and big data. One thing we can say is that those with power and influence love the idea of getting to know us intimately. Whilst of course being repelled by us being able to do the same, with them.

They don't simply wish to know us, they wish to see right through us in microscopic detail. How we think, feel and behave. It's amusing that there's an open desire to read our brains/minds and few can seem particularly exercised by the prospect of having no privacy, from the PTB even in your own skull! I like the way they talk about scientists, because this would so not find itself in the hands of commerce* and politicians?

Of course, fatz are already experiencing an earlier, primitive and somewhat skewered incarnation of this urge. I'm sure I've said before that being fat is often like being straight out of the 1950's, (at times, more like the 1850's.)

Given this, the 'obesity' construct, being ahead of the information age, turns this wishful thinking on its head. Instead of finding everything out about a generic fat type-there isn't one, but that's one of the wishes-it saves effort by making it up and projecting it on to its fat template.

The parodic elements are you are the disease to be studied like life forms are under a microscope. Oh humans are a "complex" disease. 

Instead of spying on your actions and nosing in and reading your own actual words and thoughts. It cuts out the middle man-you- helpfully, making up what's supposed to be going on in your mind. Expecting you to act according to this. Yes, you're expected to act out this is, you're admonished severely when you deviate and report your true experience.

Having established falsehood as reality. Real reality becomes the falsehood, the delusion. You are the deluded/in denial. The latter assertion, especially, is notoriously hard to refute. As that is itself seen as evidence.

The 'obesity' canard is wish-fulfillment of a certain type from a certain class born to administrate, if not rule. The desire is for them to know anything and everything about us, through any means. It's also the similar for the specific type who wish to participate in something accorded the scientific moniker, without the same mood eviscerating rigour of the real thing.

Not for them is following the truth without fear or favour, examining failure because that leads to knowledge, understanding, progress and mastery. They prefer to have all the answers beforehand. So they know what they're seeing.

*probably working on their own version/funding research as we speak

Reclaiming the (Waste) Land

Urban farms and gardens seems to be part of the way forward for food deserts. Things begin to make sense. The issue presented as privileged access versus lack hasn't quite in the past. Where I come from, that "privilege" didn't get there by grace of the powers that be. It got there due to the efforts of ordinary people, many immigrants who wanted to eat the foods they liked. I felt sympathetic, but couldn't see how that wouldn't have to come from people's desire to find ways to bring it about.

 Nikki Henderson-of People's Grocery

I knew that it wasn't long ago that African Americans and PoC and/working class people had a similar taste for fresh food, many of them still do and that I believe is probably underrated. That had slipped away due to various pressures-from marketing to the economic model adopted for supermarkets, which ceased to make sense for some inner city locales.

Growing food in the urban environs is an inspiring and effective way around this, where appropriate. Reclaiming disused land, putting front/back yards into use, as has been noted, what you grow you eat. We are designed to eat from our environment, what our eyes see. Though culture does play an important, sometimes overwhelming part. A grafted on one, created from sub-religious healthism isn't that. Itself an artificial additive, another side of the food hating culture of big business that puts profit before pride in its products and respect for ingredients.

Bryant Terry-Chef and Author

The only excuses are for calorie restriction

Aye, aye, take a look;

The use of the term food addiction is a step towards medicalisation and implies that normal human social behaviour is pathological. Forms of eating therefore become an illness. This attitude is not helpful and has huge implications for the way in which people view their own behaviour and their lives.

Well, it's weird when someone partially gets it. That happens when the mainstream 'obesity' view is your basis of opinion. its nice to catch someone else saying this. Still, this is right! This has profound implications for pathologizing eating to the point where children learn to feel as ashamed and disgusted about eating as generations have felt about their sexual organs. 

Sugar is what most of your food is turned into before it can be directly absorbed into the cells. So, eating it means that it requires little to no processing. It's very quickly is converted into energy. That makes it not "addictive" but highly efficient, useful. Addictive is what they're using to explain this ease of conversion. 

"Overeating" is mainly defined as what fat people eat. It has no objective definition. No slim person can be said to overeat per se unless they want to. Medicalizing what fat people eat just changes the terms from Dante to the current craze in pseudo-medicalization/science.

I am concerned that many people may potentially latch on to the concept of food addiction as an excuse to explain their overeating - the premise that it's "not my fault" and therefore, "I can't help it".

Yeah, not because that's false, but because that's already happened time and again. Notice he gives no specific examples, he daren't. There's solidarity in favoured identities. And also fear.

Warning others that fatz will use this as an excuse (to do what?) is a bit rich though. Whatever it is we supposedly make excuses for, but actually rarely have had. Reporting calorie restriction failure is not an 'excuse' because you're on a thin rope with your investment in it.

It is fat haters who accuse us of this to protect their weight loss diet dirtbaby. Projecting their own excuse laden mentality to privilege themselves, and use what they say to fat people to reach their well barricaded (from critique) psyches.

Because not a hair on their heads must be touched by anything so unpleasant as-what they've repressed out of sight-but clearly their deeper mind hasn't forgotten.

That happens when you run too much from yourself and feel at liberty to have an open-ended critique of others.  The thoughts you repress escape shouted at those you criticize.