How not to promote educational attainment: Have an obesity crusade

Predictably enough this story about lower educational attainment of fat girls is making some noise. Its of course very important that this awful effect of 'obesity' galvanizes more effort to harass fat children/adults and hopefully help the boys join the girls/deal with this terrible scourge.

Only so that fat children/adults can do something about themselves of course, for the motivation, honest. The fanaticism of these people who cannot stop believing in lifestyle anorexia, seems to know, no bounds. Trying to present this as something to do with the (purported) biochemical effects of their 'obese' construct;

"Further work is needed to understand why obesity is negatively related to academic attainment, but it is clear that teenagers, parents, and policymakers in education and public health should be aware of the lifelong educational and economic impact of obesity."

In a way it is. And yes, everyone should know the price fat children/people are paying for being the target of an unethical and reckless crusade which polices some of the sense right out of them. Maybe this can help a few of them to get a hold of themselves, you know, exercise some self discipline. Show us how that's done.

This research obfuscates laughably, "Associations between obesity and academic attainment were less clear in boys."

"Less clear" eh? You can bet if it was good news for them in that, it would be in the conclusions. I'm going to come right out and say, educational attainment in fat boys is not affect by them being fat, in contrast with girls. And this type of finding is not unique;

Obese girls were less likely to enter college after high school than were their nonobese peers, especially when they attended schools in which obesity was relatively uncommon........Obese boys, on the other hand, did not differ from their peers- no matter what their school context-in college enrollment. 

Nor are the shifts in the purported effects of weight over time. 

Over 17 years, low SES has become associated with higher BMI and odds of overweight among Chinese women, whereas high SES remains a risk factor for overweight among Chinese men.

It started off the same for girls as boys, but over that time, those girls from families of higher socioeconomic status diverged markedly from girls from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds.

The fusing of looks with weight and the importance that still plays in girls and women's life chances would be a pretty strong candidate.

Excessive negative stress can play a major role in undermining the ability to learn. It can literally stop the brain from functioning properly especially when combined with added stress on top of that, such as having to take in and process information quickly for sitting exams to settle a young person's future.

I have always said the reason FA is dominated by women is girls and women still diet tend to diet more than boys and from younger ages. The reality of attempts at restriction over years, derails the cultivation of belief in it that can linger more readily in those not so exposed. 

Dieting is a failed strategy. Its rate of failure is so unspeakably bad-in terms of medium to long term change, let alone short-that the likelihood of long term weight change of a significant amount is barely of statistical significance. Even if we take Stunkard's 95%, that means every attempt has about a 1 in 20 chance of reaching a slim(ish) goal weight.

Every time.

Now I know you know this, I'm not going to bore you for the millionth time. My point is if you like so many fat women started dieting in childhood, in my case 11, then by the time you get to the latter secondary school years, you are already a proven failure. To yourself.

The extent to which this undermines a girl's educational attainment will wary, it depends on how much there is to interrupt this pretty key fail.

Then there's the fact that doing something over and over again, without making a proper assessment of the true result of your actions, that is basically defines the actions of an idiot.

To remain positive about dieting, requires you to unwittingly fool yourself. This does not go unnoticed by the part of your mind that you are not wholly the ruler of. Often imperceptibly adding to your burden of shame.

The idea that if you think positive you can alter probability is mathematically unsound. Though counting calories may help maintain a suppleness with basic maths. Though it didn't with me. I think the sense of crippling inadequacy and anxiety outstripped that benefit.

Something I've never seen elsewhere is the rejection of your body, the suppression of your feelings about what's happening and the inability to acknowledge the true results, undermines the basis of many people's intellectual attainment.

Self analysis.

The ability to feel your feelings and to categorize and describe them. To assess what is happening to you and to think about what it means, teaches you to understand things about others. It extends gives your store of deep meaning and understanding of things that are unsaid, or seemingly unsayable.

The need to deny the true effects of your actions, to put a positive spin on it can add a strangely stiff, unbending aspect to your mind. Like one grown middle aged and safe before its time.

I can't pretend I don't feel this is yet another attempt to use 'research' to tell fat people and children, who are what they are. I've seen it all before. This is how it works.

It's great that more people are doing some serious analysis of this kind of thing, I hope they know just how urgent it's becoming, to not allow fat children to be dragged down further by this crusade. And to rescue those who have.

Hunger/Addiction

I've tried to draw attention to something over the years: Fat people have been spectacularly game.

In a society when people drug everything from their moods to reaching for a pill 'cos they've got a 'ickle head/tummy/butt boo boo. Fat people were told er, *you people are too much, you need to starve and run around till you've expended your largesse.* Then latterly, * you just need to spend your whole life feeling half starved a lifestyle change*.

Our response to this request was: "Okay, if you say our bodies are a problem doc etc., you must be right. You all seem like reasonable nice people. We'll do as you ask!"And we did.

Just. Like. That.

Not only did we accept such an insult to our form and person. We accepted the unnatural and instinctively disgusting plan of weight loss dieting.

Despite this not even this tender-hearted enthusiasm could make such dysfunction viable. Aiming to stay in a state of hunger is unnatural and pathological.That means it moves towards unhealth and ultimately death. Not always that ultimately. Some anorexics actually die the young deaths so many are desperate for fat people to.

But the point is we really, really, really tried, over and over again. Without the millions, yes, millions spent, telling people to put their litter in the bins provided... rather than on the ground...which will then have to be picked up by someone and put in a bin......

We starved, swooned, dieted, sweated, wired jaws, took pills, ran about, had organs banded, re-routed and removed. And that's only some of the least unseemly!

All because you know. When someone tells you on good authority that your body's all wrong and that seems reasonable and you know they're good people, it probably is.

The pathology of open-ended hunger used to be readily understood. And probably still is in countries where starvation is a more current or recent threat. But not in more sophisticated realms, no we aren't allowed to state openly that the cultivation of unending states of hunger is undesirable and unsustainable. The body is well constructed to defend against it.

In lieu of this agreed recognition of obvious fact. There needs to be an explanation for people's now seemingly inexplicable attachment to food.

Addiction.

You do not have hunger-a signal that your body requires nutritional replenishment, mainly made up of energy. No, your hobby of eating has hi-jacked your brain and you are now allowing it to do you the harm of 'obesity' blah, blah, blah shoddy pseudo-science emotive 'addiction' criteria. 

Regardless of whether weight is a real question for you or not, the answer's most definitely not a stat of proto-anorexia. Turns out you have to have some susceptibility for that to be remotely possible. Enough to stay this side of safe and sane yet stay on a diet for life. Who has that? Just be hungry all the time, but eat, unsatisfyingly, things you may or may not wish to eat and don't eat things you may well feel to eat. And go for the burn.

What makes me laugh is that we thought that was perfectly reasonable for so long. Not other people, who could at least preach fatuously in ignorance of your pain and discomfort, whilst taking their pills for oh, just about anything remotely disagreeable to them.....which less face it is many things a whole lot less bothersome than knawing crazy making hunger.

Has any one said hunger can make you crazy? Resisting the pulsing drive to fulfill it can literally drive you out of your mind? Even if you have such a mental block that it feels like you can barely manage to eat? Those recommending it, should try it. For a limited period, just to get a feel of never being free of hunger.

I don't mean no food-that's relatively easy once you get going. I'm talking about eating inadequately, always being dissatisfied, irritable. Eating things you don't want to eat and not eating things you do.

It's not just the psychology, it's the stripping of some emotional ballast. That increases your sense of vulnerability. The absence of the pleasure of fulfilling a necessary drive, properly. You do know the satisfaction of your hunger is part of your daily pleasure quotient? And that when it's undermined you acquire a pleasure deficit? i.e. your mood starts to sink.  In the end you'll be reaching for something to end the torment of tussling with yourself, even more than the actual physical feeling of hunger.

Being ravished by hunger is emotional.

Dodging it is boring. It repeatedly takes over your mind to the extent that you find it difficult to focus on other things. At some point you'll find there's no free bits of brain left to hold other thoughts, so much of it has been taken over by the imperative to just relieve this damn nagging urge. Its the imperative to do something that you cannot (won't) do that's even more wearying than the hunger itself.

Hurting yourself makes you feel very sorry for yourself indeed. The one safe space, yourself is no more. The one person who should nurture take care of you, is the one who's denying you and letting you suffer, for what? It's humiliating. That's the so called shame of eating disorders, anorexia-the way we're always told what genius high achieving in control anorexics are. And the poor 'over' eaters who are just ashamed they eat too damn much.

NO.

They're both ashamed because something that they were born able to do, they've managed to mess up. That it's for your weight, your "health" doesn't mean shit. You can't even eat properly, you can't meet your own needs, you're incompetent enough to have dropped that ball?!

When you are hungry enough often enough, you can forget.....you do forget....in the end you just don't care. You are too beaten and exhausted to carry on. What it for anyway? You just want your brain back, to feel alive again. To know what it feels like not to have that unchanging feeling in the background. To be able to think about something else to be able to feel something else. To not have your mind and body hi-jacked by a primal urge that you're resisting. 

This is what people mean when they allude to food addiction/overeating whether they quite realise I don't know.

Surely not? Surely "food addiction" is excess, but what is excess? Who defines it when weight is deemed the direct indicator of intake? Consider the way weight loss diet defenders think. How they refuse to acknowledge the failure of their favoured strategy, claiming its actually almost 100% success and the fault is fat people lack stoicism.
(*)
If you re-frame hunger as 'addiction' somehow you can re-frame your battle with hunger as an addict resisting the urge to fulfill an acquired craving. This will give you the same magic that addicts have when they go cold turkey (Ummmm turkeeeey). Which incidentally is FN. Well, they can use drugs to help them get off the drugs can't they?

It's a plan. Just like the one where you're supposed to tell yourself its not a diet, it's a "lifestyle choice." It's not hunger, it's addiction. It's not real hunger, look at the size of you! Which means you know, you can take drugs...for your addiction. 

I remember years ago, in my dieting days, becoming intensely frustrated and enraged, considering an overview of ceaseless attempts to get on-and stay on the straight and narrow yet again.

I remember thinking loudly, "the only way I'm going to be able to stick to this is if I was on heroin!!!*^$"

I weighed it up coolly. Heroin is highly addictive-but, having survived so many wretched attempts at self-enforced hunger how bad could it be?

I giggled. I so wasn't going to find out.

I couldn't even take diet pills.

* Decided to take this line out, it could be read as attacking drug addicts. That wasn't my feeling or my point. I was referring more to those who use drugs to ease minor aches, pains or their emotional issues, rather than alter aspects of their character personality or self-use often hiding behind 'illness' for that purpose.Then feel bad about their own lack of stoicism and outsource their own shame to fat people.

The problem with that is not that kind of drug seeking in itself it's that their attitude and framing squeezes out what is a necessary self critique they're avoiding and not resolved in their own minds. What they are saying to fat people displays this.

Who asked you?

It's a general rule that fat phobes are always using fat people as a canvas on which to project and talk about themselves; what they perceive as their own needs or what's good for them. Here's an example of this condescending projection from some random fat hating tool laying down what fat people are and are not experiencing according to his very good self. 

He patiently attempts to explain what manners are-well we might not know facing an onslaught of impertinent outflow such as this- plus a crash course in what a bedside manner is and what's an acceptable version of that is and how we are not actually experiencing anything in our befatted heads. Because he says so.

All bow down to his spectacular irrelevance.

He takes for granted that we haven't had sufficient experience with the medical profession, despite our apparently unhealthful self affliction.

From people who demonstrate their impeccable judgement by going along with the definition of people as disease (and then bleat stupidly when the med prof run with that.) Who claim without shame that a habit of drinking an excess of alcohol is just like the processes of hunger, eating, digestion, metabolism and weight, which they brilliantly conflate into one thing.

With straight faces.

You always have to find the key to what fat phobic bleats are really about. There's always something at stake for fat phobes and however minimal it is and it is usually. They just feel its oh so important for fat people to sacrifice themselves for this non-entity of a cause. It's never about fat people or what might be best for us, though it tries pathetically to pose as such. Out of practice makes unconvincing.

I'm thinking this is likely to be the monay shot;

Even if we already know that some of these things are bad for us, our doctors still tell us, because hearing these things from a doctor can often instill us with the fear-based motivation we could not find within ourselves.

And due to that incontinent sense of entitlement of "we", fat people should be harangued ceaselessly. Just for "we."

That's the view from a person who isn't fat. But we're supposed to mistake it for universal. Doctors and their "evidence-based" magic! It's been 'proven' that a doc talking about your weight means success in lifestyle-anorexia.

What fat people want is to be heard. A visit to the doctor's called a consultation, because you consult with your doctor about symptoms you actually have. They need to hear what fat people have to say. Not impose their own fatuous monologue brooking no response or challenge. 

You do not go to your doctor to hear a fictionalized version of your body, habits and life and assertions of 'advice' you know doesn't work and has done you harm. And how people who dispense pills for every ache and pain, think a life time of semi-starved hunger dodging ain't nothing but a little thing (yeah, because they've got no pills to dole out for that). 

Despite what this chat may be perceived to do or not do for those who aren't fat. They can arrange to experience the novelty of docs socking it to those them if that's what they so desperately want. [Just not with help from us any more. And yes, you're going to miss that.] Of course they don't want that. They want YOU to dread another tedious waylaying because that's somehow essential to the plot of the story.

Any participation in this Caucasian-style hoodoo investment in medical priests doctors should be strictly voluntary. Encouraging the idea that doctors have powers they don't have is part of the problem. Reliance on shock and fear rather than self awareness is another. What sort of  practice of medicine is that?

We belong to ourselves, we're supposed to have some clue about how we feel and what leads to how we are currently feeling. That's not a panacea to health nor always possible or tolerable, but I really find it peculiar that so many people have to go to the doctor to be told what size they are, or how unfit they may or may not be.

Setting up fat people to take a fall, on the off chance of others experiencing some "fear-based" discouragement to not eat, exercise or "reverse thinspo" as the experts call it, was not our plan. Therefore we need have no loyalty to it. Take care of your own self maintainence. 

We signed on for weight reduction, for fitting in and we worked very hard, many of us gave it everything we had, not to be sacrificed for an all around failed strategy. To achieve something we thought was positive.

Those who are not fat have become too reliant on the stigmatization, harassment and sense of defeat of others, are not owed it, they were unwise to develop dependence, let them break it. 

So, no, we cannot pretend not to know what we know, for you. To not experience what we've experienced and are still experiencing for you. We cannot turn ourselves into mung beans, on the off chance that this will help you to remain/regain slimness. We have our own needs and if that's not good for you, that's not our problem.

Not only has this 'obesity' as reverse-thinspo plan failed, it's an immoral plan.

Get a new one. This one's on its way out. No matter what you say.

Testing the Limits of Hubris

The author of this article has responded to the comments both for and against. I can't figure how to link specifically so I'll copy it's main points;
"thrawnger"

This piece was originally published elsewhere under a different title. The WP changed the title, did away with the pseudonym ("the patient" is, to me, much less personal), and thereby changed the perspective of the story. If you..... re-read the story, you will find that I made an effort NOT to actually voice my own thoughts during the the description of the work-up; I don't consider being "momentarily put off', "trying to get a sense of him as a person,' and 'leaving me to reflect on his plight' as being synonymous with having the limits of my compassion tested, nor being a bigot. I knew that this story would provoke comments, because the patient himself provoked comments -- he is us. We all have a burden in life; his was just larger and more apparent than most. The surgeon and the secretary were guilty of being judgmental and critical (much like some of the comments about my character here) because they were forgetting the man inside the patient. I cannot share the details of the other things I learned about "the patient" -- particularly events that occurred in his past that might explain his eating addiction -- anymore than I had space to share the facts that he told me himself about eating 8,000 calories daily to numb the pain and that he asked for me by name on subsequent visits because he sensed I was much more interested in helping him than in judging him and finding him flawed. To address a few other concerns mentioned, he had a team approach to his inpatient care after going upstairs. .......This story was an attempt to relate a difficult encounter honestly and factually so that people (including me) could examine their own prejudices. It looks like it worked.

Fat phobia is the default. Its more disconcerting when not or hardly there. Like the prank where you land on your behind because your chair was swiped as you went to sit on it. 

Despite this ubiquity, it's still an affront and obvious. Perhaps the dismissal of fat people means people don't trust us to be able to hear such clanging chimes of judgement, if they've affected not to.

In this case, the author "Edward Thompson" may have imagined his even tone hid more than it did. That the guy asked for him is not much of a recommendation. Its in comparison with a surround of others who have maintained less of a hold on themselves. It may be appreciated, but its still not good enough.

In a way, I can stretch to his perspective. I know the medical profession as the prime movers in this campaign of fat hatred-short of some of those dabbling in the dubious field of 'obesity'.

I'm unsure what to make of some fat activist's reactions. If they feel that badly for those at the top end of the weight spectrum, why aren't they; a) advocating openly for proper scientific research into metabolic function, rather than behaving as if being fat is like being gay? [Not even being gay is like being gay in that sense] and b) why won't they accept the medical profession's role in legitimizing the 'obesity' tirade? Why keep making excuses for them and trying to make this all about the slimming industry?

I hold no truck with them,  never have, but, Poison Ivy is not The Joker. 

The article is valuable because it tells us exactly why the medical profession feels so much resentment towards fatness. And no its not "societal attitudes" or "what they're taught in medical school" we're deemed inconvenient, extra work;

Facing him.......I’m not sure just where to start the examination, and when I begin, my hands look small and insignificant against the panorama of skin....It’s hard to tell, exactly....[where] pain is coming from.....We try a chest X-ray, turning up the power to the maximum setting. All we see is white: The patient’s body is just too thick to allow standard X-rays to penetrate to the bones....Morphine at doses high enough to make me dance on tables merely makes him a bit drowsy.

Finally, we move an ultrasound machine into his room — it barely fits between the bed and the wall — and the technician goes in to take some diagnostic images. Minutes later, he emerges.

“I need to get the radiologist to help me,” he says. “This is impossible.” A half-hour later, the chief of radiology comes out of the room, rings of sweat under his arms. “I think we have something,” he says. “A gallstone.” “Don’t put him in a room right over the ER,” whispers the unit secretary to the admission clerk. “The floor won’t support him. He’ll come crashing through and kill us all.” Finally, a slew of huffing, puffing, grunting attendants wheel him down the hall....

Where's room here to cut a dash? Nothing fits, there's extra work, hard work and sweat. Its labour intensive, maybe most importantly of all, nerve wracking, draining. How to negotiate bodies that look and feel different. Stuff's not where its supposed to be, stuff is there that's not supposed to be. How to find out what's wrong and perform your wonders and look aptly omnipotent?

You could overdose the person trying to anesthetize them, it goes on and on and on and on.

It feels to them like fat people change the nature of medicine. It becomes more manual labour. It's as if fat people reduce the value of medicine, it's sense of its own dignity, it's haughtiness takes a knock, becoming more earth bound. Who knows, that may affects the image of the profession, the overall esteem in which its held.

All because people want to eat too much and sit on their fat arses!!! Our bodies feel like an act of aggression to them. They feel sorry for themselves. Why is this/are we spoiling it for them?

Really though, they've had a long time to gear up for this. Weight watchers started in the early 1960's in the US and came to the UK in 1969. When it was clear western [model] societies were gearing up for a weight spike, in the 1970's the medical profession needed to get real and insist 'obesity' or preferably metabolic science became a priority, if they felt so badly about fat bodies. Making sure to follow that up with pointed comments about why was no progress being made etc.,

Instead, they chose the route we are on, convincing themselves they had the power to make success out of failure. They thought their support of chivvying and health hype could do better than fat people's strenuous often self willed efforts. They've continued the weight loss dieting fantasy much in that vain, even to the extent of ushering in fast food giants onto hospital premises (including children's) in the 80's and 90's. They had it in hand right?

Between them and the fat hating public, they'd soon break our will to eat. We were under their thumb.

The medical profession know calorie restriction has failed, they've known for decades.They simply refused to accept it, because, well.....they don't have to. Who's going to make them? Either they have to  sweat or fat people do, why shouldn't it be fat people?

Weight loss dieting held in place by stigma that could repress societal weight gain, rather like homophobia held the expression of homosexuality in check. Disappointment just seems to make them and everyone else all the more determined to cling on to delusion of eventual victory.

It's somewhat amusing, the new desperate thrust to brand fat people 'addicts' when it is those who adhere to calorie restriction delusion that fit the premise of faux addiction that's so au courant. Except, instead of damaging themselves to pursue this dependence, it's someone else. Which means they have more stamina for it obviously. Like the man featured in this report. People like him pay most of all for the lack of rigourous objective study. Or should I say the need to insist fatness is a direct elective choice.

The profession bleat when they feel inconvenienced when reality impinges. So perhaps their resolve to throw fat people to the wind will crumble. 

People who's metabolism is affected by their experiences, like this man are suffering whilst being accused of deliberately choosing to be a problem. It's not that people like him reach for food to soothe their pain as they're told, it's that their body awakens its own pathways to this, instinctively.

What it needs to bring about the changes it needs to absorb that; extra calories and/or lowered activity, biochemical changes in everything from their yes glandular activity to their cardiovascular function,  follows in the wake of that.

It's not "food addiction", that's just trying to rejig gluttony in order to preserve dieting as lifestyle change/weight management or whatever. This kind of response comes from the whole body. It doesn't lend itself to crude partial attacks on part of the process. The reversal needs to get the body working as one. We have no precedent for this kind of thing. Weight is unique and must be understood and defined on its own terms.

Given the make up of the profession and the way it has successfully helped to manipulate public opinion, taking advantage of the bully and shit in all of us, there's not much prospect of change unless enough people in the profession rebel and fat people stand their ground.

The latter will probably be what brings about the former. The professionals only have unbidden 'compassion' for those with social value.

Fat have behaved superbly in many respects and when we wake up to that we will be unstoppable. But we could still listen better to those who are in thrall to this loopy cultism.

Even as a youth, the extent of medical anger and disgust just didn't make sense. These are people who collect and examine samples of your piss and shit. They deal with all sorts of necrotic pus filled matter. Things you and I could barely imagine. Did you notice that? No, you wouldn't, because they don't go on about it.

So when they kick off on like a bunch of permanently tantrum throwing toddlers over your fat arse, you have to know something unusual is up. Do them the honour of hearing that and stop making excuses for them. They honestly are better than that. Have a bit of respect for them!

I honestly do not think they can make the change without fat people's help. I'm being serious about that. They need us to make a sort of intervention. No one else is going to drive this.

Reporting on some of the staff below him as judgey; "they were forgetting the man inside the patient." Well, who was intimately part of defining the (wo)man out of the patient in the first place? 

Medical outliers frame any state or condition. They help define its parameters, the range of difference in human function. Therefore, they help us all to know our amazing anatomy and ourselves.  Focus on them, inadvertently humanizes, bringing them firmly into our focus, getting us used to them. Framing them in the cooler gaze of objectivity.  

Which calms everyone down.

Often they are over-fixated on, the most glaring exception I've ever known is 'obesity'. Where they are most excluded of all. Hidden away. Turned into spectres haunting lesser fatz in case they do not continue to "motivate" themselves, to avoid their fate.  

Signing up for "food addiction" with its complement of pseudo science is just prolonging the inevitable at other people's expense.

The whole thing is a stupid mess and there's only one way out. The most obscene thing of all. The truth.

Once again: Weight isn't Behaviour

Just saw this on tumblr. A chart entitled "Stages of change in behaviour to support successful weight management" is never going to turn out well.

Weight is not behaviour and there's something desperate about framing this as "doing something" "hat is that something exactly?

This is also the basis of assuming that you can tell a person's behaviour from their size. Though for some reason, this is not acknowledged by many of those complaining about "thin shaming."

A reminder than those who think this way do not think from the same root or imperatives as those looking from a more reality based viewpoint. Either genuine scientific study or first person experience.

What the above chart does of course illustrates is in some ways rather poignant wishful thinking. If weight is a behaviour, like smoking or taking drugs. It can be directly adjusted.

In order to make such an absurd assertion, you have to distort the nature of human metabolism and agency, to the point where it bears no relation to what we know.

Weight doesn't fit any of the previous moulds. It's not neurosis, it's not addiction, it's not habit, nor is it directly amenable to will.

Neuroses, from depression to anorexia, yield directly to the application of conscious direction, they even yield readily in many cases, to placebos. Both anorexia, a genuinely deranging condition and depression yield partially or wholly to contrary actions, forcing yourself to eat/ be positive about 3/4 of the time.

Weight loss dieting is said to succeed in significant weight loss about 3-5% of the time. That in itself shows that we are not dealing with the same thing at all.

Eating is not a habit, its an innate drive that we habituate. Like sleep.

You could not do well with little or no sleep. Despite effort the imperative would remain, looking to make good any deprivation. The effort of which would unbalance its whole rhythm.

Another key difference is stopping smoking, being more positive, calming down, eating again are moving from unhealthy to healthier. Weight loss dieting is a pathology. No matter whether you start off well or not.

That is why its not so much hard as dysfunctional.

No amount of re-framing weight as directly under the control of our minds will change any of this. It's not so much impossible as we haven't found out how and this kind of thing shows it doesn't appear to be a priority.