Beasted by Them or Us

Seems its easy to say beasting fat children at a harsh military inspired fat camp in China is in preparation for their economy. Sounds like a headline written the wake of cod Chinese inflected Chinglish Susie Wong style.

As if that's not exactly the same difference elsewhere.

*What you see in the tears of a little boy forced into regimented exercise through his tear stained pain and distress. Is exactly the position fat people are in.

That's your fat hate, it's either them or us.

The Misconception:  You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate. The Truth: You grow to like the people for whom you do good things and hate the people you harm.

A while back I happened to read in a book that quoted Marx saying capitalism set the interests of children against their parents. Not sure if I got the finer details, though I immediately thought of many showbiz biogs. Where talented performers started as children and ended up making more than their parents and how that messed with child-adult relationships and the family hierarchy in general.

Calories in/out is like that.

It automatically sets the interests of those who are, for whatever reasons more prone to gaining weight, against the interests of those who, for whatever reason are less so.

Indeed, if it wasn't fat children, in this case sweating it out, or adults cutting their organs out and everything in between, it would have to be those less prone to retain who had to struggle. That's dictated by the approach.

If society followed its logic of demanding calorie restriction induced weight loss, it would create a society around that. Those less energy efficient would be engaged in just as constant a struggle to get enough calories as virtually all fatz have struggled trying to dodge and expend them all these years.

Maybe they'd have fattening camps for some, though that seems unlikely from here. 

Fat people's individuated energy restriction plan was supposed to somehow do both. Though they're incompatible. You'll recognize that kind of delusion of incompatibles, which defaults to prolonging attrition, is typical of the crusade mindset.

Currently, the rub is society's fattened and sufficiently fat phobic -because the 'crisis' is about everyone fattening, not simply fat people-for the threat of fatness to have invaded the thoughts of those who previously felt at remove.

* Link added!

Professional Rules

I'm in two minds over this recommendation. The idea is healthcare professionals should stop eating calorie dense or 'junk food', slim down and set a better example to patients;

NHS England boss Simon Stevens said staff must 'get our own act together' before it can lecture the public on cutting down on calories.

He's got the ghost of a point there. Of course it would be an outrageous condescending imposition on time-poor, caring professionals. I dislike the way 'lifestyle' picks the same easy targets; drugs, booze, fat bodies, smoking, spot the odd one out.

Why no patronizing lectures about sexual abuse/assault/harassment, bullying? Apart from being unconscionable, these "lifestyles" cost healthcare ££££'s by damaging the health of other people.

And why not press condescending marriage advice? If you can tell people what to eat, you can certainly tell them which partner to choose. The high divorce rate shows the public cannot be trusted to pick their own. Divorce increases the risks of a health problems for years after.

Or how about anger management, for the damage it can do to you and those you take it out on? As a rule, we should subject ourselves to our closest equivalent of whatever we're demanding of others. No smelly stuff about "I am so great here, you aren't". No, everyone who insisting others should engage in a punitive time consuming struggle the wrong way, should at least have to engage with their own nemeses.

Because, healthcare savings!!!

It's always bugged me that fatter medical professionals and those in positions of influence and privilege have for too long refused to exit the delusion that dieting is a sustainable way of life for most people.When they know better. It's one of the things that's enabled fat people's loss of credibility. Fat people not using their credibility to tell the truth leads to it being undermined. If you don't believe in yourself, why would anyone else?

That's what I like so much about old time drug addicts. Despite being trashed to heck by society, they still refused to permit others to overstep the mark in defining them.

That's why everyone wants to be an addict, in spite of the stigma they still attach to (real) addicts.

Why do people always think fat phobia will go round them forever? The detachment of fat people from humanness via the use of the disease metaphor has been so effective. It's like when cattle are stunned. People can't move mentally, until it stings them and breaks through the static.

Let's face it, happily assaulting the public with fat phobia has helped this to now bite them on the arse. I'm both sympathetic and not.

As for the NHS. We've had a lot of lectures about the cheapness of a diet based on fresh produce. Yet institutions from schools to its own great self consistently decide to welcome in commercial food operators for cash. Though it apparently doesn't make much out of it. Long after the 'obesity crisis was invented.

I had no idea why this was the case, till I read what med profs say on it. Turns out, it's a source of sustenance at a stressful time for patients and their visitors. A treat for children going through pain and trauma. A few may not even make it out alive.

As well as something to keep professionals going on long busy shifts or in lieu of their often unedifying canteens.

Eating's emotional.

If this does become a thing, it could spread to other public servants for example politicians and social workers.

Yet another mass long-term weight loss diet experiment on public servants, with attendant side effects could help force some much needed realism in this area.

I can't say its a nice idea, but if people won't stand up for what they know to be real. Then one has to ask how they can object to putting it into action on their own good selves?

It might be best in the long run to have this play out in the face of what could be some official scrutiny this time. 

Under The Influence

In the wake of a recommendation to extend gastric construction/removal surgery to those with a BMI of 30, from 35-if the person has diabetes.

Barbara Ellen manages better than too many fat people to grasp that we are looking at people in the grip of an urge they no longer have much control over.

This has been hidden under a veneer of 'science' and let's face it, class, race gender and professional privilege. And rarely subject to more than the most minimal scrutiny or challenge. It's meant base impulses have just run on beyond the bounds of rationality.

She notices this despite swallowing the ob koolaid on the "need" for fat people, with diabetes, to be butchered to "save" the NHS/other healthcare systems from the "costs du obesity."

She's still able to see this, without making excuses for haters such as they "mean well" or "believe" something;

Why do people rage against the obese so much? Why does the sight, or even the mere thought, of the obese excite such venom, disgust and outright cruelty?

Excite is right. Someone needs to starve.

Lest any haters are wondering. She displays the same fears of being accused of lipophilia as everyone else, that's basically anything not wholly on-side with fat hating. Such a default is that, not going along with it sounds wildly radical.

In describing the rank behaviour of dripping fanged lipophobes, she makes comparison with some fat people's purported emotional eating. Just to give haters a taste of how low they have sunk.

Charming. And the use of present and future tenses is weird. Like this hasn't been happening over decades. A historical as ever, other start history from when they noticed.

Yet;

Ironically, it could be that people with weight problems are forced to be calm and grounded; it's others around them who get emotional and panicky about fat.

Overlooking the unfortunate terminology, that's as good a description of coming to a fat acceptance perspective as I've heard in a while.

She recognizes there's no logic in raving on about the costs of  "obesity related" i.e. diabetes then complaining about increasing weight loss surgery, on the grounds of mitigating cost. After all, they've gone with fat is toxic to the point of sickness. Anything that induces weight loss will make it better. Perhaps it doesn't come across that these are healthy organs- obese is disease in human form, including organs.

True, they're really whingeing because they know full well that all this is garbage. And that calorie restriction doesn't work. They don't care.

They just feel an extreme need to make fat people do it anyway.

Fat phobes believe in nothing and will say anything in the moment, in order to advance what they see as leading to the end game of fat people practising anorexia. They are motivated by something that has been left unchecked and unexamined. They're used their fantasy, not leading anywhere.

Things are getting a bit complex now the con game is increasingly in play.

This urge is anorexia-by-proxy (syndrome) [ABP]. When the narrow focus on calorie restriction induced weight as the solution to all problems slides into a form of anorexia. This time someone else, usually a fat person is the vehicle.

ABP is what's really been driving the crusade from year dot. Everything is arranged around this.

......anything that might make an obese person's weight loss easier or faster is automatically rubbished and undermined. The rationale is that, unless someone lost the weight themselves, and panted, sweated and suffered to do so, it's not true weight loss and it's not "deserved". 

 No, the irrational is the overweening craving for fat people to severely reduce calories.

This is how some people seem to view the overweight – wanting to push them into a relentless, almost biblical cycle of ridicule and disgust, followed by punishment and retribution and finally, if they're very fortunate, forgiveness and absolution.

She's picked up on it hasn't she? The god shaped hole. The abusive psychological manipulation. They want need fat people to starve, everything is about that. Why else would what they claim will lead to health and ergo weight loss be slammed because its not starvation level?

The construct named 'obesity' is about getting fat people to devalue themselves to the point of self abandonment. Fat phobia's throws fat people out of possession of their own bodies and lives. Others can take them over to do whatever with. Fat hate seeks to make eating so associated with pain, that fat people learn to live with any amount of painful hunger. 

It's all based on calories in/out. That seems too innocuous. But it also happens to be the basis of anorexia. Anorexia draws investment in it. Investment in it draws people into anorexia in themselves and/or in their chosen proxy.

Society's Cauldron

Here's how fatness inadvertently shines a light on things others were rather left shady;

Maybe – just maybe – telling women that they're making a mistake by not personally dealing better with public and social problems is just another way of selling – and materially benefiting from – our supposed shortcomings.

I always feel a slight outer body sensation when feminists do this. Say exactly why I expected them to instinctively have baulked at crusade and its construct.

Whatever people think about fatness, choosing food as the route to change weight-then individualising it, is exactly this. Forcing individual fat people to turn around the juggernaut of society's food system. Fat people's insides, mental and physical have been into the internal junction to re-route this against the will of other people's conflicting impulses. Whilst being accorded no social power or influence over either.

Hence the cutting. Cut fat people into acting as a place mat for everyone else.

Whether it's the medical profession's desire to maintain their extent of monopoly over healing via the unsustainably passive patient doctor 'relationship', their interesting professional structure, or the desire for their workspaces-that's you and me-to be "tidier."

Or trying to leave the slimstream out of a life built around restricting and expending calories, despite them choosing that way for us. Sadly, feminism breaks down without a sympathetic frame to draw it on. In this case white middle/upper class women.

Theoretically, that shouldn't be, but this is the reality.

This is the understanding that is sisterhood. Not, brown nosing women, but recognizing the devaluation of any woman via the route of misogyny, devalues all women.

Misogynoir, classism, homophobia, fat phobia etc., ultimately devalue all women, including those feeling insulated by the distance of assumed superiority.

So, what do these feminists really believe? That women should be torn to shreds by having to work out society's systemic grievance-against its own momentum and desires?

Or that they should not.

I think we know.

Getting Radioactive with the Food Policers

This kind of harassment takes me back. It tends to create a reluctance to eat in public. I remember snorting sourly when this was named as a key symptom of hyperphagia. How important was that to me when I had it? I'd actually forgotten about reluctance to eat in front of others, until I kept reading this in descriptions of that disorder. Only then did I remember.

I had so many other problems, both being fat and having an eating disorder, that it didn't even figure as in any way notable.  I honestly didn't realize what a big deal it was supposed to be, 'til I saw Rae Earl's My Mad Fat Diary.

How typically obsessive of the white coat establishment to focus on shame as definitive of an ED associated with being chubby and fat!

It became a norm for many, especially fat people, not to feel able to eat or eat much in public. I know the latter has always been the case for some slimmer women too. But the crusade may well be heating this all up. Either increasing the extent of unwanted intervention, and/or making feelings surrounding eating more charged.

That's what does it as much as the actual interference. 

It's hard to know what to say about this. In some way it feels like its travelled slightly the other way for some fat women, smaller fat people. Ironically, the heights it reached, in one form or another, from being pinched, slapped to being laughed at, in a context of needing to get slim NOW. Caused such a build up of unprocessable pain in fat people, that this transmitted created a force of silent anguish so powerful, it put off some of the less insensitive. It discomforted them too much for them to go there.

This is what is sometimes referred to when folks say "We can't say anything about fat people-why can anything be said to slimz" etc., This harassment may rise among slimz due to the emphasis on "prevention." The absence of such internal emission of emotional radiation within slim women creates no discomfort in others.

Their lack of unease is key here.

Any thing that travels using misogyny will travel through all women, at some point. This is a bit chastening a real feminist fail for sure. If only we could have joined hands, we could have stopped it from getting here. But well, wasn't to be. The 'obesity' construct has distanced women from each other.

The motivation for this impertinence is of course the investment in calories in/calories out moreso the decision to make that the only route to weight management, whether up or down. Food policing is happening in the slender direction too, i.e. being told to eat up for the menz, as they like something to grab hold of.

I know people find this hard to grasp, but it is the problem. Not comprehending its significance, its begetting of things as seemingly disparate as; good food/bad food, clean eating, junk food, bad/good for you, calling thin women anorexics, accusing them of not eating that, calling fat people food addicts, increasingly defining us as mentally unsound child abusers etc., means women in particular, continue to support our own harassment and encroaching loss of autonomy.

There simply is no way to sacrifice fat women for slim. It should never have been necessary at all really, again, that need to throw fatz under the bus is ci/co. Only the privileging of slimmer could prevent this. And that looks like its being eroded by fat phobia which threatens to become an increasing powerhouse.

Take the whole anorexia is not a problem 'obesity' is. 

So, until it can be grasped that weight is regulated by metabolic metabolic function rather than "behaviour." This dysfunctional dictate will continue spitting up its manky furballs. 

Policing of food, is exactly justified by this idea. That is it in a nutshell, police food, policed life, equals healthy life. Could we really have been naive enough to think this was just about weight? It's always about control isn't it?

Misogyny is liberated by the sense of ownership over women. Still, no one is more porous than fat people, we're defined as an extension of other people's imagination.

The two mix, merge and feed off each other

You Did Not Eat That

Same sureness of attack, same declamatory form. With a splotch of innervating pomposity. Feel your mouth open and the air mis-behaving in the back of your throat!

Calories in/out means fat people eat and thin and slim women don't. Strangely enough, the latter continued to  expect to be spared this. And for a while, they did.

Increasingly, not it seems.

This has been going on for a while. Especially since (anti) anorexia advocates decided to exhort people to confront those who were thin, as if they couldn't just be thin natural. i.e. that thinness was their equilibrium-not their achievement.

In the media, thin women, actresses and the like have felt the need to be seen to eat in public, especially foods that are deemed unlikely to pass the lips of those slender. Even worse pose with said foods.

The pressure is for women to do whatever it takes to be thin/slim yet go at food with gusto. Be easy to be around. I remember a woman complaining that she attracted a man with her figure. But when he experienced how much effort she put into it, which was constant. He left her citing that as a reason.

Oh well.

This is ironically leading to some thin/slim women replicating what was supposed to be the trait of hyperphagia [or compulsive eating/food addiction] secret eating. One of the reasons why I cannot abide the nonsense surrounding HN is that kind of boob.

There's nothing particularly disordered about not wishing to detonate the bomb that the same smeckperts have turned food into by insisting on it as the weight lever. It can get to the point of messing with your digestion.

It's a shame, I thought at least slimz could hold up the flag of uninterrupted normal eating. But it seems, eating neurosis is overunning them too. This is bad news for all women. Slimz helped me regain a sense of what healthy eating really meant after years of hyperphagic induced in part by an unwittingly orthorexic mindset.

To have a charming benign view of food, just by being, maybe no more. 

The title, feels like a companion to, "This is why you're fat." Plus the whole fat as a feeling. Thin is probably deemed one too now. When one is hungry presumably.

Treating Black Women like they matter Improves their Health

Black women are often taught to put Black men first, last often always. To the extent that women can lose a sense of who they are, especially by the time it comes to parent.

Apparently, responding to them as real beings who matter. Counselling them, addressing their needs/ offering hope to that end, giving them even periodic advice, encouragement, attention relieves some of those tensions, alleviating depression. Wowsers.

Under what pretext was this tested? A study of a "weight management programme" charmingly called "Maintain, don't Gain." The aim is to stop especially black women gaining any weight through changes in diet and habits. The purpose is to prevent moving into higher risk weight categories.

It featured 185 "obese" low income women with BMI's between 25-35 [yeah].

What is it about this crusade that it never starts with the fattest people? If you are going to perform this kind of study and claim it as establishing something close to an evidentiary principle. They would be the most in need and reveal the most about any underlying technique.

Don't worry about the trope about how black women struggle to lose weight because black people are indifferent to/ glorify 'obesity'. It is a tiresome and lazy falsehood. Why aren't white attitudes to women as trophies who do nothing but reflect the glory of middle/upper class white men's ability provide or whatever, pointed to as a thing?

Not being as wholly unbalanced and deranged about weight as other races/classes does not equal fat positive. That is not metaphor. The investment in calorie restriction by western model countries has departed the shores of sanity. Yes, middle/upper class white people can do that too.

Being disinclined towards the strange and suicidal impulse to fight and repress hunger-which is part of our means of perpetuating life-as if its a pathology, is perfectly rational.

The fervent belief that white people are where human reason lives, doesn't make it so. Nor does the assumption of black people's unreason mean we don't retain rational after others have lost theirs.

I also note that the pressures of racism, are skirted over. There's an increasing urge to submerge racism [amongst other things] into "obesity." Part of the flexibility in pathologizing beings rather than naming an actual process.

The burdens of sexism aren't mentioned either.

Misogynoir, refers the different interplay between the two in black women. Being black does not invest with magic to swat this away as if its not there. Women don't sit around feeling sorry for themselves, but they aren't able to completely conjure away all feelings of being trapped by the trip wires of race and sex from doing its work on their nervous systems.

That trapped between multiple stresses factor is seen in working class women of all races who tend to be fatter. Whereas men are more likely to have a more varied spread of weight across income/class. If you wish to turn medicine into a quasi religious form of sociology, being on the receiving end of structural and social discrimination should be deemed risk factors for ill health.

The usual squawking is about "sedentary", including those working minimum wage type jobs. But what does that really mean? Contained, constricted thwarted, blocked, trapped is what it means. There's evidence that this changes the effect activity has on your body.

Some of the probable reasons for black women's purported greater difficulty have not been revealled in black women. Ellen Langer's highly underrated and revelatory study-which always felt like an exposé- points to how cynical and damaging that branding of "sedentary" has been.

I'm glad these women got 12 months of much deserved and clearly needed attention, affirmation and a sense that they matter. That their needs are valid and worth being catered to as say, the ladies who lunch. Weight stablisation doesn't introduce the threat to restrict the body's ability to nourish itself properly-including enough to cope with the demands being made on it, I make no bones about that.

This cannot be denied despite this all bodies are the same default that is often the assumed basis around any discussion of weight.

Black women have amongst the lowest suicide rates of all. Situational or structural depression, i.e. awareness of conditions you are in, rather than a condition being led more by personal trauma/upset + susceptibility.

This is itself suggested by;

These findings [of reduced depression] were not related to how well the women did in the weight management program nor whether they were taking depression medication.

It will be interesting to see whether and how this does get constructed into a "model." Whether it's to prevent disease or if it will be seen as a way to depression in poor black women and others. If this study shows anything, its that low income black women, especially, need more self-affirmation not less.

[h/t to New Black Man (in exile)]

I am a Person

I'm a human being. I'm one of the people. Citizen, homo sapiens, c'est moi. And I am perfectly happy with that.

I didn't ask to be given any names or brandings.

Not 'obese'. Not "overweight" none of it. These words are unsolicited, unwarranted, unwanted, impositions.

I am not interested in identifying as or with any of these. I consider them in the same light as a non-Jewish person considers the word Gentile, or a non-Muslim considers the term infidel. It's someone else's name for what I can be categorized as, from their point of view. But it has little interest for me, beyond that.

Luckily for me. Neither Jewish people, nor Muslims would feel self important enough to think they can just brand me with these. Getting their media cronies to repeat them like not doing so-one time, would stem their breath.

If anyone on the grounds of anything, weight for example feels the need to disconnect from people they wish to categorize.

I suggest they give themselves-names.

And leave general terms like people, person and so forth for those who are happy to wave them bye-bye.

Being Felled by your Own Hating is Something to Avoid

After years of "humiliation" and "shame", Linda Kelsey ex-editor of cosmo and rampant misogynist wonders why young fat women- who should be feeling as bad as her very great self-don't seem to her to be;

what I witnessed was a let-it-all-hang-out faith in themselves and a don't-give-a-damn attitude to their evident obesity. ......Far more attention and, dare I say it, opprobrium needs to be directed at young fatties.

Despite being a hack, she didn't think to strike up a convo and find out. Probably for the best.

She claims women have swallowed the "dangerous body positive message." They're concerned about their daughters weight but dare not say lest tip them into anorexia.Well, as calorie restriction is the primary instrument of anorexia, they've got something.

Though, is she sure it's simply that?

My mental and physical collapse — the most accurate way I know to describe what happened to me — was a clear sign that, like many women of my generation, I was spreading myself too thinly, trying to do too much, too perfectly, without letting my superwoman mask slip. 

Perhaps these women are aware of what a (literally) dead end hating your body and/or self is and where it can lead?

Depression sucks the life-force out of you. It makes you hate yourself. It makes you feel utterly worthless.

After all;

nearly one in five adults experience anxiety or depression, with the highest levels occurring in women in over 50

And;

Though those figures are high, they also mean that if you are one of those unlucky ones, four out of five people won’t have a clue what you’re going through.

The "unlucky" ones? It hardly counts as bad ill-luck if you end up there after life of cloaking yourself in body shame.

She starts her earlier piece on what shame and self hatred does to a susceptible mind describing the awful torpor of neurosis. Years of high anxiety exhausting the nervous system-which then collapses into a state of chronic exhaustion, i.e. depression. Turning an everyday errand to the supermarket into a "herculean task. Impossible"

Does she think people as borish as herself walking past her at that time, like she walked past those fat women, would know what she felt inside? From the outside?

After wasting years doing the same kind of thing that helped get her to this point-chiding herself for failing her perfectionist standards-she finally cottoned on that this was rather self defeating. When she got the end of her will to live;

Having sunk to a place where I believed that I, and all those who loved me, would be better off if I was dead,

Yes, she was committed. Even if she does believe fatness is 'unhealthy' she ought to have learned something about the paradox of human beings doing things they think are right, only to end up with unintended consequences.

Instead she prefers glib talk show therapy speak. Claiming gratitude for the experience. She wishes, this tirade reveals she's as bitter as a pike wishing on others what she barely endured and is still struggling with. Except to to exhort others to surround and force them into this state so that unlike her, there's no escape for them, when they've had enough.

As with other fat phobes, solipsists personnified. This has already happened to many fat people. And perhaps the young women themselves may have already been to that abyss. Gabourey Sidibe was put on her first diet at six and burnt out at about 19. Later she made the decision not just to stop chasing bad, but to step up and decide who she was and how she was going to feel about herself.

All you do is climb in, then have to claw your way out again. As Kelsey had to. I don't care who you are or what you weigh, at some point, you will have to decide who you are, regardless of what or who others think you are or should be.

This is what a mature woman with the wisdom of experience is supposed to tell young women. That wasting yourself like this, will get you a blown nervous system, that may never truly recover.

That's a lot of her problem, living in that head full of hatefulness and shame, 24/7. Never being able to get away. Sorry, but not all depressions are the same. Not everyone is depressed because they received bad treatment, from others.

This woman still has the same hateful credo that pulled her under her own moving vehicle. Her "recovery" like so many who naturally invest in fat phobia, was to absent herself from her own judgment!

the unswerving support of friends and family was critical. They never blamed me or told me to pull myself together. They knew I wouldn’t act this way if I could help it.

She had to get permission from them. Imagine if they hadn't given it to her? Instead, confirmed her view of herself and told her to stay there. Where would she be then?

Anger towards her is righteous enough, but remember, she has to live with herself. I'm truly grateful for that myself. That's punishment enough. She can't get away. There's no respite from the ugliness within and she's quite angry about that. Just like many 'motivated' i.e. self bullying fitness junkies.

Oh the honesty of fatness! Unlike neuroses, which continually flatter to deceive in this kind of way. Weight is metabolic. It cannot be fooled by drugs, sub- therapy bull-shiting.You've either affected your metabolic function, or you haven't. You can manufacture some crude temporary assault-this shallowness ends up being evident....

It's this kind of neuroses therapy, drugs haze merry go round, that gives the impression that something has happened. People like Kelsey expose that utterly. She has learn nothing, except to get herself out of the way of the Leviathan pulling her down and volunteer some other victims for it. As if that will do anything for her dim soul.

In some ways, her feelings are being exploited. Her still raw anguish and rage are hard for her to suppress in the face of those she deems so utterly beneath her. Others want to get at fat bitches and put us in our place just as she does, but know just enough to sense how bad that makes them look.

So, fools rush in, and are rather laid bare. I doubt those who paid her for this effluent give any more of a damn about her dignity than they do the fat people's she's being set upon.

Well, you know what? Not playing daily mail.

This is the kind of thing I've seen so often from fat phobes. And I'm not going for it. I've got better in mind than your repeated attempts to set up a fat versus slim-women. Nope, not interested.

In some ways I pity this Kelsey, no, I really do. That's not undercover contempt. Though if she feels insulted, I'm okay with that. "I have more compassion for MYSELF and others" She claimed.

Call that ambition.

Preliminary Ruling on Disability

The preliminary finding from the Karsten Kaltoft case is that "severe obesity" a BMI of 40 + can count as a disability. It's from the advocate general and isn't binding, though its usually a formality that the European Court of Justice will follow.

What can I say?

I do not agree with seeing weight, any weight as a uniform disability. Nor indeed did the plaintiff. It makes better sense to follow the norm which is to recognize disability as it occurs and not to invent it. But, since when did sense lead this crusade?

The advocate general, Niilo Jaaskinen, who advises the court, found that EU law did not prohibit discrimination specifically on the grounds of obesity,

And there you have it. If folks wound up by their own hysteria can no longer view fat people in a rational objective manner and we know they cannot. Who should pay the price?  Fat people or those indulging their unrestrained overexcitement?

The court has found that it should be as per usual, polluter pays.

On the other side, it could lead to a greater sensitivity in terms of providing adequate furniture and fixtures to accommodate larger bodies without fuss. I find the parking obsession comical, but was intrigued that it might mean employers have to provide healthy options!

Some warn it could make fat people less employable. I hope not. 

And;

Jaaskinen threw out the notion that a self-inflicted disability could be any less worthy of protection, saying: "The origin of the disability is irrelevant. [It] does not depend on whether the applicant has contributed causally to the acquisition of his disability through 'self-inflicted' excessive energy intake."

Pass me a hankie to dry my tears of laughter.  That's what can happen when grotesquely indulged delusion crashes into an arena where it cannot hold sway-for once and is subject to arch rationalists.

Leptin and Gherlin

The Leptin, Ghrelin duo are a watershed for me. They're the only things I had no grasp or understanding about coming into FA. Not even sure whether I'd heard of them before. Leptin possibly.

My response to them has been monumental indifference. I simply cannot make myself give much of a fig about either. Despite someone winning a prize for the discovery of one of them. They've been described as hormones.

Leptin; "is a mediator of long-term regulation of energy balance," okay.  "...suppressing food intake and thereby inducing weight loss." Don't see why. "Suppressing intake" presumably, equals a dampening / switch off of hunger/appetite signalling. Why would that necessarily lead to weight loss, even over time?

Gherlin "... is a fast-acting hormone," fast? Okay.  "....seemingly playing a role in meal initiation."

Wut?
Meal initiation? Seems oddly specific. Does that mean you proceed from hunger to actually "initiate" eating...food.....whether that's a meal or no? Anorexics can be agonized with hunger, but eating action fails between that and their "eat button."

My sketchy take on this lack of engagement is the 'obesity' crew have come up with very little of any use to any person fat or otherwise, apart from mainly the unethical and the unspeakable. I believe they're unlikely to do better anytime soon, if  many of them are even trying-more than for show.

Ob as a field of endeavour is doa-the arrival point being basic critical scrutiny or even, consciousness. It makes no sense to compartmentalize the study of metabolic function across size. Weight needs to be viewed as a (whole) spectrum. Defining fat people as disease is stupid. Studying biology in them to pathologize and justify that pre-decided branding, leads to obscuring of everyone's metabolic, that is biological function.

An obvious example is the assumption many have that weight rebound-after calorie restriction diet induced loss is specific to fat people. That its part of our purported failings as human beings (despite us already being robbed of that definition). When this can be observed in all people from thinner to fatter. Hence the former always losing the same 5, 10, 15, 30 etc., pounds.

Obviously if you rebound all the time whilst always being thin that isn't going to show. How can this confusion be a good thing? Seems like wasting the efforts of those who are putting the work in.

Hardly my idea of science.

Anyway. I happen to have clicked on the above link on some article or post and it lead to that paper.You can tell exactly what line it takes. "As a growing number of people suffer from obesity...." oh please. Studying mechanisms that have "influence on energy balance has been a subject of intensive research." That has amounted to what practical applications exactly?

Perhaps its shortness drew my eye. "In obese subjects the circulating level of the anorexigenic hormone leptin is increased, whereas surprisingly, the level of the orexigenic hormone ghrelin is decreased." Yeah, whatev's.
"It is now established that obese patients are leptin-resistant."

That was like a cattle prod. It's been "established" has it? On what basis? Immediate thought. Any chance its this? Yes, it seems thus. Because you expect a high amount of leptin in the blood to =less eats and fat people by (your) definition=too much eats. Ergo, ob must be resistant to leptin.

Naughty old obeses. Not only don't they listen to physics/their docs/everybody knows. Their blood is naughty too-it doesn't listen to its leptin.

It's leptin non-complaint.

Well, that's what happens when you turn people into biochemistry to make the ridiculous idea that they are disease look as if it makes sense. Well it does-to an army of self deluding bigots.

Let's just check the circulating leptin of people suffering from underweighcity, bet its as low as fatz is high, eh? Seems so; "Plasma leptin levels were significantly lower in underweight patients than those in normal weight patients and in healthy controls."

So, the action of the body regulating itself is bad on one end, because that's the bad end.

These papers are from 2007. Though the latter came after the former and there's nothing wrong with being wrong in pursuit of knowledge. This still indicates the underlying problem with framing, interpretation and presentation.

Rather than studying human metabolic function, through the weight to map out how it works overall. Discovering any pathology through digging that out, rather than seeking only to confirm your desired moribund hypothesis.

The former, gives all sorts of flexibility. It helps us to understand ourselves better and helps facilitate greater understanding of where and when things go awry.

Corrected or not though, why bother to create this unnecessary hurdle? What's the point of it? To police behaviour? To keep fat phobes nervous systems on high alert so they can keep thought on lockdown? You think science can take such and retain its integrity?

I still don't know exactly what leptin or ghrelin are for. I can't even buy completely into  the interpretation of insulin resistance.....yet.

Long-term Weight Loss is entirely Probable

The headline says:"Obesity research confirms long-term weight loss is almost impossible"

Not quite. Long term weight loss is almost impossible via the wrong route, the only one presented to us, calorie restriction.

Let's be clear. The failure here is not weight loss, that's an automatic process that just happens. Whether it's as a consequence of your body's delivery of energy throughout your day. The failure is the ONE means deliberately chosen to bring it about.

We get hints of possibility. After a period of gain that isn't sustained. Though stretching it a bit, when your body reduces or stops gain,  you can see that as a potential for it bringing about a reverse. It shows the body's ability to alter its metabolic outcomes to a sometimes marked degree. Though you haven't strictly lost by not sustaining gain, check with anyone who's gains every year without fail. I used to be like that.

If I hadn't stopped, ironically, after I stopped dieting I'd be a lot bigger than my biggest. There are many like that.

I can't swear to it, but I feel pretending that weight is just the calorific sum total of a set of conscious elective decisions, is getting in the way of finding out how the body slows or curtails gain in this/these way/s.

Because, then it would have to be stated plainly that, this is body, not a mind led process. And everybody knows why that's verboten. 

The subtitle's more illuminating "No known cure for obesity except surgically shrinking the stomach." No known is right. That doesn't mean there isn't, it means the western model hasn't uncovered in its times.

Some commenters seem confused [I'm being polite].

The reasoning is just stupid: most overweight people have trouble permanently losing weight, ergo losing weight long-term is "almost impossible. Instead, the author should have inquired why it is that overweight people have so much trouble with weight loss.

Favourite part;

This is an area where there is a growing amount of credible research.

Oh ain't that a motherlode in one sentence?! You'd think they'd have researched that over the last 40 + years. And why is 'ob' research always fracking growing, never ripening.

It's not about "overweight" people. Nor is the conflation of weight loss with weight loss dieting/lifestyle choiceychange whatever, correct.

Again, this is the observation of human biology in fat people. It is not unique to us. The same thing happens in thin, slim and plump people. Hence mags and papers publish diets all year. Slimmer people are often losing the same 5,10, 15, 20 etc., pounds, for weddings (their own other people's) parties, the beach, the summer, the LBD and so on and so on.

It's not about sugar, it's about biological design. There is no reason for the failure of the application of an abstract assumption, that doesn't account fully for the way biology works. It is a fact that attacking hunger, appetite and eating just tends to create a boomerang effect. If it doesn't that's usually the failure.

Just as sleep deprivation leads to an oversleep rebound and even, holding your breath for longer, produces a powerful compensatory rebound hyper-ventiliation. How many more years are we going to have to keep saying this? I know haters read me, this is yet another one for your hateraid grapevine.

Rhythmic vital impulses that are generated by your anatomy. They keen towards a mean of balance, whilst adapting by increasing or lowering signalling. 

Incidentally, note how fat people aren't enough to say something isn't working. Yet slim people can say anything doesn't work if they feel like it, in the face of obvious function. As we say; if something doesn't work 100%, slim people can assert it doesn't work. If something doesn't fail 100%, fat people cannot point out that it doesn't work. 

The article's money shot;

So if most scientists know that we can't eat ourselves thin, that the lost weight will ultimately bounce back, why don't they say so?

As the author Kelly Crowe is discovering from the drubbing she received in comments for this piece, fear.

At root, the belief in cals in/out is like the belief in god, if you believe that is a product of the human mind.

Belief in calorie restriction is not amenable to reality or to reason, that has to be lept over to get to it in the first place. So these people are unforgiving and vicious when you attack their go(o)d.

Honestly, don't you just love us fat people? Do you know I'd forgotten that what we take for granted is actually intolerable for some who haven't been exposed to this sort of response? Maybe we're a bit fooled by constantly being told, no-one gives enough hate to fat people. We know that's not true, but it suggests others don't think much of the heat we do get. Their reluctance to endure the minor forms of it, is a reminder.

Obesity construct double think strikes again.

The response from an expert;

Tim Caulfield says his fellow obesity academics tend to tiptoe around the truth......"You'll be in a room with very knowledgeable individuals, and everyone in the room will know what the data says and still the message doesn't seem to get out.

Yeah, would you be the one to tell haters if you didn't have to? FA knows how they shoot the shizz out of the messenger.

You have to be careful about the stigmatizing nature of that kind of image," Caulfield says. "That's one of the reasons why this myth of weight loss lives on.

In other words, both they and their reputation will be dragged through the mud. Possibly career ending, after all, this comes and is generated from within. They have everything to lose and nothing to gain. They're afraid and they're right to be.

Kelly Crowe says the message/truth is "harsh". There's nothing to replace it mainly because instead of pursuing pure facts, which would produce possibilities and hope for those who want/need it. Cals in/out has been allowed to infest the research and become the all or nothing.

That leaves the kind of void that cannot just exist. It has to be filled with more knowledge, which is being blocked by the contrived necessity of the sine qua non of 'obesity' research.

Note-there's also the idea that aiming for weight loss or wld is control. That control of eating is gotten only through aiming for that, even if you miss. This fails to account for the fact that restriction is a primary trigger of hyperphagia. 

This idea of control is a sign of anorexia by proxy.

Cut 'em Up

NHS quango NICE -which assesses potential procedures on the basis of value for money has proposed dropping the requirement for gastric banding (and other weight loss surgery) from 35 to 30, if the person has diabetes. That last fact has been lost. As fat people are a disease-'obesity' ergo, hegemonous, any fat person is all fat people.

It's mostly been written up as being carte blanche for all fat people to evade their duty. Gastric mutilation is ergo posited here as a treat an evasion. Perhaps that's not surprising from people who posit fat people as intent on getting a heart attack, spending NHS money, as some kind of desirous goal.

If it goes through, it will maim and kill more fat [and some chubby and slim people] under the guise of saving their health/ lives. If I was supercold and cynical. I might wonder; if people with a BMI of 30, get slim enough to look 'sympathetic', that when inevitable complications ensue, perhaps this will  make the unacceptability of this visible to most?

Awful isn't it? But to be honest, I find it hard to get upset about it. Why should I be more upset that someone like myself-if I had diabetes could qualify for death by mangled insides than someone fatter than myself who's always qualified?

Ironically [or not, this bullshit is always tripping over its own foolishness] what may block it is the very hatred that created this disgraceful butchery. Further, the pity party may actually hinder this. What's a girl to do?!

I feel little outrage because I've already said, this belief in calorie restriction-which is effectively what these operations set out to assist-is crazy. I meant it. I wasn't being ableist. The people under the influence of it, are not acting in their right minds. It's like when anorexics talk strangely about "ana." Something like that is in charge.

Starve the fat, it must be done.

Crazy is the endgame of more than one cause. The one we think of is biochemical/electrical malfunction of the brain/nervous system. In this case, thinking that's so wrong, so unchecked due to multiple privilege descends into a similar mess. In other words, you can have a batshit stream within the context of sanity. And because of that, your overall sanity underwrites your basic credibility.

That's one mental health activists possibly didn't bank on.  When I define things, like 'obesity' is a cult. And haters read and copy what I say, saying them to FA as insults. They show up their own lack of ideas.  I don't say them for fun. I say them because that's what I observe.

When I said, this mindset is deranged. I wasn't saying it to insult. It is. It's actually worse than people who's problem is the sudden malfunctioning of their brain. Here you have people who are just like you and me, then suddenly enter a frightening phase where their brain isn't giving them the correct information.

In this case, it's more the other way around, they just keep giving their poor brain shit. And you don't even have the prospect of them recovering function, because they haven't lost that. 

Certainly, this mindset would rather cut people up, than face the fact that its a dead duck that cannot lead anywhere but to the very day when its somehow forced to accept the very reality its dodging. The very reality it will do anything, sacrifice anyone to avoid.

Man V Collateral Damage

Adam Richman is an ex-professional feeder  who presented a programme the attractions of which I simply do not understand. Seems that's due to its basis being anorexia worshipping societies boring obsessive compulsive food fixation. Even the mere veneration of it produces a displacement effect similar to that found in actual anorexics.

Anyhows, Richman stopped eating to the dictates of his career-eating amounts he doesn't want to eat and has lost some weight. He posted photos of himself on his instagram account in praise of said weight loss. One of hastags he used in this was #thinsporation which =Thin + inspiration.

This prompted a follower to get in touch with Amber Sarah who has the barefaced nerve to be a fat activist, non of this [""]. Not sure why "feminists" can't take other women seriously, probably waiting for men to do it first, giving them permission to.

She responded by, as far as I can see, calmly calling his attention to the term's inappropriate "problematic" connotations. He and others claim he had no knowledge of the origins of the term. That I doubt. It's in the air, he probably picked it up symbiotically. Funny how those who deem others guilty by existence trade so much on innocence. [Or perhaps not].

Thinspo comes from amateurs who take the 'cure' for 'obesity' to its logical conclusion and flat out define anorexia nervosa (and exercise bulimia) as a lifestyle. As indeed does the establishment-for fat people. One of the props for this turn of mind is the use of the objectification of women in the form of often doctored photos of slim and thin women to "inspire" them to continue starving themselves.

It's what a consciously induced famine requires, constant reminders to keep on doing it. All things being equal, you'd just eat when you're hungry, that's kind of a default necessity. Unless you have a form of anorexia so overwhelming that it more or less runs itself 

[There's an ironic counterpart-fatspo fat + inspiration. Referring to the fact that it takes just as much continual will for fat people to swim upstream against society's imposition and view yourself as fully human, as it does to constantly and consciously contrive anorexia. If not more so.]

His first response was to state he had no fuq's to give. 'K. This prompted Amber to call on her followers to let him know the significance of ED's i.e. anorexia.  

In short, Richman then went apeshit. Not merely angry but revealled he has an extent of problems way out of keeping with his cultivated image as a charming happy stuffer-shall we say. He actually called women c-nuts and went so far as to say to someone else;

seriously-grab a razor blade & draw a bath. I doubt anyone will miss you.

Can you believe that? I'm not that bothered by offense, but I found that repugnant. So much so that I forgot myself and honestly expected forthright condemnation, at least of that. You can be a fat hater and realise that crossed a line. After all, remember all the fuss about abuse on the internet of certain women on the internet.

What was I thinking? I know better.

Thinspo is persecuted by both the establishment and middle class parents with anorexic children, mainstream feminists and the like. Its the usual displacement of their own class attitudes showing up (mostly) daughters. They're keen to point the finger of blame elsewhere away from themselves, usually to where you'll find the expression of said attitudes.

Culture's a tricky one. We tend to be so much a part of it that seeing your children interpret it can be the first time you get a clear view of certain of its themes. That can be a real shock. It probably does feel emotionally like its coming from somewhere else.

In this way, thinspo has been saddled with the same kind of displacement as the fashion industry and its thin models.

Let's say, I'm unimpressed by anorexia and have a low tolerance for either its worship or Stockholmed too often fat phobic followers who insist others should also bow to the might of their friend 'ana'. What they deem insight, is too often expression of their inability to see how much of a hold it still has on their minds. To be fair, in a society that supports that.

Despite all this, I have sympathy for their position, and none for those who cynically use them to body shield their own disgusting capitulation to promoting this pathology, in the name of things like "weight management." With respect to Amber, I think any fat people joining in the point scoring about thinsproana should examine their motives more rigourously.

Fat activists need to learn to treat their own experience with a bit more respect, before joining any crude chorus of mindless disapproval, as a matter of principle. I've little problem confronting entitled pro-ana's who think they have the droit de seigner to abuse fat people. Though a little more understanding though of what drives, often children to pro-ana might be better when it comes to mainstream discourse is needed. A little less of the mindless replication of accepted hypocrisy.

Authority's persecution of "thinsproana" has always been self serving. It's motivated by keep up the pretense that there's a yawning chasm between anorexia nervosa and the imitation of it as a way of life, by anyone, including fat people. That its pure co-incidence that the amount of eating disorders have risen and disordered views of food have become the norm, indeed "healthy" during this 'obesity' crusade.

Because fat people's experience is almost completely erased, people can keep pretending calorie restriction as a "healthy lifestyle" will not keep spewing up its numerous sub-pathologies. Often assigning them to 'obesity' because they submerge the reality that fat people have already lived a pro-ana mindset and/or lifestyle in trying to slim the way we've been ordered.

They're also trying to continue the pretense that it doesn't require everyone to live by pro-ana, merely to implement it as the way of regulating weight. Society is required by that strategy to be the gastrectomy. That is in the nature of human design. Restricting necessity is unnatural, it requires rigid and constantly enforced artifice-before you think about results.

Instead, the voice of delusion continues to post-pone the day of reckoning. Those who wish to can still kid on about individuated harm free calorie restriction as the basis of weight regulation.

Hence this kind of tussle between anorexia as the 'obesity' cure and the value of thin/slim people damaged by it, occurs. You could say it will be interesting to see whether fat phobia or the value assigned slim people will win out.