Tuesday 30 December 2014

Fat People: Come out with your hands up, it's all over

Shamateur scientist and warrior for truth Katie Hopkins has exposed our "excuses" completely. According to her, because she deliberately chose to gain weight by over then underfeeding herself. That's something to do with a spontaneous body led change in weight. She didn't of course choose a more accurate test of the effectiveness and sustainability of lifestyle anorexia-which would have been to just underfeed herself and stay artificially thin, indefinitely.

Her experience is worth more than that of millions if not billions of attempts to sustain the proto-anorexia lever. Power indeed! 

'Tis somewhat in the vein of me suggesting that deliberately giving myself a fit, then 'recovering' by not doing so, has got something to do with her [spontaneous development of] epilepsy. And before you're too appalled, don't think a mind that thinks like hers isn't making that connection either.

Yes, its not the best to compare being fat, with eccentric brain function, but I'm making the point that those who continually ride fat people's arses are simply not hearing the dissonance in their own minds. Because the usual rules don't apply to fat people, we continually become a place where minds try to resolve their own conundrums. Usually, as in this case, its some kind of displacement.

Hopkins is using fat people as a way of trying to convince her own mind that she can exempt herself from her own way of judging the human condition.

By describing to herself, how fat people can "help it" she is trying to set herself in the opposite of that, to quash her own doubts about her own condition. Doubts that created by her own worldview in the first place. Short of her actually dropping her beliefs-which is her ultimate taboo-you can see this is unresolvable.

We all have these, some are however more "self-inflicted" than others.

Actually her epilepsy doesn't seem to be any different to any other condition. It can be affected, to whatever degree, by the mental states one habitually inhabits and her mind knows this.

That's doesn't seem to be good enough for her though. She wants a more definitive, I cannot help myself, due to what I can help myself, would mean to her.

Like Linda Kelsey, people like Hopkins can't seem to grasp, this way of seeing things is ultimately unsustainable. They're either canny (hypocritical) enough to avoid letting it exhaust them-Hopkins-or only catch on and exempt themselves, after a severe mental beating-Kelsey.

Which is often when their judgement of others goes into overdrive.

Suddenly, the break applied by having to live by their own judgements i.e.consequence is relieved and the person stupidly allows themselves to careen into flagrant self righteous mode.

Don't mind them. 

It was amusing when our metabolic researcher exclaimed that she hated fat people for making her over/underfeed herself for pay. It's so entirely in keeping with her character, that she can't pass that off as a joke.

Monday 29 December 2014

The Slimmers' Disease

For reasons still best known to themselves, some in FA are determined to continue erasing the leading part medical professionals played in winding up the wretched 'obesity' crusade. Doctors know the score though, they used to call anorexia nervosa-the slimmersdisease.

Medics have gone back on what they know. When the internet began to be used to elucidate fat experience(s), one of the few genuine responses to this was-"Why would doctors lie about this?"

It's a question I asked myself in a slightly different way at the end of my dieting days. I never quite resolved it, I just knew I had to turn back.

This coinage seemed to be jettisoned through the pressure of activism, though I've wondered more recently whether this turnaround was mere convenience, given the advance of the slimmers' disease as the prevention/treatment/cure for 'obesity.'

The rationale was it "trivialized" anorexia something that's really important to avoid apparently;
“There’s a real fear of trivialising eating disorders,” says Sabine, who is 24 and works for a startup.
For "eating disorders" read anorexia and perhaps bulimia. There's no fear of trivialising disorders associated with weight gain. Really though, removing the connection between dieting and anorexia made the latter inexplicable. That has always struck as a ruthless desire to assert ideology over the prospect of warning those susceptible to AN at a point when they're most able to avoid going there. Nothing says trivial more than that, imho.

I can't say whether this has cost lives or not, but it definitely felt like it might at the time. People have told me they went through anorexia and still don't really don't have a clue what it is. 

Nor does honest connection get in the way of showing that when anorexia reaches its compulsive, self generating phase, it is not a choice.

On the contrary, one could say billions of people round the world, throughout the ages practising anorexia but overwhelmingly failing to become anorexic makes it patently obvious that succumbing to the process is about innate susceptibility rather than intent.

So why is a life sentence of dieting really chasing anorexia?

We were sold calorie restriction on the basis that say; 50lbs of fat =whatever the calories in a pound of fat was supposed to be, x 50. That gave the total of how much energy you needed to waste in order to slim down. This didn't realize the body doesn't passively permit this wastage.

Rather than find a way around this, it was decided that one should seek to make this life of waste, permanent- or "maintenance" as its dubbed. That's really when reversing weight became about chasing a pathological condition.
Anorexics restrict their calorie intake, often in combination with increasing their calorie output.
Dieters restrict their calorie intake, often in combination with increasing their calorie output.
The difference is not in; intent, safeness, medical approval, judiciousness of character or inherent talent for moderation, it's something about how the individual's body reacts to calorie restriction/increased expenditure, full stop.

So what is this difference in reaction?

Many anorexics have told us that they love food and eating. What adds authenticity to this seeming paradox is a mirror image. I a former hyperphagic, got no pleasure from eating as long as I had that disorder.

Many if not all anorexics are troubled by hunger, indeed, hyperphagia, an excess of it. Which builds up as they deny hunger. Hunger of course is MIA when it comes to the current explanation of weight.

The desire to cast eating as a habit made up of conscious decision making, means hunger has lost its place as the reason and trigger for eating. It's claimed people don't recognize it, or that its "fake." Given hunger's anatomically based, that is, generated by your body, not responding to it is basically blocking a physiological signal. A bit like ignoring the urge to sleep at the end of your day is blocking biological signalling.

All things being equal, this tends to strengthen it. Just like if someone appears not to hear your request, you tend to repeat it, often, louder. Continual blocking can also weaken or dampen it down, exhaust it vigour.

Ironically, throughout having an excess of hunger, I was always able to fast-stop eating entirely. Dieting was a bust-responding to hunger, but not properly was intolerable. But not eating at all? I could always psyche myself up for that whether immediately, or over days, or weeks. The longest it took me to succumb to-just stop-was 3 months!

It was the starting eating again and the pitiless avalanche of signalling that made this ultimately futile and rather unpleasant.

So, yes, blocking hunger can curtail it, demoralizing the possibility of response. But that doesn't make hunger go away.

Anorexics think none of us grasp the potency of its hold, but actually, by detaching their condition from its source, calorie restriction-note I didn't add dieting, that's the most likely manifestation/precursor of it, but often things like illness can trigger a bout of AN-shows out of their own context they don't either.

Fat people assume the same as anyone, that we aren't dieting-even when we are. So when we decide to stop trying. We assumed that would be nada. I still remember how I felt, "At last, I'm going to do something I'm good at." Not dieting.

To mine and everyone's surprise, it was harder than imagined. Often much harder than going along with dieting [or trying to]. It's a lot of the reasoning behind the famous "No diet talk rule" of FA blogs.

That it turned out a habit of living around trying to start a diet, stay with a diet, get back on a diet can get so overwhelming, without you being aware was a real eye opener. You literally have to avoid/curtail reference to, or thinking about dieting. Or you can find yourself slipping back into that mode, without being consciously aware of it. That's compulsion indeed.

If I hadn't utterly exhausted this avenue over the course of at least 17 years, I'm not entirely sure I'd have managed-the urge to diet can usurp your conscious reasoning. Like, you can find yourself going through your history of dieting and what it has cost you, then immediately feel yourself examining the idea of going on a diet as if that didn't happen.

I was totally oblivious. So insidious is the creep of even sub anorexia, calorie restriction. And that perhaps gives the biggest clue to what anorexia really is in essence.

The compulsion to block hunger.

I won't trivialize it by describing it in terms of faddiction. It's a compulsion, an imbalance in some aspect of ones nervous system or its functioning.

The difference between a dieter and an anorexic is that whereas the former blocks their hunger as a conscious act. In the anorexic that takes on a life of its own. It gets stronger and stronger developing a self sustaining momentum. This continually jousts with hunger-rivals and in the most serious cases, outstrips it completely. 

Sunday 28 December 2014

Body Police Close in on Weight Outlaws

As those in the know already know, weight loss via the calories in/out model is inherently invasive. It choosing to change something fundamental by attacking anatomical signalling-hunger, rather than finding a way to change underlying function.

I couldn't help being reminded of the nature of a drive toward invasiveness, reading an article about the increased use of electronic surveillance by abusers to control their ex-spouses;
Polly Neate, chief executive of Women’s Aid, told The Independent: “Domestic abuse is about control and perpetrators will use any means available to maintain and increase their control.
So it seems GPs are being told to report patients who are "putting on weight";
Under the scheme, family doctors will be asked to identify anyone who has gained weight and is at risk of diabetes – particularly those aged below 40. They will then be offered tests for pre-diabetes, followed by healthy lifestyle advice and close monitoring to ensure they are eating better and exercising more.
What this actually means is anyone's guess, the state already records and monitors the weight of children, so it would seem to be reporting it to itself. The point for me though is intent, which is to control and keep people contained in the ci/co trap.

"Pre-diabetes" and the continual lowering of the threshold for a condition-type2 diabetes-which already had one of the highest false positive rates of any conditions before that, is just a means to using the patient model, to gain control of people.

Chanelling Oprah and thinking in terms of gratitude. I suppose we could be thankful that it took the usual suspects this long to spot this as a handy entry point for their default power plays.

This kind of tightening grip is inevitable and will only get worse until it is stopped by a countervailing force. It's still trippy though to see it actually happening. A group of doctors wrote a letter to the author of this folly, Simon Stevens indicating that funds are being diverted from acute services to this supposed "prevention." Giving the slimming industry money out of tax payer funded healthcare.

Donating to those bitches is worse than pissing money up against a wall. The conscious and willful stupidity of fat phobia enables this.

As I've said before there are genuine ways of increasing health/ wellbeing and patient responsibility- or should I say, reversing the abject passivity built into the current doctor-patient contract-for the benefit of medical professionals that are being overlooked. Because this isn't about responsibility. That's a term to hide an abusive invasive controlling impulse. Always has been.

Thursday 25 December 2014

Weight Loss Diet Burnout

Normally when you are interested in a field of study-relating to an aspect of the human condition-you are drawn to study those who exhibit said state or condition.

Whether you're a sociopath or someone with zero interpersonal skills makes no odds. This has nothing to do being nice, it's to do with your interest and desire for mastery of your chosen field. In other words, that focus that draw is intellectual, whether you're nice and caring and want to help/heal/cure/assist/treat or simply pit your wits against some tangle of human biological function.

What's been singularly remarkable about 'obesity' in the last 4 or so decades is the palpable lack of intellectual drive for most declaring themselves involved in research. In its place is a sort of reflexive defense of the calories in/out ideology.

One omission that epitomizes this void is the absence of weight loss diet burnout from discussing long-term calorie restriction dieting intentions. Let me say this right now if you diet or attempt to "for life" i.e. indefinitely-weight loss diet burnout is inevitable.

Yet, so ignored is this phenomenon, that it doesn't-to my knowledge-have a medical name. It's possible that this is widely known about, but I've never heard it referenced by those seeking to impose the calorie restriction straight-jacket.

Perhaps this is because the insistence is, fat people don't diet which is why we are fat. As dieting is "obesity prevention,"there's nowhere else you can go with a refusal to accept the reality of its failure. The idea of observing fat people objectively, is a waste of time to ideologues.

The best description I ever heard of weight loss diet burnout was "It's like having a nervous breakdown, but solely in this area". "This" being the part of you that deals with seeing off weight loss dieting becomes exhausted by a continual state of emergency/war of attrition with your body. 

Though I knew of it, it caught me unawares when it happened to me because I did not see myself as a dieter. I saw myself as a healthy (/ist) eater. You know, what they recommend now. If you have the perfect diet, you'll become healthier and means you'll lose weight. Healthy=weight loss.

Or to put it more directly-though I didn't realize this at the time. One consumes health.

What happens is one day you go to do your usual-go on a diet that is-and BAM! Some part of you screams NOOOO!!!! It's specifically your nervous system letting you know that its overloaded.

That sensation of something crying out for mercy is hard to get a sense of, unless you've experienced it.

The terms we pin to any cloud of sensory data swirling around our nervous system/s goes according to cultural expression. If this seems a bit weird, I can't fault you, but that's the best way I can explain it.

And the experience itself is like walking oblivious along a familiar street, turning a corner on auto-pilot only to be abruptly shaken out of your reverie by walking straight into some obstacle or person.

Barely a peep will you here about this from official weight loss diet wallahs because, they pretend believe fat people cannot have spent any real time in pursuit of weight loss dieting triumph. 

Merely having the prospect of dieting hanging over your body, is enough to produce some serious symptoms. Yes, our body's response to dieting  can be that potent. And people don't realise this. I'll give you a scenario.

If you decide to go on a diet tomorrow-hyperphagia will kick in between now and then. Your hunger and/or appetite will open up and you'll be stopping past the point you normally do. Iow, like when you manage to miss getting off at your usual station.

Ditto if you decide to start this time next week. This is your body starting its process of weight conservation. If you are one of those people who finds it almost impossible to stick with a diet for any length, i.e. days, even hours, then this, more than weight loss dieting may end up thwarting your body's ability to stablize its weight.

Because you repeat the process week after week, day after day even. Think about that, string together a hyperphagic response week after week, day after day and what can you get? That's right, permanent hyperphagia. In other words, your body's ability to switch off this response off 'breaks.' You're never not about to diet, so it doesn't get a chance to return to normal.

How many people this applies to I don't know. Not simply fat people. People who started dieting whilst slim/remain slim may develop hyperphagic disorder through this. Some of whom didn't particularly succumb to rebound i.e. their rebound didn't go past their starting point.

Dieting is proto-anorexia. It is a pathology, it is self abuse-whether fatness is "healthy or unhealthy" or whether its desirable or not desirable to lose weight is another point entirely.  I'm commenting purely on dieting, it is bad news.

The problem with it is that our bodies, in the shape especially of our nervous system is designed to thwart this. It's this continual invoking of these defences that finally overcomes and exhausts the nervous system-that is weight loss diet burnout.

How do you recover? The same way as you would with a more full nervous breakdown, rest your nervous system. In this specific case-stop dieting and the prospect of it, completely. That rests the areas of the nervous structure involved.

But for most people, the only thing that makes them get back on the diet treadmill after that is either a strong attachment to their identity as slim/thin or despair at aggressive continued gain that shows no sign of stopping.

Otherwise burnout is often a (diet) career ender.

Tuesday 23 December 2014

Not Golden

I remember my frustration with leftist/liberals and feminists senselessly trot out the ludicrous conservative formed trope of "taking responsibility." Few things are more absurd than feminists trying to sound convincing talking to fat women about we should take responsibility or "what happened to taking responsibility"[?]

This from people who assert women should be able to get drunk/drugged up if they've a mind and go about in public unmolested.

True, but how hard is it not to get drunk? If you don't expect any woman to manage that, how do you expect them to manage lifelong proto-anorexia? Why is it not acceptable for sexists to say that women brought sexual or other assault on themselves by the way they looked in their clothes. But, okay to say fat women bring harassment or illness on ourselves through what our bodies look like?

Why's it okay to claim to be concerned about a person's health, but not their sexual health? Or about how much a person's eating, but not how much clothing a person is wearing?

Why has clothing become more inviolate than the flesh it hangs on?

I finally exclaimed, "Can't they even come up with a bullshit vaguely leftist/liberal form to abuse fat people? Can't they even be bothered to make that effort?" [Whilst lecturing us about laziness natch.]

Well blow me if one seems to have arrived-the use of  addiction as metaphor.They seem to like that one.

This is the era of folks wishing to dub everything addiction. Whilst I have time for drug addicts contribution to human dignity-by refusing to submit their humanity to the moral minority/majority- I have zero time for when the more presumptuous of them feel their experience makes them specialist instructors on what fatness is, to fat people.

I'd have to say a hell no to that.

The signifier of this sorry impertinence is often; "I'm a recovered [or whatever] drug addict and I think losing weight feels like my addiction." Or some such to that effect. It's always about their fee fees.

That's apt to get me feeling stabby.

Drug withdrawal has got nothing to do with a fat or other person, trying to become anorexic.

First off, dieting is a pathology-regardless of what anyone thinks about fatness. Withdrawal, is a product of the pathology of drug addiction.

See the difference? Dieting=a pathology in itself. Withdrawal from drugs/alcohol detox=product of the pathology of drug addiction/alcoholism.

Both alcoholism and drug addiction are acquired dependence. Hunger is an innate biological signal.

What really narks is that they fail to examine the 'obesity' construct, even more to notice that authentic voices of self-expression from fat people are missing from the ritualistic discourse on fatness.

I actually find that unforgivable, technically speaking. One of the reasons we are being tormented with this wretched 'addiction' bollocks is that the extreme subjectivity established by addicts and their friends has been taken full advantage of by the psychiatric police, threatening to undermine civil liberties.

Its because of the mental mush coming from all this that it's hard to insist that bodies cannot be defined as 'disease.' You'd think the least these self aggrandizers could do is notice a lack of a subjective voices, but no.

They actually go ahead and behave as if 'obesity' operates on the same terms as addiction does with them. Peopled by sympathetic and dedicated (if at times wrong-headed) observers. How the hell can anyone make that mistake? Let alone them.


What's amusing about this-depending on your pov-is that by comparing the impersonation of anorexia to drug withdrawal, they show how little objective insight they've gleaned from their experience. Due to its suffocating, distorting extent of its self conscious shaping of the addict persona, it's of precious little use to apply to others. Let alone with those who's subjectivity has been ironed almost out of existence.

The author, Tanya Gold* clearly doesn't have a clue about what hyperphagia nervosa is about, let alone the difference between being fat with and without such an ED. Many with hyperphagia or aspects of aren't fat. Though she was herself, that goes for alcohol, given its high calorie density.

Of course, she went to the ED field, one dominated and distorted by anorexia nervosa, with similar problems of extreme subjectivity. Consequently, this field has often had as much relevance to diagnosing and dealing with HN as an umbrella in the face of a force 9 gale.
Sugar is more dangerous than the drugs we are taught to fear.
Er, no.

One of the more surprising things about this noise though is its subtext of exposing the undercurrent of 12-step quackery.

My feeling for a long time has been that abstinence is bullshit. Addiction should be ended by finding ways to restore a normal chemical balance-so the addict's body loses the physical need for drugs.

Rather than the conventional way which is to stop the drug and see whether the system balances itself after being beat up by a withdrawal phase deemed scary enough to deter people from going through it.

I've little time 12-step-group therapy is fine and rational- its the other b/s tacked on to that. Tough love/you've got to hit rock bottom etc., It's just a way to get people to sign up to their own abuse and potential destruction. To accept incompetence as efficacy, as all there is or should be (sound familiar?) They've gotten away with this shit, due to the extent of guilt users carry about being addicts and /or the things they may have done during it.

The impression I mostly got though was that the addicts/alcoholics parroting this guff, believed this guff. Stories about their debauched, degraded downfall. How they "needed" to be utterly abject, broken, sometimes even up to stating that they were left to their potential deaths when no one could deal with them anymore. And that this ruthlessness of exhaustion was the saving/making of them. Ugh.

Though I used to root for those addicts who expressed their often experiential skepticism towards this hookum, I at least assumed those telling this conventional narrative were for real. Other people also, to the extent they assume there's some kind of process that can lend itself to other areas. 

It prompted me to point out there isn't. It's all image. Fatness can't succumb to this kind of flummery, because there's nothing to succumb to.

What Gold reveals a real sense of outrage at every single lecture she was probably given about her dependence. At being in a position of dependence, about having had to ask for help from others, especially those hostile towards them of being declared "stupid", degenerate, worthless corrupt and so on.

It shows that this approach, which deals in stigma hurts and damages no matter who its aimed at and why. That doesn't necessarily go even if a person vanquishes their habit.  

And no, it isn't justified, it's mostly lazy, mean and punitive for the sake of it. It's a chance for people to look down on others, to get one over on them. To loudly bray about how great they are and how lowly and pitiful their object of scorn is. All rapped up in a pompous sense of self righteousness.

There's similar going on with this participant in another aspect of this culture of horse pucky. People talking a good game of 'sickness' and recovery. Yet, who actually haven't processed enough of their baggage for that to be convincing.

Meaning their "recovery" is probably a change of mind, a gritting of teeth. Or if they're lucky a spontaneous, partial or whole unravelling of the underpinnings of their dependence. Rather the indistinct mystical revelatory process they propose.

This is becoming a pattern. We see the same high degree of bitterness and rage in a former smoker who also wants fat people to be even more aggressively abused and broken in their desire for some kind of catharsis. Any excuse will do. Despite him admitting we have already-all the way through the 'crisis' he's blowing more hot air into.

And despite stating freely that stopping smoking may well have prolonged his life to get to this point, it doesn't matter. Resentment of every aspect of the situation they advocate as their 'recovery' is evident.

That's denial.

* apologies for link mayhem.

Monday 22 December 2014

Children Need Wisdom not Mindwarps

An FA blog featured a submission about a children's book "Don't call me Fat!" The book itself is a newer tranche of 'obesity' propaganda assaults on fat children. On its face it pretends to play nice, but it polices both fat and slim children into their accepted roles. Instead of interrupting and overthrowing the 'obesity' discourse, making it clear that fat hate is the fault of fat haters, it seeks to justify it.

If that sounds harsh, try comparing it with the author's book on bullying, where it's made clear other people's bullying is down to them, not you;
A bully can make you feel like its your fault that they are picking on you, even though this isn’t true.
Too right. The book on fat says;
It doesn’t matter whether you are a child or an adult, weighing more than is healthy can stop you from doing fun things like running, jumping, swimming, and climbing as far and as fast as others.
That's the point where you say people expect this, but it's not up to them to tell you what your body can or can't do. You're allowed to find out. That's really a lot of the point of childhood and it can last a lifetime. Remember when, children=potential? It abruptly says at one point that there's no excuse for this;
Sometimes when you are overweight, people will try to make you feel bad about it or tease or bully you because you are not the same as them. Teasing or bullying people for how they look is mean and is never the right thing to do. 
This tired lip service isn't good enough. You need to break it down and state categorically that people are seeking to undermine you. To change your feelings of yourself to the precise 'obese' trope mentioned. And here's a way not to fall for it. i.e. Remember that your body is you and it is you that is living it, not anyone else. Not even your mum or dad.

It's the new thing, to mix some phoned in unconvincing stab at "sympathy." It gives the impression that fat phobia is as nice as the tone its impersonating. It should include that too, that people can bully whilst seeming to be nice. If you feel a bit confused after someone has spoken to you this way. You've probably just had an experience of it.

Its playing on the urge of people to see their abuse of fat children and adults as doing good, the other fat phobes who don't "sugarcoat" their vindictiveness are the bullies, not them. Remember, this is "a first introduction to...";
Anyone can be a bully. It could be a boy or a girl a person on their own or in a gang. It can even be an adult. A bully can pick on you and leave you out of games.
Indubitably. Back to the fat book;
It can make it hard to find clothes that feel comfortable. and it can make you feel as if you are very different from others and that you don’t fit in.
People feel self conscious about their size if it is greater than the norm, ask tall children-or anyone who was about that. See them slouching in embarrassment. The key is reassurance, not to stick the knife in.

I'm sure it helps that they aren't cast as a disease and relentlessly told that they'll never be able to gain control of limbs that long. That they'll never move them as fast as shorter limbed people. And how they feel so awful about that.

I think you'll find fat children feel as human as other children, until they're taught otherwise- ceaselessly branded obese this and obesity that.

Expect lots of lot's of lovely anklebiters earnestly regurgitating this kind of bollocks in the near future. Without wishing to overstate the point (moi?) this really is an abuse of their trust and intelligence before you even get to the effects on a fat child. This aggression is so hard to deal with. What is wrong with these people? Can they really be this incapable of controlling this urge?

What's more, this tripe is written by an alfalfa sprouting, quinoa exhausting eco-twit psychotherapist. When the mind police are on the case, its time to say eh-oh.

There's no need for the fat book if she can't do any better than this. If its too hard to see a living breathing child rather than 'obesity'. Then she should have just used her bully book and inserted references to fat/ness. Give fat children the bully book-the "how to use this book" part is especially instructive for parents of bullied children. It even gives a list of others on that subject.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Saturday 20 December 2014

A Slender Ruling

The EU Attorney General's ruling has come in regarding the consideration of whether fatness is (a) disability. The conclusion is slight and rather specific, yes if it hinders your full and effective participation at work.

So completely unnecessary. Open minded communication between people, putting yourself in another person's shoes-imagine going to work and having to use children's furniture could have dispelled any need to go to law. Instead of seeing increasing size as the social evolution it is, rather than a cue for hysteria, this sport has become unnecessarily fraught and increasingly expensive. 

If the man at the centre of this really had problems doing up a child's laces, a conversation could have been had about that. It's hardly a big deal. The general consensus though depends on continuing to pretend fatness doesn't exist. That will make it non-existent by this sustained effort of collective fantasy.

Recognizing what's real is felt to actively create the very reality that exists. In other words, twisted mal-logic, delusion and magical thinking.

Seeing grown people routinely assert this unashamedly makes it hard to formulate a response. 

Don't make clothes for fat people, or suitable or professional standard ones. Don't provide proper equipment and furniture to properly accommodate them, posit them only as "costs" rather than assets and contributors, undermine them in as many ways as possible. Don't recognize their needs as human needs like any others.

Continue a jarring stream of demoralizing micro-aggressions. Along with doing everything to keep people bricked into calorie restriction-no matter the personal, social, financial or indeed moral costs to us all. 

Take it from me, it's quite remarkable what fat people have and continue to endure. I wonder what effect that has on the stomach and internal organs, never mind accusations of called "junk food."

This case brought merely to find some means of legal defense against being thrown out of work due to other people's easily set off state of hysteria has yielded exclamations that making provision to enable qualified people to do their jobs is supporting their "unhealthy lifestyle." Others predict financial ruin for employers, even insisting people above a certain weight should be sacked, regardless of their ability and even denied benefit.

Without money they can then be impoverished into thinness.

Another example of the mind-bending effects of the 'obesity' construct leading people directed by it to bring about the very conditions they claim are already in existence.

Fat people are defined as "sick", so harass and harry as much of the health out of them as you can. Fat people are defined as lazy. So put them out of and deny them work.

Then point to this as proof that they're "scroungers" and so indicative of their 'obesity.' And so on this cycle of trying to force fat people to live out other people's destructive fantasy stereotype.

The current UK govt have led with pathologizing the poor/unemployed in order to roll back welfare, so that's very much in the air. Yet, here shows people being volubly slammed for having the supposedly prized work ethic.

A man that just wanted to keep doing the job he had been doing for 15 years and suddenly work is presented as some kind of privilege, of the slim. Whining about the weakness of the notion of "thin privilege" whilst actually trying to turn the things we all need to survive into that.

Let's get fat people out of the workplace in order to benefit from their absence. That's true greed and a kind proving quite insatiable at that. Some slim people continually beg for more and more to be given to them, because they're slim. They want cheaper healthcare, insurance, tax breaks and now greater and greater advantage the employment/ jobs market. They want fat people to be taxed not their beloved "junk food" Despite them signing on for mass calorie restriction.

They're turning fatness into a disability, by their unstable neurotic reaction to nothing and by continuing their attempts to transfer increasing resources from fat to slim. Not to mention wasting our time by setting us up for an early shift.

I hope more people are beginning to see, this isn't about "looks."

It's trying to establish a kind of sectarianism, based on body size, a kind of tribalism. If Black people were shown doing this, the contempt would be palpable. All systemic and systematic discrimination is about theft in the end.

Despite disagreeing with defining fatness as disability-it's been suggested that it could dissuade employers from employing fat people, for one thing. This process of legal consideration sets in perspective just how churlish, unreal and unmanageable the whole 'obesity' crusade is. It's impositions make no sense, go nowhere and cannot be submitted to, even if you wanted to.

The  establishment promotion, support  and indulgence of this has produced a mindset incapable of dealing with its own failure. Few initiatives surpass the 40 year clear run it's had.

It's been able to re-defined humanness, ways of life, habits, mental and moral state/s, purely on the basis of weight. With unusually, the full agreement and commitment of its quarry.

It has bullied, lied, degraded, hated, set people against each other, robbed us all, turned us into shittier people, exposed our most venal and base sides yet has failed by its own and every standard. Even the drugs war makes more sense.

It wishes to continue asserting things as facts-fatness=sickness, then when consequences and conclusions are inevitably made from that, quickly denies its own assertions, without reference or accountability for that.

How can something be totes unhealthful and neither disease nor disability? I've always disliked the use of illness/ disability, by the able bodied to point out social problems too, but precedent for that has happened already.

Given it was an employment matter, there's nothing in the statute about discrimination regarding body size, that would have to be established as a category in law.

You're left with should a person who can do a job and is willing to work be denied because of what are perceived by others as their limitations? And perceived is important, because Kaltoft disagreed with his former employers assessment of his physical abilities, or lack of.

Instead of dealing with grown up reality like that. It continues to pander to itself "Prevention is all" to the rescue-ignoring obviously that our current situation is the product of that very prevention of which it speaks. Same as the useless non-'cure'. The whole crusade's assertion of discipline, restraint and proportion, should be tried in a court of law, subject to minds trained and paid to think properly more often.

Let's see then what happens to assertions such as fatness is 100% preventable via a permanently suspended acknowledgement of reality.

Tuesday 16 December 2014

Danish Takeover

Jens Christian Holm, a Danish doctor (usually is) has "cracked" fat children via the innovation of treating eating as if palliating an eating disorder-along with exercise bulimia. This has been hailed as the second coming of defeating the "epidemic" of fat children. The good doctor claims out of 1,900, he's helped 70%, not to be fat, over 4 years, by tackling "all aspects of the children's lives."

This means diddly squat. The medical profession does not exist to take over anyone's life- neither child nor man. That kind of passive dependence is what is really tapping out health budgets, that and the profiteering of big pharma.

Even if you wished doctors to be a doctors puppet, you'd at least be expected to screen out those bent on indulging their doolally compulsion to force all fat people into proto-anorexia at any price.

The whole thing raises such a continuous string of alarm bells, it becomes like a police vehicle testing site.
In general, obese children are neglected. They are often lonely and many of them don't participate in activities with their peers. They lack self-confidence.
So bring them out of their shell. Liberate them from the social and mental constraints that are undermining their instinct to move freely in tune with their soon-to-be fully restored expressed will....?
With this scheme there is a real hope they can lose weight and have a good quality of life.
That'll be a no then. Instead, lock them into that neglect, isolation and loneliness, insist they try to dig their way out, every. single. day. It's all about you.
Obesity is an illness that is very hard for children to fight on their own, he says.
But they are totally on their own. As usual, children are being taught their neglect and abandonment is how they (not others) are cared for. The only "togetherness" here exists to facilitate the implementation of 'lifestyle' disorders, not to invoke a sense (re) connection with self or others. Any sense of isolation is intact.
Their entire life needs to be changed, because they tend to be lonely, tend to be ashamed of themselves so they need to do this, and to interact with other children in their daily lives.
No actually its you that wants to do this. Teaching them to be at ease in their own skin and challenging unprovoked ill-feeling directed toward them-situating it firmly where it is-within that person relates more to their needs.

Feeling freer to move and nourish yourself well is rooted in the default embrace of themselves as whole beings. Moving according to our own dictates, requires being in touch with and read their own feelings and moods better than before. This is more about knowing your place-contained within this kind of mindset.

Outrun your inner feelings, don't deal with and/or dismantle them. Separate physical from spiritual holding the pursuit of the physical as solution to the spiritual. This could be a chance to renew ones idea of self turning it back into a positive self-sustaining nourishing one.

Then there's the entrenchment or creation of over-responsibility, that can do a lot of damage to a person's ability to assert themselves and avoid getting into the kind of abusive relationships modelled here.

This clear signalling of the emotional basis of starvation disorders, linking the solution to personal problems to exercise bulimia and control of food. There's even the symbolic identification of fatness =problems. I think this was missed because every single case study used in this is male;
Mike Nelausen, 14, has become a standard bearer for the Holbaek project. He used to weigh 85kg (13st 5lbs), but having embraced Dr Holm's evangelism, he has slimmed down by 23kg (3st 8lbs), and is no longer the target of playground bullies.
This taking over of a child's life starts in hospital with a battery of tests-from body scans to having their blood examined. During this 24 hour period they ".....answer a detailed questionnaire about their eating habits and behaviour patterns."

Behaviour patterns?

Along with having the food they eat dictated-i.e. bland, tasteless pap, and how they eat it, wait 20 minutes for more of it. No thanks. Their daily "screen time" is rationed to no more than 2 hours [Oh, really?], plus they have to go to bed at a set time.

Teaching a child to respect their own natural rhythms including the importance of rest, is fine. And even encouraging them to depart from the screen on occasion if its become a substitute for other activities they might enjoy. But this context of everything for weight loss is a diversion from the idea of balance.

Adults who "feel sad" get pills or talking therapies. I'm not recommending the former, just saying this at least fits around the demands of their responsibilities. How does this approach set a child up for the demands of adulthood?

It neither makes them more resilient nor gives them a convenient sticking plaster. There's something truly ominous about this doctor's lack of any sense of overreach and what it says about the state of that profession is increasingly going.

The sex divide of FA is down to the relative lack of boys involvement dieting, compared with girls. Here is potential changing of that waiting to happen. I know the burnout waiting for these children after a decade or two of being pressed into running/cycling miles every day merely for acceptance rather than internal desire. That's what these people can never seem to grasp, there's a difference. 

Insisting children do overly rigourous phys ed, in all weathers, created generations of people of all sizes who were implacably hostile to P.E. That precipitated and enabled its decline, amidst a purported crusade against fattening that traded on activity as an obstacle to that. 

To explain a bit more why this approach is by its nature invasive, expensive and ill conceived and disorder generating, let's take a real genuine, actual disease.

Imagine dealing with HIV/AIDS, by seeking to prevent sexual intercourse- vaginal, anal, oral. Note intercourse, not SEX. Everyone can still get their jollies, just not via penis in vag, anus, mouth.

Conception would be through IVF. Anyone wishing to have a child, would get a referral from their GP.

Hugely invasive by nature because, wrong target.

Intercourse is rarely a necessity, less so than responding to hunger. Yet even if invasively policed and punitively strictured, running counter to a certain strength of desire is a foolhardy waste of effort, even with the threat of death. Trying to divert attention from this, by talking nonsensically about "addiction" is like saying human beings struggle against bondage is addiction.

No, it's instinct. Attempting to constrain too strong an impulse will simply result the re-routing of its expression, often into pathological tics. Establishing safer sex as a practice has been the preferred approach.

The invasiveness of the calories in/out approach is inherent in its targeting of hunger and appetite and is an obvious sign of its dysfunction and how it produces more.

Singapore already tried a similarly invasive, energy wasting school based slimming campaign called "Trim and Fit." This reckless programme singled out plump and fat children for special attention. Giving them lunch tickets with designated calorie limits in addition to extra phys ed during what should have been their free time.

Slim children got to wear wristbands with "I am Fit and Trim" on them, for just being. Fatter children were easily identified and discrimination, bullying an teasing became open and endemic.

Parents eventually stopped this mess 15 years later when the psychological and physiological burden on their children became too high. It too was "effective," if you ignore the extent and variety of distress it  produced.

Calorie restriction dieting is inherently disordered, so's exercise for the purpose of wasting energy. I'll repeat for the slow-witted, that is not CORRELATION that's CAUSE. Dieting is capable of causing every know eating disorder via its assault on and denial of hunger-though that doesn't mean all instances of ED have been caused by it. Which disorder is provoked depends mainly on individual tendency.  

When some of the children who went through trim and fit were caught up with in their late teens. Many of them were fat and levels of depression where higher than normal. Which despite propaganda is not the norm for fatter people. Testament to how damaging this way of life can get.

What's saddest of all is the betrayal of trust. Isolation and loneliness in a child could be an opportunity to empower. Ultimately, its one way you can teach a person not to be slayed by various slings and arrows;
As she scrapes and shreds carrots for a low calorie dish with minced beef, his mother Karina breaks down and weeps. "It was extremely hard to see him like that. We tried everything but he just kept on gaining weight. So when it finally started to work, we were really happy.
We will all have to learn how to overcome challenges, to recover, why shirk an opportunity to really teach a child this?

Wednesday 10 December 2014

Baroness Pennywise

I wonder if the schizoid refuge is just a normal cognitive deficit. A Tory politico called Baroness Jenkin got herself into bother. She blithely insisted the growth of food banks, was down to poor people not being able to cook.

Food banks are places people go to receive a weekly supply food donations because they can't afford to feed themselves-in part or whole. Many recipients-recommended by various agencies- are in work. The culture of austerity policies, high rents, low or zero hours contracts-where no work at all is guaranteed yet the person isn't allowed to take on something else to try and cover that, is taking its toll. 

"We've lost a lot of our cooking skills" she exclaimed bubble headedly. As if those skills where carelessly dropped along the way without oversight.

Predictably and rightly she got a stinging backlash and to her credit, apologized and corrected herself. It wasn't that her words had no merit. It was that she identified a generalized outcome/trend through the impoverished and marginalized as if it was specific to them-and absent from others who are better off.

That particular sentiment is prevalent, amongst the better off classes, regardless of their politics. They simply cannot come to terms with the fact that it takes far more skill in virtually every area you can think of to survive as a poorer than a better off person.

Their mind then has to keep making this same faux pas. I'm sure it's been pointed out as a particular form of dishonest self service, but I can't call to mind any metaphysical term.

She didn't mention her own party, headed by one Margaret Hilda Thatcher decided for no earthly good to take cookery lessons out of state education. Honesty would have forced her to say, "We/they got that wrong and now we are seeing the consequence." It's never a good sign when these links aren't made. Making them is the best way to guard against them being repeated.

Omitting this not only shirks the responsibility commentators keep using as a stick to beat their quarry with. It shows a lack of concern about stopping a repeat. You could say that is happening now.

No-one thought ending culinary education was a good idea. They either didn't care or protested yet it still went ahead, purportedly to "save money." Worse still, they replaced these useful lessons in self care with things like "food technology." Something I've quite never got, but consisted in large part of studying the design of commercial packaging. Usually the kind of ready meals that then really took off.

Entirely coincidentally I'm sure.

The Conservatives also put the provision of school meals out to tender to the kind of outfits that brought the kind fast food canteen culture food nutrition fanatics bemoan as the creator of their fevered lipogeddon scenario.

It was as if the politicians did everything they could to undermine people cooking for themselves, prepped their taste buds via school meals. Then normalized ready meals as a main focus of eating. Education eh?

It's reminiscent of a similar strategy happening with the attempts to privatize UK health by stealth. Dismantle the things that stop people being dependent on ready made commercially engineered product of whatever kind. 

It was this sustained line of policy and the lack of any strong opposition to it that made me see through the mirage of any kind of common cause when it came to food, weight and health. The truth about the food fanatics who opine about 'obesity' is they have no intellectual base or backbone or heart. They attack only those who are undefended leaving aside anyone who will remotely answer back.  

I realized that equation didn't add up. People hate fatness and insist how/what we eat is the answer. Then do little about the very things they say causes fatness to advance, because their fantasies of weight as identity i.e. slim people don't eat this kind of thing takes precedence over everything. They can't constitute a cogent defence, they don't truly care.

I said to myself, my poor old mind can't take this level of underhand bullshit. I actually did give a damn about how children are fed and felt it mattered for its own sake. But I had to accept this is in the hands of people like BJ. Who criticize only outcomes in specific groups. So, let the chips fall where they may, no pun intended, and let science give people the ability to manipulate their own signals. And let people eat what they really eat.

Whether food was the route to "weight management" or not was irrelevant to me anyway. Science has a job to do, either way

Those who shout about 'obesity' never fight the kind of policy their own complaining requires. The concentrate all their fight on attacking people. When tired of their bullying aggression, they nonsensically applied their pet viewpoints; "personal responsibility"or "boo big business."

Sorry, but porridge is hardly "cookery" the instructions invariably come on the packet. And, nor would everyone who can cook dream of putting it past their lips. I've heard the raw stuff makes a good body scrub though.
People have always gone hungry or hungrier because of lack/absence of cookery skills. It was mentioned in Orwell's famous book, the "Road to Wigan Pier." At one point he referred to a study that found a family amongst the poor and emaciated that were healthy and robust. Turned out the mother was some kind of nurse (I think). She was well trained in nutrition with a high degree of culinary skill, (she also happened to be fat by the way.) Today her success would be pathologized as 'bad lifestyle' she'd be deemed 'obese' and "unhealthy."

Tuesday 9 December 2014

No word for Snow: Why Hyperphagia Nervosa

The word anorexia means-without appetite, an- + -orexia. Hyperphagia means an excess of eating. It refers to both that and an excess of hunger/appetite signalling too. It's used for both. Anorexia experientially isn't what the word means. 

Still, we manage to learn from anorexics that it refers to a compulsive cycle of extreme (food) restriction. I hope others can dig deep and show the same grace with hyperphagia nervosa, even though its associated with being greater than slim. Though it must be said, not all with this condition are plump/fat.

Apart from because I say so, there's a specific and very important reason to locate the problem where it is, with hunger/appetite mechanics, rather than where disinterested others want it to be, with food.

It's not ego or shame. It to understand and grasp the underlying problem. In order to identify and formulate strategies to reverse and be relieved of substantially if not wholly of it. Something that has been left to lay people with this condition to do, given the uselessness of the usual ]professional] suspects and their tiresome fat phobia.

In the wake of 'obesity' panic neurosis, there have been many assertions that humans are naturally inclined totally towards fattening. That's construct related paranoia. Fatness is mysterious precisely because it happens whilst body's homeostasis is doing many things to arrest gain and/or stabilize weight.

A possible sly example of this is the unrecognized grip the use of starvation has on our consciousness. We all hate dieting. The very idea of restriction invokes repugnance and disgust in many across the weight spectrum. Strangely though, this doesn't affect the strength of the hold calorie restriction/ counting and such can gain over our minds.

Even if you barely diet a day in your life, deny yourself little, do less than a lick of exercise, it seems if calories in/out forms the basis of your understanding of hunger, food, eating and weight, that's enough to trigger one of the body's more prominent defenses against calorie restriction, becoming overly fixated with food.

As we've all been inculcated with ci/co as the default premise, we're all labouring under this fixation to some degree or another. Only when you begin to exit the pursuit of lifestyle anorexia, calories in/out and it unravels sufficiently enough, can you really appreciate the depths of this neurotic tunnel vision.

If that's not entirely clear, I'm saying that when you consider going on a wld, your nervous system averts your focus to food. People cast this as "rebellion," or "you feel like thinking about food" no, that is your nervous system directing itself and therefore you there. It is not conscious decision making. It's involuntary.

From throwing up visions of food into your conscious mind, like pop-ads. To making you gabble ceaseless paeans to your thwarted desire for _________ [insert verboten food]. This internal directive is defense by constant evocative reminder-against your imposition of lack. I'm saying, this occurs even with the potential for you doing this, it happens as a result of ideology, including your desire to impose restriction on others.

Thinking often is a tiny fraction of doing. And an action is often the power of thought in motion.  This is what the placebo effect is rooted in.

To think something is microscopic action, a form of activity in itself. If strongly charged enough, it can propel (you) straight into action, without much engagement of conscious thought.

Usually this is infinitesimal and leaves a certain mood or feeling in us, depending on our interpretation. But we know especially after, it often directs and leads to actions and influences our behaviour, responses, attitudes, expectations etc.,

This food fixation psychology seems to be why everything is focused on food and eating. Bodies come to = amounts of food. Fatter bodies, lots of/ too much food. What's effectively a starvation disorder-anorexia- is called an eating disorder.

And why a disorder of hunger/appetite mechanics, hyperphagia is called "compulsive (over)eating" and latterly "food addiction."

Hunger, not will is the cue to eat. Eating is the normal response to its anatomical signalling, not an elective decision apropos of nothing. To not eat when you are-at the right level of hunger is abnormal. 

Because hunger is generated by your anatomy, the more heightened a level it is performing, the more powerfully your body is functioning physically. And;
  • the more there's an excess of physical function/tension in your body and/or nervous system-like a fist being tightly clenched 
  • the more likely it is to be capable of animating/generating behaviour  without conscious input
  • there more likely there are to be consequences from the energy diverted into all this excess of function, i.e. potential damage from overuse and/or exhaustion.
Shifting the focus to where the problem is, with the functioning of certain parts of your nervous system (concerned with eating), clarifies perspective to a more accurate and useful one. If I had ever seen hyperphagia only in the way it has been alluded to, I would have struggled to free myself of it to the extent that I've been lucky too.

I'm leaving binge eating disorder alone, because I'm not entirely sure of its distinctions. Nor do I claim to know for sure whether my experience is definitive. But I can describe my experience as accurately as possible, to be part of a resource for others who are going through this.

Constructive evaluation and criticism is welcome. At the same time, trying to understand those with the experience-not just me- is more important than reasserting the status quo.

Monday 1 December 2014

Liberation Posture

If those running NHS England and other health politicians, medics et al are solely motivated to elevate people from a passive infantile attachment to the healthcare machine. They might spare some focus for poor posture.

After years of seeming to belong to some quaint past, people have been instinctively picking up again, with nary a peep from from our unquestionably benign patrician establishment.

Sports people increasingly use posture braces and wear t-shirts with built in aides to hold the body in better alignment, whilst on the move, which is a step on from the adjustment of standing or sitting. That gives a potential public face to raise awareness among people, without the necessity for coercion of either party.

I remember cottoning on to this many years ago. It came into play when too much of my rather overwrought desire to improve/support my health was going down the drain, due to the cul-de-sac of weight loss dieting and exercise as a vehicle for it. And whilst I do not claim to be an exemplar, far from it. I'd say without the level of awareness I have, I'd be palpably worse off for it.

I know other fat people (as well as others) arrived at the same point for the same reason. Depending on how your body's shaped, higher weight can make it seem more of a challenge, due to the pull weight can exert but don't let that put you off. It's possibly more rewarding for fat people to take care of their posture.

It's one defense against succumbing the burden of the 'obese' construct, which exerts a physical as well as mental toll. A lot of the things fat people are supposed to have, bad knees, hips even things like joint pain are often the cumulative effects of bad posture and mis-use, ditto for others including thin people. Consider why so many people require one hip or knee to be replaced.

Use. The way you use your body, your habitual posture, stance, gait. That goes for fitness related injury too. Usually the dominant side that goes first-i.e. if you're right/left handed. 

This is all challenging enough which aids mindfulness and patience, force is likely to cause harm or impose more strain.

It's pretty obvious that this is a big influence on the extent of back problems. Ditto those who keep getting the same injuries whilst doing sporting or other physical activities. That's usually a postural fault or a problem with the way you use your body, and/or even your mind whilst you are being active. Other times its a physical kink.

Seeking to restore, and improve posture and use is accessible for most people, regardless of physical status. It challenges and increases our awareness of our bodies, rather than shifting more locus of control to the medical machine under the guise of "personal responsibility". It reminds me a lot of the aims of HAES, which was a therapeutic desire to keep and restore function to fat people abandoned by the medical system. You have to start from a place of acknowledgement, preferably acceptance and work from there.

Above all, it's positive. It seeks to liberate rather than to constrict in preferred pathology. Even just  regularly visualizing pulling up a string coming through your spine and out the top of your head, is enough to help to begin the process of re-training the way you hold yourself.