Using Dead Infants to Promote Calorie Restriction

Using percentages

The headline reads;

"Weight gain between pregnancies linked to stillbirths and infant deaths"

Linked is always a word to watch out for when it comes to "obesity related". It usually means-linked to being noticed in a fat person- (it only takes one). The sub-heading is;

Swedish research shows women who put on weight after first pregnancy increase risk of stillbirth by 30-50% and likelihood of infant death by up to 60%

There's the use of percentages. It means the starting figure is not impressive enough even for 'obesity' wallahs, used to speaking with at best a microscopic level of critical scrutiny. 

To be fair, they know some of us are wise to their phoned-in manoeuvres;

Because infant death and stillbirth are relatively rare, the increased risk does not equate to large numbers of deaths.

You know it.

Carry on bullshitting in the face of fact

Next we have carry on regardless.

But experts say stillbirths and infant deaths are already unacceptably high and that it is important to look for ways to help women who become pregnant keep their weight down.

That's a big "But".

The death of an infant is tragedy, though not enough to overcome the urge to control people's eating. These tragedies are to be prostituted for the purpose of dieting, same as anything. Despite the fact that it usually increases the effect being reported. Women should be anorexic a lot anorexic, though not to the extent of dying, because that would be "going too far."

Back to metabolic function

Let's go back a tad.

If I'm understanding this correctly, the study is referring to women who gain weight after their first pregnancy.

They're said to be more likely to have a subsequent child whose stillborn or dies within their first year- whatever their starting weight.

This is genuinely intriguing.

Pregnancy is a time when many if not most women find they gain weight easily. This is due to the body often increasing its energy conservation-rather like when re-gaining weight after diet induced weight regression. The body instinctively lowers its output in order to protect the energy supply, in this case, to the foetus.

Rebounding to the mean

The body can vary tremendously in its ability and extent of reverting back to pre-pregnancy levels of expenditure and storage (of fat and supporting tissue). Restoration to the (prior) mean can happen partially, or (seemingly) hardly. Ditto the period of time over which any metabolic reversion occurs.

Women who lost weight between the first and second birth were at lower risk of having a stillbirth or infant death.

If this is as read, reversion is likely to signal the body's sensitivity to calorie restriction, which is also dependent on the state and response of ones metabolism. As readers of this blog know, weight is all about metabolic function-basically, the rate at which the body generates/replenishes and destroys its own cells. This stillborn/early death effect appears to be related to those bodies whose metabolism is less exact in its restoration of pre-pregnancy function. Potentially reducing the stream of energy available to the developing foetus and/or its ability to meet any extraordinary needs.

Energy conservation

It's somewhat speculative, but the energy conservation displayed in this weight gain could conceivably deny a subsequent foetus a high enough degree of sensitivity it may require to be fully viable at birth or up to its first year. That could also include an issue of timing in that the (slightly?) inexact energy stream may tell at some points of foetus's formation than at others, as in affecting some body systems more than others.

Metabolic manipulation

I used to say back in the day that if men got pregnant, they'd be a whole discipline dedicated to restoring them and their function to pre-pregnancy states. I was thinking as much in terms of appearance as anything.

Why some women, if not many or most women do not "snap back" more readily to their pre-partum state, has always puzzled me. In the same way that the overwhelming majority of people's bodies, thin to fat alike, return to their pre-diet weight over time. So too should women bodies return more to pre motherhood state with such momentum. Perhaps they do more than appears from our vantage point.  Homoeostasis if you will, works both ways.

It exists to maintain a consistency of function. The expected completely different looking body after giving birth is yet another example of the rules being made by a lack of intervention, rather than some assumed hard and fast rules of nature-as in "I'm meant to be 12/15/ 25 stones." Too deterministic, there's just no clear route to reversing weight.

The price of anorexia worship

This could well be, along with the much forgotten people who cannot retain weight, yet another example of the price paid for refusing to approach weight honestly, as a metabolic issue, rather than via a stupid crime and punishment angle. You must serve a life sentence of anorexia for your crime of in this case, mere weight gain.

If the white coat mafia could have just treated fatness via metabolism, heaven knows what they could have achieved by now.

As this list grows ever longer, we have to marvel at how much knowledge we are sacrificing to the dominance of these lifestyle anorexia promoting wing-dings.