Surgical Experiment

"More obese patients in the UK should be offered weight loss operations, say surgeons". This threw me for a loop the other week. I was unsure why all this push now?

In a joint statement, 45 international organisations, doctors and researchers in diabetes say surgery should be considered as a treatment option for anybody with type 2 diabetes who is obese or even mildly obese (with a body mass index of more than 30) if drugs and lifestyle changes – diets and exercise – do not succeed in keeping their glucose levels under control.

Pocket billiards to that. Weight loss gastrectomy is one big experiment. A follow on from the diet or die. Where are these people when weight outliers are being cut out of their homes, being humiliated and defenceless in plain sight for everyone to have a pop at? Where they to direct humane considerations, dignity and privacy for those people? Where are they to inject a sense of objectivity into people's perception of metabolic function?

The opposite of where they are when its about hacking the vital organs out of bodies their professions have had primary role in devaluing.......for mucho £££'s.

Looking at the subtitle of that article,

Guidance says operations to shrink stomach should be offered to anyone with condition who is obese if other methods have not succeeded

The stomach is a muscular organ, why can't it be shrunk without mutilating it? Forests of worthless "obesity research" drivel is published. Why can't any spare the effort to use anything from the mind to some kind of electronic stimulus shrink the stomach, or turn down the function of the part that they cut out?

If you are going to starve people at least have the decency to turn their hunger to a less than normal level. Or would that prevent weight loss? Hunger is a metabolic function. It seems to run parallel in some way to where metabolism is at in terms of maintaining the body. If you turn hunger down, does that have a knock on effect that reduces body's ability to use up its fat stores?

There are no "other methods" of achieving weight loss on offer. Only various means of going about the same one- calorie restriction, with less or more assistance from such as powerful yet strangely useless drugs or thought re-education.

Ironically, one thing this butchery does get right is adjusting function first with results flowing from that. Whereas willpower only dieting leaves things as they are and just expects you to hurl yourself into the abyss that is a body's superior ability to outsmart your intentions. Rather than adjusting function, it leaves that to strangle or fully/ partially amputate the stomach.

The problem with calorie restriction induced weight loss or CRIWL, is that it is the wrong means of bringing about the purported aim of weight loss. Weight loss is not a technique, its an outcome of other things. The body knows how to do it and does it all the time with ease.

What we need to do is find out how and find the best means of making adjustments to metabolic anatomy to set its mechanisms to a different end or set point. If it can be done in part or whole through the stomach, then find the means of doing that in healthy ways. If we can alter the level at which the hypothalamus is cranking out its various duties, then do that.

In other words, tweak or reset the body in ways that change its set point-then let homoeostasis take aim at that and regulate it. Don't attack the body, use it.

The right means of adjustment will not hurt, cause major discomfort, nor will unravel back to where you started, because you will have changed the start. Regain happens due to the target of homoestasis remaining the same, unless it has shifted spontaneously before, during or after the diet began.

If weight loss was dieting, you'd feel the body's constant back and forth, reversal/advance of your weight all the time. Indeed, it wouldn't happen would it? Another impossible imposed by the phony conflation of dieting with weight loss.

Surgery doesn't remove calorie restriction's imposition of "willpower," or conscious direction, it just lessens it, which is why it tends to succeed better than dieting without surgery. The thing I didn't really grasp was that the more invasive surgery tends to decimate hunger too, at least until healing has (partially?) restored it. This can vary from days, weeks, months years, though the average seems to be between a year and a year and a half. Roughly in line it seems, with the period of greatest weight loss.

A pointer to the extensive and studiously avoided adaptability of the nervous system. Also an example of how hunger doesn't come from one source. I still missed this though.

Its not that hunger is all in your stomach. It's that your whole body is to some degree involved in energy metabolism, all your body's processes run on it. All things being equal-i.e. sans; eccentricities, quirks, malformations, etc., Hunger is unlikely to be solely about the brain.

Nature usually has at least one back up, if not more, especially for things that are this central to survival.

Hunger is overseen in some way by the brain, mainly the less conscious parts, but there are other sites that can have a significant contribution to its tone, tenor and pitch.

The digestive system as a whole is so rich in nerves that it makes a kind of (relatively) primitive brain itself. Other parts of it may also be capable of altering hunger/appetite function.

Such aggression towards the body is not necessary. Its desired by those who wish to insert themselves in between people and their ability to manage their own functioning. A big lever being their on-going refusal to do much about arresting weight in any non-invasive way. No matter what, if you cannot stop a process, it's likely to cause problems at some point.

No one should have to just wait and hope their body stabilizes. It's well within our capabilities to achieve. The will(power) is just not there in sufficient amount. More powerful than that is the urge to block that.

There's been a lot recently about how weight loss gastrectomy provides some great insight into finding out how to make dieting stick. These experts find it easier to mutilate millions and stand by with their algorithms, clipboards and laptops making notes, rather than getting more of a clue about the workings of metabolic physiology.

Like children pulling the legs off daddy long legs and pushing them to see how or if they can walk, so its just so easy to go down this route when you have such a grip on others. To honour and preserve healthy organs is still too much to expect.

It all has a scent of the path of least resistence.

Attacking Bodies

I was puzzled by the story of a feminist group called "Cherchez la Femme" and an ad publicising one of their events. Little did I know it was going to turn into why mainstream feminism is too often stuck in an intellectual drain part Xty X.

The event question, mooted as a "talk show" will discuss fat acceptance/body positive and such. F**book [yes I'm aware only two **'s.] banned it from boosting the ad you see at the top of the banner of their page, featuring a picture of Tess Holliday in a bikini.

Now what thoughts are rushing into the void? Discrimination? [see comments underneath the post]. Or good on f**book for resisting the impulse to promoobo? [see DM commenters-probably responding to that headline].

All this despite Jessamy Gleeson a producer of said event, helpfully touching on f**book's actual problem, which is-to quote them,

Your ad wasn't approved because the image being used in the ad doesn't comply with our Health and Fitness Policy.
The image depicts a body or body parts in an undesirable manner. Ads may not depict a state of health or body weight as being perfect OR extremely undesirable. [my emph.]

You can see "undesirable manner" plus the last two words-"extremely undesirable" probably set some people off. We'll let them continue,

This includes ad images showing:

• Close-ups of "muffin tops" where the overhanging fat is visible

• People with clothes that are too tight

• People pinching their fat/cellulite (even with full body visible)

• Human medical conditions in a negative light (ex: eating disorders)

Any clearer? Here's the money shot,

Ads like these are not allowed since they make viewers feel bad about themselves.

And there we finally have it. Lying bunkum and balderdash about how mere viewing of bodies gives poor ickle womenz body boo, boos, have come home to roost.

Tess Holliday's form is apparently presented as an aspirational image, which might make less than perfect fatz feel bad about themselves. Boosting the ad featuring her image is therefore being blocked by f/b on the grounds that women's bodies cause women to have problems with their own bodies, totally against their will. If indeed they have one in this storyboard.

No wonder no-one got it!

Like every fat person, I've said I really miss(ed) the input of the mainstream bodied. But I keep waiting for the application of their business as usual twaddle to be of any earthly use to fat women. I don't wish to seem unnecessarily divisive, but a lot of what is said in the m/s about women 'n' their bodies is horseshit and stinks just as bad. Dishonest, bogus and heavy on the quack, ridden with psychobabble, blatant unconvincing placeholder type waffle.

It's only supported by the halo assigned to certain people.
 
Is it really bad of me to point this out? We know those phoning this in don't believe it either, 'cos they've told us. They bend over backwards to tell fatz we choose our bodies, and get very onery about any attempt to introduce the nuance of our actual experience [how dare we].

Not a little of that is due their own frustration and boredom with their own fakery and its dampening of honest exchange in this area but won't give it up. Well, it's status ain't it?

I couldn't help but be amused when on one forum some years ago, there was thought to be a suggestion [there wasn't] that slimz diet solely for the approval of others rather than personal fulfilment. They rightly felt the inference to be blazingly patronising [whether true or not]. "What, we're so pathetically supine that we cannot express urge to control our own bodies? We have to be 'oppressed' for that?"

There you have it. A tacit recognition of just how bad this nonsense about poor defenceless women starving themselves because of other women's bodies really sounds without the shield of m/s investment.

Just read that highlighted sentence again;

Ads like these are not allowed since they make viewers feel bad about themselves. 

For three year olds maybe.

Bodies do not cause eating disorders. And even if they did, tough. People's bodies cannot banned or pathologized because of other people's personal issues. There's also a sense of using body banning to avoid seeing someone you might envy and of finding ways to harass those you are jealous of, but don't have the authority driven funkfest that is the crusade.

[Oh yes they would.]

The only concern should be any undue exploitation of those who appear in such publicity, models, actors and the like. But as long as they aren't under duress to starve themselves, the body police can lump it.

Especially given that the problem is the denial of your agency by the white coat elite, intent on continuing to deny real means to help yourself. More effort can be put into techniques that could undermine and protect people from problems with hunger and food.

Thinspo is rank, it's hatred should be challenged, but the agency of those involved must be recognised, along with the context in which it operates. Insisting any reversal of weight must happen via calorie manipulation, encourages calorie restriction. It's not gone unnoticed that  thinspo is just a form of "weight management."

This little set-to should give pause for thought in going along with this other women's shady antics of the bodies cause me/someone else damage variety, this is where it can end up.

Now there's potential discussion with real bite. I wonder if CLF will take this ball on in their talk?

This is 'Obesity'

Sarai Walker's article in NYT tells us exactly what the 'obesity' construct is and is for.

I posted a link on Twitter to a 1969 interview with Jim Morrison, in which he said, “Fat is beautiful.” Minutes after posting the link, a friend responded angrily that being fat is unhealthy because it causes high blood pressure and other health problems. This response, I told the audience, is an example of what I call “Fat Derangement Syndrome,” where even people who consider themselves to be open-minded, critical thinkers become outraged if fat is spoken about in any positive way.

"Fat Derangement Syndrome" is 'obesity'. It's the applied vigiliante style, permanent chorus of disapproval, which is supposed to trigger feelings of unwellbeing in fat people. This can be pointed to as the expression of the pathology of 'obesity'/caused by 'obesity'.

Or what have you got? A lot of hysteria about unhealthy, and a lot of completely tuned out fat people going about their beeswax, being just as un/healthy as they are, no more no less? How easily can you make fool yourself with that?

The much hoped pathology that is the 'obesity' construct can only be made anything like a realistic pretense even for the desperate, with this kind of proactivity. If you really want to believe something, the urge is to act that out where you feel you can. To try and make it happen. Or else, why bother wanting it?

Unfortunately, Sarai Walker like many of the fat activist bent point blank refuse to countenance this, despite heavy prompting. 

During the audience question-and-answer period, people stood up, one after another, and made negative comments about weight.

You don't say.

I felt like a witch surrounded by torch-wielding villagers. It was clear that even for many urban sophisticates paying to attend a festival about difficult ideas, thinking about fat as anything but bad was borderline impossible.

Oh its possible alright, it just not desirable to these folk. If they're so sophisticated, why would this be anything but their decision? This whole rackety ob act wouldn't exist without serious interventions from the white coat mafia, true. However, no-one's stopping the keepers of all human intellect and compassion from seeing right through that. Basic critical thinking would do that.

No one's in a better position to dismantle it than they. If they'd have wanted, they could have saved us all from this by seeing it as beneath their dignity-which it is. The 'obesity' crusade has always been aimed straight at Walker's audience. It knows them, because it is them. It is how they think, especially about those of the lower orders.

Walker can't believe her audience doesn't recognize her. I'm one of you!

Fat activists, those who see themselves as white, middle/upper class educated intelligent etc., refuse to acknowledge that given no comebacks, they too can choose to feel liberated by bigotry. The implications on self identity are sharp but why is that any different for the rest of us?

How do you think I feel about Black people, especially self-declared militant activists, accepting the idea that Black people are lazy and stupid, as long as they're 'obese'? We are talking about their mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts who worked all hours for them and theirs.

I did not need to know it was this easy. But I'm not going to pretend that hasn't happened.

I can see, despite the assumption that Black people live to cry "racism" at every turn, the sheer fatigue with politics. How wonderful to be able to achieve radical change that's wholly internal? The power is yours.

Black or otherwise, fat people are imbued with the magic of totally existing in an ether untouched by the laws and mechanisms of society.

If I ignored all this and pretended its purely about don't know, it would be erasing and ignoring those feelings. Whilst I don't respect the craven submission to 'obesity' folklore. There is something deeply condescending about behaving as if they're under any real duress to feel this way. It's collusion pure and simple.

Something else;

Backstage, the moderator of the event asked if I was O.K. This wasn’t the first time someone on my tour had pulled me aside to ask that question. I said I was fine, but in the hotel that night, I crawled into bed, relieved that I no longer had to perform as a professional fatty. I wanted to go home and hide. I am ashamed of this response. I wrote a novel to give fat women a voice, but then became exhausted using mine.

That is the best description of "political correctness" I think I've ever read. How ironic that she thinks that's the source of her pain! Rather than her refusal to see people want her to feel bad, feel ill, so they can say-that is what we are talking about. So they can validate their assertions. That's how brittle and willfil the ob cult is. 

The real consideration is not to feel like you're fronting with an insouciant 'tude. It's to recognize the limits of identity. That you have to be able to be more important than whatever group you feel part of. That you can and must be capable of standing aloof from them. Knowing that they are wrong and you are right.

If the boot was on the other foot, wouldn't you want them to stand their ground against your wrongness? How many times have your mistakes been corrected by those who refused to submit to you[r identity]?

BizarrO

Something I seem to have failed to get fully across to fatz is just what an unprecedentedly peculiar consciousness we've been cornered into. Many fatz trade in the sob fatty story, they feel the only way they can communicate with slimstream is to accede to their demands that we are tragically melancholy about our rape-proof status lols.

Enter, the DM (and others) reporting a new "bizarre new "roast me" craze". This unheard of pastime involves posting a picture onto the internet and inviting people to insult you on the basis of what you look like.

Or in other words, exactly what is supposed to save the 'obese'. In this case it is invited, therefore consensual-signalled by the person holding up a sign in said picture with "roast me" written on it. 

Do you remember consent? That's when you decide of your own volition to do or not do stuff. Those were the days......

The DM and others rightly state inviting people to abuse you is not a health aid. It is not the sign of a healthy psyche or a moral character. It is not even a signal that one seeks to exit the depths of bonbon-related depravity.

It is bizarro.

It requires an explanation. Acceptance of such would be a deviation from the norm.

More than this, if you do not consent, and are just set up for it, you are the victim.

Fat people are truly gracious in bearing this.

There are rules to this. Comments should be "dry and funny". Only with permission, as already stated. The uses of said forum, should be older than 13, to give this consent. Leaving the youngest children out of it.

How civil.

Time served playing 'obese' is like having been in a mind-altering cult. Your will is bent into the service of the cult, rather than yourself. The two are presented as if they are one.

After an experiment there's debriefing. After a cult comes deprogramming.

The aim is to restore the mind back to its equilibrium of judgement.

Going from a savage internal monologue of fat hating to a truer sense of yourself, on the basis of will, is such a feat that people struggle to see beyond that.

Wonderful though that is, it isn't enough. Fat people, activists included need to develop methods of debriefing/ deprogramming our minds from the punctured perspective that has been so normalised.The refusal to call time on the crusade means, no one wants us to, perhaps even us. 

From where many of us stand, it threatens to put so much distance between us and the slimstream that it feels like a greater test of sanity than dealing with fat phobic norms.

Given fat people have no interest in separating ourselves from slim people. On the contrary. We've always sought connection, from our extreme dedication to  [re-]join them in the utopia of slim. To now when we twist ourselves out of shape to try communicating on their terms, and pay the price for that ourselves. 

Limitations on the respect a person has for themselves will curtail the ability to respect others, even those we give as much respect to as slim people.