If you're overseas you may not know UK TV station Channel4 still thinks it has a bit of a reputation for edgy forward thinking television-out of the other big 5 terrestrial channels. Despite this, the furrow it ploughs with fatsploitation is brain dead standard issue at its most banal.
As with a lot of middle class metropolitan types, station honchos are on board with 'obesity' construct agit-prop. Tonight they're airing an episode of their long running 'Dispatches' series called "The Secret Plan to Save Fat Britain".
Indeed.
That could be read with an unfortunate-for them-literalism, as an assessment of the last 40 years of 'obesity' campaigning. To not only save fat people from not exiting fatness, but to add to and ballast their number. Think about it, if fat people had succeeded in their plans to 'lose weight' all these decades (centuries), this wouldn't be a thing.
The calorie restriction model has saved fatness from extinction-against the will of fat people themselves.
Anyhow, this programme is apparently an 'investigation' (plz) into how the current prime minister Teresa May has "watered down" the government's scattergun grand plan to regulate metabolic function from the outside in.
This grand stratagem is driven by increasing the encroachment of the organising principle of our era-lifestyle anorexia. Stuff like making restaurants include calorie counts on their menus, stopping supermarkets from offering certain promotion deals, getting them to remove sweets from checkout areas, reducing advertising an marketing calorie dense foods and other measures to reduce intake.
Anything but the most obvious and scientific, which would be to give people the ability to lower their hunger. And no, that doesn't require drugs, just more experimentation with using our thought processes to affect our function. An area of human capacity that's sorely underdeveloped.
It needs to happen for those who have an excess of hunger function. Contrary to assertion, its relatively rare, so people do not get how disturbing it is- including fat activists and some who claim to have something called-binge eating disorder. I'm not talking about binge eating, I'm talking about excessive hunger.
After finding efficient ways to bring this about, that can be applied to normal hunger. Whether that's a good idea or not I'll leave up to the individual, but that would be the best, easiest, healthiest way to reduce intake. However, this reducing of hunger, leaves control of what you eat with the individual, clearly that's an important target for those who feel everyone else's hunger/appetite is an extension of their own.
And should therefore be under their diktat.
The programme implies it will dig deep to uncover food industry machinations to expel policies from the lifestyle disorder manifesto. I'd be amazed if they hadn't lobbied their cause. Having been used to fat people the "obesity community" are struggling to deal with their own levels of cynicism and intransigence.
Its amusing to see the mainstream media-often bellyaching about social media's encroachment on the news agenda and how its a disaster not to leave the news agenda to metropolitan know-it-all classes.....- bending this into a conspiracyesque form.
The intimation is fat phobes would be "do something" about 'obese' if it wasn't for those pesky industrial food varmits and their underhand nefarious tactics.
In truth, this whole shebang depends on the inherent dysfunction of the calorie restriction model. The upshot of that being a success would decimate industrial food as we know it. Along with that, a lot of the transfer of employment from the heavy industries of yore.
Even this far into that process that bottom line hasn't slimmed down. Indeed, it would reverse what is keeping many millions going financially. Whether you insist fat ='overeat' or no more than anybody else, the permanent state of semi-starvation required by this method, would strike a massive blow to the food economy. Not to mention the cultural impact of a quarter, more or less of the adult population in a permanent state of hanger.
This doesn't tend to come up in these discussions. Instead you get repetition of the have cake and eat it too fantasy. Food needs to be restricted for the 'irresponsible' people who can't control themselves, but not for those who can.
It's been pointed out that if the latter are so sparing in their intake of popular calorie dense foods- they'd hardly miss them-especially given their massive self control.
The calorie restriction model is especially unsuited for liberal capitalist society. The nature of it requires a dictatorship like control/mismanagement of the food environment. Its invasive outer dictation, need to interfere with commerce and to dismantle a lot of what provide incomes for those who'd otherwise struggle gaining employment pits it against forces societies want to beat it. The almost complete lack of real opposition means no one has to face up to this. The failure of restriction is an integral part of sustaining most people's 'obesity' crusade delusions.
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