Appropriating Addiction

I'm having a bit of a Diane Abbott interlude right now. The crude ambushing of an intelligent, highly accomplished Black woman, to put her in the place assigned for her by the British establishment and its hmv media has been as brutal as it is bracing. It's easy to forget yourself, getting caught up in making yourself a safe space for others, only to find that you suddenly cannot defend yourself against them, as effectively as you know you can.

Whether you are targeted and surrounded or no, it's not enough to be on your game. You've got to be on top of it at all times, one chink in the armour and you are a piñata.

Anyway, back to more trivial matters.

"A food addiction has defined my entire life. And it is slowly killing me"

Here’s a list of things I’ve done to try and fix my obsession with eating: four psychiatrists, nine psychologists, two hypnotherapists, three meditation workshops, one hospital stay, 10 dieticians, 18 personal trainers. I’ve moved house 28 times, countries twice, states six times, I changed schools four times. I’ve been on Weight Watchers so many times I’ve lost count, Jenny Craig three times, Dr Cohen’s diet twice, Atkins three times, Mayo Clinic diet once, vegan diet five times. 

This list displays a refreshingly direct grasp of efficacy for this area. You have a problem-real or perceived. You apply a solution to said issue, if said issue remains, you judge the [prospective] solution to have failed, end of story. You then move on.

In the case of calorie restriction, this basic rule is comprehensively rejected. The issue is weight-light or heavyweight- you apply the purported solution to it-calorie restriction dieting. Either you remain the same, or its temporary effects rescind themselves ending with you being back where you started. Ergo-this 'solution' has failed.

That's it, move on to a more righteous path. 

But no, we aren't allowed to. We must not see this failure, we must only see ourselves or our bodies as having failed this godlike principle. This refusal leads puzzled indoctrinates to ask themselves; "Why can't I starve?"

About a decade ago, a group of American psychiatrists studying obesity decided to look into whether some people's anecdotal claims of food addiction could be proven.

Answer; "[It's as if] we are physically dependent on food!!!" Round and round in the same circle. You simply cannot get away from a reality that stark and unyielding. Some of us aren't used to being told no, even by nature.

The attempt to distance the professionals is palpable here but distinctly implausible. Since when do these give a damn about what fat people enough to attempt to illuminate their experience? Unless it can be twisted to fit their agenda- see this is in the number of their pointless and ill conceived rat studies.

Even if you employ metaphors, the comparisons you make must be apt enough to be worthwhile. There's no use in saying I think the term 'football' is "too narrow". It should be broadened to include round fruits like watermelons, later on, if not melons, why not oranges and apples etc., "You hurt me if you don't allow apples in, I like apples. It feels like a football to me, who are you to say otherwise? etc.,"

Subsequently football becomes things that aren't footballs. Rather like disease no longer has an agreed definition due to its promiscuous emotive misapplication.

Real addiction happens because exposure to an outer supply of chemical agents disrupts our body's inner production of chemicals with a similar structure. That inner supply is made totally within us and is sufficient for us, all things being equal.

Even if you ignore the debate ending fact that we have an innate physical dependence on food, addiction doesn't work as a replacement/ metaphor for dependence because our bodies do not make the energy we need to survive, internally.

On that basis, the notion of food as an addiction appears to fundamentally violate the laws of physics, lmfao.

Hunger is the thing ob wallahs are desperate to phase out, denial of fact doesn't end it. The basis of their empire of falsehood is eating is purely a conscious act, like taking drugs or alcohol. No matter how much they seek to reformulate that using different terms.

Making people feel like addicts not only demoralises, depresses and disempowers them-the opposite of what is claimed-it makes it easier to sell them drug abuse. Food is the gateway, we've got better drugs for you.

Like your average neighbourhood junk peddler-but without the honour of not pretending its concern for your health.

Ironically, a more apt example of the unbalancing of internal function, by the introduction of an outer dissembler appeared in that proto-anorexia/anorexia editorial of the other week,

In their article, Gianini et al (2017) report that both individuals with anorexia nervosa and individuals on the NWCR:....Are physiologically primed for weight regain. Both groups have lower resting energy expenditure... than non-weight reduced BMI-matched controls.

Lower expenditure is the product of disrupting your energy metabolism through the bolt-on of extra energy wastage. It's like you've sprung a leak and your body is finding ways to slow down the rate of [energy] loss.

Compulsion on the other hand refers to neural posture that has been assumed by the conjunction of nerves used to carry out various actions and behaviours, to the extent that the action/behaviour is not as voluntary as before. It has become compulsive or a compulsion. That posture requires dismantling.

Again, eating starts from being naturally compulsive. We all in the main, eat the same way, we respond to our body's calls for energy. Hunger is the body's demand for energy, eating is the response to that demand for energy. Notion of 'addiction' to responding to your body's energy demands is redundant. Needing to respond to you vital needs is a given.

The best way to reduce intake of course, is to reduce hunger, thereby reducing the need to respond to it.

As for Melanie Tait, what are we to make of her utterances?

Astonishingly, the jury is still out on food addiction.

She expected this all to be a typical mindless phone-in that makes no sense but that we all submit to unquestioningly as if lies are the same as truth when it comes to certain quarters.  What does she even think 'food addiction' means?

...“substance-use disorders”. Twelve-step programs say an addiction is a physical compulsion, coupled with a mental obsession. Whatever addiction is, an addiction to food has defined my entire life.

How can a "whatever" define anything, let alone your life?

Food is killing me, slowly, clogging my arteries and raising my blood sugar. Increasing my risk of Alzheimer’s, cancer and diabetes. Still, I can’t stop.

Um, you can feel 'obesity' agit-prop in your body can you? Food does not "clog arteries" that's biological myth, but this isn't really about Tait's experience. It's more about selling this to the impressionable.

They [her parents] don’t believe I have a food addiction. They think I’m weak. That I can’t control myself. That I’m lazy. 

This is an ignorant person's idea of what they think a drug addict would talk about their experience. She even tries the old part of the addict narrative of stealing to feed their habit. In this case, Mel says she stole food from her parents so many times, why?

Most of the time I think they’re right; they know me better than anyone else. Why can’t I just stop eating?

All through this, she keeps clunkingly inserting aspects of the 'binge eating disorder' playbook, hilariously emphasising the ludicrous insistence on 'secret eating' and shame being the biggest telltale. Virtually every fat person feels ashamed to eat at some phase or other. Which calls to mind the desire in this to separate the failure of dieting in fat people from the failure of dieting in everyone else.

 To remind folk, I had a chronic disorder of hyperactive, hyper functioning hunger. When I first heard eating on your own was such a big deal I was genuinely stunned.

I had actually forgotten about eating alone, that's how much of an impression it made on me. If I was forced to name as many as 20 major bad things about hyper hunger function. I'd struggle with more than five obvious major ones, despite that, eating on my own wouldn't make the list.

And that ill conceived checklist consists mainly of, eating more than expected/wanted. So if you want to eat lettuce and you past the chippy and get a bag of chips, because you are hungry, that's supposedly a symptom of 'binge eating'.

But that's a 'symptom' of weight loss dieting. The reason you fail is not because you are 'out of control' its because your body is cleverer than dieting. You don't control your eating, that's a subjective interpretation of how you feel when your intake matches your outcome.

This is the norm, that's why people are so obsessed with telling fat people we're fat........ and greedy and lazy. We have to learn the harmony we feel is shameful and not acceptable. Yet this is the major symptom of 'binge eating'

The experience of genuinely hyper functioning hunger and nervous system was a real problem, not the imagined one fat hating puppet masters so desperately and strenuously want, sorry about that fat phobe Gippettos. There's something vain about this particular fixation.

This interaction is inherently abusive, with professionals seeking to gain such complete control of people that its easily to the extent of those relationship where one partner micromanages the other. What bugs these controllers is the notion that their handlee is doing anything independent.

The notion that you are eating away from their gaze is too suggestive of an inner life and will outside their control.

Fundamentally, the problem with all this the wish to impose their feelings on everyone else. The wish to pretend this is objective and universal. That this hasn't carried the day thus far is what's causing Ms. Tait's/her puppeteers "astonishment".

Binge eating disorder is a lot like 'obesity'. A construct that exists to be fashioned by the dominant fantasies of an already decided narrative. It appears to boil down to two things. Either the hunger generating aspect of weight loss dieting/calorie restriction-exercise bulimia disruption and blow back. It's still not routinely acknowledged that dieting deranges your metabolism and makes you feel like shit, not any "weight battle" with your greedy/lazy character.

When you keep dieting, and trying to diet, as fat people are more likely to, this can become a chronic disruption of its own. One that doesn't abate even between diets.  

There's not enough genuine detail to say whether she's referring to that or actual hyperactive hunger function. It shouldn't be but sadly lies are not conducive to sorting through sometimes elusive symptoms.

Mel has got some issues though. She makes a lot of her seemingly unwilling solitariness and mentions a sort of arrested emotional development. Together with the fact that she does feel her hunger is ferocious suggests she could have a problem with the centre of her brain-where the hypothalamus et al reside. Sounds to me like they could be the same source.

Maybe this is her brain/nervous systems way of pointing to this.