The Calories in/out Lens

Secret Habits of Anorexics.

Because we rarely hear this and when we do, it somehow doesn't seem to stick in people's minds,

Theroux meets one woman, Rosie, whose condition left her unable to walk at one point and led to her contemplating suicide.

Her parents reveal to Theroux that she spends hours scrolling through social media pictures of food on her phone.

This is the lens everyone is looking through; anorexia-calories in/out. This is coins, "eating disorders", why "binge eating", why 'obesity' comes from to devour/eat away, why fat people are seen as walking larders who have no legitimate hunger function, why food taxes, sugar phobia, food paranoia, clean eating, orthorexia, why everything is obsesses with food, controlling food, food is good, food is bad, eating is unhealthy, eating is healthy...........

It's even why anorexia/thinness is somehow seen as against left-wing /anti-capitalist and fatness as conservative/pro-capitalist.

My problem is I don't see sufficiently through this lens as others, including fat acceptance people.This leaves me cold. I don't care about food in this way because my notion of weight isn't based on calories in/out which as I've frequently said is incomplete. Nor is the focus of this point of view capable of properly defining or describing the hyperactive hunger function I experienced. It actually gets in the way.

Though both are about excessive hunger function, one comes from deficit, the other from attempts to impose deficit.

Communication problems are rooted in refusing to acknowledge not everyone sees as you see, nor wants to.

Absolute Neurosis

"A lesson from the biggest losers: Exercise keeps the weight off" refers to that study of former biggest loser contestants.

It claims the key to staving off the rebound part of any calorie restriction induced weight loss cycle [the calorie-weight deficit/restoration of calorie-weight deficit is all ONE cycle] is exercise.

"Hope"

I wish the NYTimes would make room for other types of articles on health, providing us with indepth insight into various genetic illnesses, diseases, and other conditions. These constant articles about studies of how to lose weight and keep it off are tiresome. Diet and exercise works, don't we know that by now? Let's move on.

Hope and I do not agree on the viability of cal res, but we both agree it's time to move on with endless portentous repetition of nothing. It's the professionals who don't want to. They are the ones wanting to keep going round and round in their circles as long as they can, postponing that inevitable moment when science must stop being pseud.

On average, those who managed to maintain a significant weight loss had 80 minutes a day of moderate activity, like walking, or 35 minutes a day of vigorous exercise, like running.

Compare this with stopping smoking. This is of course, after spending the weight. This is a life sentence of the wrong means to achieve ends.

On average is not for everybody though,

For the four years after the show, he exercised more than two and a half hours a day and gained back just 40 pounds.Then the injuries began, forcing him to cut back his workouts to one and a half hours a day. His weight crept up to 235 pounds.

The next year, “my body just started breaking down,” he said. “I had a foot injury, a wrist injury. I couldn’t keep it up.” And he was exhausted.

More than two [one!] and a half hours a day to gain "only" 40 lbs, not to be slim let alone thin.

Physically breaking down under the strain of exercise purging, with injury piling upon injury to the point where you have to stop - usually comes towards the hospitalisation end of a thin/slim person's anorexia nightmare.

It's also calls to mind neurological weight loss diet burnout, where your nervous system is unable to tolerate the provocation of restriction and you just can't.  I say that not to be fancy, but because you want to keep dieting, but something has changed, your body blocks you, it's a rather eerie discovery.

Yet this too is perceived as failure of the person, not the method,

It’s a difficult task for virtually anyone, Dr. Kerns said: “The amount of time and dedication it takes to manage one’s food intake and prioritize exercise every day can be an untenable burden for many people.” “It’s totally unfair to judge those who can’t do it,” she added.

Doesn't multiple injuries or nervous system exhaustion with fighting off restriction show dedication? How can you get any more dedicated that actually exhausting your body's ability to continue with what you are doing?

Cahill could do it. He wasn't a can't do it! At the very least should be where even the most raving calorie restrictionists draw the line. It should be "Okay, you all have to train like athletes and starve like anorexics, until your body breaks down, then you must stop."

But no, apparently, you still haven't done anything. It is an extreme version of how the ideology in people's minds erases recognise fat people's efforts.

As has been pointed out, these "biggest losers" are the success stories. They are outliers in success. Biggest loser type dieters are like anorexics without the madness, their behaviour, not anorexics, is driven by pure will.

Neither are in control.

Nor is dieting hard its easy, it's the body blocking its action that gives it rigour, but that wasn't in the calculation. Ci/co cannot adjust to this.

What happened to Danny Cahill is what your defences are blocking, potential damage and injury. This erasure of fat people's efforts is a sign of deep neurosis. These people are hallucinating an absence, whilst looking directly at what is present.

I'll re-emphasise, it is normal for most of us to display signs that could be seen as or actually form part of a psychiatric diagnosis. Unless that's so pronounced as to pull other things out of alignment [or the reverse], the overall pattern is what makes up genuine diagnosis.

This should be enough of a warning sign though, even addicts going into rehab and coming out addicts will not be told-you didn't go there. Whether the failure is seen as one of those things or something the person did wrong, their presence is recognised.

Here's is a mindset which perceives doing purely on outcome. Do nothing + the desired outcome = activity, success. Do everything + undesired outcome = inaction, failure.

Calorie restriction has always been unlimited in this way, sure evidence of its inherent quackery. Every function has limits. Only in fiction are there no limits. In reality, not recognising any limits just puts pressure on your mind to erase the limits that will naturally manifest.

Dieting and exercise feel bad not because they are hard-they aren't-it's because they are bad. 

All this is also evidence of a profound failure of us fat people. Our refusal to set limits ourselves, on what we should expect to do is perhaps most shocking of all. What exactly is motivating us to allow such liberties to be taken with us? Why do we allow people to impose unending, unendurable labour?

Slim people, fat phobes maybe sinking under the weight [yes] of their own neuroses, but it is we that seem entranced by this. It is we that appear to be willingly sleepwalking to our own destruction.

I Don't Care How Much You Love Your Son, Your Fat phobia Will Curdle It

NB, if you are feeling delicate, you might want to give this a miss, frankly though, Giles Coren is not a person who is taken seriously so any anger is just missing the pointlessness. "I don't care what my son becomes as long as he's not overweight".

I've been at pains to point out that in spite of appearances, the 'obesity' industry are the ones blocking  the most efficient and effective means of altering weight. Science should deliver proper means of inducing weight loss for those who need or want it-and is free to, as it is to pursue any other methods or solutions it, or its paymasters decide.

It just chooses not to and will continue not to, as long as its under zero pressure to explain this decision. I recommend-as I always have-taking it up with them. If enough people do, that'll put some heat under their feet.

What's just as odd as that reluctance is the way fat phobes have followed the 'obesity' industry's lead in promoting failure ahead of that, no matter how desperate they claim to be or are for the same clear effective resolution fat people desire/d.

The suspense [lols] is seeing how long it's going to take for this penny to drop, amongst fat phobes and activists alike.

That's pretty much how I'm reading this offering for signs of mental fatigue. The article itself concerns Coren's attitude to his little son meeting those who wish to be the dis-ease of other people, like for instance, himself;

It's all very well to say that it's puppy fat.......but what if… IT DOESN'T GO AWAY?

Acknowledging the lack of proper method or approach, along with angst of knowing what we have is a whole lot of nothing- from someone who likes pretending otherwise. Home is where the heart is,

Adele's parents probably thought it was puppy fat too. And Paul Hollywood's. And Russell Grant's. No doubt Diane Abbott's family assumed that she would change shape when she was out of nappies. But the change never came. 

Wishing and hoping, oh the impotence, yet he still ventilates the trap people like him like to collude with;

It's reasonable to assume that the parents took their eyes off the ball, let their porky pups feast on a shitty diet and do fuck-all exercise into adolescence and now look at them: ostensibly successful, yes, but laughable to behold with their untucked shirts and stretched, shiny faces. The sort of people you want to follow down the street playing "Flight of the Valkyries" on a tuba.

Your eyes?

I'm worried as fuck that my little Sam could go the same way. Not only because of how it will ruin his life but because of how it will reflect on me.

I'll bet you are, you know the score. And ruin his life? That's a strong statement of the effects of being constantly surrounded by your mindset.

Unsurprisingly Coren doesn't hold back on the usual brain dead fat phobe memes, one thing that is a surprise is the rank paedo-gaze I thought people had finally let up on,

You're looking at that picture of my son and you're thinking, "Fat little bastard". Sure, he's cute. He's got a nice little face. Except he's fat. Arse on him like Vanessa Feltz and a full frontal presentation at bath time that puts one in mind of a Gavin and Stacey-era James Corden or a well-waxed Christopher Biggins, all giggly on too much rosé.

Yeucch. I was thinking cute Giles. Cute. When does the average parent speak of their infant child in these terms? This and various other inappropriateness dogs people their whole lives. 

....each actual fat person is blatantly just a badly brought-up, greedy little son of a bitch committing the unforgivable sin of gluttony in a world where there is not enough food to go round. I'd kill them all and render them down for candles.

Capitalist goes revolutionary with their crude and crudely misplaced anti-capitalism critique, [along with upper-mid parental inadequacy fears]. Your frustration is aimed at the wrong target you airhead. And unforgivable compared with what? Cold-blooded murder? Paedophilia?

As for that last line, it may help to know Coren is Jewish. It feels like something spit up (somewhere) from his cognitive basement. If other Jewish people don't object to it, I don't really see why anyone else should take it to heart. He's desperate for the attention,

But it's hard to know what to do about it. 

Say what?

...it's hard to know what to do about it.  

What about the usual starvation and hard labour you usually recommend? Does it feel less doable when looking into the eyes of a little mite trusting you not to hurt him?

How very normal.

I'd put him on a strict diet and buy him a hamster wheel but my wife is not the moral absolutist that I am and she is the one who does the Ocado orders. And cooks most of the food. But is a bit of a lazy tart. Sorry — a busy working mother with many other important things to think about, who knows her way down the path of least resistance.

Hiding behind your wife? Isn't that major league cuck in your world? Moral absolutist, proto-anorexia + exercise purging = morality, rather than standing up for your boy against disingenuous fanaticism?

And come on Giles, the path of least resistance has a heck of a lot of overlap with the greatest efficiency. I see your laptop isn't a windup one, do you feel morally sullied by its efficiency?

I say, "Can't you give him a carrot instead?"

And my wife says, "If you want him to eat carrots, you try feeding him a fucking carrot!"

So I let it go. And I feel ashamed. But then I see these middle-class kids with their weekday screen bans and their steamed fish and vegetables and no chocolate or sweeties and 10 hours' oboe practice a day and it makes me want to puke. 

I'm glad he said this because fat and/or working class people aren't allowed to feel this way by middle class 'obesity' upholders. Either they're failing to be nutritionally educated, dupes of the food industry or are criminally negligent, anything but disinterested in someone else prescribing their way of eating (and life).

This is a culture clash. The 'obesity' cult is about dictating the way you live, feel and increasingly, think. You aren't allowed to choose that on the pretext that you must surrender yourself for thinness-through-calorie-restriction-induced-weight-loss. And the way they want people to live, and the things they want others to prioritise isn't attractive.

The focus on scare stories rather than the usual understanding dynamics and how to direct them is supposed to scare us into living their way and evidence of the lack of interest in the purported subject. They're like others who don't feel they need to take "no" for an answer.

Weight change should have nothing to do with dictating diets, or sequestering huge amounts of your time and mental bandwidth- that's up to the individual. The issue is functional dynamics and the alteration of them. 

I try to look on the positive side. Such as the possibility that having a fat adult son — who I will unquestionably continue to love with all my heart no matter what — might help me to lay aside my prejudices regarding fat people and bring me to a more respectful place vis-à-vis the fat and ever fatter future we unquestionably face as a race.

Fantastic, you do that, because if you continue with such cultivated loathing, it could infuse the deep well of love you feel and you wouldn't like the possible consequences,

.....being grotesquely flabby, sweaty, knock-kneed and impotent would mean that Sam was unlikely ever to have a girlfriend or any mates or be invited to parties

How would you feel about love if it was mixed up with the feelings expressed here? Exactly.
 Time to do what fat phobes rarely have to do, choose which is most important to you. Your fat phobia, or your son.

Ministering to Bodies does not Equal Ownership of People

A few weeks ago a certain health authority announced that it will breathalyse smokers to make sure they've stopped smoking for 8 weeks before they can be referred for assessment for "non-urgent surgery".

They said the changes were being brought in after 85% of people who responded to a public consultation agreed that smokers should be required to quit before being referred. 

This transparent attempt at buck passing shows the architects of this know they are in the wrong, they don't want to own it. Instead they try to stick it on the usual targets, the public.

Smoking is a habit. It is not addictive, it's is not even particularly faddictive-folks still woefully underestimate the power of the human mind in real life.

Smoking has never been more self-selecting than it is today, so if anyone wants to truly make further inroads into the numbers remaining, they need to come up with techniques that actually work for those who smoke and resist urges to indulge in power games expressions punitive fee fees or crackpot vigilante justice.

To use that brilliant-as-it-is-skewif expression, check the optics: anti-smoking professionals targeting people for; reaching for a cigarette-reaching for a cigarette-reaching for a cigarette, by reaching for self righteous shock tactics-reaching for self righteous shock tactics-reaching for self righteous shock tactics.

If phoned in anti-ism equalled expertise in the formation and cessation of habits, that wouldn't have happened now would it?

If health professionals and bureaucrats wish to truly engage in public health, they need to engage with healthy behaviours to bring about that end. They can do their; "Bad for you, bad for you act, in an emergency, in the initial stages of any real or perceived health crisis- if they've not thought of anything better. After the initial loosely aligned are shaken off though, they'd better put some effort into how to actually alter what compelling about what they're complaining about.

With real demonstrations of efficacy, that can be repeated, not assertion or pseudo-science statistically massaged 'studies', or other so called "evidence-based" hocus-poci. No stupid chewing gum or horrible-as-they-are ineffectual drugs "support" either. If you are criticising using material things, why is that all you've got? If you think the answer to problems is things, what are you looking down your nose at?

Why aren't you more concerned about how to alter the behaviour and performance of your mind/body, using your mind/body? That is a real anti-thesis of habitual consumption of material objects.

If that sounds like a tall order, that's the sort of feeling you invoke in your targets.

In the past Public health was honourable and progressive. It improved society and was led by knowledge such as an understanding of the true value of hygiene and of the nature and transmission of disease.

Public health must again be about raising the health of the populace, not a pretext to assaulting mental health, inducing self hatred, creating social/moral hierarchies, or a cover for weird politics/ morality social engineering and the vaunting of one's own personal hatreds. 

Incidentally, no cure-all but smokers or trying to be ex-smokers should consider making a practise of yogic style or other breathing exercises. Even that famous warm up stretch where you take deep breaths as you raise your arms from your sides into the air- really open your chest [it's famous but I can't find a link.] And when you lower your arms whilst exhaling, really empty your lungs-without strain- and pause before taking another breath.

This won't suit everyone but it's worth a try. If your body knows its going to get some invigorating breaths, that might weaken that aspect of the attraction of fags, just don't bring that to smoking!

I can hardly finish without mentioning;

The CCGs also require obese patients to reduce their weight by 10% over nine months or reduce their BMI (body mass index) to less than 30, whichever is greater, before being referred for non-urgent surgery.

Again, whomever wrote; "reduce their weight" knows the only means made available for that-CRIWL is harmful and doesn't work. Euphemise away, you are not even fooling yourselves. Effectively this is seeking to force people to starve off weight against their will. It's seeking to mandate the ceaseless repetition of self harm and self abuse.  

Let's refresh on medical ethics;

• Respect for autonomy – the patient has the right to refuse or choose their treatment. (Voluntas aegroti suprema lex.)
• Beneficence – a practitioner should act in the best interest of the patient. (Salus aegroti suprema lex.)
• Non-maleficence – to not be the cause of harm. Also, "Utility" - to promote more good than harm
• Justice – concerns the distribution of scarce health resources, and the decision of who gets what treatment (fairness and equality). (Iustitia.)

That's a fail on all four and more.

Fat people have taken the initiative, we have done the dieting, that's how we know the results are not satisfactory to anyone.

Patronising nonsense about how people need 'support' to impersonate anorexia, be damned, this is a medical dispute.

There's an obvious vacancy here for science that seeks only to properly understand and manipulate metabolic function. That doesn't concentrate on pointless categorising of people by weight as if being above or below their arbitrary lines makes your bodily functions unrelated to each other.

Look at what that has produced. 

If medical professionals et al want to continue their blocking of real science that actually works, and promotion of pseudo-science that doesn't, they need to explain their motivation for this. They need to become accountable for the outcome.

Either way, doctors don't own fat or any other people. They can't tell us black is white and white is black or try to press us to support their science fiction.

I repeat, fat people have always wanted to slim, we have been prevented by the lack of proper method. Medics et al can only continue to bypass that for so long.

"Obesity scientists" as others choose the area of knowledge they wish to pursue, which is their right. That doesn't co-incide with the needs of those they treat as their personal quarry. No-one signed up to be their puppets, we signed on for altering weight/metabolic function in good faith. That has not been provided and is not on offer so that is that.

Neither they nor medics nor society is owed anything by fat people. We've done what we can with what we've been given.

Nor for the record, is mutilation of the stomach any more a viable option than smoking yourself slim.

'Intuitive' Shopping

"Why Britain is ditching the weekly shop".

The interesting thing about this for me is the signs of shopping more towards one's own internal dictates. Perhaps the days of dietary dictators are over [for the real people at least].

Longer opening hours and more convenience stores have combined with a drive among shoppers to waste less and stop themselves “over-buying” to a new trend called “as and when shopping”.  

Middle and uppper class people wing meal planning the same as everyone else, you'd think their much touted nutritonal education/expertise would save them from such shopping faux pas. 

“Just a few years ago, an average Waitrose would open with around 200 big trolleys and 150 shallow ‘daily shopper’ trolleys lined up outside. These days the tables have turned, with 250 shallow ‘daily shoppers’ and just 70 big trolleys needed.”

Um hum.

A fourth meal each day – especially healthy snacks or indulgent treats – is evidently also becoming more common. “This is not about gluttony, rather it is about adapting our eating schedules to our busy lives,” the researchers said.

Ha, ha, never about gluttony, if you are talking specifically about fat people, is it? Imagine the luxury of just adapting to the actual demands on you, rather than being a servant of hostile outer imposed dictates that don't even work in part, due to that kind of contrivance and inflexibility...

When it comes to diet, a commonsense approach now rules; strict eating plans or cutting entire food groups have fallen out of favour and carbs – from bulgar wheat to versatile quinoa – are back on the menu.

Dieting/healthist eating is the opposite of commonsense.