Dieting Has Proven You Can't Learn Anorexia Nervosa

"Long-term weight loss maintenance in obesity: Possible insights from anorexia nervosa?" was written by a group of "eating disorder researchers" led by Loren Gianini. It caused a kerfuffle some weeks ago. I've not had the privilege of reading it, they're shy. I'm going with the seemingly self explanatory title.

Its assertion, phrased as a 'question', rests on the ever present notion that anorexia nervosa is an acquired skillset which can be learnt. Weight loss dieting rests on that basis also, making it easy to cast the failure of weight loss dieting as a failing of the person.

This is also the logic of "pro-ana"-the desire to pursue anorexia nervosa as an acceptable lifestyle. The idea was always of a pathology to counter a pretend pathology [body mass].

Weight loss dieting is and has always been proto- or early stage anorexia.

It's well known. When so much as a squeak of concern is expressed about anorexia, the swift response is often, "We have an obesity crisis!!" In other words, anorexia is allowed as "treatment" for 'obesity', those (slim/thin people) succumbing to anorexia and wasted by AN are deemed "collateral damage".

It's tea and sympathy for them and likely a big bit of cake-to build their weight back up-plus some family or other counselling.

Apart from the illusory divide, the central offence of these researchers is the feigned innocence-presenting an inherent part of the 'obesity' playbook as a new possibility. This is typical of anything within touching distance of 'obesity' right now, things that have been around for ages are dubbed new developments just discovered by research, to save face.

You could be amused at this from those getting off on lecturing others on the value and necessity of facing uncomfortable reality head-on. It's positively monstrous of them to deny themselves the privilege.

Why oh they punish themselves?

Anyhoo, the connection between proto-anorexia as; prevention, treatment, cure of 'obesity' plus "maintenance" of nobesity and anorexia nervosa is where this begins to get [slightly] interesting, throwing up the so often self-defeating nature of "noble lying".

Anorexia nervosa [AN] is not a skillset. This is something we all nominally agree on, but we actually do not. Insiders bray, anorexia is not a choice. At the same time, they and their supporters think it is. 

Let’s spend taxpayer money to help fat people learn the magic sauce that people with anorexia have mastered.

Anorexics have not mastered anything, [perhaps you could say their body has]. AN is a susceptibility or tendency if you prefer, meeting the trigger of early stage anorexia. People don't practise and become perfect, something in the has to succumb to this pressure.

Something controlling/affecting hunger and eating's neural pathways implodes or fails.

You can be a lazy bum if you are susceptible enough. The ability to start and stay on the proto-anorexic/anorexic route is likely to be part of that tendency.

This postulate is fundamentally erroneous. It misjudges what's happening with anorexics, assuming fat people need to copy them better, when the whole of dieting 'n' exercise already tries to do that. It cannot create a tendency toward anorexia. We can't copy succumbing to anorexic stimulus. 

...further research be conducted to inform interventions to facilitate these behaviors in the higher weight group and interrupt the behaviors in the lower weight group.

You can do all the behavioural research you like-I actually assumed at first that they were doing biochemical research and were seeking to chemically trigger anorexia in some aspect.

This experiment has already been done and dusted, the urge to keep repeating it unceasingly is neurosis that should be dealt with the same as any other.'Obesity' promoters like to behave as if the past hasn't happened. Using our bodies in the way they are designed is the right way to achieve whatever metabolic outcomes are required.

As for the fat phobia of 'eating disorders', that's a no-brainer, they've always been that way, even the term "eating disorders" is a product of calories in/out modality and experience. If you are going to fit your experience into their notions you've already accepted that basis.

False disconnection of proto-anorexia or dieting from anorexia nervosa causes unnecessary confusion and suffering, making it harder to understand what AN is. Saying that anorexia nervosa is the exposure of an innate tendency shouldn't affect funding. People can't help being anorexic, but they can help dieting in the main.

This divide is the voice of people under the influence of anorexia nervosa.

No More NHS Donations to the Slimming Industry

Following on from a post the other day, "News Just In: Diet's Don't Work, Again", we have, a "study" funded by WW. Rest assured they did not interfere, it's pure coincidence that this 'study' concluded we must increase the transfer of NHS funds to them.

How so?

...the move could prevent tens of thousands of cases of obesity-related diseases over the next 25 years.

So that's "obesity-related" a bullshit obfuscation and 25 yrs, m'kay.

The study found that those given a year-long pass to weight-loss classes lost more weight and were better able to keep it off than those on three-month programmes or those going it alone with self-help guides. 

Ummm, an *eyeroll* statement if ever there was one. The next thing is to examine the brazenness of this fronting, for comparison with prior outstanding achievements in that area.

Number one cute move [they think] dieting clubs are called "weight loss classes" btchplz. Typical over the last 4 decades of failure is slimz undying assumption that they know how to school us in what is mainly involuntary regulation.

1,267 people were split into three groups-one group was given a self help guide. Notice all fat people have ever wanted, to do it ourselves, is increasingly discouraged due to the previous presumption. They can do it to us better than we can do it to ourselves.

The other two groups were split between those who had instruction in the rocket science of eating less and doing more for 3 months and 12 months respectively. The latter won the war on fat.

The results show that, on average, those offered self-help guides lost 3.26kg after a year, while those offered weight loss classes for three months or 12 months lost 4.75kg and 6.76kg respectively. 

That's self-help=7lbs 2oz, 3mths=10 lbs 7oz and 12 mths= 14lbs 14 oz.

All regained at the two year point but the 12 month group won by being 4.29kgs/9lbs 7oz less than their starting weight. You do the numbers. It shouldn't need to be said this is clearly not the right way to reverse weight.

Slim people have no idea what they're doing. They can't even do what would come before this to help their poor selves. They are just performing their delusion with us aiding and abetting as if they are so mentally damaged that we cannot possibly shatter their delusions.

This sort of nonsense 'research' is the kind of toilet paper science (barely fit to wipe ya arse with) that's produced purportedly to show the effectiveness of what is mainly quack ridden areas like mood difficulties and other neuroses. Things that shhh, *whisper it* you can directly access/ alter with your own mind.

It isn't easy, sometimes it is or feels impossible, but that is why a lot of flummery can be made to look like it has reliably tangible effects i.e. refeeding, talking therapies, substance rehab and such.

Researchers, medics et al insist this is an apt model for manipulating metabolic function. You can grasp the central problem MASS and what produces it is real. It isn't thoughts, moods, habits or the product of certain experience.

You cannot tell slim people this, and sadly, fat people are still too utterly mired in supine conditioning to unholy deference to medics and health professionals especially, to get out from under supporting their vainglorious delusions. 

So in short no, do not donate any more healthcare resources to slimming club quackery, it's needed for stuff that actually does work.

News Just In: Diet's Don't Work, Again

Intermittent fasting, i.e starvation, isn't any better way of starving yourself than doing it everyday. Who could have predicted thus?

There are no 'types' of diet, only different ways to achieve the same end, weight loss by calorie restriction.

Weight loss diets, no matter the presentation or PR, all work through the same principle, that of starving your body of the energy it needs, full stop. They all fail the same way too. Defeated by your body's design.

When that fails, so does your life.

None of this has been worth re-defining your humanity, reality, fact, science, or physiological function for. The failure is inherent in the design of calorie restriction dieting, not in the person trying to restrict calories or their psychology, character or physiology.

Energy intake evens out regardless of how you try to soften the blow, concludes this small study of 100. The body needs what it needs. We already know all this and have known for decades, centuries even. It can join a pile that's probably higher than Everest, not including the millions of people with their scores of efforts to get and stay in this lane.

Try telling this to cal res fundamentalists though.

They still want to save self imposed starvation by pointing the finger at people.  They cannot save it. Not by threats, not by hate, not by penalty, not by mutilation.

Don't be terrorised by reports of illness, sickness and death, it's likely to put you in the kind of chronic low level but persistent stress that requires constant infusions of ready energy to sustain it. That would be "self inflicted."

Don't perceive or identify yourself as in anyway inherently pathological. Do not be sad or oppressed. Be empowered, you said no. You saw through what everybody else asserted at you volubly. You defended yourself against influential people. You stood up for yourself, no one can take that from you.

Keep flexing those muscles and strengthen them.

Don't identify as 'obese', you should be able to realise by now that it has nothing to do with you. Tend to yourself as you are, identify and deal with your actual problems. Like the ones from your actual life and past-let's face it, none of us want to. But that is the only way we will feel better about ourselves, whatever course we wish to take.

If you have too much hunger, then recognise that. Stop allowing other people's fixation on food to become yours. Take note of the pattern and extent of your hunger. Notice whether its responsive or unresponsive, that is, as you respond to it, does it lessen or not?

It should be your focus to reduce the level of activity back to normal. Just because white coats aren't interested, doesn't mean you have to go along with their disinterest.

Your diet can be more or less useful to meeting your needs, but that isn't the same as having hunger functioning that works properly, and makes sense to you.

As you cannot do that specifically, you'll have to do it globally, that is you'll have to alter the way you feel about everything. If your hunger is responsive, satiety levels palpable and real, then let yourself alone and stop trying to starve yourself.

Feel less stressed, take the things and people that don't matter less [and less] seriously. Build your courage by practising small acts of it everyday and always remember this is your life and your body.

Not someone else's argument.

Saving 'Obesity' Crusade Delusions

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.

Dieting Bug

Confusion about calorie restriction dieting still reigns. Due to "obesity science" and medical professionals,  we're led to believe that there's such a thing as healthy weight loss dieting. Along with the slimming industry which has widely disseminated the falsehood that weight loss is weight loss dieting.

It is not. Dieting is the route by which weight loss is to be pursued, we are given no choice on this. Weight loss is a natural bodily process that's a side effect of the body's use and regulation of its energy.

Another point of confusion is the unthink that if something is "unhealthful" i.e. being fat, that this somehow automatically makes calorie restriction dieting healthy. This appears to parody the cost-benefit ratio. Where something that is unpleasant can become acceptable or even a good thing, due to a comparatively greater risk of what it seeks to alleviate or resolve.

Throwing water over your furniture is something you avoid, unless its on fire. Then, not doing something that would normally ruin it becomes a very good thing in the cause of stopping an inferno. 

Of course a cost-benefit equation does not remove consent, nor pretend that the most toxic and unpleasant route is a must if you can pretend that what it is attacking is the worst most deadly health threat ever i.e. 'obese.'

Dieting is inherently volatile and pathological because it attacks hunger which is there to maintain the body's energy supply. Including to that of your brain. Sufficient energy deficit there would not make for a happy ending.

Hunger is something diet and 'obesity' peddlers like to undermine the existence of, tellingly. That is why we eat, and not hedonism as the current wishful thinking goes.

If it cannot prevent you embarking on this course, it will try to stop any halt any assault you manage to inflict on it. If it cannot manage that, then it will wait until there's any lapse in stentorian resolve i.e. through life happening and shizz. And if you manage to get past that, it will keep trying to reverse your regime of restriction, any chance it gets.

Think of those inbuilt defences as being like the body's immune system (IS)function. Dieting is like an infectious pathogen you're told to infect yourself with to achieve the side effect of weight loss.  That's crazy, but it may not feel like it if those with scientific or medical authority tell you that's a perfectly rational aim.

Now in order to succeed, you need to keep exposing yourself to this pathogen and allow it to develop, your IS keeps fighting it off. In response to this, you are told you need to turn the attempt to infect yourself into a long term infection or "lifestyle"-dieting is a life sentence without any parole for good behaviour.

I'm sure you  realise this means your aim flies in the face of your body's in-built survival instinct. But 'science' and doctors insist-its that way and that way only. Of course it isn't, but they tell you it is.

Your failure to become or remain infected is really the success of your immune system function. Not to mention that this particular bug is unpleasant to be infected by, for a short time, let alone a lifetime. 

That, my friends is a way to grasp the nature of calorie restriction induced weight loss.

Surgery is more effective because it can overcome the body's self preservation instincts which tend to stop you being able to continue self harm if there's the slightest hint of a way out. Surgery cuts that out for you, by cutting out your stomach and rearranging what's left.

I suppose the equivalent to that would be immno-suppresant drugs, say after transplantation, to stop the body rejecting the new organ. In the case of weight loss surgery, it would be to stop your body rejecting the pathology being imposed on it.

Traci Mann's Secrets

It's usually worth reading the admirable Traci Mann on diets especially, as she's one of those rarities who has the moxie to just go with the truth about eating and weight. She has a new book out, "Secrets from the Eating Lab", I'd definitely have a look. This article and interview contains some telling details.

A few points first. Diet-as in what you eat-can have "types", weight loss dieting though is purely singular. It is one thing and one thing only-consuming too few calories for your body to sustain its [current] mass. Anyone who says otherwise is pulling your pin.

What we’re told are “types” of [weight loss] diet are mainly about desperate attempts to increase the body's tolerance of diets. For example by manipulating appetite- the ratio of macro and other nutrients you eat.

High-protein [weight loss] diets appeal to those whose appetites favour protein rich foods. High carb diets make use of those whose leanings are towards carbohydrate rich foods and so on. The aim is to increase moral. Dieting is very morale sapping due to it usually being so unpleasant. 

Mann says something amusing “no one has any willpower”. I’m presuming that references dieting’s failure of everybody. Some favoured bull is spread around-that above a certain weight you’re unlikely to lose enough to become slim.
 
That's misleading, it's equally true of all weights, including thin people repeatedly shedding and re-shedding a few pounds. Obviously, if you're always thin/slim then that failure isn't apparent. The same mechanics in all of us is producing the same outcome, restoration of each size's starting mass or thereabouts.

Willful delusion forces such obvious failure to be cast elsewhere, in this case onto the dieter. That also distracts from questioning the principle of hunger-blocking as weight regulation.

Dieting becomes like god, it can never truly fail, only sinful humans fail it. 

Actually, dieting via its inherent dysfunction demands and uses up tremendous amounts of will power, it's a-lead your horse to water but can’t make it drink-type situation. Merely leading [and holding] the horse, i.e. your body to starvation drains will power to little productive end.

Dieting is broken and pretty much unfixable, certainly as a general technique, its existence doesn't even make sense. If weight is all about conscious decision-making, then stop making that decision-the end. No need for a plan beyond that.

The plan reflects the fact that hunger is not generated in the conscious mind.

It’s worth remembering not to think in terms of [why] the body fails diets, when it’s the other way around. Diets fail the body. The primacy of the body over dieting needs to be reasserted. The body does not have to answer for it's failure.

When you are dieting.......your brain becomes overly responsive to food, and especially to tasty looking food. But you don't just notice it — it actually begins to look more appetizing and tempting.

This is an action of your nervous system-your brain is the primary hub of that of course. People seem to find it hard to grasp that because all this activity operates through your own information superhighway-your nervous system-that the action of dieting, more specifically your body's response to it, can literally change the way you see, perceive and even  seeming to put thoughts in your head.

You may also remember that this feature was identified as one of the problematic eater types in that BBC Horizon doc. And that I had this exact problem as one symptom of a hyperphagic eating disorder. I would be surprised if this wasn’t a facet of Georgia Davis’s metabolic problems-and others like her.

Mann describes this as increasing [eating’s] “reward value”. I disagree; it increases the imperative to eat. In other words, it’s like having the munchies when you smoke a blunt, or the action of an overactive bladder where the urge is overpowering, even when your bladder is empty.

It’s not that eating becomes more enjoyable-it doesn't necessarily at all-it’s that the urge continues to recruit more and more nervous circuits in your brain-in other words the urge takes it over. Your will is literally overpowered and it becomes too uncomfortable to the point of distressing not too go with it.

Relief of such discomfort is hardly about pleasure. It feels way more compelling than normal hunger. Though I get that's a difficult concept for many.


As for the hormones, I’m not hot on them, but that seems more a register of your depleted energy, framing them as cause. Iow, if I jumped out at you-shocking you, your feelings would be expressed by chemical release, that didn’t cause your fright; that’s how your body both signals and registers it.

These hormones don't stop diets working, they're signalling your body's defensive response to deprivation.

Energy conservation-the body adapting to less by using less energy to function-is yet another defense-they are multifarious, showing the body is really designed to resist starvation and why it so often succeeds. This is often put down to saving you from famine, it could just as well be a defense against anorexia too, as that is a build up of a compulsion to starve, which can also takes over a person's brain. 

One of the things stopping anorexics perishing ever more quickly is this energy conservation.

“How could it [work]when you have to fight against all of that?”

Exactly. When we are this designed against proto-anorexia, it is definitely the wrong way, [not the only way]. 

There is absolutely no reason why reversal of weight must only occur through hunger blocking, unless that in itself is the true aim.

She makes a brilliant observation about the experience of dieting in a way that I hope becomes the norm.

Let's say you're in a meeting, and someone brings in a box of doughnuts. If you're dieting, now you need to resist a doughnut. That is going to take many, many acts of self-control. You don't just resist it when it comes into the room — you resist it when you look up and notice it, and that might happen 19 times, or 90 times. But if you eat it on the 20th time, it doesn't matter how good your willpower was. If you end up eating it, you don't get credit for having resisted it all those times. In virtually any other arena, that would be an A+, but in eating that's an F.

Yes! Not only is this an acute representation of dieting’s flawed hypothesis, it helps tells us what anorexia is. You aren't simply saying  no repeatedly, you are repeatedly blocking an impulse-that of hunger. At some point, this repetition becomes varying degrees of compulsive in certain subsets.

Isn't that extraordinary?

Totally unexpected. This is what we want to happen when we are trying to master a skill! Who'd have thought it could ever spontaneously self-trigger toward such a devastating end?

That could explain why many PWA can get to feeling agonies of hunger, but somehow cannot act on that. Continual blocking builds a wall between the feeling and its response.

It’s like resisting the urge to sleep. No one feels it’s purely about self control to miss sleep to do other things. It’s recognized that there’s a trade off in terms of tiredness. The absence of a sense of consequence from thwarting hunger, produces unnecessary misunderstandings.

Nor is it "impossible" to reverse weight, this simply isn't the right channel.The assessment of dieting's efficacy [or lack of it] is probabilistic. The odds of achieving it via calorie restriction dieting is very thin [yea]. If people want better, they'll have to lobby for genuine ways and means which are entirely possible. 

Sporting People

Something rarely if ever mentioned, but achingly obvious is;

There seems to be a world of difference between moderately overweight couch potatoes, who would sportingly accept their own culpability, as most do....

[My emphasis] Where this thought goes awry is Barbara Ellen's attempt to split fat people into 'morbid' i.e bmi 40+ and under that. [At last the much touted FA dichotomy of good/bad fatty finally makes some sense to me.]

She's wrong though.

ALL fat people are and have always been very sporting about mea culpa(bility). We've been on a continuous loop of, "We are fat because we eat too much and do too little." Or should I say, lazy 'n' greedy, as long as the crusade and before. That is all any fat person I've ever know has ever said about "why" they/we are fat.

I can't speak to interactions fat people may have with those who aren't fat though. Don't forget how much we pander to slimz, instead of setting them right or ignoring them, we respond to their rote interrogations, as if we're on trial. Which we are, due to being defined as guilty.

We can learn to say no to this though.  

One of the unintentionally comical things about the mainstream fat phobic mindset is its so psyched up to meet a resistance that rarely if ever comes. The sheer momentum of expecting resistance carries them on as if they are;

Despite my best efforts, Betty denied any personal contribution to her unhappy life situation. Oh yes, she could, on an intellectual level, agree that, if she stopped eating and lost weight, the world might treat her differently.....Besides she marshaled other responsibility-absolving arguments... 

She could agree that if she stopped eating and lost weight, the world would treat her differently, in what way is that "responsibility-absolving"? It's as if the frequency of our "confessional" has moved the idea of 'responsibility versus denial' onwards. Onto our bodies. Our words and actions mean nothing. Weight loss is everything.

Weight is deemed the sum total of actions ergo fat people must be "in denial" merely by being. Fat people must be refuting culpability due to our size.

The central reason we're in the dog house is because, ALL PEOPLE LOVE BASTARDY.

Permit me to explain.

Bear in mind, women are human beings. Yes, you're saying, you know. What I mean is, women are fully human. Meaning when you can perceive qualities in women, you are likely perceiving a quality of the human character, not some lesser category of.

M'kay?

Usually a form of that particular complaint, "Women love bastards" is issued by hetero-guys having erm.... less luck pursuing intimacies with women than they would like to explain their situation.

Their general thesis is that they're nice, i.e. helpful, respectful and responsive to women's needs, but are overlooked continually for what they call bastards. That's men who don't appear to give a damn about making nice.

I will not sally forth into the mire that is friendzone, nice guy syndrome et al. All I need to say is that any truth there is in that sentiment is that we all have ideas of qualities we desire from each other that when we meet those qualities in others, we absolutely loathe those who display them.

I remember a golden age Hollywood actress liked to give some snap about the more she saw of dogs the more she preferred them to men. I remembered thinking, if any man behaved like a dog, you'd despise him.

One of my pet hates [lol] used to be animal loving types who project noble savage/innocent onto other animals and then seek to surround themselves with them as if to say, they are transmitting the glory of their noble savagery/innocence onto moi. Which makes me better than you.

You could say fat people have been the ultimate nice guys when it comes to people's attitudes to their weight. We listened, avoided confrontation, put the demands of others first and that's exactly why we're loathed.

This is frequently missed, especially by fat people many of whom flat out state that our attitude upon awakening from this stupour of "niceness" is responsible for the aggression of others. And that we need to be courteous at all times, explain to the disingenuous and hostile, who will change their minds on presentation of compelling evidence.

They have some kind of Stockholm amnesia complex,  plus a mathematical fault-where they've forgot that we've been just as nice as its possible to be and if that has brought us here, it stands to reason that the answer does not lay there.

In a way you could say its heartening that people aren't so shallow that all you have to do is play like a pup and you'll win them over. They actually prefer you to be real, to inhabit yourself. To be there in person, rather than acting a part.

Things like this made me realize just how much human relations are ruined by our expectations of each other. And how the things we think we want from others, we actually detest when we get them.

"Everybody wants" [thinks they want] other people not to deny any [seemingly] obvious culpability or possibility of it. That kind of knee jerk defensiveness and avoidance of responsibility can be so wearying to the soul. It makes approaching people with their possible or otherwise wrong-doing ever more daunting. This tension has created many a misanthrope.

Yet....here's fat people fronting up, no defense, no fuss, "We did it gov'nur 'twas us, we're guilty as heck" etc., Instead of relief, cheers all round and like Barbara, "How sporting of you." We are utterly despised. And no, it's not for our so called "gluttony".

When individuals have more wealth than some sovereign nations, when the earth is being bled try then torn up to find every resource garnered by nature over thousands of years. Or if you prefer personal consumption, when what people snort up their nose so they can babble shite faster, causes people all over the world to get shot to hell, trying to go about their business.

When in some countries, booze is almost religion and getting drunk virtually a sacrament. I'd venture to suggest greed is hardly unspeakable.

Fat people are effortlessly loathed for doing what we all yearn for. So much so that people weary themselves making an effort to contain any of it.The truly nicest, generous most tender hearted souls manage to dredge up a fiery hatred of fat people, out of nowhere. It can be quite curious. 

To me this sportingness is one of the things that's great about being fat. I'm unmoved by the endless search for innocence that I see reflected in the construction of slimness as the signal of an unblemished character.

Trying to erase what is or is deemed negative about the human character is an understandable way to raise self-esteem, reduce stress and enhance well-being. But it is, dehumanizing in its way, positively so. We are not free of blemish and often a fault is the other side of a blessing and vice versa.

Blinds Up

I like my window allusions, so.....continuing with that theme-or not...just a word on why fat phobes/those with inured with the conventional take on weight are so messed up in the head with it.

The first critic is your inner one. If I say; "The UK Prime Minister is an expert on metabolic function." I know before I've got to the end of that sentence, whilst composing it in my head, that this doesn't appear to be so.

I have other knowledge, understanding, information, already that my minds checks through to make sense of what I'm thinking. Like when you sound out your friends for their response.

Your mind attempts to run info coming it and going out, via the relevant facts it already knows. So quick and brilliant is the-organ-that-seems-to-be-you, that often before you've finished thinking a thought, it's already worked out how much sense it's made.

The amazing thing is not the extent of our cognitive errors, but how few of them there are compared with how many there could be.

Anyway, the conscious mind is like the blinds covering a window, to your greater mind. Blinds adjust to let the light in i.e. being receptive to incoming information, open minded. Or they can keep it out and you become unreceptive to info, closed minded. When the blinds are down obviously.

Then you can just have the blinds right up, in order to let something in that wouldn't otherwise pass muster in your conscious mind. You suspend the sense that would activate your bullshit detector. The other knowledge you have in your mind would stop it.

In order to accept the mindrot that is the 'obesity' construct and its attendant bullshit, one has to have the blinds up. That is why those who accept it  can make little sense. i.e. let's pretend bodies are disease and the workings of those bodies are disease in action.

But, though its disease its also a choice, but a bit genetic, but mostly passed on through "bad habits," it can be totally prevented but not cured and no cure/resolution is possible, we aren't looking for or advocating for one either, our failed strategy's failure is depressing, but we'll keep it anyway, it's treatment, but you have to do all the work and it does nothing, so isn't treatment...............

When all that's required is-let's find out how the system/s concerned work. Then let's find out how to manipulate it to change its outcome/s to what we demand.

That's the least you can do, if you insist.

From there we can see how those manipulations affects problems with that system and have an idea on further potential for solving them completely or partially. And so on. You'd think they'd want to help those they haven't cast as villains.

Only with the blinds up, could you be trying desperately to 'prove' what you don't believe in order to claim that leads to everyone submitting to a failed modus operandi.

Limited Horizons

Didn't expect to bother with the other two episodes of this. I completed the trio, in spite of myself and felt certain things were worth noting (my hand accidentally typed that as "nothing").
The premise, to apply a scientific approach to calorie restriction dieting (CRD) was laughable. That would obliterate the practice. It turned out really to be another desperate chapter of-operation save calorie restriction dieting. The prime motive as ever isn't to slim fat people but to keep us dieting.

At the start of each part the presenter asserted: "We know 'obesity' is caused by overeating." Tell that to the surgeons cutting stomachs out-along with added mal absoption! They clearly see the "cause" as an absence of starvation.

The programme's USP was "tailoring" diets to a person's eating [faults]. WW arrived at the same place for the same reasons with their points system. Both are an instinctive drift- realized or not- toward aping normal eating, a tacit admission of failure.

And if "overeating" i.e. an excess of hunger is the problem, why not apply a scientific approach to reversing that? Temperature too high, reduce it. Too many hunger signals? Reduce their extent and/or range, simple. Yet not a dicky bird was said about such.

Just to clarify, this would be more or less the same whether a person had normal hunger or not. Its just reducing normal hunger might lead to pathology and be rather unethical-given you'd be imposing loss of function rather than healing. [Sound familiar?]

What made me truly sit up though (and sit through to the end) was beneath the-anyone can change their weight demeanour-lay a boneheaded genetic fatalism I'd not imagined. Even I gave them way more credit than this. They literally said, whatever problems you do (or don't have) as a fat person are created by your genes and you're stuck with them.

The paucity of this vision staggered me.

I know it's become the thing to turn to genes as the explanation for and answer to everything including stigma-not so. But post neuro-plasticity and given all the insistence that fat people facing reality were "giving up", well, I hardly imagined this would be applied to weight.

This weird genetic fatalism has advanced in the mainstream without touching fat people much. Seeing it applied to aspects of this area showed it up afresh. Though I've not been backward in declaring dieting pretty much worthless, I've never doubted for a second that there are ways to properly and gently re-direct metabolic function and weight-don't conflate weight loss with calorie restriction dieting. There is just not enough real drive to find alternatives.

To recap, they'd split pre-chosen candidates into three groups of eaters; feasters- whom they said couldn't stop eating once they'd started. iow, their eating travelled from 0-100 mph but had faulty brakes. Emotional eaters-appetite was stimulated by stress etc., and constant cravers-who felt like picking at food most of the time. 

I had all of these problems and more, I had to rid myself of this.

They explained that feasters had a surfeit of a gut hormone (it was GLP-1) which was supposed to tell their brain they'd had enough. Okay, but, their attitude was this was some kind of unbending trait, that you were just supposed to live with!

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

It was at times achingly poignant to see these people dealing with these issues, whilst on a calorie restriction diet. I too spent years fighting myself and unwittingly stoking my problems further. That direct relationship wasn't mentioned either as I recall.

More than this though not even the remotest possibility of relief was alluded to, can you believe that? Imagine being told your bladder is hyperactive, its genetic, bye. Even if they've got nothing, you'd expect them to mention that was something to investigate, but no. They got no further than a fixation on fatalistic interpretations of biochemistry.

The cruelty of total blame is often mentioned, but this hollowing out of having anything to go on is overlooked. Wanting to help people deal with their people problems is key to progress. Solving problems or merely trying to leads somewhere, even if its just-that's not the way. In the absence of any need for that, there is just this kind of emptiness.

The longer this void goes on, the more self perpetuating it becomes.

This unresponsiveness reminded me how removed so many of those involved with 'obesity' are from having a true understanding of vocation.  Serving the people concerned is what ultimately propels a subject forward, without that it can't really go anywhere.

I was touched by the gratitude of the participants. Though obviously prompted they spoke in terms of the "this knowledge that has been given me." How it (finally) gave them something to go on which promised resolution, which is all people want. To be able to solve any problems they do have. It is the crusade that leaves people in this weird state of passivity, underneath the flurry of futile disordered recommendations.

People spend aeons stuck in this cycle of repeating failure. It is responsible for a lot of decline in people's attitude towards themselves. Not things like the so called "tyranny of thin."

This stymieing of people's intelligence also contributes to the sense that fat people are somewhat lacking in intelligence. Fat people are left exposed by this lack of information. Usually, people can tell you more about their state of being than others know. Not fat people as we're imprisoned in the level of disinterest others anchor us to.

There was talk of "hungry genes" being "obesity genes" and I just felt this kind of assertion has not aided progress in so many areas. And even those using it to hide behind-despise it as a cop-out. Fatz are routinely taunted with accusations that we blame genes. Now we're to be taught to parrot this trope to little useful end.

They did give an arresting coping mechanism for dealing with hunger or cravings-they're the same thing in fat people don'tchaknow-blame the food companies. For putting temptation all around you.  Hereby recruiting fat people into fat phobes phoney war against industrial food. 

It was said openly this was a way of taking some of the burden of blame off yourself. I suddenly understood more about this kind of psychological outlook. I'm not meaning to sound like a goody-two shoes, but this really feels rather clunky in the area of fatness. The idea is fat people do this anyway. But the reactions of those advised to do this- spoke to the novelty of its application.

Industrial food's hold over our environment has advanced off the back of the individuation and blame default of 'obesity'. I have my issues with IF, but ultimately the problem lies in the CR approach, which stupidly targets hunger. Treating it as an "addiction" to be erased. It's a bad target as it is designed to fight back. If enough of these defenses fall short or fail, anorexia beckons.

The "emotional eaters" were supposed to be subject to a psychological approach. This consisted of abseiling off an abandoned lighthouse-to make them see they could channel strong feelings into motivation for action. I could not see the connection. Added to that was group support in the form of a slimming club. They mentioned CBT, but didn't deign to tell us what this consisted of.

Training the nervous system to remain calmer overall, stopping activity triggering hunger/appetite would have achieved a more direct and controllable result. That along with, if necessary, dealing with traumatic events-which helps to stop further stress impacting on your energy (which can also trigger appetite in the susceptible).

It's as if the decades of dieting failure has hollowed out potential layers of expertise and the whole has regressed. Complete dependence on CRD has inflicted the same intellectual damage as occurs in others dependent on a compulsive, repetitive habit that has dominated their life. After withdrawal they go back to it because life no longer makes sense without it.

That's why these people cling to ci/co. 

It was hard not to laugh at another demonstration of how the body compensates for artificially bolted on activity-i.e. exercise. Between sessions its well known the body instinctively compensates by curtailing output-or you "slob out" as the programme put it. 

As usual its up to you to police yourself into undesired, taxing, artificial behaviour because its so logical that anyone will sustain that for the rest of their lives.

There was a ludicrous bit where a make-up artist was put through his paces on an exercise bike and told getting off the bus a couple of stops early, standing up whilst talking on his mobile and going to the shops and carrying cans in a basket (not a trolley) would waste as much energy as 30 mins hard peddling.

Yeah, perhaps after four hours! It was farcical. Later we were informed metabolic expenditure falls as you lose weight, so you'll have to reduce your calories as you lose weight. How quickly would this exceed your allotted intake, if you could sustain this long enough?

The participants were followed through the first month of the usual, initial biggest weight loss, euphoria-why has this been all my life, to the disappointment and disillusion of week 4, I'm doing all this, feeling like crap and not losing/gaining weight, through to the final weigh-in after 3 months. Collectively, they'd lost 8% of their weight, the target was 5%.

Now people are seeing through dieting (again) fat people are still trapped in and dragged back to the low expectations of those demanding of them, things they don't even know they don't ask of themselves.

Limited Horizon

Horizon, a pretty decent science series, overall, purported to explore if a scientific approach could make dieting work better. You mean it not been used up till now? *eyeroll.* I somehow expected the focus to be on the dieting approach in relation to human anatomy, how and why it fails.

Not so. It went a bit reality tv gathering some people carefully selected to fit eating categories coined by the programme-makers. Their "solutions" turned out not to be designed on some further scientific understanding-oxymoronic though that is.

Instead they were the fad diets du nos jours;

5:2 or intermittent fasting-when you eat normally 5 days a week and up to 600 calories a day for two.

A low-GI (glycemic index) diet-basically, low carb, sugar, protein and vegetable based; currently passing as paleo, stone age etc.,

And a low calorie diet.

As you'd expect, the group bore no reflection to the true make-up of those in the 'obese' categorization. They featured mainly people around or above BMI 40+. 

There were some amusing shots composed of them assembled together, with the "experts in obesity" standing in a row ahead of them. They of course looked tiny-in comparison, you couldn't miss that visual humdinger. Not sure if it was me but, it seemed to be saying, wisdom, over here-slim, ignorance over there, fat. 

The structure of the programme was created around the usual pre-determination conclusions about weight. It's designed for the comfort and satisfaction of those heading the process, to help fat people achieve the unlikely. Any sustained, objective rigour must fit around that, with a bit of resorting to the tediously predictable genetic determinism, behavioural psych plus some biochemical snow jobbery currently beloved of the slimstream.

I wasn't impressed by another appearance of "psychology" with an emphasis mainly on eating as if its a psychological not a physiological impulse. I don't know how much this borrows from ED's, but it's not a good sign.

Eating is not like mood. Analyzing the way (you think) someone eats isn't a form of psycho-analysis.

How much awareness there is of this extent of self fulfilling prophecy is hard to fathom. In the programme a couple of the experts claimed to have had their predictions confirmed, one exclaimed she was happy and reassured by this. What she was on about exactly, went over my head.  

Greedy, lazy are giving way to more subtle inference-mentally below par, emotionally incontinent and/or incompetent. Unedifying though that is, it's movement from the sadistic humiliation and ripping apart of people.

Though mostly made to look stupid, bovine and infantile with liberal use of shot and brass heavy music when on the move, we were at least spared a masochistic parade of fat people abasing themselves, begging for absolution-one must remember to be thankful for small mercies.

The programme showed again why 'obesity' as a field is a self defeating ghetto-assuming that isn't the intent. Metabolic study should be based on anatomy, not size, it's an artificial divide, reducing the ability to perceive real similarity and difference. Creating confusion and false conclusions.

Imagine, not recognizing a slim person's "Hello," as the same as a fat person's "Hello". Falsely investing  bodies/people with health and pathology, corrupts and distorts the interpretation of anything observed in either of them. Disconnecting people from commonality and indeed, universality. 'Obesity' is pointlessly divisive.

For instance diet failure being presented as a characteristic of deathfatz rather than everyone from thin to fat alike.

It would be going too far to say this is the opposite of science, but its up with directly altering the conditions of those you purport to study and reporting findings as intrinsic to your focus.

The three definitions of fat people's purported eating problems/types were;

Feasters - People who once they start eating can't stop. This was said to be down the failure of a gut hormone which signals you to stop.

Emotional Eaters -Those who "used" food to cope/ate in response to stress.

Constant Cravers - Those who felt like eating all the time.

Sounds reasonable. Its not as if what they say has no meaning, however-it would tend to mislead the unwary.

I'm in an interesting position to assess these given my experience with hyperactive hunger/appetite mechanisms. I experienced all three together and had to (re)solve them. Formulating your life and diet around this is repugnant to me and wouldn't have worked.

Looking at weight or even eating in terms of food cannot adequately represent the nature of eating whether normal or disordered. Eating disorders are basically dysfunctions of the hunger/appetite mechanisms, usually caused by trying to control weight via calorie restriction. Forget complex emeashuns for now.

Being fat isn't an ED, though that was the inference, i.e. throwing around the term "overeating", making that an inevitable component of being fat. Speaking as a person who's had an ED, is not necessarily representative of fat people, nor excludes many who aren't. Again, seek and ye shall find what you want to.

I'm sure many if not most of the rest of them could identify with these as well- at varying levels- so could most if not all slim and thin people too. Not only do these not necessarily signify ED's, they can also signify them too! ED's are a question of degree, they aren't special diseases. They're more imbalances. Like having a heightened temperature.

If they'd had representative sample of fat people as well as all weights with honest investigation, they'd have realised that. Of course, ob sci doesn't work like that.

There was some info to be had from this. I was strangely heartened to find that they explained something I learned years ago and have been banging on about. Your ready energy stores. We all know about fat stores on your body, but before you can get to those, you have a system in place to supply you with constant (ready) energy. Kind of like the change you have as everyday spending money.

If you didn't have this system, you'd be in danger of swooning or conking out every time an extra demand was made on your body-one that required any surge in energy. Your (fat) stores aren't that instantly accessible.

Something amused me, they first explained using the 5:2 diet/ intermittent fasting, that during the fast days of 600 cals or under, your body would resort to digging into your fat stores. They used an animated graphic of this and missed out the chump change (ready energy.) They then cut straight to Dr Giles Yeo, who explained it properly-that your body uses up this ready energy first, then goes for your stores-if it needs to make up for any deficit! He seemed a little ticked off and was keen to emphasis the missing point, not sure the presenter (a doctor himself) was getting his point.

He really seemed to know what he was talking about. So why he involved himself with this I'm not entirely sure.

Claiming, this is what makes fat people fat is unconvincing. There are plenty of slimz and thinz who'll tell you they feel hungry all the time, some or other of them are often found eating sweets , chocolates and desserts. Indeed, snacking. It struck me that their bodies too seem to have established this loop where the body seems to have said, "Hey, I can make more use of my chump change loop to cover more of my energy needs."

It doesn't just stabilize fatness, it stabilizes weight, including thin/slimness too. Quite a few people have told me they can only stay slim on a diet of calorie dense or junk food diet-(what you eat) with  occasional veg thrown in. I must admit I find this loop interesting. I've no idea what it means or whether its a good/bad sign or neutral.

The emotional eaters category was misleading. It really meant with certain people, stress triggered their hunger and appetite mechanisms to fire in conjunction. The programme put a selection through a frustrating and therefore stressful driving test.

But that only changed the hunger and appetite (what they ate) levels for some. It was claimed there's a gut hormone, I think it might have been GLP-1, my bad, some times its hard to take it in with the distancing effect of extreme skepticism, interferes with the ability to stop eating.

That could have just been a feature of being in that state. In other words, your biochemistry as cause. So, if you are in a permanent state of anxiety and analysis of your blood shows the preponderance of certain chemicals, then that is assigned as cause, rather than effect, when it could be either. A feature of defining bodies/people as 'disease', their function becomes their 'disease' it's ridiculous.

Getting rid of the triggering of hunger due to my nervous system being in a state where hunger/appetite was being stimulated by (a certain level of) stimulus in my system, was the basis of ending my ED.

I was and still am ecstatic to be liberated from both the ED and being in that state.

Which raised something else which is hard to say even in an FA context, fat people are stuck in and limited by the standards slimz apply to themselves, but look really slack in fat people, seeming to confirm all the abuse we receive.

True. 

The missing service ethic of service means the demand  for people to cease to be fat, doesn't become an instigator of progress. The kind that would be progress for everyone.

This was part one of three, I've yet to see the others. They follow the group to see how they fare with the same old same old.

As if we can't guess.

Shut-In

I see our friends at channel 4, those who forgot themselves and brought you, my mad fat diary-are back to their usual mining of fatsploitation-[anorexia-by-proxy, agit-prop]. An upcoming one that sounds really edifying is called "Shut-Ins."Can you guess what that's referring to?

Permit me to give you a hint.

Here's me saying we've (all) been bricked into lifestyle anorexia/exercise bulimia. Actually, we're bricked in to wherever our bodies do or don't go, with one exit only marked the above. Then C4 goes ahead with this;

.....with 2.5% of over 16’s now morbidly obese.........an increasingly large group of Brits are now unable to leave their homes due to their extreme weight gain. Many of them depend solely on their partners, parents or offspring to look after them, unable to take care of themselves sufficiently their family carers become a vital life-line and link to outside world.

I feel like I've watched it in all but detail. Where's the money shot for research fat phobes-you know those who are so grateful to fat people for telling the truth about 'obesity'?

With lives on the brink The Shut-Ins will follow two such people and their loved ones, both of whom who are held hostage by a life devoted to food. 

That could be a life dominated by an excess of hunger but hey, nevermind;

Fixed rig cameras will be set up in their homes and a life-changing crack team including a GP, dietician, psychologist and bariatric surgeon will be enlisted to monitor both their relationships and their diets in a bid to turn everyone’s lives around.

Ah, there we are. It's not just a prurient documentary taking full advantage of unnecessary and cynical marginalization, its got the weight loss porn tacked on for your erm..... explosion of catharsis. That must be the equivalent of the Bedlam going to see the crazy people.

Those punters were easily pleased though, as I don't remember them demanding to get their full jollies seeing them being "treated." See, people don't have problems, they have fat. It's the old, there's nothing going on but my obsessions. They may think this is fat people being subjects, but I doubt it. If I see it though and I'm wrong, I'll write a corrective post.

The disinterest in actual people's actual problems gives the whole crusade a fake aura of people chasing a pretense of care they can't really feel. Amazing that seemingly opposite feelings produce no tension whatever. Such is the deadzone effect of a complete lack of integrity, curiosity or even professionalism. 

This neglect of the person-sets a pattern that has entrenched this peculiar inability of fat people to mount an effective defense for so long.

There was a recent programme on about the representation of British spies on film. It spoke about a character who'd been scarred by this job- which consisted of him pretending to be other than he was in social as well as other settings.

They described this man as hollowed out by this. I thought *bingo*-that's it. Instead of being able to acknowledge your efforts-because the results are so universally refuted-you're forced up against pretense.

In the course of all this, you repress, deny even disconnect from your true feelings and experiences. Ending up bonding with a version of you that isn't in existence.

The refutation of repeated reality hollows some aspect of a person- dispossessing you of some part of your self knowledge, sometimes leaving an oddly childlike, deeply passive space in you.

Our capacity for adaptation kicks in so quickly, we adapt to this odd limbo that's invested with so much hope. Hope that can outlast reason and at times sanity.

This refusal to see a person and their actual problems is as imprisoning as being forced down one route to altering metabolic function. A lot of our experience is made up of solving or trying solve our own problems.

Indeed, some view life as a series of that. Imagine not being able to really focus on them somehow. That's as much why people disappear down this rabbit hole as anything.

Of course other people's hackneyed suffocating projection is everything. Aftab stays indoors and sometimes eats up to 12,000 calories. No wonder he's stuck indoors, right? Wrong.

I mentioned a woman presenter who said she heard about the reality show Ruby and wept when this very large woman spoke herself tearfully of eating thousands of calories a day. This particular woman said at the height of her hyperphagia, she considered 15,000 to be her having a "good day."

She weighed under 140lbs.

There's also a picture I remember from years ago of a kitchen stocked with food, four loaves of bread, vegetables, everything a family of four would need for a week. It was the replication of a teenager's last meal. She was bulimic, it killed her. She weighed even less than the presenter.

It's as much a mystery as to why more people don't achieve "shut-in" status, than it is why more aren't 140lbs/63.5kgs.

Intake and weight are as much about the luck of the draw than anything. And if Sharon, Aftab or anyone else's body wastes most of their intake, their weight would be unremarkable. If you ask fat people why they not fatter, you'll too often get the same bone headed vanity you tend to get from slim if you ask why they're slim.

Find a way to reverse the process. It's a whole process, but a set of interconnecting reactions. One key in the right place reverses the whole, just as smoothly and as holistically as it advanced. Appetite, hunger, weight, they're all just parts, they aren't cause.

I don't know if that term's as evocative for you as it is me. I keep thinking of the first Mrs Rochester who represented women losing their minds, repressing themselves into the feminine ideal, rather than, you know, being.

Until their mental springs went pop or they crossed some invisible (not blurred) line. 

Who'd have thought, a person could end up this way, purely because its been decided that this the route to preserving the medical monopoly and its hierarchy?

Towards the end of last year, I happened upon an impressively upbeat woman named Mandy Sellars. She has an extremely rare disorder that's made her legs grown to a combined weight of 238lbs/108kgs.

Now what immediate approach do you think doctors took to try and help her? Yep, they sought to stop her legs increasing in size. Because containment is an obvious first goal in cases of excessive growth, not wastage. In doing that, you are potentially finding an active route to reversal of that growth, anyway.

The insistence on wastage or bust has always been a point of suspicion and is why people feel like hiding at home.

The 'obesity' crusade can get away with a lot with fat people. One thing it cannot do is stop you noticing what scientists/researchers medical professionals do when they truly mean well

The Slimmers' Disease

For reasons still best known to themselves, some in FA are determined to continue erasing the leading part medical professionals played in winding up the wretched 'obesity' crusade. Doctors know the score though, they used to call anorexia nervosa-the slimmers'  disease.

Medics have gone back on what they know. When the internet began to be used to elucidate fat experience(s), one of the few genuine responses to this was-"Why would doctors lie about this?"

It's a question I asked myself in a slightly different way at the end of my dieting days. I never quite resolved it, I just knew I had to turn back.

This coinage seemed to be jettisoned through the pressure of activism, though I've wondered more recently whether this turnaround was mere convenience, given the advance of the slimmers' disease as the prevention/treatment/cure for 'obesity.'

The rationale was it "trivialized" anorexia something that's really important to avoid apparently;

“There’s a real fear of trivialising eating disorders,” says Sabine, who is 24 and works for a startup.

For "eating disorders" read anorexia and perhaps bulimia. There's no fear of trivialising disorders associated with weight gain. Really though, removing the connection between dieting and anorexia made the latter inexplicable. That has always struck as a ruthless desire to assert ideology over the prospect of warning those susceptible to AN at a point when they're most able to avoid going there. Nothing says trivial more than that, imho.

I can't say whether this has cost lives or not, but it definitely felt like it might at the time. People have told me they went through anorexia and still don't really don't have a clue what it is. 

Nor does honest connection get in the way of showing that when anorexia reaches its compulsive, self generating phase, it is not a choice.

On the contrary, one could say billions of people round the world, throughout the ages practising anorexia but overwhelmingly failing to become anorexic makes it patently obvious that succumbing to the process is about innate susceptibility rather than intent.

So why is a life sentence of dieting really chasing anorexia?

We were sold calorie restriction on the basis that say; 50lbs of fat =whatever the calories in a pound of fat was supposed to be, x 50. That gave the total of how much energy you needed to waste in order to slim down. This didn't realize the body doesn't passively permit this wastage.

Rather than find a way around this, it was decided that one should seek to make this life of waste, permanent- or "maintenance" as its dubbed. That's really when reversing weight became about chasing a pathological condition.

Anorexics restrict their calorie intake, often in combination with increasing their calorie output.

Dieters restrict their calorie intake, often in combination with increasing their calorie output.

The difference is not in; intent, safeness, medical approval, judiciousness of character or inherent talent for moderation, it's something about how the individual's body reacts to calorie restriction/increased expenditure, full stop.

So what is this difference in reaction?

Many anorexics have told us that they love food and eating. What adds authenticity to this seeming paradox is a mirror image. I a former hyperphagic, got no pleasure from eating as long as I had that disorder.

Many if not all anorexics are troubled by hunger, indeed, hyperphagia, an excess of it. Which builds up as they deny hunger. Hunger of course is MIA when it comes to the current explanation of weight.

The desire to cast eating as a habit made up of conscious decision making, means hunger has lost its place as the reason and trigger for eating. It's claimed people don't recognize it, or that its "fake." Given hunger's anatomically based, that is, generated by your body, not responding to it is basically blocking a physiological signal. A bit like ignoring the urge to sleep at the end of your day is blocking biological signalling.

All things being equal, this tends to strengthen it. Just like if someone appears not to hear your request, you tend to repeat it, often, louder. Continual blocking can also weaken or dampen it down, exhaust it vigour.

Ironically, throughout having an excess of hunger, I was always able to fast-stop eating entirely. Dieting was a bust-responding to hunger, but not properly was intolerable. But not eating at all? I could always psyche myself up for that whether immediately, or over days, or weeks. The longest it took me to succumb to-just stop-was 3 months!

It was the starting eating again and the pitiless avalanche of signalling that made this ultimately futile and rather unpleasant.

So, yes, blocking hunger can curtail it, demoralizing the possibility of response. But that doesn't make hunger go away.

Anorexics think none of us grasp the potency of its hold, but actually, by detaching their condition from its source, calorie restriction-note I didn't add dieting, that's the most likely manifestation/precursor of it, but often things like illness can trigger a bout of AN-shows out of their own context they don't either.

Fat people assume the same as anyone, that we aren't dieting-even when we are. So when we decide to stop trying. We assumed that would be nada. I still remember how I felt, "At last, I'm going to do something I'm good at." Not dieting.

To mine and everyone's surprise, it was harder than imagined. Often much harder than going along with dieting [or trying to]. It's a lot of the reasoning behind the famous "No diet talk rule" of FA blogs.

That it turned out a habit of living around trying to start a diet, stay with a diet, get back on a diet can get so overwhelming, without you being aware was a real eye opener. You literally have to avoid/curtail reference to, or thinking about dieting. Or you can find yourself slipping back into that mode, without being consciously aware of it. That's compulsion indeed.

If I hadn't utterly exhausted this avenue over the course of at least 17 years, I'm not entirely sure I'd have managed-the urge to diet can usurp your conscious reasoning. Like, you can find yourself going through your history of dieting and what it has cost you, then immediately feel yourself examining the idea of going on a diet as if that didn't happen.

I was totally oblivious. So insidious is the creep of even sub anorexia, calorie restriction. And that perhaps gives the biggest clue to what anorexia really is in essence.

The compulsion to block hunger.

I won't trivialize it by describing it in terms of faddiction. It's a compulsion, an imbalance in some aspect of ones nervous system or its functioning.

The difference between a dieter and an anorexic is that whereas the former blocks their hunger as a conscious act. In the anorexic that takes on a life of its own. It gets stronger and stronger developing a self sustaining momentum. This continually jousts with hunger-rivals and in the most serious cases, outstrips it completely. 

Weight Loss Diet Burnout

Normally when you are interested in a field of study-relating to an aspect of the human condition-you are drawn to study those who exhibit said state or condition.

Whether you're a sociopath or someone with zero interpersonal skills makes no odds. This has nothing to do being nice, it's to do with your interest and desire for mastery of your chosen field. In other words, that focus that draw is intellectual, whether you're nice and caring and want to help/heal/cure/assist/treat or simply pit your wits against some tangle of human biological function.

What's been singularly remarkable about 'obesity' in the last 4 or so decades is the palpable lack of intellectual drive for most declaring themselves involved in research. In its place is a sort of reflexive defense of the calories in/out ideology.

One omission that epitomizes this void is the absence of weight loss diet burnout from discussing long-term calorie restriction dieting intentions. Let me say this right now if you diet or attempt to "for life" i.e. indefinitely-weight loss diet burnout is inevitable.

Yet, so ignored is this phenomenon, that it doesn't-to my knowledge-have a medical name. It's possible that this is widely known about, but I've never heard it referenced by those seeking to impose the calorie restriction straight-jacket.

Perhaps this is because the insistence is, fat people don't diet which is why we are fat. As dieting is "obesity prevention,"there's nowhere else you can go with a refusal to accept the reality of its failure. The idea of observing fat people objectively, is a waste of time to ideologues.

The best description I ever heard of weight loss diet burnout was "It's like having a nervous breakdown, but solely in this area". "This" being the part of you that deals with seeing off weight loss dieting becomes exhausted by a continual state of emergency/war of attrition with your body. 

Though I knew of it, it caught me unawares when it happened to me because I did not see myself as a dieter. I saw myself as a healthy (/ist) eater. You know, what they recommend now. If you have the perfect diet, you'll become healthier and means you'll lose weight. Healthy=weight loss.

Or to put it more directly-though I didn't realize this at the time. One consumes health.

What happens is one day you go to do your usual-go on a diet that is-and BAM! Some part of you screams NOOOO!!!! It's specifically your nervous system letting you know that its overloaded.

That sensation of something crying out for mercy is hard to get a sense of, unless you've experienced it.

The terms we pin to any cloud of sensory data swirling around our nervous system/s goes according to cultural expression. If this seems a bit weird, I can't fault you, but that's the best way I can explain it.

And the experience itself is like walking oblivious along a familiar street, turning a corner on auto-pilot only to be abruptly shaken out of your reverie by walking straight into some obstacle or person.

Barely a peep will you here about this from official weight loss diet wallahs because, they pretend believe fat people cannot have spent any real time in pursuit of weight loss dieting triumph. 

Merely having the prospect of dieting hanging over your body, is enough to produce some serious symptoms. Yes, our body's response to dieting  can be that potent. And people don't realise this. I'll give you a scenario.

If you decide to go on a diet tomorrow-hyperphagia will kick in between now and then. Your hunger and/or appetite will open up and you'll be stopping past the point you normally do. Iow, like when you manage to miss getting off at your usual station.

Ditto if you decide to start this time next week. This is your body starting its process of weight conservation. If you are one of those people who finds it almost impossible to stick with a diet for any length, i.e. days, even hours, then this, more than weight loss dieting may end up thwarting your body's ability to stablize its weight.

Because you repeat the process week after week, day after day even. Think about that, string together a hyperphagic response week after week, day after day and what can you get? That's right, permanent hyperphagia. In other words, your body's ability to switch off this response off 'breaks.' You're never not about to diet, so it doesn't get a chance to return to normal.

How many people this applies to I don't know. Not simply fat people. People who started dieting whilst slim/remain slim may develop hyperphagic disorder through this. Some of whom didn't particularly succumb to rebound i.e. their rebound didn't go past their starting point.

Dieting is proto-anorexia. It is a pathology, it is self abuse-whether fatness is "healthy or unhealthy" or whether its desirable or not desirable to lose weight is another point entirely.  I'm commenting purely on dieting, it is bad news.

The problem with it is that our bodies, in the shape especially of our nervous system is designed to thwart this. It's this continual invoking of these defences that finally overcomes and exhausts the nervous system-that is weight loss diet burnout.

How do you recover? The same way as you would with a more full nervous breakdown, rest your nervous system. In this specific case-stop dieting and the prospect of it, completely. That rests the areas of the nervous structure involved.

But for most people, the only thing that makes them get back on the diet treadmill after that is either a strong attachment to their identity as slim/thin or despair at aggressive continued gain that shows no sign of stopping.

Otherwise burnout is often a (diet) career ender.

Danish Takeover

Jens Christian Holm, a Danish doctor (usually is) has "cracked" fat children via the innovation of treating eating as if palliating an eating disorder-along with exercise bulimia. This has been hailed as the second coming of defeating the "epidemic" of fat children. The good doctor claims out of 1,900, he's helped 70%, not to be fat, over 4 years, by tackling "all aspects of the children's lives."

This means diddly squat. The medical profession does not exist to take over anyone's life- neither child nor man. That kind of passive dependence is what is really tapping out health budgets, that and the profiteering of big pharma.

Even if you wished doctors to be a doctors puppet, you'd at least be expected to screen out those bent on indulging their doolally compulsion to force all fat people into proto-anorexia at any price.

The whole thing raises such a continuous string of alarm bells, it becomes like a police vehicle testing site.

In general, obese children are neglected. They are often lonely and many of them don't participate in activities with their peers. They lack self-confidence.

So bring them out of their shell. Liberate them from the social and mental constraints that are undermining their instinct to move freely in tune with their soon-to-be fully restored expressed will....?

With this scheme there is a real hope they can lose weight and have a good quality of life.

That'll be a no then. Instead, lock them into that neglect, isolation and loneliness, insist they try to dig their way out, every. single. day. It's all about you.

Obesity is an illness that is very hard for children to fight on their own, he says.

But they are totally on their own. As usual, children are being taught their neglect and abandonment is how they (not others) are cared for. The only "togetherness" here exists to facilitate the implementation of 'lifestyle' disorders, not to invoke a sense (re) connection with self or others. Any sense of isolation is intact.

Their entire life needs to be changed, because they tend to be lonely, tend to be ashamed of themselves so they need to do this, and to interact with other children in their daily lives.

No actually its you that wants to do this. Teaching them to be at ease in their own skin and challenging unprovoked ill-feeling directed toward them-situating it firmly where it is-within that person relates more to their needs.

Feeling freer to move and nourish yourself well is rooted in the default embrace of themselves as whole beings. Moving according to our own dictates, requires being in touch with and read their own feelings and moods better than before. This is more about knowing your place-contained within this kind of mindset.

Outrun your inner feelings, don't deal with and/or dismantle them. Separate physical from spiritual holding the pursuit of the physical as solution to the spiritual. This could be a chance to renew ones idea of self turning it back into a positive self-sustaining nourishing one.

Then there's the entrenchment or creation of over-responsibility, that can do a lot of damage to a person's ability to assert themselves and avoid getting into the kind of abusive relationships modelled here.

This clear signalling of the emotional basis of starvation disorders, linking the solution to personal problems to exercise bulimia and control of food. There's even the symbolic identification of fatness =problems. I think this was missed because every single case study used in this is male;

Mike Nelausen, 14, has become a standard bearer for the Holbaek project. He used to weigh 85kg (13st 5lbs), but having embraced Dr Holm's evangelism, he has slimmed down by 23kg (3st 8lbs), and is no longer the target of playground bullies.

This taking over of a child's life starts in hospital with a battery of tests-from body scans to having their blood examined. During this 24 hour period they ".....answer a detailed questionnaire about their eating habits and behaviour patterns."

Behaviour patterns?

Along with having the food they eat dictated-i.e. bland, tasteless pap, and how they eat it, wait 20 minutes for more of it. No thanks. Their daily "screen time" is rationed to no more than 2 hours [Oh, really?], plus they have to go to bed at a set time.

Teaching a child to respect their own natural rhythms including the importance of rest, is fine. And even encouraging them to depart from the screen on occasion if its become a substitute for other activities they might enjoy. But this context of everything for weight loss is a diversion from the idea of balance.

Adults who "feel sad" get pills or talking therapies. I'm not recommending the former, just saying this at least fits around the demands of their responsibilities. How does this approach set a child up for the demands of adulthood?

It neither makes them more resilient nor gives them a convenient sticking plaster. There's something truly ominous about this doctor's lack of any sense of overreach and what it says about the state of that profession is increasingly going.

The sex divide of FA is down to the relative lack of boys involvement dieting, compared with girls. Here is potential changing of that waiting to happen. I know the burnout waiting for these children after a decade or two of being pressed into running/cycling miles every day merely for acceptance rather than internal desire. That's what these people can never seem to grasp, there's a difference. 

Insisting children do overly rigourous phys ed, in all weathers, created generations of people of all sizes who were implacably hostile to P.E. That precipitated and enabled its decline, amidst a purported crusade against fattening that traded on activity as an obstacle to that. 

To explain a bit more why this approach is by its nature invasive, expensive and ill conceived and disorder generating, let's take a real genuine, actual disease.

Imagine dealing with HIV/AIDS, by seeking to prevent sexual intercourse- vaginal, anal, oral. Note intercourse, not SEX. Everyone can still get their jollies, just not via penis in vag, anus, mouth.

Conception would be through IVF. Anyone wishing to have a child, would get a referral from their GP.

Hugely invasive by nature because, wrong target.

Intercourse is rarely a necessity, less so than responding to hunger. Yet even if invasively policed and punitively strictured, running counter to a certain strength of desire is a foolhardy waste of effort, even with the threat of death. Trying to divert attention from this, by talking nonsensically about "addiction" is like saying human beings struggle against bondage is addiction.

No, it's instinct. Attempting to constrain too strong an impulse will simply result the re-routing of its expression, often into pathological tics. Establishing safer sex as a practice has been the preferred approach.

The invasiveness of the calories in/out approach is inherent in its targeting of hunger and appetite and is an obvious sign of its dysfunction and how it produces more.

Singapore already tried a similarly invasive, energy wasting school based slimming campaign called "Trim and Fit." This reckless programme singled out plump and fat children for special attention. Giving them lunch tickets with designated calorie limits in addition to extra phys ed during what should have been their free time.

Slim children got to wear wristbands with "I am Fit and Trim" on them, for just being. Fatter children were easily identified and discrimination, bullying an teasing became open and endemic.

Parents eventually stopped this mess 15 years later when the psychological and physiological burden on their children became too high. It too was "effective," if you ignore the extent and variety of distress it  produced.

Calorie restriction dieting is inherently disordered, so's exercise for the purpose of wasting energy. I'll repeat for the slow-witted, that is not CORRELATION that's CAUSE. Dieting is capable of causing every know eating disorder via its assault on and denial of hunger-though that doesn't mean all instances of ED have been caused by it. Which disorder is provoked depends mainly on individual tendency.  

When some of the children who went through trim and fit were caught up with in their late teens. Many of them were fat and levels of depression where higher than normal. Which despite propaganda is not the norm for fatter people. Testament to how damaging this way of life can get.

What's saddest of all is the betrayal of trust. Isolation and loneliness in a child could be an opportunity to empower. Ultimately, its one way you can teach a person not to be slayed by various slings and arrows;

As she scrapes and shreds carrots for a low calorie dish with minced beef, his mother Karina breaks down and weeps. "It was extremely hard to see him like that. We tried everything but he just kept on gaining weight. So when it finally started to work, we were really happy.

We will all have to learn how to overcome challenges, to recover, why shirk an opportunity to really teach a child this?