When Food Becomes a Drug, Drugs Become Food

Here's some apt musing from College Humor. I can't recall coming across this phenomena so succinctly put. It reads as a comment on the public health brigade-and the class milieu's they're rooted in's increasing hatred of food and love affair with drugs. Unless its nature's junk; low cal veg and such. I like greens, but they're low in what the body needs most to survive, energy.

It's perfectly okay to turn this on its head and make believe the opposite, as long as you don't expect that to re-design human anatomy and physiological function or to impose it on the unwilling. Alas, 'obesity' constructivists feel exactly that, even if they have to "cut a bitch", lols, to prove it.

College Humor: Your Healthy Friend Who Does Drugs 

It's as if vanquishing the meaning of something as central as what feeds us, leads that meaning to migrate to something else-it can't just disappear. Reminiscent of what's dubbed 'addiction transfer', unsurprisingly yet another product of wrong thinking. That term by the way refers to when a substance is being used for a certain purpose or purposes. On ceasing to imbibe the substance, the purpose remains and some other substance or thing else takes over. The person's 'solution' migrates.

What's really on point is the way the 'healthy' junkie feels drugs are clean and food is dirty, even alcohol which is a food as well as an intoxicant. Ironically, this is treated solely as a drug, which enables her to ingest it liberally, despite it also being a food. It also notes the way 'eating health' leads people to feel healthy. Something fat haters never get about fat people who follow healthist eating diktats/life models. That feeling has led so many fat people to resist weight patholgization-as it conflicts with the health they've been eating (and creating/storing through activity). Fat phobes struggle to grasp that attacking haes, is attacking this feeling in anyone who feels it along with its whole psychological basis.

There's the development of a cognitive black hole where drugs are not only clean but somehow a substitute for dirty old food, when food is being cleaned out of ones life. Food gives energy, certain drugs have a stimulant effect, so drug abuse lends itself to dodging hunger, hence 'obesity' wallahs are peddling "pharmacotherapy"[one shizzes you not], that's drug abuse to "treat" your dimwitted battle with hunger.

Despite spending decades trying to persuade us cake is dirt, there's no shame whatever in trying to push drugs onto fat people, who would normally avoid pushers like the plague (that weight will never be). Somehow taking them to help sustain a fantasy weight loss diet success means they won't attack; your liver, kidneys, eyes, ears, brain etc., Despite them being straight out toxins, if they support the idea of your diet, they're cleansed-Oh Hallelujah!

Any damage they do can be blamed on 'obesity', so w/e's and kar-ching.

This associative impressionistic sensibility was handsomely revealed by the 'clean eating' *shudder* trend. I told people the 'dirt' comes from being associated with FAT/ness, not from anything in these foods. Or else the drugs being peddled to fatz would be deemed unspeakably filthy. Synthetic approximations of all sorts promises another Oxycontin nightmare.

I can't even swear that the real motor for trying to get fat people hooked on drugs is so drug fanciers can finally break the silence on their peculiar attitudes to drug mis-use. Fat people's problem isn't too much gravy, its too little "pharmacotherapy"-every junkie is really into that. Therapy through pharmaceuticals from the disease that is the intolerable feeling of existence.

Which is of course what 'obesity' sets out to achieve, making fatness such an unbearable experience that you'll willingly give up your body parts on promise of escape.

Oh the irony, old time junksters labelled withdrawal "getting clean" now fat has out dirtied junk and slim has cleaned trash up. That could have been the final word on how 'obesity' hysteria has far outstripped even the utility touted by its devotees promoters.

More than anything, the establishment's favoured degeneracy must become everyone's, how can an illusion of faux superiority be maintained if those deemed en bas aren't doing more drugs than you?

Sweet Drinks Tax on Ice

Ooooh, seems multi-millionaire Jamie Oliver's first strike to starve the poor by taxing the food out of their mouths has hit the buffers. It could only be temporary, but I don't care. Dare to dream as they say!!!

Who'd have thought David Cameron would be so skittish about acceding to the demands of these pious wing-dings? I don't even care if its to do with his business cronies. The grip food paranoiacs have  on the national psyche makes this a hook or crook situation.

I repeat, government strategy should be a return to science. Drop "obesity" and its dizzy factotums; phoney research, pseudo-science, quackery and increasingly now, psychobabble. It's all in service to a literal dead end.

The issue is supposed to be weight reversal. That is what is being demanded of fat people, and that is what fat people almost to a person signed up for at one point or another.

See Oprah for evidence of this.

Anything else; the weight categorization, the food fixation, the ad hominem hatred, the endless death threats, the general empire of falsehood, wrapped up in a performance of science (and/or reason) is all irrelevant distraction.

Get past the fact that calories in/out is not the be all and end all of weight. What stops that working is not will, its the body's own design. Calorie restriction dieting is not a viable strategy, as is evidenced in the whining about how fat everyone is, in the midst of its tyranny.

Instead, start with the system that produces weight, the metabolic one. As well as mapping it more fully, find out other targets to alter its course. Ones that don't fight with it, but use its ability to alter itself.

The government should not be funding the research of anyone who cannot accept this, no matter how eminent the institution. No more hypothesis, anatomy instead. Diet fanaticism has done enough harm already.

Focus on people with conditions that produce aggressive weight gain and/or hyperphagia along with other outliers.They are the most important here. They are the reason answers must be found to how to stop and reverse weight gain. They're left to flounder due to this derailing of science, all anyone is interested in is what they eat. No attempt is even made to reduce hunger if that's an issue.

If they cannot acheive the demanded level and duration of starvation, they're told to "diet or DIE." It would be unbelievable if it wasn't actually happening.

No more should they be left in the shadows to be mocked ridiculed used cynically as cautionary tales then left to their fate due to the lack of interest the "obesity" field has in their suffering.

Whilst I'm at it, stop all of this costing the NHS agit-prop, this is a deliberate incitement of hatred and ill-feeling towards fat people, using the cover of "obesity" to pretend that's not ad hominem.

Fat people have never stopped science from coming up with ways to make us slim. We said for years that dieting isn't cutting it, we were doing it. We were told to shut it by both 'obesity' peddlers and the general chorus of vitriol.

We are not costing anything, this hatred is though. Anyone who doesn't want to pay that should stop blocking science.

Find out how to deal with excessive hunger, like you'd deal with excessive temperature. If society insists people weight less through eating less then it must learn to lower hunger further than par. If that feels unethical, that's kind of the point.

Anything can be demanded, when it comes to 'obesity' nothing has to be proved. 

No one's hunger should have to be lowered much below norm, like with stomach removal to induce starvation, bulimia and mal-absorption.

Find out how the body actually produces weight, through the metabolic system. Find out how and why many people's bodies store weight at a rate higher than the average slim person, its like they are physically hibernating, whilst eating perfectly reasonable amounts. Find out how to alter that.

Find out how to stabilise a person's weight. To stop it where it is, rather than allow it to continue up for want of any technique to manage it-beyond dieting. End this all or nothing culture of starvation induced weight loss or your body can go where it may.

This should also be applied to localized areas of adipose storage, like the breasts or chest for men. If science had gone down that route before, people wouldn't need these breast/chest reduction operations. All this feeds into metabolic function, which is reponsible for many aspects of our state of health. A lot of the things blamed on fatness are metabolic, so there's no need to slim people if there's focus on alleviatng those.

If Cameron merely re-establishes a scientific standard in the study of weight as part of metabolic function, he will set a standard others will follow as they will be forced to see the error of their course.

We have to get out of this stupour of misanthropy. The ball's in your court Dave.

TV Cooks on the Rampage

What the everloving heck, cooks on the rampage? First some guy called Alton Brown who's rather late and therefore false in claiming that if the US succumbs to the idea that chucking calories down your neck=disease, it will signal the end of the republic as a cultural entity.

Though reports differ, the AMA declared alcoholism a disease in 1959 that's only 55 years ago, so Brown needs more time to take in the implications. He's perhaps a historian. One can say many things about the US but it appears to have weathered that storm. Clearly he knows little about either civilization or the US.

I can agree with him though that this was bunk, as is the same lie about weight. Both were/are more about siphoning health insurance $$$$'s than anything else, note he doesn't bother mentioning this genesis. Haters often don't. How many times have you heard "FGS medical profession/scientists don't call 'obesity' disease!"?

Though wiser among them have stopped trying to pretend that came from fat people [I wouldn't]. On the whole fatz don't give a sweaty armpit for that. Makes me proud.

Then there's Jamie Oliver, wait, I can't hate. Oliver is more pathetic than he is tiresome, though he is undoubtedly that with his construct related blunderings. I caught the last 15 mins of his documentary called "Jamie's Sugar Rush". 'Twas about 15 too many. I can't make myself care enough to do some digging (please) but what I saw contained a dubious-though somewhat ironic-commentary on indigenous Mexicans consumption of fizzy drinks.

In conversation, he made out that this really required some compelling explanation, which turned out to be, they saw fizzy pop as some kind of sacrament [no, I'm not exaggerating]. This from someone peddling secondhand mythology about sugar as the devil's dandruff [ha, ha, bet that gives you pause] responsible for whipping off a leg near  you. All this within a background of a baby on the breast and food cooked from fresh and wholesome ingredients.

Mexico has instituted a sugar tax the programme claimed has reduced 'obesity' by I think he said, 50,000 people. Yep, 'obesity' reduced by x people. That slipped through. I told you 'obesity' has been deemed 'disease' not 'a disease' as folks tend to insist. The distinction is made by what 'obesity' refers to. It defines people as disease in human form. That's clumsy etymology based on the identifying fatness from the eyes of an ignorant slim person imaging what it would be for them to be fat.

That is not what it is to be fat. 

It's a failure of cognizance. It is someone reaching beyond their intellectual capacity and falling flat. That fat people have borne it at all, let alone for this long, shows who's being allowed the controlling influence here.

The context of calories in/out making hunger and food targets put cooks in the firing line as culpable. Their fat phobia is defensive. That framing makes them feel bad, they take it out on fat people. Seeking to distance themselves. You are responsible, not us for making food that is (nominally) delicious.

It also gives somewhat of a taint. Interest, if not obsession with food doesn't make someone pathological, or bad. Hating fatz exonerates this interest.

Then there's what Oliver represents, a keening for gravitas. Cooking is seen as trivial and he is often seen as a dim but eager type. He's like those pop musicians, he wants to be taken seriously, do something important.

'Obesity' has lured him into thinking that's possible for him or necessary in this way. Everyone ought to be appalled at the lack of investigation into metabolic function. But not with the lack of policy formed around food fixated paranoia. You can never have too little of that. The documentary featured a primary (elementary) school where children grew their own veg and knew what various kinds were and like them. They also learned to cook, ace.

All these things were in many schools if you go back far enough. They were mainly removed during the crusade itself. Indeed its emphasis on individual choice in place of hunger was the most uniform agent in that and other things that mitigate implementation of the starvation strategy.

Though 'obesity' is a surface trivial irrelevance, it manages to be a poisoned chalice, splitting focus away from what is worthwhile and doable. If he'd just sought to re-establish a hot balanced meal for dinner in every school, he might have succeeded. Instead, it had to be a certain amount of calories and that just imposed one demand too many.

(Re-)establishing a gardening area in every school, teaching children about produce and wholesome ingredients, plus cookery lessons are laudable enough aims in themselves.

Enough to achieve everything Jamie yearns for, with the addition of fondness from those who might not have rated him. Though many support him-it is due to their fat phobia, not because he has truly impressed.

I understand the programme peddled the usual pseudo-science, conflating 'diabetes' with sugar consumption, the latter as causal agent.

Firing questions, why has type 1 gone up so much also, why do people who eat cook from fresh find 'empty' calories so acceptable to their palate, why isn't children growing produce and eating the norm and so on, just seem like they're aimed at the wrong person. Ultimately, its not Oliver's fault that 'obesity' has so uniformly drawn out the worst vanities in so many.

I would suggest to Oliver that he drop weight loss diet shill Susan Jebb and stick with his knowledge and love of good ingredients to create good food.

I'm not making any deep point, just saying, be aware cooks of sliding into this syndrome. Food is not the way we should be seeking to control our metabolic function. You are not guilty. So stick to what you are good at and be positive about it.

No Duty To Eat Greens

Now here's a really good article containing many points worth making about the current fat hating food paranoia. Can't say that everyday. Writer Stephanie Convery calls for an end misplacing "Judeo-Christian" virtue in salad greens. It's pitiful seeing Dawkins-type atheists rounding on Xtians, then channelling the same via food paranoia and fanaticism.

At least believers are self-aware enough to be honest about their need for religion.

She makes the point that this is not the right angle for examining the ethics of food.

That’s not to say there aren’t ethical, environmental and political questions to be asked about food, such as: under what conditions is it farmed? Are the workers paid fairly? Are there less resource-intensive and more sustainable ways to organise food production? But these aren’t questions that can be solved with personal angst over a dinner plate.

Personal is right. It's all about moi.

The article also notes that the highly recommended du nos jours green, watery veg are nutritionally speaking, pretty useless, as we run on energy. If that wasn't enough, some of it is toxic at high levels, which is one reason 'no-one' craves them like calorie dense food. Not completely, I once had a craving for lettuce so strong that I could get no peace until I went and got some. I sprinkled it with balsamic vinegar and a few shavings of Parmesan. Divine.

Purely because my body demanded it for some reason. Once.

As SC mentions, the ridiculous nay hysterical elevation of this kind of produce is topsy turvy wishful thinking driven by the insistence that "weight loss" must happen via calorie restriction. This makes first hunger then food its target. The hunger is usually silent, buried under "choice" as if an abstraction outside of bodily need.

What makes this special though is this,

Over the past decade or so, the Health At Every Size movement has been building momentum against this kind of “fat-shaming” culture that contributes to the development of pathologies about food,

 Whoo-hoo!!! Such confidence. Direct mention, free of shame or "obesity is teh bad" type apologia. Just factual acknowledgement, HAES (in the context of fat acceptance) has led the way in reversing this tide of pathological cultism, not to mention its companion pseudo-science.

Pretending nature's real "junk food", as much as I like it, is somehow the epitome of human health is that.

Hunger is the Impulse, Eating the Response

Certain things immediately spike your attention, then fade to the back of your mind. They're so ubiquitous that though you keep tripping over them, you get into the habit of pressing on past them.

Going through a list of psychologists, one was quoted as expressing a widely held view-that eating is a behaviour. It's a sensibility straight from calorie/weight hypothesis: Weight as a direct product of your calorie intake minus your calorie output.

This comes from assuming hunger is some kind thought because we become aware of it via our conscious minds. This is an error of perception, as they say. A bit like assuming pain is a thought because you become aware of it in your head also.

Hunger is a collation of sensory data coming from all areas of your body, through its nervous circuits. That is what ends up in your brain. There's when you become aware of it. Hunger is an impulse, and I don't mean as in "impulse buy," I mean electrical activity transmitted through your nerves.

You know the music you hear from the radio doesn't come from inside the radio, don't you! That would be like the error we make with hunger, assuming its inside the box, when its mainly picking it up what is sent there.

Saying eating is a behaviour is not wholly inaccurate by strict definition, but it's misleading. It makes more sense to think of eating as a response [to hunger]. We can't feed ourselves through our own bodies. We are designed to run on energy extracted from food therefore our response to hunger has to be acted out. But that cannot be read completely as if its independent of that impulse. It is not useful and actually quite disruptive at times to cast eating as a personal decision apropos of emeaushun.

There might be a slight tangle in the difference between professional and layman's use of the term behaviour. "Manner of conducting oneself" is how we generally think of it. That fits in with the calories in/out which posits eating as acting out a whim. The psychological definition is more technical;

1. the aggregate of all the responses made by an organism in any situation
2. a specific response of a certain organism to a specific stimulus or group of stimuli

That's more like it, a bit different in emphasis to our notion of behaviour as some acting out of conscious will. It could apply just as easily to going to sleep, but no one thinks sleep is simply a conscious decision just because we have some angles for conscious regulation of it.

With something like breathing, you  respond to inhaling by exhaling, automatically. If you had to somehow act out exhalation part, would it make sense for you to see that as disconnected from inhaling?

Yes, it would be a behaviour in terms of response to stimuli, but you could not disconnect it from being a response triggered by inhalation. Whatever triggers or stems that. Could be the rhythm of your breathing, or in the case of those with certain allergies, pollen /some other nasal irritant, could be shock, anxiety, concentration, awe, pleasure, etc.,

Vital, inbuilt, anatomically generated impulses cannot be controlled in the way having abstract thoughts can. We attempt to regulate or should I say, re-regulate them. Because they are already regulating themselves. They have their own rhythm and self-sustaining momentum. Unless we're aiming to re-establish/reboot that, what we end up seeking to do is interrupt often disrupt this regulation trying to alter the outcome of it more to our liking.

Is important to grasp that with restrictive eating, we are disrupting something that's already designed to regulate itself.

Nutritional Vanity-Buster

Oh, it turns out that people of low socio-economic status (LSES) know as much or as little about nutrition as middle/upper class folk and eat just as well too, if not better?

I've been saying this forever, but, of course when it comes to dieeet, people won't be told. It's not what is true, it's what's supposed to be true that rules. And middle/upper class folk should know more in general than the degenerates unfortunates who aren't economically secure. Otherwise, why else are they more favoured?

It must be virtue.

The self declared know-it-alls put fast food in all they run, from localities to schools and hospitals within them- if they knew so much, why did they do that? Long after the crusade was in full force? If as they've asserted continually 'obesity' costs so much in health? Clearly not enough.

Diet or should I say appetite is no more about studying nutrition than weight is decided by counting calories. Apart from basic nutrition, which could be covered by teaching people to cook a variety of produce, we just need to know how to put things together well. Enthusiasm, imagination, I was going to say love, but food + emotion is verboten.

Let's just say, we need to learn balance. In fact, at a certain point-when nutrition takes the path of healthism, it can get in the way.

"Nutritional knowledge" [doesn't that convey such pretension?] is yet another self-denuding place holder, to [haute]bourgiesplain why their class/es are healthier, slimmer (if they are) better than others. Men are still more uniform in body size across most class race etc.,

The answer is that the easier, more fulfilling your life is, the more your needs have been met, the safer more secure your environment has been-the less likely your various energies are to have been or be repeatedly taxed beyond your available resources.

That's too much of a vanity buster. 

Diet funk about to clear?

Finally....

“It would be all but impossible to carry out a research trial where you controlled the diets of thousands of people over many years. That’s why guidance in the UK is based on a consensus of the evidence available not just on randomised controlled trials.” Victoria Taylor, senior dietitian at the BHF

...the obvious.

There is certainly a strong argument that an overreliance in public health on saturated fat as the main dietary villain for cardiovascular disease has distracted from the risks posed by other nutrients such as carbohydrates. Yet replacing one caricature with another does not feel like a solution.

It's clear that ones diet is designed to be a bit too specific to a person's needs for dietary advice to be generalized beyond a certain point. Whether its their physiological and yes psychological make-up, their preferences according mainly though not wholly to exposure. Environment, culture, region, etc., The best way to get beyond the general advice is to learn to fine tune the interpretation and response to your own hunger and appetite.

General guidelines often seek to minimize risk to those with genetic susceptibilities. It's a bit like weight loss dieting. The insistence on this as the basis of weight regulation and "health" has left those susceptible to virtually all ED's from anorexia to hyperphagia to blunder far too often into these tendencies unwittingly.

So sacrificing minority susceptibility for, in this case, a perceived good isn't necessarily ethical. In this case it's clear that the exact nature of dieting needs to be made abundantly clear. And nor should it be the basis of anything.

When it comes to general dietary guidelines, too many have been seduced by the idea of one perfect diet. It's one thing to diagnose vitamin C deficiency and another to say, there's a diet suitable for all, which everyone should follow.

I suspect this has been invested with the desire to enforce a somewhat imagined bourgeois standard on everyone. On the grounds that this will in itself uplift society.

Finding out how diet affects health isn't particularly amenable to scientific inquiry-way too many variables- I hope this spate of admissions will hold. Recognizing limitations may actually help boffins to identify and make use of what actually is useful.

The aim needs to change too. Instead of trying to control other people, try assisting them with making better use of what comes naturally.

Appetite Balance

Theoretically food is food or at least, energy is energy. However our bodies are designed with energy dense foods in mind as the centre-piece of our dietary intake.

It's entirely possible, I'd say likely, that we're designed with a certain percentage of major nutrients- fat, carb, protein in mind. Obviously that has to be reassessed and maybe overridden in the case of congenital defects or chronic disorder/ illness.

It's just occurred, is the paleo fad a reaction to following recommendations and guidelines to reduce the overall percentage of fat in the diet? Irrespective of health-fattening has coincided with a lessening of cardiovascular mortality, so despite claims thus far outcome doesn't appear support this being a necessary harbinger of harm.

I know many paleo types assert what I call the carb monkey hypothesis, i.e. that "too much" carbohydrate monkey's with your insulin and (apparently) causes people to fatten. I've never been particularly convinced. I'm disinterested in diet as the pathway for metabolic manipulation. Now I'm wondering if my dismissal of paleo hype may have been about not finding the explanation/s particularly convincing.

What though if the IMH just uses a biochemical model to explain what's happening physiologically as tends to be au courant?

What I'm thinking is if about 33% intake of dietary fat is about right-its a pretty universal percentage-leaving aside environmental issues. Can reducing it (much) below that in itself, provoke bodies to make good that loss by upping the fat percentage via bloodstream and/or storing it in our bodies?

Is this partly why some report feeling better and/or losing weight on a higher fat diet-their appetite and therefore their intake is simply a more suitable balance?

Baroness Pennywise

I wonder if the schizoid refuge is just a normal cognitive deficit. A Tory politico called Baroness Jenkin got herself into bother. She blithely insisted the growth of food banks, was down to poor people not being able to cook.

Food banks are places people go to receive a weekly supply food donations because they can't afford to feed themselves-in part or whole. Many recipients-recommended by various agencies- are in work. The culture of austerity policies, high rents, low or zero hours contracts-where no work at all is guaranteed yet the person isn't allowed to take on something else to try and cover that, is taking its toll. 

"We've lost a lot of our cooking skills" she exclaimed bubble headedly. As if those skills where carelessly dropped along the way without oversight.

Predictably and rightly she got a stinging backlash and to her credit, apologized and corrected herself. It wasn't that her words had no merit. It was that she identified a generalized outcome/trend through the impoverished and marginalized as if it was specific to them-and absent from others who are better off.

That particular sentiment is prevalent, amongst the better off classes, regardless of their politics. They simply cannot come to terms with the fact that it takes far more skill in virtually every area you can think of to survive as a poorer than a better off person.

Their mind then has to keep making this same faux pas. I'm sure it's been pointed out as a particular form of dishonest self service, but I can't call to mind any metaphysical term.

She didn't mention her own party, headed by one Margaret Hilda Thatcher decided for no earthly good to take cookery lessons out of state education. Honesty would have forced her to say, "We/they got that wrong and now we are seeing the consequence." It's never a good sign when these links aren't made. Making them is the best way to guard against them being repeated.

Omitting this not only shirks the responsibility commentators keep using as a stick to beat their quarry with. It shows a lack of concern about stopping a repeat. You could say that is happening now.

No-one thought ending culinary education was a good idea. They either didn't care or protested yet it still went ahead, purportedly to "save money." Worse still, they replaced these useful lessons in self care with things like "food technology." Something I've quite never got, but consisted in large part of studying the design of commercial packaging. Usually the kind of ready meals that then really took off.

Entirely coincidentally I'm sure.

The Conservatives also put the provision of school meals out to tender to the kind of outfits that brought the kind fast food canteen culture food nutrition fanatics bemoan as the creator of their fevered lipogeddon scenario.

It was as if the politicians did everything they could to undermine people cooking for themselves, prepped their taste buds via school meals. Then normalized ready meals as a main focus of eating. Education eh?

It's reminiscent of a similar strategy happening with the attempts to privatize UK health by stealth. Dismantle the things that stop people being dependent on ready made commercially engineered product of whatever kind. 

It was this sustained line of policy and the lack of any strong opposition to it that made me see through the mirage of any kind of common cause when it came to food, weight and health. The truth about the food fanatics who opine about 'obesity' is they have no intellectual base or backbone or heart. They attack only those who are undefended leaving aside anyone who will remotely answer back.  

I realized that equation didn't add up. People hate fatness and insist how/what we eat is the answer. Then do little about the very things they say causes fatness to advance, because their fantasies of weight as identity i.e. slim people don't eat this kind of thing takes precedence over everything. They can't constitute a cogent defence, they don't truly care.

I said to myself, my poor old mind can't take this level of underhand bullshit. I actually did give a damn about how children are fed and felt it mattered for its own sake. But I had to accept this is in the hands of people like BJ. Who criticize only outcomes in specific groups. So, let the chips fall where they may, no pun intended, and let science give people the ability to manipulate their own signals. And let people eat what they really eat.

Whether food was the route to "weight management" or not was irrelevant to me anyway. Science has a job to do, either way. 

Those who shout about 'obesity' never fight the kind of policy their own complaining requires. The concentrate all their fight on attacking people. When tired of their bullying aggression, they nonsensically applied their pet viewpoints; "personal responsibility"or "boo big business."

Sorry, but porridge is hardly "cookery" the instructions invariably come on the packet. And, nor would everyone who can cook dream of putting it past their lips. I've heard the raw stuff makes a good body scrub though.
People have always gone hungry or hungrier because of lack/absence of cookery skills. It was mentioned in Orwell's famous book, the "Road to Wigan Pier." At one point he referred to a study that found a family amongst the poor and emaciated that were healthy and robust. Turned out the mother was some kind of nurse (I think). She was well trained in nutrition with a high degree of culinary skill, (she also happened to be fat by the way.) Today her success would be pathologized as 'bad lifestyle' she'd be deemed 'obese' and "unhealthy."

Food Revival

When people are into things, they are into those things. When people are into nothing in particular, they talk 'obesity'. There isn't one interest, inclination, field, topic, subject, vocation that anyone's into that is enriched by the 'obesity' monologue.

Take food deserts, there's a story to tell there......but......through the dehumanized narrative of 'obesity'? Doubt it.

Neither the shape nor the tone lends itself  producing fruitful indeed real discussion. It puts people on the defensive. And no, I don't mean fat people, or even slim people claiming to not eat what they eat, until "junk food tax" is mentioned, then suddenly, "Why should I have to suffer?"

I mean people can't seem to locate an honest historical flow-it's like 'obesity' shreds that because it is itself so inherently ahistorical. After all, it starts from denying the actions people actually take because it cannot acknowledge the usual results of those actions.

People ask in their usual disingenuous way: "Why doesn't fat acceptance fight against food deserts?" But to be honest I don't get any connection. It feels tacked on, similar to the insistence on talking about and supporting weight loss dieting.

Trying to get all fat people to support anything that ties them to a fat phobic agenda.

Whilst fat acceptance definitely has a race problem, this isn't intersectional fail. Nothing trades more on white privilege than 'obesity' bullshit. The idea that controlling your food intake is the answer to structural problems is apolitical mind pap.

If you want to talk about why people eat what they eat today, you're going to be talking about cultural pressures both internal and external, lived, memories, intra and extra-migration, then talk about that. Most of all, you'll be talking about people with love, with heart, with soul. Do you hear any of that in the ob monologue? Of course you don't. Why would casting people as disease to be run like objects be about the reality of human experience?

I was sensitized to calories in/out healthy eating from quite an early age. Certain changes in the modern Western model food environment became clearer. 

Supermarkets were retreating from urban centres to the outskirts and suburbs, led by the US. The fashion in business seemed to be highest profit margins.

What struck me over and again was despite Black social commentators, activists, professionals like social workers et al's frequent commentary on things like drugs, the sex trade, unemployment, liquor stores on every corner etc., I heard virtually nil about changes in the food environment.

The attitude to food seemed different, carefree almost. Despite the frequent pretense that middle class people "know more about nutrition."

Whilst I'm more aware of news agendas, I know if the talk had been half as intense, I would have picked up on something. Cultural memes turn up wherever there's a critical mass of cultural commentary. I found it truly odd that more prominent Black people did not seem to be giving voice to this or any potential implications etc., Whereas I, in my nervous earnest soul was concerned, for the future.

I was the kind of kid who felt like they died a little inside, every time I saw an abandoned sofa/fridge/vacuum cleaner. I kept thinking about the earth's resources-how could we carry on like this?

In those days I was more on board with the basis of 'obesity' crisis narrative, because, ci/co. I got that we needed to lessen weight through eating (less) and increase output-through activity. I also got at some early point, that this did not make sense as an individual thing.

Losses of certain things were seen in terms of working toward or against that calorie restriction/expenditure model. The streets used to be played in by children, then they were ceded to the motor car and children went indoors. Our swimming baths and other facilities were being shut down. We stopped being given cookery lessons at school. Provision of school dinners meals went from meals to a replication of fast food canteen.

Fast food outlets were liberally permitted by councils to be within spitting distance of schools. School playing fields were sold off. The "No ball games" sign appeared everywhere and were enforced more and more rigourously. Fast food restaurants appeared in hospitals. Everyone of them sent my anxiety a little higher.

I wasn't so much a food prude as a someone struggling with self imposed restriction. With my schizoid diet and ramped up eating disorder, I often ate there the same calorie dense food as others, along with my "healthy" diet. I was pragmatically self denying- if all this hadn't been there, that would be an assist for me.

In the end it was about intent. If you insist on lowering calories, every decision you make in regards to the food environment- becomes part of or against that process. That's intrinsic to such such a crude methodology. If you weren't prepared for it-completely understandable, it's crap. So pick another route or stop demanding people be slim via that route.

At the same time, industrial food continued penetrating seemingly every crevice. I still remember the shock of hearing that a certain FF giant, directly targeted research and endeavour at the youngest children. Many didn't know. By the time they did, it was old news to me and they still didn't care a whole lot. Though people are making a fuss about that now, most didn't And that includes middle class white people.

But no. By the time FF entering hospitals was lost-and to be fair some did protest-I realised I was done expecting this to be implimented. You cannot fight the will of those who have the voice. I was broken by their indifference, lol.

I really just like this piece. In just over 600 words, it tells me more about a basis of the formation of some food deserts-in this case rural, rather than urban. Than anything tacking itself onto the 'obesity' monologue. What is it? A restaurant (pre-)review.

A guy called Sean Sherman, who's a Native American and grew up on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota plans to open a restaurant featuring his interpretation of pre-colonial first nation cuisine. I was skeptical, is this another one of those return to Stone Age diet fantasies? But I read on and he set it in context of wider historical forces affecting many groups in US society and first nation people in particular.

Change happened as part of what was seen at the time as progress. A shared cultural capital, in this case food. You can see this on a larger scale with, especially US Fast food littering the globe.

When this began outside the US, people spoke in glowing terms about this food. It was it. The cat's whiskers. A shared global breaking of bread. There's a psychology that's not the usual nonsensical faddiction distraction.

In the case of the Sioux, [Sherman's restaurant is to be called "Sioux Chef"] they were not by choice farmers. That became an imposition of colonial conquest and reservation life. Before they were hunters, fishers and foragers.

Growing up on his grandfather's ranch on Pine Ridge, one of the nation's largest reservations, Sherman had regular access to fresh meat and produce. He also learned to hunt at an early age, getting his first shotgun when he was 8 years old. But the chef is quick to admit his upbringing was atypical. "I was lucky," he told Mic. "Most of the families around us relied on canned and 'commodity' foods. There was one grocery store on Pine Ridge, otherwise you had to go into Nebraska or somewhere in Rapid City [South Dakota.]."

That makes so much more sense doesn't it?

Sherman portrayal reminds me of something I complained about years ago, the negativity of the 'obese' monologue. It assaults people, rather than looking at their current skills, recognizing those and building on them. Not to mention those of their elders, parents, grand-parents which may have fallen by the wayside as things can. This could have been a point of exploration of revival and inter-generational communication.

He's spent the past six years traveling the country, however, researching Native American cuisine and learning traditional methods of drying meats, grinding corn and gathering herbs and spices. He's also been active in Minneapolis' local and organic food scene, something which figures prominently in his vision for the Sioux Chef.

Revival and yes, fashion, trends, joined with genuine enthusiasm and love, for food, for history, for culture and recovering what has been lost, what is valuable, for its own sake. 

Getting Radioactive with the Food Policers

This kind of harassment takes me back. It tends to create a reluctance to eat in public. I remember snorting sourly when this was named as a key symptom of hyperphagia. How important was that to me when I had it? I'd actually forgotten about reluctance to eat in front of others, until I kept reading this in descriptions of that disorder. Only then did I remember.

I had so many other problems, both being fat and having an eating disorder, that it didn't even figure as in any way notable.  I honestly didn't realize what a big deal it was supposed to be, 'til I saw Rae Earl's My Mad Fat Diary.

How typically obsessive of the white coat establishment to focus on shame as definitive of an ED associated with being chubby and fat!

It became a norm for many, especially fat people, not to feel able to eat or eat much in public. I know the latter has always been the case for some slimmer women too. But the crusade may well be heating this all up. Either increasing the extent of unwanted intervention, and/or making feelings surrounding eating more charged.

That's what does it as much as the actual interference. 

It's hard to know what to say about this. In some way it feels like its travelled slightly the other way for some fat women, smaller fat people. Ironically, the heights it reached, in one form or another, from being pinched, slapped to being laughed at, in a context of needing to get slim NOW. Caused such a build up of unprocessable pain in fat people, that this transmitted created a force of silent anguish so powerful, it put off some of the less insensitive. It discomforted them too much for them to go there.

This is what is sometimes referred to when folks say "We can't say anything about fat people-why can anything be said to slimz" etc., This harassment may rise among slimz due to the emphasis on "prevention." The absence of such internal emission of emotional radiation within slim women creates no discomfort in others.

Their lack of unease is key here.

Any thing that travels using misogyny will travel through all women, at some point. This is a bit chastening a real feminist fail for sure. If only we could have joined hands, we could have stopped it from getting here. But well, wasn't to be. The 'obesity' construct has distanced women from each other.

The motivation for this impertinence is of course the investment in calories in/calories out moreso the decision to make that the only route to weight management, whether up or down. Food policing is happening in the slender direction too, i.e. being told to eat up for the menz, as they like something to grab hold of.

I know people find this hard to grasp, but it is the problem. Not comprehending its significance, its begetting of things as seemingly disparate as; good food/bad food, clean eating, junk food, bad/good for you, calling thin women anorexics, accusing them of not eating that, calling fat people food addicts, increasingly defining us as mentally unsound child abusers etc., means women in particular, continue to support our own harassment and encroaching loss of autonomy.

There simply is no way to sacrifice fat women for slim. It should never have been necessary at all really, again, that need to throw fatz under the bus is ci/co. Only the privileging of slimmer could prevent this. And that looks like its being eroded by fat phobia which threatens to become an increasing powerhouse.

Take the whole anorexia is not a problem 'obesity' is. 

So, until it can be grasped that weight is regulated by metabolic metabolic function rather than "behaviour." This dysfunctional dictate will continue spitting up its manky furballs. 

Policing of food, is exactly justified by this idea. That is it in a nutshell, police food, policed life, equals healthy life. Could we really have been naive enough to think this was just about weight? It's always about control isn't it?

Misogyny is liberated by the sense of ownership over women. Still, no one is more porous than fat people, we're defined as an extension of other people's imagination.

The two mix, merge and feed off each other

Pathology Fetish

Here we go;

If you'd asked me 24 days ago if I was addicted to anything, I would have laughed in your....face......I am a slave to nothing and to nobody, bar my toddler and my mortgage provider. Bring on the dancing girls –I have this life thing licked.That, of course, was before I decided, on 1 January, to give up sugar.

You may see where this is going;

It's been both ridiculous and terrifying to see how closely...sugar deprivation has mimicked.... "real" addiction. I'm craving the stuff all the time. I can literally feel – or feel I feel – a hollow inside me that only Cadbury can fill. I can't concentrate. I'm foul-tempered. I'm consumed with guilt and self-loathing. How did this happen? How did I let something come to have such a hold on me? Most addictions – in my anecdotal experience – stem from patterns learned in childhood or people's need to escape from some unhappiness. Mine's just the result of mindless greed.

Mindless indeed.

This keen invention of ways to slap the label; disease, illness, sickness, addiction on yourself. When offered to fat people with (hyperphagic eating disorders). Apart from those wholly obedient to the mainstream discourse-and even then-not so enthused. This is because fat people have had to face up to the idea of culpability without mitigation. Don't expect anyone to notice that though, including fat people.

These (mis-) labels are superfluous and strangely irrelevant. Even the fatz who try them on, because whatever slimz do is all there is to do, or because they think it'll shield them from aggression or because they feel it a useful model to adopt, don't sound remotely convincing.

Slimz do, they really believe this shit. It's trés authentique coming from them. I can't help but watch them with fascination, wondering what its like to be so incapable of telling the difference between a stubbed toe and a sta.

It takes real oblivious self absorption/confidence in your own feelings to compare suddenly without preparation or substitute, cutting a major source of energy from your diet with this:

The closest I've ever come to describing it to a friend is; You know when you're underwater, and you need to come up for a breath? And it's taking too long to get to the surface? That feeling, of having no oxygen left, your whole body feeling like fire, salty and aching with the desperate need to breathe? That's it, only not exactly, because it's worse.

At one point, I went into the bathroom, and found Lawrence -- all six feet, two inches of him, tattooed and scarred up and tough as hell, having lived through one of the most astonishingly hard lives I'd ever heard of, curled up in the bottom of a tiny, filthy shower stall like a little escargot, sobbing and shivering in desolate agony.

 You may say that's a little unfair, she included a caveat;

....sugar deprivation has mimicked what we will, for reasons of limited time and space, just have to agree to call here "real" addiction – to booze, fags, drugs et al.

It's somewhat equivocal though. Nor are cigarettes an addiction of any sort. That's another sop to smokers to shield them from aggression, others and their own, a perk of what others deem thin privilege.

Are these differences really that hard to spot? Don't get me wrong, opiate withdrawal can vary quite a bit. There are many who are untroubled by it. But that does not mean its any old thing.

The obesity cult shows fear of death by pushing ideas of human morality onto fatz. Insisting we personify "slow death", degeneracy, corruption and decay, of all sorts. We are 'unhealthy' and dying. This is superbad of us, morally like.

But their branding their own fetish of things like illness addiction etc., as "brave" and "honest".  I can't quite remember why right now.

The need to be pure is the mind finding a focus of worship again. Lifestyle anorexia is the cure for the spiritual guilt of consumerism.

What's even more odd, is the way certain labels shift meaning according to who they're applied to. Being a drug addict is bad, but its somehow addict becomes honourable if you are slim and its "food". But not if your BMI's 30+, then you're/its a dirty shame.  The addict kudos (for faux addicts) is based on our terror of death. Genuine addiction can continuously brush with death. This seeming insouciance in the face of the much feared creates a gravitas, amidst the profound contempt for dependence. Or enslavement as Mangan referred to it.

"Mindless greed" makes me wonder if this is another instinctive nod to getting fatz to sign on for faux addiction. Rather like some slimz used to put down thin people in order to act like they were getting on side with fatz.

They'd hide behind us of course, using us to express their own shame...about what? About having a fat not slim condition, what will the neighbours think? Frankly I don't give a shit. I'm just not and never have been an addict.

I've been through hyperphagia - an excess of hunger signals (when your nervous system is so jacked up that every emotion, stress and even action invokes your appetite and hunger.) At its worst, I, can only describe it as feeling like I was possessed by a malevolence that god botherers would call old nick.

But I can tell you, that simply was not addiction. Nor is it useful to see it in that way and I don't care if it is for anyone else either. They're entitled to see it that way. They're not entitled to insist that has anything to do with science or is something everyone must get on board with. Let slimz "confess". They have a choice, their bodies aren't defined as guilt.

I really hope fat people keep saying no to meaninglessness imposed upon them without giving a damn what they might think about it. That's only in keeping with a slim halo. We've been through too much to sell ourselves out to things that do not acknowledge the meaning and effects of our experience. 

We've more than earned the right to say what that is, without interference.

The macronutrient whirl

Too much fat, causes fatness. Fat's bad for the heart. No, a largesse of weight is caused by too much starch. No, not enough protein. No, too much sugar.

That's where it is now.

Been here before.

Round and round and round the macro nutrient wheel. In a dizzy whirl, never really getting anywhere.

Fat. Carbohydrate. Protein.

We have to keep going round and round in circles, just like we go round and round in weight loss dieting circles. Rooted as we are by the insistence that this is the answer. Dietary manipulation is the key to weight.

It causes all sorts of distortions. Rotten and absurd constructs like "food addiction," people as disease life lived as a treatment for the disease of existence, eating disorders as the treatment for eating disorders. All either created or shored up by the insistence that eating the right make up for foods, will lead to trim.

It sticks you in a corner and means you cannot get out of it. So are condemned to keep rustle the objects there. Picking things up and putting them down, like someone who's lost something they cannot find. 

But you know what? Even if this was the answer. Since when does there have to be one answer-for those who need/want it?

Why has this particular avenue become a monotheism?

Reclaiming the (Waste) Land

Urban farms and gardens seems to be part of the way forward for food deserts. Things begin to make sense. The issue presented as privileged access versus lack hasn't quite in the past. Where I come from, that "privilege" didn't get there by grace of the powers that be. It got there due to the efforts of ordinary people, many immigrants who wanted to eat the foods they liked. I felt sympathetic, but couldn't see how that wouldn't have to come from people's desire to find ways to bring it about.

 Nikki Henderson-of People's Grocery

I knew that it wasn't long ago that African Americans and PoC and/working class people had a similar taste for fresh food, many of them still do and that I believe is probably underrated. That had slipped away due to various pressures-from marketing to the economic model adopted for supermarkets, which ceased to make sense for some inner city locales.

Growing food in the urban environs is an inspiring and effective way around this, where appropriate. Reclaiming disused land, putting front/back yards into use, as has been noted, what you grow you eat. We are designed to eat from our environment, what our eyes see. Though culture does play an important, sometimes overwhelming part. A grafted on one, created from sub-religious healthism isn't that. Itself an artificial additive, another side of the food hating culture of big business that puts profit before pride in its products and respect for ingredients.

Bryant Terry-Chef and Author

Key in a Lock

Cue massive yawns;

For 10 years, my problem was too little, rather than too much, food. What could I, recently recovered from anorexia, possibly know about fatness?

Well done, in not bothering to find out whether that is 'the problem' for all fat people. It's true though, that anorexics should have the closest understanding of what its like to be fat. Not because they're alike, but because fat people are treated as if we have an eating disorder that will kill us, regardless of our personal situation.

You cannot weigh behaviour. Anorexia is a disorder, fatness is weight. 

In my experience, many of the more vocal often middle class anorexics don't understand a whole lot about anorexia past their subjective interpretations. Basic understanding is recognising something in its original setting. Deeper is when you can recognise it other contexts. These anorexics failed for instance to spot that it is effectively the prescription for 'obesity'. Many still find it hard even after it has been pointed out to them;

For so long I wondered how most women can diet and exercise and not develop a full-blown eating disorder, whereas I started losing weight and exercising excessively and got sucked into the spiral of anorexia. When I see the girls in the office tucking into chocolate brownies for someone’s birthday, moments after announcing their new diet regime, I wonder if eating disorders and disordered eating are actually part of the same spectrum; whether self-starvation is simply a more extreme form of female dieting. I see a lot of anxiety about weight around me; I hear a lot of guilt about food. Sometimes it seems that ‘normal’ dieting and anorexia are worlds apart, sometimes they seem very close.

Dieting is like a key, anorexia is like it fitting a lock and turning. Only one in 200-250 people have this lock or susceptibility to anorexia. Though that varies in strength too, unless you have it, then your body is unlikely to succumb to full blown anorexia. However, dieting does unbalance the mind and body. A lot of fat people have that almost anorexia and/or other symptoms, due to the extent and duration of their dieting careers, which often start in early childhood.

There are also other 'locks' bulimia, hyperphagia. Yes, a lot of people don't realise, an excess of appetite is often part of the body's way of fighting off your attempts at calorie restriction.

Think about it, if your body increases your hunger signals, that's makes resisting hunger far harder work than even it is normally.  There are other exposures to ED's. Lack of money. Some stop eating because they find it easier than eating then having to stop again when they run out of money or food. Some develop under-eating patterns so as to relieve the pressure on parents and develop that massive anxiety about eating that many with ED's get-not only anorexia.

Binge cycles can be established by having more money at the start of the month and none at the end. And this can raise hunger to the point where people would rather do with the minimum of clothes to ward off their excess of hunger signals. People become expert at getting maximum calories from minimum resources. This can also unbalance their appetite and hunger signals.

I didn't realise people conflated thinness with anorexia till I encountered thinsproana. I've known too many thin people over the years and their attitude to food was so normal compared to mine to consider they have anything to do with anorexia. Which to be honest, can give off a certain vibe. That's why I simply do not see thin people as anorexic. Though at the same time realise very low weight is more likely to be a symptom of wasting.

Many of thinz, along with others helped me to have an idea in my head of what normal eating meant. Anorexia is further from them than me in the days of my 'healthy lifestyling'!

Holistic Activism

Now you're talking;

Gardening in Detroit, for these women activists, demonstrates self-reliance and self-determination. ......gardening becomes an exercise of political agency and empowerment. Instead of petitioning the city government to increase access to fresh food, or lobbying for more grocery stores and markets to locate in the city, they transform vacant land into a community- based healthy food source that allows them to be able to feed themselves and their families and to provide an example to their community of the benefits of hard work.

This is what I feel has been missing from the food desert problem-the food challenges faced by the urban (and rural) poor. A more holistic mindset. One that roots the need for good food in an overall picture. The flight of the big supermarkets from urban centres exposed the lack of sovereignty the people living there had over their food supply. And how they could just be left high and dry because of it;

In addition, food becomes a point of entry for discussing how African Americans might gain control over other aspects of their lives, including access to affordable housing, clean water, community policing,and decent public education.If food is life, as these women activists suggest, then the ability to control the quality of food and increase access to healthy food in Detroit’s predominantly black community is an essential aspect of the struggle for self-determination and self-reliance.  "Sisters of the Soil: Gardening as Urban Resistance in Detroit" ~ Monica M. White

Yes. This is so often missing from the discourse on food, usually centred around those who have access. Having no response for those who do not.

My problem has always been, how do you get provision back when business policy mitigates against it? Especially without a constant and overwhelming demand? These woman are at least showing the possibilities of some way around this. Even if urban or similar in rural areas aren't the whole of the answer for everyone. It does show a possible way people can and are willing to take their destiny somewhat into their own hands.

Growing food also seems to be the most profound way of cultivating enthusiasm for produce. What's more seamless than wanting to taste what you've nurtured grown by your own hands? Or even stuff you've seen growing out of the ground? I can't imagine children who won't want to taste what they see growing.

This is the kind of thing that really fight the might of mega-globo industrialized food, a fuller sensory experience. Not a negative crusade to pathologize people's bodies whilst trying to enforce a duty to eat vegetables.

I've never been able to get on board with the use of 'obesity' as way of resolving what is an issue of economic and social justice. Trying to link the two has always felt unwise. Here's why;

The declaration that obesity is a disease and the acceptance of these and other drugs as an answer to America’s staggeringly high obesity rates shifts focus away from the real and central issue: the quality of our food.

The central issue of 'obesity' whatever that truly is, has never been about improving anyone's situation, let alone those who's needs are pushed to the edge. It's only begun to try since fat people started to assert some consistent expressions of self worth. Our self loathing enabled even more slackness than would have otherwise been likely to occur. How can a crusade that keeps undermining fat people's humanity be compatible with their needs? 

And talking about weight, whilst I would not dismiss the influence of an unbalanced food culture in bringing out or exacerbating certain metabolic issues. Weight is possibly not the most direct sign. The percentage difference between Black Women and men with a BMI +30 shows a difference of twenty points.

The percentages amongst Black populations in the UK vary. Yet that divide is replicated amongst African women in comparison to men.

US BM's statistics barely differ from anyone else's. It's possible that even this is an overestimate given, I'm not sure prison figures are included in this calculation-in the past they haven't been. That would probably affect the figures.

I find it hard to accept without clear evidence that the whole of the difference in outcomes for Black women is solely down to food. The importance of good food should never been seen through the lens of weight is diversionary. The obsession with that angle too quickly becomes disordered and that itself begets more imbalance.

If 'obesity' wasn't in the picture, would fulfilling food needs be worthwhile? Of course.

And that has to be the heart of reviving food culture, always. People are just worth it, regardless.

Cues

You'd think in a world braying senselessly about 'obesity' this would be instinctive. But no, apparently people have to be told to stop trying to force their children to override their our needs and eat what they tell them to.

In the service of clearing ones plate. It can upset the rhythm of the appetite and hunger mechanisms that are part of your body's self regulation.

Eating what you want and need should be the same thing. This is one of the reasons why it can cease to be. Supporting children's respect for their understanding of their own needs is the beginning of practising normal/intuitive/balanced eating.  

Far from not clearing your plate being necessarily 'wasteful'. You often find your ability to match your needs to what you put on your plate gets better over time. It's also possible to save things for later i.e. Some like to spread what they eat over a longer period. I found this when I stopped my prescription and cleared up the eating disorder that it had largely created;

Pushing food is not always about getting children to eat more — it’s also about the quest to get them to eat healthy.

This is what happened to me in a nutshell. It's about manipulating your appetite-the make up of what you eat-and that can also put you out of touch with your needs, keeping your hunger signals open driving you to get what it requires.

Real waste is actually mechanically eating what you neither want nor need, on the say so of others. That turns your body into a waste disposal unit. And makes someone else's fee fees more important than listening to your body.

That could be a metaphor for how to live in general...... and in more specific ways. 

Ironically, or not, it's the association fat people have with being policed from the outside, i.e. not knowing (or being allowed to know) your own mind, that has helped to degrade the general reputation of fat people.

Fat People as Personification of Bingeing, part 1

Whether it's those thin/slim anorexics who use "the fat person in the mirror" as a metaphor for why they're starving.  Or the bitterness of people who see fat people as representing the thing inside them which made them fail to become anorexic.A certain type of slim person is still using fatness and fat people to express their personal psychodramas. If this unpleasant interlude is to be brought to a close, this kind of appropriation needs to end.

Teevee presenter Mika Brzezinski is a warrior against 'obesity'. She neglected to tell folks that she's had bulimia for years. In her mind fat people represent her urge to binge. I'm serious, the construct says so. Yet, the truth she represents runs counter to this.

That some slimz can out eat most fatz any day of the week. Mika roped her friend Diane Smith into a joint effort, her to stop bingeing and gain 10 pounds and be "okay with that." (All about weight). Diane who'd gained 100 pounds in the 15 years of their friendship, was to lose 75.

"Weight problem" i.e fatness = Eating problem kind of sums it up. Apparently Smith was appalled when she was call F-A-A-T by Brzezinski. She even used the word zomgobese. Brzezinski made big play of the beloved denialist trope when Smith's idea of herself was more than likely formed when she was slim. 

We'll forget that if the usual assumptions are true, the remedy would have been the same for both-stabilize eating-desired results follow. Rather than one swapping an ED for normality, the other a perhaps ED-I can't tell-for the impersonation of another one.

That's not nitpicking. People keep theorizing the 'cause' of fatness, yet can never demonstrate this through reversal of said 'cause' rolling back fatness. Dieting's indicates another fail.

By casting fat people as disease, "obesity" casts us with the uniformity our brains associate with disease. In the minds of those who accept this definition, fat people become one (fat) person. What goes for one, goes for all. Hence this absurdly unscientific, if one fat person can become slim you all can. If one fat person can sustain a lifestyle ED, you all can!!

This is as ridiculous as presuming all slim people have binge eating disorder because Mika does.

From Brzezinski's book;

How does a person who is not overweight write about her lifelong obsession with overeating without sounding like a narcissistic, woe-is-me skinny girl.

How about just telling your story? I eat like a fat person is supposed to, yet I'm not even chubby. And it's nothing to do with self control. Unless that's what you call bulimia, which let's face it, many do secretly.

Well, what do we expect? You've got the requirement to become or remain slim, with the emphasis in recent times on "because it's healthy." That puts pressure on people to do it in a healthy manner, which is even less efficient than unhealthy ways, making it harder to admit what might be going on.

Appetite and hunger can easily become levers for the body to maintain mental/mood balance in the face of stresses that threaten to sink your mood regulation. She seemed very nervous in that interview, still full of disgust from her rather amusing "Nutella" story (plz, it's not crack). All she was describing there was the product of the suppression of this lever, without resolving any underlying issues. Yet she was talking about how it felt like "addiction."

The capacity and power of appetite and hunger is not just as we see it. It's capable of far more than that if the trigger is there, or our system is sensitive enough. Proper scientists, need to deal with that and we need to learn to learn techniques to manage our internal stress and anxiety as a part of our mindset, like bathing every day. We definitely need to teach them to children.

Almost Anorexia

When I have in the past mentioned proto or early stage anorexia or the bitterness of failed anorexics fuelling and shaping the inexplicably aggressive and now dominant form of fat phobia. I think some may have found me a bit too aggressive. Or unsympathetic.

I'll recap the first aspect. Weight loss dieting (WLD) or it's model, calorie restriction (CR) is a supremely unnatural and unbalanced way of eating, full stop. That isn't the same as saying that a person may be better off having lost weight.

If weight could be lost the right way, it would at least in part consist of being able to a use energy more efficiently. Or what a lot of the benefits of HAES are about. Think about it, the energy your body gets from food is used to fuel the operations of your body (that includes your mind).

This means the way your body is making use of energy affects every aspect not only of your matter or body mass, but of things like your ability to think or regulate your moods.

There is effectively no real argument. There mainly appears to be one due to the presumption that being able to use energy more optimally is the same as forms of starvation or having to endure them in order to attain what would seem to represent that more efficient use-slimness.That falls down because fatness and slimness are not opposite states.

Keep your eyes on CR. That is the heart of the matter. In the past, we all presumed adipose tissue was like savings in the bank. Spend it, through exercise or less calories than you needed (CR) mais voilà; slimness.

Bad though that would still be, at least it would be TEMPORARY. Once the weight was 'spent' you could return to balance.

The flaw was the body's constant reassertion of its cycle of self regulation, spelt a big fat fail. However that wasn't accepted, instead the temporary was to become permanent. Groundhog WLD. That's really when it becomes practicing anorexia.

Again, the temporary is enough to cause a direct or domino effect, in some people. But the real cause of this is attempting to make the temporary, permanent. 

Nobody has noticed it, if you translate 'nobody' to mean many FA people and others not participating in the general delusion. Those who are haven't because FP's experience of being prescribed the practice of anorexia has been totally erased. Even the "thin/slim privileged with anorexia" routinely dismiss it.

The ideology amongst many of those active in the field-for that read anorexia and possibly bulimia-is to disconnect weight loss dieting from anorexia as that has been seen to "trivialize" the damage anorexia can do. And recently I've discovered that many thin/slim PWA feel they have to escape the overbearing assumption that AN is just about vanity and is in the control of PWA

The author of this book appears to underline what many of us have noted and that is that WLD can do so much damage that you don't even have to be a successful yo-yoer to have experienced it.

Even the mere threat of it-if that's ever present-can be enough to do a lot of psychological harm. It can even do physical harm too. So primeval is the design to resist and throw off the threat to life and limb.

A lot of you know someone who's never off a diet, yet always remains the same size as they always were or more.

This is an example of the extent of our erasure, we are 'nobody'. Even when that erasure hurts those who are deemed to be somebody.

How to think progressively

The European Union is planning to vote tomorrow on a proposal brought by Dutch Euro politico Kartika Liotard. Its intent, reflected in the title is to "eliminate gender stereotyping in the media", it isn't legally binding;

whereas stereotypes still exist at all levels of society and in all age groups, affecting how we perceive each other through oversimplified assumptions based on socially constructed norms, practices and beliefs that are often cultural, and religion-based and -fostered, and which reflect and perpetuate underlying power relations

This move to ban pornography is seen by many progressives as an attack on civil liberties.

Okay, I'm sure you spotted a gap there. The document lists 69 points (oh sauce) aiming to improve the status and opportunities of women. Part of that focuses on the stereotypical portraits of girls and women relayed in various forms of media from advertising to the mainstream advance of pornography;

Calls on the EU to conduct research into the links between child pornography and adult pornography and the impacts on girls, women, boys and men, as well as the relationship between pornography and sexual violence. Calls on the Member States to establish independent regulation bodies with the aim of controlling the media and advertising industry and a mandate to impose effective sanctions on companies and individuals promoting the sexualisation of girls; 

The latter is what seemed to most excite the sensibilities of progressive civil libertarians who see it as a slippery slope obviously, given it's supposed to be about ending the perpetuation of sexist stereotypes especially to supple minded youths.

Porn's okay because there's no evidence to prove it encourages sexual aggressiveness toward women. So phew, no cause for concern there. In fact, it would be a bad idea if that was being planned because apparently wanking, decreases the likelihood of sexual abuse. Convicted sex abusers say so. 

Pornography is not just the commercial proposition of anything for a toss, it's a social, nay feminist good. Keeping folk safe(r) from the more harmful elements in society. Free speech tends to go with it too.  

Large size sugary drinks on the other hand have a proven link with porn unfriendly obeastiness. Regulating these isn't any kind of attack on freedom. That's just some propaganda put about by cynical mega global food corporations. New research finally shows;

sugary drinks were found to interact with genes that affect weight, significantly amplifying any genetic risk for obesity

So there.

Could there be potential for agreement here?

whereas the alcohol industry, with its vast investment in the marketing of its products, strongly contributes to perpetuating gender stereotypes and the sexualisation of girls and women.

 Booze, drinking calories;

On any given day, about one-third of men and one-fifth of women consumed calories from beer, wine or liquor.

No way then, LOL!