The treatment for BED? Stop Calorie Restriction Dieting and Stop Pathologising Your Body/Self

American Addiction Centre's page called "Compulsive Overeating". The question with binge eating disorder has always been what is it?

...absolutely no control around food. Since many binge eaters restrict food intake...

If you are restricting your intake, then that's,  by these people's notion "control".

The snake swallows its tail after first slithering toward something getting hold of it in its teeth. The intensity of pursuit narrows its peripheral vision until it ends up biting its own tail. The cycle is complete and is able to perpetuate itself.

With anorexia-restriction, circuitry around the response to hunger seems to weaken and /or the circuitry around blocking is activated and becomes powerful. An ever decreasing vortex of response ensues.

With binge/purge-restricting certain foods, increases appetite for them til that becomes irresistible creating panic leading to a salvaging action of purging stomach contents (aspire assist) this reduces/threatens to reduce energy intake, which increases hunger function to compensate for lack or prospect of it. A cycle is established.

Then you have binge eating disorder, 

...defined as consuming large amounts of food within a two-hour period at least twice a week without purging, accompanied by a sense of being out of control.

That's not a cycle. Also, the equivalent of "purging" is the restriction beforehand. It's a reversal of binge/purge, instead its restrict/restore. One step forward, one step back.

That this is not really an eating disorder like anorexia or binge/purge is confirmed by this startling piece of information: "...an issue that’s remarkably responsive to treatment.." EDs aren't remarkably responsive to what passes for "treatment", because that doesn't consist of any technique that does the job of restoring response to hunger.

Responsivity to "change the way they think about and consume food" is a voluntary action. The whole point of a disorder is it has become involuntary, that's why people ask for, or end up in hospital needing help.

I've usually struggled to grasp what BED advocates were getting at, the coinage contains different cross currents of hunger and other metabolic dysfunction. The addiction folk don't get it, for them-eating=thinking. They want to fit it into their model. "...they think of food in addictive terms."  "They’re obsessed with food..." Obsessed with food is those using the diet-weight hypothesis;

...unusual relationship with food. ...they think about food...they gorge on food... ...change the way they think about and consume food. ...a great deal of food.. ...hidden foods and/or food wrappers. ...unaware of the smell or the taste of the foods... 

That's the first 6-7 paragraphs, excluding all references to eat, eating and binge. 

Food. Food, food, food, food, food, food, ........................foooooood. Food. Dammit. Foooooood. Once you step back from all this and you really begin to feel the senseless obsessiveness of it all.

From BED advocates descriptions, I'd realised it's probably an effect of chronic calorie restriction dieting. As I said, there is no yo-yo dieting, dieting is the yo-yo. If it takes at all, this heightened hunger is one reason why it doesn't.  

I had to reserve judgement in case I was missing something. They also vigorously denied this link.

Since many binge eaters restrict food intake during the day and binge at night, the goal is to get them to eat three meals a day and a snack.

Those who treat eating disorders use duress and pressure to get some restoration of a person's hunger response. Getting someone to eat three meals a day is hardly that. It's more like someone who hasn't been eating properly.

Despite "diet culture" etc., people still cannot grasp that calorie restriction dieting is inherently unbalanced. Including if not especially people who should know better by now. This may come as a surprise given the insistence that "weight loss" is an absolute no-no due to continued conflation of that with cal res dieting. 

Seems (dieting induced) weight loss is totally bad, but dieting itself can be good, so much so, that this gets in the way of perceiving the unbalancing effects of dieting. "Good dieting" is when your body overcomes the assault, not the the nature of the assault itself.

If you smoked furiously for a few years, stopped and your body did not succumb to any related probs later. That's not "good smoking" that's your body's operations standing up to that pressure. As they are designed to do but cannot in every instance.

I've put it out there that the "obesity diagnosis" is not compatible with mental health, it is an assault on it, not the "drug addiction movement" [no such thing]. Freudian slippage on "fat acceptance movement" there. Addicts do not reverse their dependence, they go through withdrawal, that doesn't demand much transferable skill.

This sort of linking of fatness to various pathologies seeks to use your acceptance of terms supposedly embedded in our psyche. Usually to do with finessing professional failures as the way its supposed to be, up to an including letting people die -yes, what Michael Buerk said. 

Whether or not one can be fully cured of binge eating depends on one’s definition of “cured.” 

That'd be normal hunger function, which is of course not their aim because they're not charged with solving anything. What they've forgotten is the current targets of their theatre are. If something is "remarkably responsive to treatment.." treatment which consists of voluntary action of stopping cal res dieting and the pathologising of yourself and your body-should fully 'cure' it.

Treatment often begins with efforts to recognize distorted, all-or-nothing thinking .....

Like;

Normal people don’t consume 4,500 calories worth of food in one sitting, or order takeout for four when dining alone. 

Yeah they do, it's the function, not the person. See how journalist generalised from the specific, typical all or nothing thinking, like 'obesity', which because someone else feels some way about your size, the whole of you must be defined by that feeling.

'Intuitive' Shopping

"Why Britain is ditching the weekly shop".

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

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

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

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

Um hum.

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

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

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

Dieting/healthist eating is the opposite of commonsense.

Life Needs Life

Chanowk Yisrael grows produce in his urban landscape.

Yisrael.... tells me that for some of the folks (even into their 30s), this was the first time they’d experienced the joy of pulling a piece of fruit off the vine and biting into it right then and there. It’s a life-changing experience, he says, that he provides for people year-round in his backyard garden.  

Pick it, smell it, taste it. Even imagining that is more enticing than any healthist bulletin of eat this or pay the wages of disease and death. Whatever you opinion neither food industrialists, many of whom would put unrefined canine poop in your food if they could get away with it, nor fanatical fantasists poisoning our understanding of food, should be allowed to dictate your experience of food and eating.

People eat according to the best and most suitable choices for them available in their environment, whatever any projection insists. Folks do not exist in a vacuum.  Not according to the dictates of the price of everything and the value of nothing and/or the pleasure watching prudes.

Both are lacking sense and sensuality.

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?

Middle Class People-Have Your Long Overdue Examination of Your Own Drug Use Now Please

Ludicrous attempt at talking up the pretence of a gigantic plot by sinister agents of industrial food to addict the US, no the worldwide populace to 'sugar' in a sort of repeat of the Chinese Opium wars, except without the imperialism, bloodshed, or opiate drugs.

The b'stards!!!

And do you know what else they've probably done too? Yes, they've prevented anyone from coming up with a viable model of human metabolic function. These dastardly biscuit peddlers have made off with our ambition nay our ability to find ways to adjust our own bodily function.

Bring it back right now, cake wallahs*?!*

It's all too horrifying. I daren't look........but I must. For you dear reader, I'm prepared to sacrifice moi-meme.

"Put down the donut: When Americans became hooked on sugar instead of natural fat, obesity balloned," by someone called Michael Joseph." Originally printed at AlterNet,

AlterNet’s aim is to inspire action and advocacy on the environment, human rights and civil liberties, social justice, media, health care issues, and more

You have to wonder who exactly is behind these efforts and why such as AlterNet with their stated aims of giving voice to alternative sources of information- are keen to give this a platform. Mickey's breathless page shows what he's about, claiming his opinings are "backed by the latest science" ah if ever such a mighty term were not so debased as science is right now.

That headline; "When Americans became hooked on sugar instead of natural fat, obesity balloned". Makes no real sense and has history backwards. MJ says as much himself "As we replaced natural sources of fat for sugar." That's the as low as low-fat diet, unnatural.

Low-fat diets were heavily (yes) promoted by the usual suspects; "obesity science," doctors, public health bureaucrats, busy body quangocrats, the meejah.

Heavily.

There might be a story around how this conclusion was arrived at-fat makes you fat and causes heart attacks. We were told that fat sticks to the insides of your cardiac vessels, leading them to infarct and such. Now we're told similar happens due to sugar. Back in the day it was refined starch.

Do people really still believe so fervently that diet is the key here? Really? Because I would have thought it was obvious that we have all just been chasing our tails on that one. The idea of low sugar/low carb is high-protein repackaged again and again. Diet is not a starting point. It's part of a process. It's what controls the process that is key to improving function and preserving, improving or repairing health.

Again I ask, why can't we just stop dodging that? What's the problem? That is the real story here. That is the real way we have all been sold out. Who's behind that? What do they want? What are their aims?

Dr David Katz said more recently that his expectation in promoting low-fat diets was that people would eat lots of vegetables, fruit and grains, emphasis on the latter-despite what he's implying now. In those days no one would dream of telling people to live on hundreds of portions of veg. No-one would have dreamt of the starvation calorie counts people are expected to live on permanently. Only when you were going on a crash diet.

It was clear early on that people wouldn't just drop the foods they liked to eat on the say-so of the likes of him. The idea of having your diet intimately dictated to as a matter of course-not say on a diet would have seemed laughable to most people. We have come to accept the idea that people should tell us how to eat and increasingly how to live. [Gives a clue of the motive behind all this.] In the meantime companies replaced in part with sugar, in order to brand foods "low-fat".

Its fair to point out this is a-letter rather than a spirit of the law-type finagle but that's how the food business attempted to marry irreconcilables with its profit motive. Were they expected to go into voluntary liquidation?

Any fault with current sugar overload lies squarely with those who peddle low-fat diets as a must. Their meddling constantly blows up in other people's faces. The most obvious being the lack of any real control people have other making adjustments to the way their bodies are using energy.

Now they and/or others are entering a new phase of their theatre of the absurd, pretending big biz acted nefariously to faddict people to sugar [what for?] The article recognises the weakness of that point though by citing your morning orange juice, whether concentrate based or freshly squeezed by your own hand, it contains a lot of sugar. More at times than their supposed bete noir-fizzy drinks (should include beer and wine). 

No more of any of that for you. That's realistic isn't it?

Underneath the headless back fat(ty) photo used-which may not be down to Joseph is this caption;

International diabetes organizations are calling for weight-loss surgery to become a more routine treatment option for diabetes, even for some patients who are only mildly obese. Obesity and Type 2 diabetes are a deadly pair, and numerous studies show stomach-shrinking operations can dramatically improve diabetes.

That's right, an article on the perils of doughnuts is promoting the cutting out of healthy functioning organs, for the purposes of "stomach shrinking". Repeat; the stomach is a muscular organ.

It is a muscular, highly vascular bag-shaped organ that is distensible and may take varying shapes, depending on the build and posture of the person and the state of fullness of the organ (see the image below).

Shrinking is a natural action of muscle, partial or full amputation isn't required for that.

As for diabetes charities, how dare they recommend this reckless mutilation, have they pushed for better investigation, or questioned the lack of progress in this area? There was a time when charities where the voice of reason or kept out when they had nothing useful to say. Now they are clearly becoming infested with agitants spreading the message of brutalising bodies with hack-happy-quackery.

Unfortunately, the American (and worldwide) public are experiencing the consequences. As we replaced natural sources of fat for sugar (and excess carbohydrate in general), soaring rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other conditions of the metabolic syndrome soon followed.

In real terms cardiovascular health has improved in the West as societal weight gain has progressed-whether health lovers like that or not. As for "metabolic syndrome", the clue is in the name. It might benefit most from the ability to alter the way metabolism is functioning. More experimentation of a different kind is where we need to go. Get off the drugs or surgery tip.

That will also be required to tackle type 2 diabetes in a more effective manner. Not to mention weight for those who need or want it and mental health problems, up to and including eating/hunger disorders.

Alternet shows a predictable profile of bourgeoisie self-repression about their love of drugs, poking through the hole torn by their bigotry and fat phobia. "We're all being used: No, it's not immoral to use illegal drugs." Um yeah it is.

I've queried this myself in the past. How can people allow themselves to be complicit in the deaths of so many poor oppressed people in the Americas, just in order to get high? At the same time as casting fatness as evidence of immorality or addiction then coming down on people like a ton of maggot infested shit. Can they not see that's a description and judgement of their own behaviour? It's not how I feel about it, its about how they feel about it, no matter how obscure it is from them.

This time the point is made from the horses mouth, a Mexican business graduate [NYT link].

I was born and raised in a midsize town in northern Mexico. As a child, I biked and skated in the streets. But these days, kids aren’t allowed to play outside. Everyone has a heartbreaking story of how the drug trade has damaged his life.

Folks prefer to talk about Mexican 'obesity' without too much mention of the effect of the drug wars tragedy and restraining of youthful impulses to move around. Another example of the way fatigue with serious structural problems migrates to 'obesity' which becomes a proxy for fixing life. I remember asking a fat phobe why he didn't know the health "costs" of paedophilia. He said; "We can stop obesity".

Stopping 'obesity' is like a living fable for the idea of being able to stop wrongs. There's an element of desperation about the need for us to believe we can and practise that on something. To others it feels like a safe space for our ability to right wrongs. The need to win at something simple is more valuable to others than any sense of what its doing to those its aimed at.

Note the way not bothering with coke is not seen as a reasonable ask. Instead of thinking about the damage Mario Berlanga speaks about firsthand, we're informed actually, this isn't about the blood in coke, its about the illegality of the drugs. You know they're illegal, so don't take them in the first place. If you do, own that. If you can't do either, don't use fat people to explore your repressed shame, it gives the game away that you know the score (lit.)

Violence — whether among cartels, or between cartels and government forces — plagues cities along drug trafficking routes. Shops and restaurants shut their doors, employees are laid off. Cartel members routinely steal cars at gunpoint. They take over houses and factories for shelter and fire automatic weapons in public spaces. My relatives have been forced to drop to the ground at home and at the supermarket to avoid being shot.

Guessing its not a comfort to know someone's feeling better from all this.

Food as drugs, eating only for pleasure, hunger is addiction is displacement. Its the pressing through the psyche that which is being heavily repressed.

So spare us your tedious symptomatic macro-nutrient paranoia. The only thing that has been hijacked is science-by pseudoscience. Increasingly, people are seeing that all too well.

Failed Approach Tax Levy

Yeah, the promise of big fat coffers tantalisingly await 'obesity' dealers.

Government skittish about sugar taxes?!* Cancel that! George Osborne, UK Chancellor announced a 2 year post-dated sugar tax on fizzy drinks in his annual budget.

The turnaround was an effort to shield himself from immediate blowback on the more controversial elements of his proposals. Such as cutting financial support for disabled people or whether his accounting adds up or not.

No wonder folks refer fondly to this as politricks.

The hiatus is supposed to give fizzy pop merchants (type that without laughing) a chance to "reformulate" their products to comply with sugar fearing fanatics barmy dictates. The last macro-nutrient these experts turned into public enemy no.1 was fat. Unfeasibly low levels were demanded to give us all eternal life and save healthcare £££'s [do their promises evah?]

Food producers replaced fat with sugar and "unhealthy" saturated fat with "healthy" polyunsaturated fats in the form of vegetable oils. Then trying to substitute animal fats their chemists ingeniously found that if you hydrogenate veg oil, you get solid, fats, trans fats as it turns out.

Oh sugar!

Now there's supposed to be a sucrose epidemic. Au secours!

It's sugar not fat is the cause of all ill health [and probably evil], despite producers already withdrawing from previous levels, when nobody was fat. Remember when you could see the sugar in a digestive biscuit? Arguing about sugar levels just feels like validating this nonsense. No reason will suffice anyhow.

Give this time, sugar'll make a comeback in some form, just like fat. 

Braying public health agitants gain zero humility from any of this. Food is still the cause of weight, except it isn't. Weight amongst other things, is decided by an individual's metabolic function.

The response to this news falls mainly between; personal responsibility. Fat people must be blamed has managed to become the last stand of western style free will. The other is, companies have a duty to reduce the sugar in their products. This tends to be presented as conservative/libertarian versus nanny-state liberal/leftists.

Fiddlesticks.

They're the same team. The ob cult specialises in creating these empty polarities.

Not only do both cast fatness as inherently blameworthy and blame fat people for being. They support the framework that created this levy. 

If you insist weight must be lost via inducing calorie deficit, it's hard to see how you think this sort of thing can be avoided. If a quarter of the adult population could induce themselves into a permanent proto-anorexic state, that would reshape the food business, putting certain business out of business.

A loud hangry mob who would trample over your rights in pursuit of a society shaped around helping to hold them as much into sub clinical state as possible. Some might say you've got part of that with slim people. Not that they are hangry. Just enjoy making sport of people.

The intended outcome of product "reformulation" and what the "child obesity strategy" will likely be about, unless it consists of putting together a crack team of real scientists who intend to do some proper science and aren't beholden to the 'obesity' cult. 

If you insist on the imposition of calorie deficit, which way of achieving the same thing is more humane? Ordering companies around and taxing them + rearranging the environment? Or pressing and setting up milliolns of people for failure, undermining them mentally and physically in the process? 

The first scenario-millions of permanent proto- anorexics isn't likely to happen. Ergo, "individual responsibility" has its cake and continues to have it, whilst the pressure on individuals continues to rachet up....... until what? You criminalize fat people? Don't laugh too hard, social workers are already involved. That's some of your 'costs of obesity' right there.

Don't ask anyone to cry for the food biz, they didn't defend people. They didn't step up. They didn't question the framing of weight.  Indeed, they too invested in it looking to make money.

Hoist with your own petard, sugar fizz.

The food biz could have made clear that its products are not to be demeaned nor used to insult and degrade people. That's still an option by the way. If your products are shit, make them better. If they aren't, do not allow them to be spoken of as if they are. Trouble is of course, the food biz does itself no favours by continually degrading many of its offerings with cheap substitutes for proper ingredients for profit, just saying.

Fat people on the other hand fall over themselves to implicate their own behvaiour; "We don't eat right/ eat too much/eat when we aren't hungry" and so on. I notice this because I always do notice the gap in this area. 

Listing fat people's purported failings makes a person feel exempt from said flaws. But if this is all 1st world problems (no I don't approve), then logic dictates those reporting this have to assume they're just as "free will" shirking themselves. Little could illustrate that better than trying to dump your real or perceived flaws on someone else, to make yourself feel better. 

In comparison with fat people's immediate uncritical embrace of weight loss dieting, incredible dedication, tenacious refusal to give up on it and stoicism in the face of defeat.

I make no bones [har] about being against this tax. Its an opening sortie in funding the parasitic 'obesity' industry-that still includes a lot of its "research 'n' science". Its real aim is to perpetuate itself. Producing nothing of any earthly use to the people it gave the world permission to despise.

If it gets away with this tax, the demands will continue and become more expansive. Why indeed should soft drinks makers pay a sugar tax when there are numerous other 'products' that contain sugar, namely fruit for one. Aaaaah but that's the good kind of sugar.....but not if you're paleo/sugar low. Even fruit has gotten caught up in the dead end that is food=weight.

I confess to having lost track of this explosion of nutritional nonsense.

Your body should be levied too. It converts a large part of your diet into a form of sugar in order for it to be available as energy. The sugar-is-poison crew don't tend to bother much with that.

Taxing food taxes the poor, not because only poor people eat sugar, merely that they consume it at all.

Men's weight is rather uniform across class, it is women's that varies substantially between the richest and poorest. My view on weight and socio-economic class is the fattest overall are not an official class per se but where the aspiring working and lower/impoverished middle classes meet. 

They tend to be permanently overstretched, overtaxed but also pressurize themselves and carry a certain shame that often comes from aspiring toward better (ergo, the implication being, what you are isn't good enough) along with the loss of as firm a sense of place. Not fitting into the class that matches your income nor that which you aspire to.

It's not bad to be there. But you can get lost in the pressures that are on you, in you, shaping you.

These kinds of chronic underlying stresses lead to shifts in the functioning of your body, i.e. altering your taste buds to favour sweetness. This is body led, your tongue is merely the end point and facilitator. It is instinctive coping and survival. It has nothing to do with "comfort eating" which is another dubious mis-conceptualization.

This is likely what's behind Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier speech were he talks of the poor wanting something a bit "tasty" rather than bland food advised. Food tastes different in different mouths and even within the same mouths in differing contexts. He too, like many of his counterparts today assumed it was purely about pleasure.

The more free range working class tend towards thinness. Though I cannot confirm it totally, there may be a greater use of eating disorder techniques, such as making yourself sick to help stablize weight, amongst better off women. There seems a lesser chance of multiple stresses, fewer insecurities, financial etc., makes it less likely that you'll fatten.

"Healthy food is more expensive" is not my personal experience. Cooking skills, styles and appetites are as diverse in poorer people as in the better off. The pretense that because poorer women seem to be fatter overall than the richest women is less down to the food eaten than the way their bodies are functioning though both reflect the contexts that they live in.

That's why some slim down when they get famous/better off. They are out of that milieu, their body's workings shift. 

The culture of shame surrounding food means people feel on the back foot when it comes to anything to do with eating. There's a sense of having to excuse and justify what you eat. Though I do think there is something in the food desert thing. I'm not sure the full story's been told on that one. It might be better to say that if you are middle class, there tends to be less need for you to have to be able to cook.

If you are poor, that is more likely to put you under immediate duress.

Healthy is more expensive is popular as few bourgies of any political hue can tolerate the fact that it takes more skill to survive in poverty with any balance, than it does in wealth.

The belief that the poor require nutritional "education" comes from the assumption that poor people are stupid/ ill educated (by their class right?!) If you are brought up eating certain kinds of things that's your 'education'. That's no different than other people eating what they've been brought up with. I was brought up the same way, I wasn't "educated" about food, I didn't need to be. My mother fed me mainly on food cooked from scratch, centered on fresh produce.

Weight disparities among some poorer groups of men and women can match those between poorer women overall and the men in their group, double. That would not be so if food was the 'cause' of weight.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.