Pre-existing conditions, Schme-existing conditions

America's current healthcare funding woes are a reminder of the way the current shift in health modes from-health problems are a largely random misfortune that happen at/to you toward health probs are your fault...which yes, both are rather silly but, ya know, culture.

Let's take sleep hygiene, yay! Now you must get the required amount of sleep, or else-you die [the epic coup de foudre of all health these days].

...his conviction that we are in the midst of a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic”

There's that word "epidemic" again. The 'obesity' model is spreading-pardon the pun. At least this incarnation of invasive duty-dicktat doesn't define a person as something other than that.

Second, they should start thinking about sleep as a kind of work, like going to the gym (with the key difference that it is both free and, if you’re me, enjoyable).  

Settle your excitement, I'll betcha can't wait.

Though there's some acknowledgement of the sheer real life inconvenience/implausibility of this.

....in the end, the individual can achieve only so much. Walker wants major institutions and law-makers to take up his ideas, too.

Admirable realism in comparison to the ob cult, albeit that's rather a low standard. It's aimed at people who do not have the extensive cult level conditioning of BMI 30+ and will only tolerate so much.

For example, if people must starve, they should probably be doing it in largely in bed with minimal demands on their energy. By the way, the assertion that folks can necessarily shed serious weight on 1,200 cals brings an amused smile to my face, before you get to long-term sustainability. Why do you think they are having their stomachs excised for?

This 1 in 4 Americans have an expensive pre-existing condition, insurance-wise, caught my eye, it sounds suspiciously low. Who really is undiagnosable with something now? Would you confidently bet anybody can get away with proclaiming themselves healthy, merely because they've got nothing wrong with them? Have you learnt nothing all these years? Lols.

And lifestyle is getting funnier by the day for other reasons too,

...the KFF has a list of conditions that insurers routinely used to deny coverage or inflate prices prior to the ACA, including: HIV, treatment for alcohol abuse, anorexia, bulimia, cancer, heart by-pass surgery, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, obesity, pending surgery, pregnancy or a man whose partner is expecting a baby, and sleep apnea.

So anorexia and bulimia, effectively CRIWL the only permitted "treatment" for "obesity", are pre-existing conditions, along with it courtesy of the AMA's LIE, not forgetting "diabetes" that's also "medicated" with anorexia/bulimia/orthorexia/mutilation.

Anxiety is the state which is demanded from anyone straying into BMI 30+ in order to "motivate" themselves-supposedly. And depression/low mood happens with chronic underfeeding and starvation. It's also what happens when anxiety exhausts the nervous system, along with the extent of force used by the nervous system in trying to fight off and restore the effects of sustained energy deficit.

Dieting for any length of time requires an obsessive-compulsive focus merely to implement it and probably the development of one if it is to become a life sentence, evidenced by how difficult it is to "give up" dieting.

This sort of thing blunts satire's edge. 

Don't Punk the Function, Change the Destination

I was somewhat aghast at gaining insight into Dr. Sharma's current perspective on metabolic function. Using the spring in elastic as an analogy for the body's resistance to calorie restriction induced weight loss-CRIWL, he tells us again why a failed strategy's failure is the fault of the body,

No matter how hard or how long we pull, the rubber band keeps wanting to bring our weight back to where we started. 

That 'resistence' is homoeostatic in nature, part of the body's own self regulation. It is why though your cells replace themselves many times over your life (cycle), you still remain a recognisably human form.

Fighting that is like fighting the body's instinctive design to restore itself properly. You don't fight your body's natural abilities to self regulate, you use them. If Sun Tzu was here he'd tell you, even if you insist on going to war, that's fighting to lose. The rise in weight over the last 40 years of multi-gazillion ££$$'s slimming, fitness, etc., industries has demonstrated that ably.

That answers "....how do we take the tension out of the rubber band?", we don't. That "tension" is exactly what keeps a person at 8 sts/110 lbs/50 kilos. It isn't the issue. What we do instead is to reprogramme its destination, so it this 'resistence' can deliver and repeat that outcome.

Later, Dr. Sharma explains why CRIWL is more retainable in the longer term, without an intact stomach,

......and we now understand that this has little to do with the “restriction” or the “malabsorbtion” resulting from these procedures but rather from the profound effect that this surgery has on the physiology of weight regain.

I took a WTH take,

.......the profound effect that this surgery has on the physiology of weight regain.

And a third,

...the physiology of weight regain.

Got it. Being cut into starvation makes it easier both to achieve CRIWL and to sustain more of that loss, for longer, though he again puts it with more of a flourish,

.....many of the hormonal and neurological changes that happen with bariatric surgery, seem to inhibit the body’s ability to defend its weight and perhaps even appears to trick the body into thinking that its weight is higher than it actually is.

Yes, surgery hampers the ability to respond to your body's signals even in their acute phases (hello anorexics). That latter reference is interesting, why would the body thinking it is heavier than it is lead it to lower its weight, or assist in that?

Not many "fields" would frame amputation as "hormonal and neurological changes". I don't know much, but I'm sure if you lop off someone's leg, you'll reduce their body's protein and calcium, because a leg has muscle-that's protein and it also has bone and that contains calcium, geddit?

...bariatric surgery helps maintain long-term weight loss by reducing the tension in the rubber band, thus making it far easier for patients to maintain the “pull”.

It increases the tolerance of starvation, yes.  It can also reduce hunger dramatically, until the body heals enough for it to recover. Fat people especially have to waste incredible amounts of self control on CRIWL. Surgery, saves a little bandwidth enabling  that to be invested in maintaining a state of lack. Allowing an outstanding level of discipline to pay off better than intact bodies can usually manage.

I must also say, surgery adjusts the body before which is as I have been saying for years is the right way around to do this.

Metabolism is a bit more like a self driving car. If you want it to only go so far , then do not leave it programmed to go much further out. Alter its destination.

Don't deprive it of enough power to reach its destination, i.e. starving it, hoping it breaks down before it can get (back) to its destination-your starting weight, use its ability to regulate itself.

That can go either way as they say. Further in or further out, depending on where you want the body to end up.

The insistence on achieving weight loss or gain via starvation and forced feeding is unnecessary. Though Sharma gives ample clue as to where this is going,

For example, daily injections of liraglutide, a GLP-1 analogue approved for obesity treatment, appears to decrease the body’s ability to counteract weight loss by reducing hunger and increasing satiety, thus taking some of the tension out of that band.

For example, daily injections of liraglutide, a GLP-1 analogue approved for obesity treatment, appears to decrease the body’s ability to counteract weight loss by reducing hunger and increasing satiety, thus taking some of the tension out of that band.

GLP-1 or glucagon-like peptide 1 is produced in our own gut. I was led to believe that it acts as some kind of break or counteracting force on hunger. Hunger is a metabolic function, it is both affected by our internal environment and the state of our metabolic function.

Though its hardly straightforward to tease out, affecting hunger, will potentially affect the state of overall metabolic function.  What I don't get is why the amount of GLP-1 cannot be increased without introducing it, which runs the risk of compromising internal levels of production. The body is wont to react that way to outside sources of what it produces inside.
Hence why real addiction happens and why substance/drug use is something to be avoided, not courted. The medical profession used to understand this.

Think of it as sprinkling “magic dust” on that rubber band to reduce the tension, which makes it easier for patients to maintain that pull thereby helping them keep the weight off. Of course, both surgery and liraglutide only reduce the tension as long as you continue using them. Undo the surgery or come off your anti-obesity meds and the tension in that band comes back as strong as ever.

Is it just me or does that, especially, the last bit sound like a drug pushers patter? I have to ask for the umpteenth time, why are doctors increasingly determined to turn the public into drug dependents?

Think of it as sprinkling “magic dust” on that rubber band to reduce the tension, which makes it easier for patients to maintain that pull thereby helping them keep the weight off.
Of course, both surgery and liraglutide only reduce the tension as long as you continue using them.
Undo the surgery or come off your anti-obesity meds and the tension in that band comes back as strong as ever.
- See more at: http://www.drsharma.ca/stretching-the-rubber-band#sthash.cUDb5a1j.dpuf

Think of it as sprinkling “magic dust” on that rubber band to reduce the tension, which makes it easier for patients to maintain that pull thereby helping them keep the weight off.
Of course, both surgery and liraglutide only reduce the tension as long as you continue using them.
Undo the surgery or come off your anti-obesity meds and the tension in that band comes back as strong as ever.

Diabetes Trippy

I'm not even going to pretend to care about Rob Kardashian or the rest of his family. I don't get what they are for and I'm as okay with that as I am with others totally getting the point of them. But it seems Rob has got the diabetes.

The fat kind. The naughty, type 2 diabetes. The one you get for being guilty.

The twist here is he's basically a bit of a five minute fatty. Unconvincingly so at that.

According to reports, this man gained over 100lbs in one year. He was also depressed, seemingly hyperphagic and having problems with alcohol.

From my own point of view of no medical expertise whatsoever. I'd say such a cluster of symptoms, along with such ferocious weight gain signalled RK's incipient diabetes. This could be totes wrong of course. That a slim guy decided apropos of nothing to force feed himself, turn down thermogenesis and chub up by a nice round 100lbs (why not 50 or 150?) because erm, "fat logic" is far more plausible.

After choosing to enter "fat logic" whilst slim, he became depressed about it, because he was getting what he planned, yes, that sounds the ob construct mal-logic to me. Never knowingly makes sense and no-one cares because it serves a purpose, nothing of which is to be of use to any fat person whatsoever.

Interestingly enough, he was taken to hospital suffering diabetic ketoacidosis, something most indicative of type1 diabetes, the innocent, unimpeachable kind. Alas for Rob, his problems made him fat, so, the obstacle that is the 'obesity' construct will have to be negotiated.

In my strictly non medical judgement.

The ob construct is increasingly forcing medical segregation by body size. From the nonsense of "obesity-related" to this progressive cleaving of diabetes along weight lines. I'm not entirely surprised to learn that diabetes tends to be the classification for chronically elevated blood sugar. Like others, I'm not particularly convinced that they are related to each other enough to bear the same tag.Though I could not swear against it either.

However the issue here is not about weight, it's about metabolic function and whether the angle we are viewing it from is the most useful or accurate. I didn't get those suspcisions from the good doctor, I've said forever that the term "insulin resistance" has always thrown up a conceptual red flag for me. [I can't help a wry smile when I hear "auto-immune" too.]

In a way, the addition of "leptin resistance" seems to confirm my suspicions about the nature of cross over between type 2 diabetes and weight.

As will be of little surprise to you, Rob has been told his diagnosis, rather than being shock of mortality, a challenge to his personal sense of self, or a potential light bulb moment for what he may well have assumed was wholly "emotional" is simply a "wake up" call for him to stop being fat etc.,Yes, heaven forfend any fellow feeling on the impact of finding out that you have an illness.

"Everyone knows," fat people get ill solely due to the wages of sin, in order to motivate them to an anorexic triumph and the approval of people who think that's an apt response. The criterion for diagnosing diabetes has been lowered to that end. And why not? It is frequently said, that medicine is an art not a science.

RK's apparently off to rehab for the etc., part of which is probably indicative of his underlying condition. The best comment on rehab was made by the late Amy Winehouse. She was much mocked for this, but all she said was the truth, rehab is mostly hot air. Unless you count attention and time away from your normal existence.

That's usually called a holiday. 

Rehabilitating Your Urge to Move

We are born moving and have instincts to move that are rhythmic. At certain times it feels better for us to move than others. Like at times it feels better and easier to get to sleep than others.


This article, "Lack of Exercise can disrupt the body's rhythms" is talking about exercise helping us to know optimal times to move. It feels like its conflating exercise with movement, which sometimes happens. They aren't the same. The peaks of your natural instinct toward movement is something you should be able to pick up on at any state. If anything, I'd say exercise isn't a good way to achieve this for most people. Especially if you aren't in to it.

It's a bit like demand feeding/normal eating/intuitive eating. You have to clear psychological obstacles out of your mind-like identifying your body as inherently incompetent or yourself as forever physically incapable. Adopt a new more neutral open-minded stance, if positivity is too much of stretch.

Put your mind on alert for optimal times to feel the urge move at its most strongest, then above all, respond to those feelings/urges, freely. Act on them, no matter how short in duration-seconds even!
Follow through with that impulse as long as it feels good to you, stop promptly when it ceases to- at least at first, until you get into the swing of things, later you'll gain more flexibility.

With consistent practice and patience these urges should become stronger and more distinct, longer lasting and more satisfying to engage with.

The key is learning to perceive and go with rise in your instincts to move, synchronize impulse with a positive response. Avoid overburdening them with excess desire, guilt or shame about seeing yourself as inactive, or needing to make up for lost time.

Now's the time to learn patience and love for yourself. Go at your own pace.

You can do this outside the movement you need to make to go about your normal affairs. It will feed into that at some point.

Make a point of shifting your consciousness away from any negative or forcing to a more coaxing wait and see what you can do, type stance.

If at first you can't feel any sense of an urge to move, then try for least disinclined/most easeful of all. And take it from there.......

Lack of Vitamin D is more associated with Diabetes than being Fat

This is intriguing. Apparently those measured with low levels of Vitamin D are at greater risk of developing diabetes, regardless of their weight. It has the novelty of being an even greater risk for diabetes than those flung around 'obesity'.

The body uses exposure to sunlight-on the skin-to make vitamin D.

It reminds me of a guy who's done pretty well for himself. He grew up with sister's who made him stay in and do his homework, when he just wanted to go out and hang out in the streets with his friends. Some of them didn't do so well.

He went on to gain a degree and has a career in public doing things he likes.

He's also a fat diabetic, though he could by this token just as easily be a slim diabetic. The dilemmas of health and the sacrifices demanded to aspire to higher and to get there. As with life in general, we will all have to make some sacrifice to our health, to ourselves at some point, to get what we want.

Indeed, to prioritize health above all else would look very strange if not immoral. Who's to say, a feckless abandonner of a family is not preserving their mental or financial health? Who's not to say the incompetent have said on some level, this far and no farter? They don't always say the good die young for nothing.

In all this boneheaded @besity malarkey, we rarely touch on this. Because its comforting to have do this and go with health, do this and go against health.

Should this man's sister's have left him alone to hang out and maybe not so qualified, but perhaps more acceptable in weight and maybe not even diabetic [until perhaps later anyway]? What's the priority then?

I know a similar family where there seemed to be some tendency toward type 2. Some in the family had it. They too were a Black family whose parents had done menial jobs and worked very hard. The children turned out to be; social workers, teachers, lawyers and so forth. Success stories.

One of the undercover impulses driving the 'obesity' cult is blocking of aspiration. You see it in the way they attack celebrities who are fat and successful. The life-sucking calorie restriction dieting plus the ego desiccating 'obesity' branding promises to take the edge of what can be needed to fulfill potential. Though all the presentation is otherwise. What's needed to come up from outside, from underneath is belief and stamina. That comes from practice and application. Not running around half starved.

The old pulling up the ladder. Maybe that's part of the extent to which people succumbed so readily to the 1%. If they'd spent more time paying attention to what those above them in class were up to and less to keeping out others below them socially.....

I'm also not sure about the old arrow of causality, does susceptibility toward diabetes mean your body is less able to make Vit D? Or is it that less of it does something that undermines metabolic function? What I do know though is that what is deemed healthy for one area of your body contradicts healthy in others and that's rarely mentioned in the kindergarten level-simplistic calories in/out healthism.

HAES is not the Paradigm Shift

HAES- "health at every size" refers to making wellbeing/ health decisions according to what works and makes sense to you-which is the norm for all humankind. Those choices go according to what best facilitates your ability to function, what suits you best and what is most sustainable for you. HAES came from fat people's own desire to re-assert a normalcy that had been derailed by official interference from medical healthcare influence and society as a whole.

In other words, its (fat) people behaving normally. 

The real paradigm shift happened when fat people were diverted from that cause in order to adopt calorie restriction as a way of life. That wasn't the initial intent, which was temporary. It spread to take over people's lives because its dysfunction and profound inefficacy did not act as a break on its imposition.

No "evidence" was produced to show that this made sense or even what it was supposed to achieve.

The instigator of this counter-intuitive, self harming and futile behaviour was people considered to be scientists and the actual medical profession. Via cultural imposition of discomfort and unease they sought to make good the idea of being as disease.

In other words, the main driver of calorie restriction dieting-which is repulsive to most people was escape at any cost, not a positive embrace of the foul. 

No "evidence" was produced as to show how this improved health or even would succeed in these purported goals. Which were supposedly slimness but look far more like deepening and containing a person in a no-man's land between discomfort and self abuse. What would be the point of seeking to ghettoize people as a class-by weight-in order to liberate them from said ghettoization?

No plan was made of how this was to work out. 

The basis of excusing this behaviour was pathologization of fat people or 'obesity' which posited people as slim with or without the imposition of an adipose suit that is a disease, a dis-ease generating organ etc.,

No proof could be advanced for this as it doesn't accord with anatomy. Declaring slim people as shrunken failed fat people cannot be proven as the premise doesn't hold. The human body is not ideology, its anatomy that's objectively observable.

No evidence advanced for which pathways would turn this kind of stress into health-in those above a certain body mass. No one would expect pathologizing (slim) people, defining them no longer as human but as dis-ease as leading to health benefits. So at least explanations would be required to explain why that changes.....

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. 

None was proffered. 

The reason I have difficulty with haes is, I have little idea why normality is being touted as a paradigm shifting novelty. This continues the learned habit of defining anything that comes from people as case for the defense. When actually, the prosecution has not proven its case.

In case of any undue excitement, its lack of such does not mean either the process of weight and weight itself cannot be a problem. I shouldn't have to mention that though, because its obvious the 'obesity' has little interest in dealing with that. Their case is solely about social engineering and doleing out punishment.

Deliberate intent to contrive unnecessary pathology goes against all the rules of health. Even a snake oil salesman or a quack knows better than that. This could be easy to miss in the case of 'obesity', because we're used to treatments for life threatening conditions, i.e. chemotherapy for cancer being almost as rough as the disease itself.

That is a by-product, a side effect of the treatment not its aim. That's the difference between real disease and 'obesity'- the former is a problem which treatment seeks to relieve whilst the main aim of cure is at the helm. 'Obesity' wallahs own estimation of 'obesity' is its nowhere near disease enough.

Strange Taboo

It's unacceptable to say that a fat person can eat little compared to saying a slim person can eat a lot. But one rarely referred to taboo is that one can have an irresistible compulsion to eat, but not enjoy eating.

Again, there's little problem with saying that one can have a sexual compulsion-that is an overwhelming desire for sex, or to keep getting sexual relief-orgasm. Seeing as some seem to doubt sexual compulsion.

This experience is far more prevalent than one might think.  For example those who say they "Hurt themselves with food." Seem at least in part to be relaying an irrepressible drive to eat without pleasure.

I had no idea this was so until I let it slip out. The reaction from one girl was so hysterical that I felt need to withdraw it so she'd calm down. Then much later on, I remember discussing this again, after preambling it with that very incident.

As if the word irony had no been invented, a similar thing happened and I was accused of not knowing what I was talking about. Because what I said didn't match the wrong descriptions of ignorant disinterested people, who call the ED shots.

The hot button seems to be food=pleasure. Anything else is somehow unacceptable. Yet my experience is that the pleasure of eating is generated by the correct workings of the mechanics used for eating and digestion.

If your body is out of song then it either isn't generated or felt.

What's even more intriguing is the issue of control.

It's presumed that ED's mirror each other. That they have the same issues and themes despite different context, behaviours and outcomes.

One thing that's most associated with anorexia is control. This is probably due to the worship and fetishization of anorexic behaviour as the only route to inducing deliberate weight loss. Hyperphagic disorder and anything associated with it, is seen as the opposite, out of control, though there are sometimes attempts to press it into the AN mould i.e. fatness is first defined as an ED, which it isn't, then described as trying to gain control by filling a void of despair, like anorexia.

But when it comes to genuinely having a hyperphagic disorder, I'd say the control bit is more likely to be showing through any insistence that one either eats purely out of elective conscious choice, for pleasure, or to "hurt" oneself.  

Ask yourself how many times you hear a hyperphagic say anything but.

Liberation Posture

If those running NHS England and other health politicians, medics et al are solely motivated to elevate people from a passive infantile attachment to the healthcare machine. They might spare some focus for poor posture.

After years of seeming to belong to some quaint past, people have been instinctively picking up again, with nary a peep from from our unquestionably benign patrician establishment.

Sports people increasingly use posture braces and wear t-shirts with built in aides to hold the body in better alignment, whilst on the move, which is a step on from the adjustment of standing or sitting. That gives a potential public face to raise awareness among people, without the necessity for coercion of either party.

I remember cottoning on to this many years ago. It came into play when too much of my rather overwrought desire to improve/support my health was going down the drain, due to the cul-de-sac of weight loss dieting and exercise as a vehicle for it. And whilst I do not claim to be an exemplar, far from it. I'd say without the level of awareness I have, I'd be palpably worse off for it.

I know other fat people (as well as others) arrived at the same point for the same reason. Depending on how your body's shaped, higher weight can make it seem more of a challenge, due to the pull weight can exert but don't let that put you off. It's possibly more rewarding for fat people to take care of their posture.

It's one defense against succumbing the burden of the 'obese' construct, which exerts a physical as well as mental toll. A lot of the things fat people are supposed to have, bad knees, hips even things like joint pain are often the cumulative effects of bad posture and mis-use, ditto for others including thin people. Consider why so many people require one hip or knee to be replaced.

Use. The way you use your body, your habitual posture, stance, gait. That goes for fitness related injury too. Usually the dominant side that goes first-i.e. if you're right/left handed. 

This is all challenging enough which aids mindfulness and patience, force is likely to cause harm or impose more strain.

It's pretty obvious that this is a big influence on the extent of back problems. Ditto those who keep getting the same injuries whilst doing sporting or other physical activities. That's usually a postural fault or a problem with the way you use your body, and/or even your mind whilst you are being active. Other times its a physical kink.

Seeking to restore, and improve posture and use is accessible for most people, regardless of physical status. It challenges and increases our awareness of our bodies, rather than shifting more locus of control to the medical machine under the guise of "personal responsibility". It reminds me a lot of the aims of HAES, which was a therapeutic desire to keep and restore function to fat people abandoned by the medical system. You have to start from a place of acknowledgement, preferably acceptance and work from there.

Above all, it's positive. It seeks to liberate rather than to constrict in preferred pathology. Even just  regularly visualizing pulling up a string coming through your spine and out the top of your head, is enough to help to begin the process of re-training the way you hold yourself.

Hypothalamic Obesity

Things have been rather eerie lately. Turning a corner and walking into some unseen land that has uncannily familiar themes.

I've found it strangely chastening to read experiences I know many can relate to outside the straitjacketing imposition of the 'obesity' narrative. Like, this is what we are not hearing, despite never hearing anything but "obesity, obesity, obesity."

The haunting feeling partly comes from the suffering of children. It feels a little like gatecrashing someone else's crisis. Reporting the shock of fellow feeling and identification feels like I'm subverting their desperate situations to my own purpose. These stories are undoubtedly worth reading in and of themselves. 

It started by reading an article by Robert Lustig-yep the sugar is poison and responsible for teh "obesity epidemic" guy. It's about something called "Hypothalamic Obesity." Things got a bit too real in a different way, when I also tripped over a parent blogging of her young daughter's experience with this condition.

I don't doubt many others will relate to some of it too, despite not having had hyperphagic mayhem having a prize fight in your brain. I'm sure despair in the face of upward gain, in the face of trying so hard to prevent and reverse weight will strike a chord with many. 

Hypothalamic obesity is when a tumour on the hypothalamus-an endocrinal gland located on the underside of the brain-is removed and this trauma to the hypothalamus provokes aggressive and speedy weight gain and fatness. We're talking relentless weekly if not daily gain.

The difference between this 'obesity' and common or garden kind is, it's accepted as real. It has a distinct and objectively observable trigger or starting point, so though it wouldn't be impossible to deny, it would be harder to.

It cannot be cast as an elective choice of the individual and that its accompanying hyperphagia-heightened and/or excessive hunger signalling, is an actual imbalance in the body, rather than subject to being twisted into such as "food addiction", emotional disturbance, neurosis etc.,

There is an insistence that this hypothalamic obesity [HyOb] is marked out from other 'obesity' by being resistant to weight loss diet and exercise. Now anyone in tune with reality will note that this is not only unconvincing on its face its not true in reality either.  

It's marked by its trigger-tumour removal (occasionally the tumour itself) and speed of gain. That speed is probably a sign of what makes it even more intractable that just being fat. The hyperphagia that accompanies it isn't felt to be commensurate with fuelling such speed of gain. The body is storing energy at a high rate.

I am a Person

I'm a human being. I'm one of the people. Citizen, homo sapiens, c'est moi. And I am perfectly happy with that.

I didn't ask to be given any names or brandings.

Not 'obese'. Not "overweight" none of it. These words are unsolicited, unwarranted, unwanted, impositions.

I am not interested in identifying as or with any of these. I consider them in the same light as a non-Jewish person considers the word Gentile, or a non-Muslim considers the term infidel. It's someone else's name for what I can be categorized as, from their point of view. But it has little interest for me, beyond that.

Luckily for me. Neither Jewish people, nor Muslims would feel self important enough to think they can just brand me with these. Getting their media cronies to repeat them like not doing so-one time, would stem their breath.

If anyone on the grounds of anything, weight for example feels the need to disconnect from people they wish to categorize.

I suggest they give themselves-names.

And leave general terms like people, person and so forth for those who are happy to wave them bye-bye.

Being Felled by your Own Hating is Something to Avoid

After years of "humiliation" and "shame", Linda Kelsey ex-editor of cosmo and rampant misogynist wonders why young fat women- who should be feeling as bad as her very great self-don't seem to her to be;

what I witnessed was a let-it-all-hang-out faith in themselves and a don't-give-a-damn attitude to their evident obesity. ......Far more attention and, dare I say it, opprobrium needs to be directed at young fatties.

Despite being a hack, she didn't think to strike up a convo and find out. Probably for the best.

She claims women have swallowed the "dangerous body positive message." They're concerned about their daughters weight but dare not say lest tip them into anorexia.Well, as calorie restriction is the primary instrument of anorexia, they've got something.

Though, is she sure it's simply that?

My mental and physical collapse — the most accurate way I know to describe what happened to me — was a clear sign that, like many women of my generation, I was spreading myself too thinly, trying to do too much, too perfectly, without letting my superwoman mask slip. 

Perhaps these women are aware of what a (literally) dead end hating your body and/or self is and where it can lead?

Depression sucks the life-force out of you. It makes you hate yourself. It makes you feel utterly worthless.

After all;

nearly one in five adults experience anxiety or depression, with the highest levels occurring in women in over 50

And;

Though those figures are high, they also mean that if you are one of those unlucky ones, four out of five people won’t have a clue what you’re going through.

The "unlucky" ones? It hardly counts as bad ill-luck if you end up there after life of cloaking yourself in body shame.

She starts her earlier piece on what shame and self hatred does to a susceptible mind describing the awful torpor of neurosis. Years of high anxiety exhausting the nervous system-which then collapses into a state of chronic exhaustion, i.e. depression. Turning an everyday errand to the supermarket into a "herculean task. Impossible"

Does she think people as borish as herself walking past her at that time, like she walked past those fat women, would know what she felt inside? From the outside?

After wasting years doing the same kind of thing that helped get her to this point-chiding herself for failing her perfectionist standards-she finally cottoned on that this was rather self defeating. When she got the end of her will to live;

Having sunk to a place where I believed that I, and all those who loved me, would be better off if I was dead,

Yes, she was committed. Even if she does believe fatness is 'unhealthy' she ought to have learned something about the paradox of human beings doing things they think are right, only to end up with unintended consequences.

Instead she prefers glib talk show therapy speak. Claiming gratitude for the experience. She wishes, this tirade reveals she's as bitter as a pike wishing on others what she barely endured and is still struggling with. Except to to exhort others to surround and force them into this state so that unlike her, there's no escape for them, when they've had enough.

As with other fat phobes, solipsists personnified. This has already happened to many fat people. And perhaps the young women themselves may have already been to that abyss. Gabourey Sidibe was put on her first diet at six and burnt out at about 19. Later she made the decision not just to stop chasing bad, but to step up and decide who she was and how she was going to feel about herself.

All you do is climb in, then have to claw your way out again. As Kelsey had to. I don't care who you are or what you weigh, at some point, you will have to decide who you are, regardless of what or who others think you are or should be.

This is what a mature woman with the wisdom of experience is supposed to tell young women. That wasting yourself like this, will get you a blown nervous system, that may never truly recover.

That's a lot of her problem, living in that head full of hatefulness and shame, 24/7. Never being able to get away. Sorry, but not all depressions are the same. Not everyone is depressed because they received bad treatment, from others.

This woman still has the same hateful credo that pulled her under her own moving vehicle. Her "recovery" like so many who naturally invest in fat phobia, was to absent herself from her own judgment!

the unswerving support of friends and family was critical. They never blamed me or told me to pull myself together. They knew I wouldn’t act this way if I could help it.

She had to get permission from them. Imagine if they hadn't given it to her? Instead, confirmed her view of herself and told her to stay there. Where would she be then?

Anger towards her is righteous enough, but remember, she has to live with herself. I'm truly grateful for that myself. That's punishment enough. She can't get away. There's no respite from the ugliness within and she's quite angry about that. Just like many 'motivated' i.e. self bullying fitness junkies.

Oh the honesty of fatness! Unlike neuroses, which continually flatter to deceive in this kind of way. Weight is metabolic. It cannot be fooled by drugs, sub- therapy bull-shiting.You've either affected your metabolic function, or you haven't. You can manufacture some crude temporary assault-this shallowness ends up being evident....

It's this kind of neuroses therapy, drugs haze merry go round, that gives the impression that something has happened. People like Kelsey expose that utterly. She has learn nothing, except to get herself out of the way of the Leviathan pulling her down and volunteer some other victims for it. As if that will do anything for her dim soul.

In some ways, her feelings are being exploited. Her still raw anguish and rage are hard for her to suppress in the face of those she deems so utterly beneath her. Others want to get at fat bitches and put us in our place just as she does, but know just enough to sense how bad that makes them look.

So, fools rush in, and are rather laid bare. I doubt those who paid her for this effluent give any more of a damn about her dignity than they do the fat people's she's being set upon.

Well, you know what? Not playing daily mail.

This is the kind of thing I've seen so often from fat phobes. And I'm not going for it. I've got better in mind than your repeated attempts to set up a fat versus slim-women. Nope, not interested.

In some ways I pity this Kelsey, no, I really do. That's not undercover contempt. Though if she feels insulted, I'm okay with that. "I have more compassion for MYSELF and others" She claimed.

Call that ambition.

A cure for diabetes? Poverty

Being too poor to eat or more accurately, having not enough food around anyways. Between 1991-5, in the post-soviet shakedown Cuba's ability to feed itself decline. This lead to a population wide fall in consumption of calorie intake and weight of 12lbs/5.5kg on average .

Along with a fuel shortages, which caused people to take to travelling by pony bike and foot, diabetes went into decline. According to boffins, this caused a decline in the level of deaths by heart disease as well as diabetes. Smoking was mentioned, but no matter.

Intriguing given the notoriously better health of richer people. Rather in keeping with an underlying green romanticism about how measures people take when poor are green and need to be preserved.

After 1995;

A rebound in population weight followed in 1995 (33.5% prevalence of overweight and obesity) and exceeded pre-crisis levels by 2010 (52.9% prevalence).

Sort of what happened in many countries post-WW2. That played its part in the weight spikes of the 1960's and 70's, the latter is the real beginning of the modern rise in fatness.

This is what my brain worked out years ago, weight regulation (management) via calorie restriction requires the whole of society on a diet. Yet we're all constitutionally designed to loathe and resist calorie restriction. Furthermore, those less inclined to store weight's interests begin to be diametrically opposed to those who are more inclined to store weight. And the former win.

Individualization of weight loss is not about blame, its about leaving slimz and thinz out of it. The blame is a lever to apply this, not a cause of trying to make calorie restriction private. 

Rather like gastrectomy is the only thing that delivers meaningful weight loss results (to hell with health and too often life obviously). To overcome the high resistance of our design to cal res, you must cut people into it restriction. The parts of the mind that don't run the body, cannot override the parts of the brain and nervous system that do. Or the latter would be superfluous and nature always has a reason.

Society shaped around dieting is key to implementation. The results are another story.

Four years isn't long enough to find out what would happen. There's little doubt in my mind that any longer, would simply reveal other problems. That's the problem with the fashion for either/or assumptions replete in healthism.

The weight loss or undermining of the ability to maintain a higher weight for those who aren't prone to storing fat, would create more of them and more health problems for them. Just as before when they suffered from such societally induced wastage. This is part of fat people's proneness to guilt. The sense that we are shafting them.

That comes from this chosen solution which is insisted upon, no matter what.

That's why some along with myself have pointed out, the best resolution is to find a way of altering the metabolism individually. Dieting isn't that, sorry, it only impersonates it. That should satisfy everyone. Don't want to lose weight? Don't. Want to, do. Slimness can no longer pretend to be a big deal, no class created around weight falsehoods. A block to eating disorders acquired through trying to lose weight through cal res. Yes that's the cause of many ED's, no probably not all.

As I keep saying, manipulating metabolic function is a gateway to better treatment for all issues related to metabolism and use of energy. That includes the possibility of better (actual) mental health treatments-drug free ones. Note I mean real scientific study of actual metabolism and its function, not any pseudo 'obesity' nonsense.

Or we can continue with this derangement.

Reblog: Food cannot be an Addiction

You cannot be "addicted" to what is necessary to your survival.

What addiction really is

Your body makes certain chemicals to-amongst other things- help animate you physically and mentally; an example of these is endogenous opiates.

If you take in a version of these artificially, i.e. use drugs from the opiate family; cocaine, crack, heroin. Your body reduces its internal production of these chemicals-in order to prevent your body overdosing. After your system has used up these drugs, your body restores its own production back to normal or near normal levels. The gap between this happening is what users refer to as "coming down". That down period indicates some of why the body makes these chemicals.

Addiction happens when your body doesn't or cannot quite restore its level of production back to normal. It is then under-functioning. This makes people dependent on the artificial supply to support their flagging system. It's the point when users say, they take drugs not to get high, but just tofeel normal." This can happen because the mechanism is sensitive (to being depressed) or inflexible in some people. Or it can be worn out through repeated intake of drugs.

Things required for a substance to be addictive

An intoxicant.

That means a substance that has the capacity to literally, poison and/or end your body's ability to continue functioning. It is the body's attempt to avoid destruction or death that is the basis of addiction. You cannot be addicted to anything that cannot poison or overwhelming your body's ability to function.

The substance makes you "high."

This refers to extreme mood elevation (not mere relief of urge or pleasant feelings). Changes in perception can occur; i.e. seeing things that aren't there, not seeing things that are there (hallucination) and so on.

Addictive substances, disassemble your functioning, i.e. you become physically and mentally uncoordinated.
Getting high is a by product of the intoxication process. It's literally the early stages of poisoning that's messing you up. This is an objective state. It can be observed by others. It does not need to be "discovered" through brain scans or misinterpretation of the workings of the nervous system.

As has been clearly demonstrated by the AMA's recent decision. Many people no longer use words for their meaning, but for their associations.

Addiction, in the minds of the ignorant- often those who stigmatize drug addicts-is associated with being out of control, not being able to stop some habit or other. So whenever they have a troublesome issue they think, "addiction". When in reality, genuine addiction is an issue of function.

The self dramatizing attempt to appropriate misunderstanding of drug addicts experience must stop. Addicts have already been put through enough; sacrificed by society, marginalized, hounded, demonized and pathologized. Their habit put into the hands of criminals in order to mash them up, acting as discouragement for others.

Anyone who wishes to describe their issues with food is welcome to do so accurately and put the effort in to understand and explain to others what they're going through. They also need to stop ignoring the fact that everyone eats.

We all get hungry, have appetites and eat. They do not own food, nor have the right to distort or pathologize it to gain what they feel is sufficient recognition for their pains. If they cannot do that by describing their experience as is. Then they have to question whether their feelings match that reality.

Their reprehensible linking of a natural self nurturing act to pathology, forgets this will condemn children for the first time to grow up perceiving self maintenance as an act of dependence. Rather like thinking of sex as a shameful act. The culture of anorexia as 'cure' for fatness is already lowering the onset of anorexia almost to toddlerhood, are we going to bookend this debacle with another disaster at the other end? We owe them more than that.

An excess of appetite and /or hunger is usually more along the lines of an obsessive compulsive disorder;

Don't get pleasure when performing the behaviors or rituals, but get brief relief from the anxiety the thoughts cause

Eating relieves the extreme build up of pressure coming from your (overwrought) hunger and appetite mechanisms. This is not getting high. Though experiences and interpretations may differ, I doubt getting high or drunk on cake would have gone unnoticed.

Obsessive compulsions and neuroses of any kind demand re-balancing of your overall nervous system not abstinence (which doesn't actually cure the cause of addiction. It deals with the symptom-drug use).

With obsessive compulsion- an essentially benign instinct has gotten to a way higher setting. You don't need to rid yourself of it totally, but to get it back into balance. If you have this problem you need to look at balancing your system as a whole. [I'm not recommending that particular book it is just an example of the overall approach. Seek out a version that speaks to you.]

Calm yourself and your system down as a whole. Some have found meditation helps to start that process. Stick with it as it can take a while. Stop any habits of self hatred or putting yourself down. A lot of people with this problem have a habit of taking disappointment in on themselves in order not to show aggression. This can act as a depressant on your system which then seeks additional energy to keep you from sinking into mental illness. It requires you to change the way you see yourself. To learn to trust yourself and your emotions.

The power of STOP!

I didn’t realise how much the counselling industry had penetrated the mindset of a strata of society 'til I visited with the internet. Not that it is necessarily a good or bad thing, but as with any valued cultural theme, the enthusiasm invested can spill into making a fetish of its dominant themes.

The one I’m thinking of is, talking must occur at all times-to affect an almost quasi spiritual cathartic resolution. I don’t mind this, I know how to talk myself and was once described disparagingly (he felt) as over-analytical! Heh-ayee, that’s one of the best admonishments I've ever had!

So theoretically (I thought) I’d be on board with things must always be talked through. But to my surprise, when it comes to the kind of circular negativity that is all self perpetuating momentum and no logic like say, fat hating yourself. I’ve learned that sometimes there is just one word needed.

STOP!

I’m not saying that’s all of it, but sometimes telling your brain to HALT! The momentum of these pointless and circular thoughts is the best thing you can do. It's all you need to cling to when you're tired of thinking, talking, worrying at and wrestling with all sorts of rubbish that just happens to have gotten a hold of your brain. Things that have been circling around your head for years and probably will forever more unless you tell them to just:

STHU.

And don’t feel it has to be once either. Keep repeating as many times as you want, for as long as it feels like something you need like; relief, peace, or to feel like you are doing something when you don’t have the energy to think or do anything much.

You don’t have to worry at all or think about it, just move on when you feel to. And return to it whenever you want. And guess what? It has an effect. Well, I’ve found so. It doesn’t necessarily stop all or any of them, dead, not at once. But it can and does weaken them enough to give other options a chance.

Don’t worry too much, allow the effects. Then think about what they are.

So talk things through, talk the hind legs off a donkey if you like, but sometimes you just need one four letter word.

Expanding the repertoire

I was given a nudge to think of an aspect of the conjunction between fatness and disabilities when I read this;

People who are unhealthy. Many people are unhealthy and also fat, many people are fat and disabled, and the framing of health at every size excludes them.

(My emphasis).

This is the frame;

I liked the idea of a movement specifically reinforcing the idea that being fat doesn’t make you unhealthy,

I was reminded that all fat people are expected to method act that we are ill and possibly disabled to help achieve the ubiquity of the obesity prognosis. This has created a reaction and desire to assert the true variety of fat peoples health, in this case average or normal health as it is that rather than, illness or disability that is being erased from the discourse. Usually its the other way round.

We have been set up this way in order to try and justify the special diet prescribed for us, one that rather than the elimination of troublesome nutrient groups or types of proteins, seeks to minimize food, full stop.

The nature of calorie restriction and the fact that it creates and often introduces numerous disturbances, pathologies and imbalances of its own, combined with the false premise, has created a desire to return to normal eating, movement and above all relationship to self, especially by those fat people untroubled by more than general health concerns.

This moves directly away from connecting with PWD in a way, although I'm not by any means saying that they all need special diets either because I know they don't. But it is salutary to consider this potential directional tension.

In a sense the closest an average fat person with average health is going to get to feeling like a PWD or someone who needs a special diet, is being 'obese'-as expected- and weight loss dieting respectively. And that is in part what they are moving against, because of what it does to someone to act the part of being ill or having a disability.

Its important to note also that the HAES was created in some part by those who either had or were moving toward infirmity and/or disability at least in part due to mental and physical obstacles placed in the path of fat people having a positive relationship with their bodies, especially as well as their minds.

I've said before that intuitive eating or I'd prefer, normal eating is not suitable for anyone who needs a special diet for any reason, because the needs that prompt that diet requires more use of conscious direction, which is closer to weight loss dieting than normal eating.

The thing that makes this more sustainable is the absence of calorie restriction, although that can often be a side effect, something that has been well noted by those who peddle them to aid weight loss.

Indeed, in normal eating the conscious mind plays an important role. Intuitive eating (which some think of as normal eating) however most people tend to assume it means eating with as minimal conscious input as possible, by bypassing it whenever possible. I actually think there is a place for this, notably when recovering from a long term weight loss diet/dietary restricted mindset, temporarily until recovery can begin.

The problem is not the conscious mind itself, but the overinvolvement of it to (especially) restrict calories which is the central failure of the WLD strategy.

So the issue is to scale back that over involvement to a more balanced ratio and divest it of negativity and anxiety about eating. The latter is something that's available to all no matter their dietary needs and there may well be some further applications to PWD/special dietary needs, but I feel like it has to come them as they are the ones likely to be most aware of their own needs and what does and doesn't apply.

I don't think its enough to say exclusion, merely because something doesn't and maybe cannot meet your needs but does meet the needs of others because they have differing ones.

All this leaves plenty of room for mutual upliftment, however when it comes to divesting oneself of pretending to be something that one isn't, how does that affect those who are in that situation in reality? Care must be taken to emphasise the problem is the falsehood, not the state itself.

Is there anything that can be learned? I don't feel qualified to answer that. There is no central body of FA, I think people have to contribute what they know to it because I don't think its a good idea to leave it to the ignorant.

The question is about support and working together to do whatever it takes-that we can do- to get that knowledge worked out, fully realised and included.

*Altered for clarity, apologies

FA is my HAES

That's right, self acceptance is my HAES. Health is uncovered not pursued. Not outside, layers within. When I located health outside myself, through others I became alienated from my centre. To accept oneself is to accept health. To reject oneself is to reject health.

What is pleasure? Is it partly a desire for well being and that's the basis for health. Health is a consideration in some way in everything we do. Without being fully aware of this. It overlaps with the desire for enjoyment and that which is pleasing to us.

It is an inner need, not an outer one. We do not need to be told to be healthy. We need to reject that which makes us unhealthy. Including those who seek to manipulate our deep unyielding desire for wellness, for their own ends.

That's for the sake of their health in some way. The need to see their own ideas reflected everywhere they look, to reassure them, to make them feel safe and validated. Isn't that about their health, even when it's at the expense of others? Isn't that their personal philosophy, that others must be sacrificed, if they're to be okay?

To reject pleasure/enjoyment is to reject health and healing. Self defeating hedonism is the chasing of that refused pleasure-it is displacement, not motivated by some unseen monster that is "pure greed" there is none. There's only needs we are attempting to fulfil, sometimes the wrong way. The need is not satisfied and grows ever more frustrated and unrequited. Until we are exhausted.

It's the need to make good that loss that they often call, addiction, that leads to the real form of it. To embrace oneself is to embrace health. To reject self is to reject health, to hate oneself is to hate health.

Hate creates displeasure, loss, a loss will be felt, that loss will be mourned, that loss will be chased. To hate is to wound, to love is to heal. Hate is not health. Spite is not health giving. To create either is to create displeasure, is to ultimately create ill health. Hate for its own sake cannot come out of health. Only righteous hate can be the beginning of healing.

Movement is to the body what thought is to the brain. I want to think with the whole of me, together and in turn, mind and body, body and mind. I choose to move my mind and my body. I don't accept those who tell me, my body is wrong or bad, it is incomparable.

Allow me to serve my health, in the way that makes sense to me. I move me-I move myself, myself moves me. I don't exercise, starting at exercise is meaningless to me. Your way of health may not be my way of health and vice versa................

Smoking fat stand-off

Thanks to living400 for a link to a gratifyingly amusing article. It sheds some light on exactly why the toxic pile that is the obesity crisis is increasingly going to bite other people on the arse. Basically in it the quietly admirable Gina Kolata looks at the entirely predictable way in which obesity hype cannot cash the cheque its been allowed to write.

Many in FA, have predicted already that there is no way that hyping fatness over smoking as a health risk is not going to impact on anti smoking. If the crisis didn't make people so brain dead, or if they actually tried engaging honestly with us, they would have noticed the threat themselves. But no, they've just blundered right into that one!

So much for the endless lectures we receive about our inability to face reality, or consider consequence ha, ha! I'm sorry, but when people were talking about how fatness is worse than smoking, takes more years off your life etc., Did anyone really think they were going to just grow money to throw at their obesity boondoggles?

You think the obesity crisis creates money out of nothing? My, are people out of it! What's even stranger about all this is the fact that smoking is correlated with weighing less. So there's an even greater irony of symbiosis. Fatness is going to continue to bump up against little empires and citadels and whilst I wish no-one any harm, the prospect of this could get interesting.

Trauma

Seeing this article on some studies about the role childhood trauma can play in health outcomes and specifically becoming fat, [thanks to Bri for the link] fills me with mixed feelings. A conclusion from one 286 person study reported that 50% of fat male adolescents had been sexually abused, makes one wonder about how fat men would feel about being identified thus.

In this atmosphere of everyone being an expert in fatness and its supposed inherent pathology, violation of fat people's sense of privacy is par for the course, this is a bit much though. One can imagine having to either deny or even to avoid comment when confronted with the usual inquisition regarding why one is fat.

Not pleasant to have to deal with the shamateur psychologists, who feel it's imperative to confront fat people with their latest notion and watch them squirm with from a vantage point of smug superiority and denial. Any reaction is felt to show the innate wrongness of fat people and confirms the rightness of the action. The report does the usual thing of fusing fatness with mythical decisions to "overeat", rather than considering the possibility that the overall stressors on the nervous system change the way the body functions in a wide ranging way, including affecting appetite and hunger signals, it then says this;

High ACE scorers who do not overeat, smoke or take drugs still have high rates of obesity, heart disease, depression and diabetes.

(ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences)

That refers to metabolic change. It feels to me to undermine the idea that that 'overeating' directs weight, more than being a feature of metabolic activity (change). It also suggests that the presence of fatness in the body, changes mood, supports, keeps it elevated against the downward pressure of traumatic events. Or even feelings of shame. 

Which would explain why people felt disturbed by the loss of that anti-depressant effect. It gets on my nerves when this is creepily explained as the person being scared of weight loss. How would it be, when it wouldn't occur to many people that their weight itself is the defence not any eating that may be occuring.

Of course that generates feelings of panic, fear and a sense of loss, that weight is playing a role. The fixation on food has always obscured that the emotive 'causes' of fat or anything would be more logically dealt with via dealing with the trauma rather than attacking what's likely to be a defence mechanism in action.

It doesn't surprise me that our nervous system especially can be permanently changed by titanic emotions, positive and negative. You have one body, everything that goes on in your head, all your feelings and experiences are processed in that body. How can that not affect its function?

No fat health dream

An article by a guy called David Frum illustrates so well how desperate some are to see ending fatness as the solution to health inflation. The frame fits the usual patsies;

And many are uncomfortably aware that self-destructive behavior is most often found among the poor and among minorities: Black women are more than three times as likely as white women to be severely obese.

Yeah, how could they behave fat, abusing themselves with racism and classism like that, not even having the decency to use their magic to clean up the mess. That magic stuff which makes society's whipping boys able to lap it up and not show any signs. Unlike those accorded more room to manoeuvre who still manage to come down with all sorts, some at their own hands too, no doubt.

Before assuming health outcomes are solely down to a favoured fixation and it's supposed endgame, one should make sure treatment, when received isn't an issue.

Black people may take less out of the system to deal with their issues, in terms of drug use anyway. That could could be implicated in putting timber on anyone prone to it. Before jumping to conclusions, I suggest people look into things like that and comparative consequence.

Which points up something else. Fatness is such an easy target, especially false equivalence. Children not wearing seat belts is hardly comparable to fighting a primary instinct of your life force. This assumption of free standing fatness, without context or positive intent for it-by the body, fails to take into account that when you try to deal with real things through suppression, you can just drive that energy elsewhere.

One could say the decline in smoking as good as that is has removed an obstacle to weight gain. I'm not advocating smoking. Just noting that stopping smoking doesn't necessarily stop the reasons for smoking.

Pretending there aren't reasons doesn't do that either. Take note this time.

Chaging of the body's use of energy and type 2 diabetes

This article, basically a puff piece for how great and safe GBS is and how its a diabetes cure, references a small study which showed fat diabetics who have GBS lose less weight on average than those fat people who do not-have diabetes that is.

I learned that losing 40% of "excess weight", not weight at surgery as I thought, is considered a success for the procedure. Of 310 patients studied,  92% who weren't diabetic achieved that figure, and 79% of those who had diabetes.

No one is sure why. The speculation from Dr. Guilherme Campos, head surgeon at the bariatric facility concerned noted though the procedure is the same, surgeons use internal the persons anatomical markers as to how to shape the reduced stomach. 

I wasn't sure why that was relevant unless those tended to vary according to having on not having type two diabetes. Ditto the flexibility of the stomach, with regards to its capacity to recover its previous size. That sometimes is total or as near as before, meaning between 5% -15% of GBS patient lose no or little weight. 

A more pertinent possibility was mentioned- medication taken to combat the condition. Which tends to preserve weight due to actions to regulate, lower blood sugar. I'm not sure how that's related to what happens when that energy when is driven to exit the blood.  

It's a salient connection, lowering of blood sugar with weight preservation/ gain, which points to weight's defensive possibilities. That would be a connection to uncover properly.

I note Campos himself defines diabetes as "a consequence of being overweight." If that was the case, all fat people would have it and no slim people. Clearly there's the usual question of direction of cause plus the influence of innate susceptibility.

As I mentioned, its just as easy to explain the other way around. Fatness is a defence, self management, or a side effect of the development of diabetes.

The argument against that is lifestyle change staves off  the onset of diabetes, even reverses it, which would again be to do with the alteration in the body's use of energy. What would be intriguing is to find out exactly what is going there.

It's been noted that the so called curative affects of GBS kick in before any real weight loss can occur, which is to do with the re-routing i.e. bypassing of part of the small intestine. Another example of a change in the processing of energy.