Well, well, well. There I am perusing the Establishment by Owen Jones, it's about the power elite that run Britain. Barely do I get into the foreword and he writes this;
The modern Establishment relies on a mantra of 'There is No Alternative': potential opposition is guarded against by enforcing disbelief in the idea that there is any other viable way of running society.
This reminds me of there is no alternative way of reversing weight but the one that doesn't really work, and is a brutal, time-sucking, disordering, self abusive, waste of energy, literally. Though we're focused "weight loss," it so often ends in gaining that back, plus. So you are fat and remain so, whilst being told you're doing otherwise.
The illusion of viable escape is another facet of this kind of class hustle. What really makes this trap is weight loss and dieting as one and the same. That there's only one way to regulate weight, as this one doesn't work, it's assumed there's no way. Why wouldn't there be?
Do you know how many ways there are to regulate fertility? Any system of any complexity has numerous avenues for changing outcomes.
How many ways are there to deal with mental health? Drugs-how many drugs? Talking therapies-how many of them! Gestalt, primal scream, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, cbt, aversion, that's just off the top of my head. Not only different kinds of things, many varieties and they're still looking. Who ever heard of one way, that doesn't even work is all there is and all there must be due to erm "morals"?
Doesn't the contraceptive pill work? The 99.9% effective pill? Why wasn't that the be all and end all of contraception then? Even if dieting did work, so what? Why would that stop anyone looking for something else if there's so much to be gained?
Acceptance is noble, it is and can be a positive choice and a liberation, but we are being blocked into it. Why? What is the point of insisting on this route? And it doesn't help those who need help, progress has to be made for them alone. Why don't they come first? If they did as they usually would, this whole crusade would be seen as untenable.
Why is this trap tied to social engineering, micromanaging people's lives?
A better grasp of metabolic function hold far more promise than weight. Better control of things like mental health along with obvious metabolic problems that can be hard to manage, diabetes, pcos....
Metabolic function is too fundamental to us to be left unknown.The brain is being mapped, the bacteria in the gut is being mapped. What's so special about metabolic function? It isn't as discrete, it's multi-system, but, isn't that interesting to ptb? If not, why not?
There is no alternative, especially if we're not looking for one. Why not though?
'Obesity treatment' continues to be even more scant than long term weight loss dieting "success." To illustrate what this means for those looking for real answers. See the story of Falicia and her mother Earlene Johnson. Who just wanted to find out why her eleven year old daughter is 400 pounds.
You'd think that would be a reasonable request. Concerned mother who's been following the rules since 2007 wants further inquiry, resolution and probably reassurance from specialists. Unsurprisingly, beyond the usual diet and exercise. Nothing doing. Ms Johnson and Falicia were referred by the child's paediatrician to the ironically named Children's Mercy Hospital. Where they offered her succinct but utterly useless white coat fat phobia.
They believed Falicia was eating too much and that her mother could stop it. Trans. we have nothing and we're going to make someone else feel bad about that. I have to commend the mother on her calm approach, it's a priceless gift for her daughter.
The hospital effectively failed child and mother. Refusing to do any blood work-though Falicia has had plenty and has been well monitored-to try and find a cause once and for all. Now the story becomes odd as next day, the mother was met by Missouri's child services. The hospital had apparently "hotlined" her claiming her daughter had a disease called "blout"(?)
Something that doesn't appear to exist in humans.
Either way, they'd effectively refused to investigate. A later one showed the child's blood sugar and cholesterol to be in the acceptable range.
The point of this sorry little tale is we cannot get beyond ELDM even for the sake of the children. What's worse of course is that this hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Once accused it is virtually impossible to refute. Which is supposed to take it outside the realms of evidenced based.
[I'm so diplomatic today!]
Even if that assumption has validity, you're not out of the woods. Excuse the usual inflammatory reporting here, it is unpleasant.
Now it's clear seven year old Jessica has both the issue of speedy weight gain/high weight and dysfunctional appetite and hunger signals-which simply aren't switching off despite being responded to. That is incidentally, how we all eat. We respond to our hunger and appetite signals, that's what they are for. If there are too many, or they're constant and unresponsive to eating, that is what needs to be addressed. If only to relieve perpetual torment.
If you haven't experienced this, do not imagine the rubbish you hear about 'food addiction' or binge eating describes this properly, or just how unbearable it is. It is some kind of imbalance in the brain and/or nervous system.
Jessica was taken into a paediatric hospital and put on a strict calorie controlled diet and exercise programme. Under the aegis of child services.
Here's a follow up to that intervention at an 'obesity' clinic.
So problem solved.
Except it isn't. All that happened is one symptom has been removed-weight. Though relieving the weight on her body. It also leaves behind 20 pounds of loose skin-which she will be operated on to remove. It is assumed that's a product of weight loss after the stretch of higher weight. It's more a sign of the shock low energy weight loss dieting is to the system. Making it an apt metaphor. What has shrunk the body has left the underlying equation the same. Just taking up less space, within its larger creation.
Leaving the poor person to do a whole lot of teeth gritting. Forcing herself to exercise 5 days a week, forcing herself to eat less and to not eat certain things. Walking through a ceaseless mental forest of an ever present urge.
Her malfunctioning high appetite and hunger are left intact. How to convey this, ever tried to stay up all night? Ever get to the point where it becomes excruciating to remain awake and it's second by second effort of concentration and will? Imagine feeling an urge that strongall. the. time.
Would you deem that 'addiction'? No, it's an actual imperative to do something, not a deficiency. A basic visceral urge like, a phobia-which isn't a normal fear, but sometimes kind of worse and more pressing.
Addiction is a craving for something your body lacks. Not drugs, but the pleasure or reward chemicals your body reduced the function of, when they were being taken in an artificial or outside source habitually. To stop you overdosing. People want the drugs because their system isn't recovering.
The reasons behind seeing this malfunction as 'addiction' are why poor Jessica has nothing but some pills-yet another junked up child courtesy of 'healthcare'- to try and battle through a constant pressure. It's the kind of pain that doesn't hurt like a cut, but that takes you to the edge of your emotional endurance nonetheless.
That's why she cries out. You can see what her mother was responding to. Luckily the people at the clinic remained strong and set her straight, by the admirable 'discipline' of not giving a shit.
I cringe at the thought that these kinds of pills will do anything to deal with the problem. You can cheat neuroses like depression to some degree, but not a mechanical failing like this. Where real understanding i.e. science is required.
This is why I get angry, because children like these get caught up by this mindless zombie cult of the obesity void. They should have been able to depend on us grown ups getting our act together by now, instead they have to inherit this fiasco. What has to happen, what do these children have to go through, before it is enough?
By now, there should have been major investigation into how to switch these signals down. If they had, Jessica and others like her would never have reached the point she did.
By now there should have been a thorough mapping out of how human metabolism functions.
If the desire to help was there it would have produced something by now. To do that you have to recognize what you don't have. Many eyes are stuck on the magic bullet legend. But it's the caring for people, continually trying to meet their needs, that has so often given medicine direction and ideas.
Without that there's what? The hatred of fat adults, is one thing, but transferring that to children is unconscionable. The indulgence ought to be put aside for them. But the health establishment simply will not. Instead of reporting parents to child services, they should be reporting "obesity science" to some authority for being uselessly irrelevant and out of touch with actual needs.
Look at what other fields have achieved in the time wasted on one punitive, ineffectual strategy. How long will this go on?
In my case, which wasn't as serious as Jessica's appears to be. I was lucky to stumble upon an answer by mistake. After I took up meditation and other calming techniques for symptoms of anxiety that were threatening to overwhelm me.
I do not extrapolate for the heck of it, but I'm pretty sure this strongly suggests that it is possible to find some predictable, repeatable, in other words scientific way to reduce excess hunger and appetite signals significantly. Without drugs.This is systemic imbalance, not acquired habit. It is not caused by food. It is the mechanics of the nervous system and it's affect on metabolism. There is hope, there are answers.
I still remember when I first started commenting on the internet. I was on a certain leftist blog. Having one of my sadly numerous desolate sub-conversations with a smug middle class man. During which, he asserted laziness was a character flaw.
I responded that I did not view it this way.
End of conversation.
Apparently, if I was too out of it not to know the profound truth he uttered, when I heard it. We could hardly continue our futile 'exchange'.
This part of the internet has been strange for me. I expected to find connection with like minds. It has not been so-for varying reasons-in the main.
Laziness, that great cloud stalking fat people under the puny caricature of 'obese', is itself a lazy accusation. In whomever this quality is found, it is usuallysome kind ofmental protest. Sometimes its the early stages of a kind of melancholia, or even depression.
We can see a form of it manifesting in the rigid adherence to the calorie/expenditure model as the be all and end all of weight regulation. It's devotees want it to be it, hence they lack an overwhelming drive to go on and fill in the gaps.
Expectation is the key to this form of indolence. They feel it has already been done, when in fact, it hasn't.
Communication didn't have to be this hard. Some just want it to be.
It's posts like this that remind me again that fatness is keeps being used to discuss things that have been shut down elsewhere, due to the extent those things have been defended out of other discussions.
Time after time fatness feels like the last stand of people being able to say what they feel they need to say, yet what has it produced? A deeper understanding of metaphysics? Scientific advance? A great slew of ideas because our psyche's are free not to give a damn about fat people's sentience?
Hardly.
The same thought stopping paradox returns, coming from the disconnection slim people have developed for fat people.
The writer says, self acceptance is really hard, I don't want to feel shamed for not having the discipline/will for it. But I must do something about my weight, others should not feel shamed for the ill discipline, lack of will widely associated with that.
Why can't people connect these dots?
When fat people protest the latter, we're accused of being 'oversensitive'. Excuse me? What about someone in a weight loss diet ascendant society who feels marginalized merely because they rigid hegemony has broken down at xojane?
This disjointed way where slim people keep expressing the same or similar feelings to us and just don't recognise it is getting old. They complain and moan about what we say doing everything to de lgeitimize it, yet lead with the complaint we are doing that by no longer being silent and abject as before.
How awful of us.
Though the complaint is that it's becoming unacceptable to bray loudly about how repulsive your barely plumped body has become, rather than just stating exactly what your problem is. As if it's lacking in compassion to want you to hear exactly that, rather than a whole lot of generic fat hating.
It just doesn't make sense, using fatness to divorce yourself from your real feelings-why is that so important when you are complaining about the distress the underlying feelings are causing you?
This often seems more about self hating as modern femininity, yet pulling its punches by using fatness as a cushion for the impact. You want to reduce the impact, so you can keep on that way.
Often this is said to be a way female bond, when it seems more- how to be a woman. Those told to knock it off and deal with their real issues feel as if something is being taken away from them. When they are not subject to endless slews of fat women whining tediously about how from this angle they thought his part looked a bit (((gasp))) thin and they was horryfied, horryfied, I tells ya!!!
Having a thin rope (hur, hur) of acceptance for yourself as a woman seems to be an indicator of female acceptability, self dissatisfaction the primary agent of action and change for women. Yet, we associate men with action, even though they are more encouraged to achieve things by seeing themselves as just dandy.
Self acceptance for many, fat people especially is often one of the greatest changes a person can make. Yet again that is erased pressing it into the indolence of fat people, making a nonsense and a bore of an emergent fat consciousness of self.
I really wish certain people would just stop enforcing this boredom as a means of shutting down the involvement of fat people as subjects rather than objects.
It feels more like self loathing stems action and enforces that as a state. If women don't cut themselves down, might they go too far?
Some of us are tired of all this and fear the torpor of self hate more than whatever trouble we might get ourselves into if we have to face our real problems and what we do with that anchor lessened or removed.
So why pick indolence over laziness? Fat people are called greedy and lazy. I've stuck with greed, so why switch to indolent?
They both essentially mean the same thing "disinclination toward effort of any kind, but more specifically, physical".
The difference, if any is in the shading, I suppose indolence feels like it refers to a state of being, the end product of laziness. Whereas laziness is more about reluctance, rather than a habit of being so.
But I tend to use them interchangeably. Maybe I'm just really bored with the word lazy and it's overuse in a specific capacity has made it too loaded to express oneself freely.
And that is needed. One of the things we are told about being fat is that it makes you less intelligent. Looking over the 'sphere one can see that cannot really be seen as a general rule, however, in my own case, I do feel that being fat, or more specifically, being an obese person in the way I'm supposed to be, has compromised my the development of my intellect, palpably.
I'm cannot claim to be definite on that, I must leave the window of possibility that I was always meant to start off bright and dim into dimtwittery. However the level and sharpness of the latter, and the fact that one of the things that has been building up during my dim days like canned heat, is the desire to think.
Because one thing the crisis dogma is designed to do above all, is to stop all of that excess. If you try, you're always being told, "your making it too complicated", or what I call the tyranny of "just" comes out. "It's just this, or it's just that" and that is the height of all rationale, any thing else is overthinking. Stop all thought here, (x marks the spot) the world is flat and that my friend is that.
Wonderful.
And not degenerate, at all, it only looks regressive, really, it's no nonsense wisdom, cutting through the decadent and fetid air of thinking about stuff and trying to draw as much wisdom from the knowledge you have, in order to inform you of new directions.... New directions..... PAH!!! Haven't we got enough directions already? Haven't we got more than we can possibly handle?!
I'm digressing, I find indolence interesting apart from the obvious reason, because I've never been convinced that of it as a character flaw, always loud and clear it has seen to be a comment. The number one thing that comes to mind is, protest.
As I've learned, I feel that we end up in indolence because we hold fast to beliefs that lead us there, without trying to be cute, laziness to describe, laziness has always felt, well, lazy.
The efficacy of a treatment, remedy, medicine and so on depends on the ability to take or tolerate it. As much as its actual potency or lack of it. If you cannot complete the course, then its obviously falling short and needs a redesign at least.
Nothing to do with morality. Anti-biotic medicines work the same on lawless as the law abiding. Those deemed good or bad. Nor does efficacy depend on being deserving or undeserving. If you break your leg messing about or in the course of saving puppies from drowning, the treatment is the same. Or according to the requirements of your injury.
Medical need is the only judge when it comes to medical matters. What's being said here is not that fat people can never become slim and stay that way. It's that weight loss dieting is intrinsically unsustainable for the overwhelming majority of people and that's a feature of the way our bodies function.
On the rare occasion that it is, it won't be down to greater or lesser "self control". Its a biological anomaly that cannot be generalized.
The famous 95% of weight loss diet fail is a probabilistic figure. Every attempt at dieting has a 95 % likelihood of failure. I don't think that means the same as out of 100 people, 5 will succeed at dieting. It means every time you diet, that's the chance you have of sustaining it to something approaching slimness-if you're fat.
Anyone could theoretically have a very small chance of success and a far larger one to fail at any attempt. It is possible for some element of spontaneous metabolic adjustment to make a difference at any time in any person, whether they diet frequently or not.
'Morality' is a total irrelevancy when it comes to a medical treatment.
This kind of thinking, plus such as, you have to be positive, if you don't believe you can't do it etc., is the hallmark of quackery.
We're told diets work if you 'stick' to them.
It happens that the lack of sticking to weight loss diets is a product of their intrinsic dysfunction. Even if this were not so, there has to be a realistic assessment of probable chance of any measure. Not pretence based on assumption.
Theoretical efficacy is just that, theoretical-unless it can be made actual. We have a whole raft of clinical trails and tests for medicines and other treatments to confirm hypotheses. When you want to change A and you apply agent B to it. The acid test is whether A changes (in the way you require).
If it doesn't, no excuses are needed, it doesn't work. Take it from there, find out why it doesn't work and that might lead to you find out how something else could. Or don't, it's up to you.
