"The Economy Must Take Priority"

The current Prime Minister Theresa May recently released a paper on her government's policy on "childhood obesity". It was much criticised as weak and she was effectively said to have bowed to the pressure of big fud rather than to the plucky quangocrat public health grifters.

That's suppose to be choosing ill over good if you're unsure.

I simply cannot make myself give a fleck about that mess, but I was mildly diverted by her comments. I decided to read them in context, to get a feel of what made her back peddle even on plans already deemed by 'obesity' wallahs to fall short of their demands.

I can't pretend to have a secure sense of what Theresa May's about, but one thing I do get from her is she appears to be nobody's fool.

I trotted off, still ropey search skills in hand and was justifiably taken aback. I could find no further comment from the UK Prime Minister in any of the numerous farticles I had to hold my nose through.

Found a deluge of Jamie Oliver though. The sorority might want to consider the potential for knicker-twisting, revealed by journalistic standards.

Every article, at least the early on in a story's life-cycle should quote the PM's comments on her own government's policy before responding to them with opinion and editorial. No-one needs the whinging of mostly male "experts"who had nothing of any real value to say.

Especially as this fragment rose above the senseless dirge as an actual cogent response-share it or not. The economy comes before "childhood obesity". Now maybe the context was more conciliatory, I wouldn't know.

Does she know what a lot of child hating shit 'childhood obesity' is? Or is it just her pro biz instincts speaking? Either way, she's giving voice to what people call "real talk".

It's a bit like gyms who have more subscribers than they could accommodate if they all turned up at once. Continuation of the 'obesity' contrivance depends on not acknowledging the unviability of its failure of a 'cure'- that failure being defined as the failure of the individual.

Even the astute Gina Kolata's recent interesting piece on that biggest loser study was framed as "...why so many people fail to keep off the weight they lose."

May's response is why even if you saw things only in the mainstream way fat people are and have always been set up to fail and blamed for both that and the failure of the means of regulating weight.

Usually what appears to be sides of 'obesity' debating are phony polarities. In this case, those who demand calorie restriction comes about through "individual responsibility" and those who demand the regulation of business.

It's a faulty distinction, regardless all the real toxic stress falls on the individual. It's just anything less than 100% assault on the mind's and bodies of people, including children, is deemed soft. An unacceptable let up on the unconscionable. Like complaints about criminal justice; prison's are too much like holiday camps, if they do not grind the person down with systemic punishment.

May like others of her political cast responds to entreaties to regulate business as they would an assault on a person. I cannot say the reverse is true of those who are seeking to curtail business, they're too disconnected by their use of the de or should I say, unhumanizing 'obesity' moniker.

They just feel it might be more effective to price people into starvation rather than persuade them that anorexia performance isn't the acme of personal and parental achievement.

Neither are bothered by the notion of a life of battling self induced starvation.

May is correct in letting that cat out of its bag. The food and restaurant industry replaced heavy industry. Dismantling the former to replace with the expanding service industry has been the policy of many governments. Without it, it is hard to imagine how many even well off economies could have embarked on this course.

That is why no government, Labour or Conservative is stupid enough to go down that road. They're happy to talk the talk though.

Setting pathologized bodies, devalued bodies against these odds explains a lot of why fat people cannot get out from under being pathologized in the style of rage or phony pity. Blaming fat people holds this together.

It's called having your cake and eating it too. Keep the (de)industrial strategy encourage its replacement, yet insist on something that would require a curtailment of its replacement that would be economically speaking an unknown quantity. Whilst I know beyond doubt few give a damn about fat people, young or not, I doubt the economy could have stood it at any point. Even now, what seems doable only seems that way due to allowing food-commerce to get the hold it has. 

That is what Theresa May means when she says, the economy comes before any pretence of concern about child welfare. It always has and it always will. Forcing that into capitulating to business interests convinces only those who want to kid themselves that they don't know this.

There's not and has never been any reason why children need to be exposed to the psychological conditioning of scotty burger inc. That was about selling the children for the economy, stupid.

Pro-biz or more pro-prospect of employment for people who would otherwise be even more employment-challenged than they are?

Keeping society together right now depends on what the 'obesity' activists are attacking, precisely because they know neither fat children nor adults matter.

That my friends is the class angle on 'obesity' and the food industry.

Fat phobes dream of people under eating in a thriving food sector, through "willpower" or "discipline". Public healthists think they can have both if the calories get stripped out of prepared foods. Ironically the business friendly right are too dizzy on punishing someone to even make that airy-fairy concession to reality.

The economy will always take priority.

Britain's nuclear weapon system recently came up for review. Arguments where openly made that not renewing nuclear weapons would cost jobs. Never mind any other consideration of having those weapons.

On the one side fat people are boxed in by the desire of white coat brigade to evade what will have to be a professional reckoning. On the other, by people who've developed a neurotic compulsion to starve fat people, of any age.

One and All

There's no substitute for competence. A cold manner with a real grasp of a subject and ability to apply reason to practicalities, is above, the same old, same old + bags of charm any day. Way above. An article on anorexia gives an insight as to how well meaning is not much cop without useful intent.

It reports claims of an addition to "ground-breaking" treatment for anorexia;

Adults with anorexia often have distinctive traits that lock them into a destructive relationship with food. But those same traits could help them manage their illness

"Manage their illness"? Why would anyone want to manage anorexia? I thought Kenneth Tong, possibly inadvertently, summed up the 'obesity cure' pretty well. Anorexia isn't a choice though, its an unusual response to what can be an attempted choice- sustained calorie restriction.

Incidentally, can we have a discussion about the death of cure, as an aim? Since when did the aim of medical science become "management"? Management was something you did whilst you were looking for a cure. What falls short of management? Management as the endgame strikes me as a desire to make money off sickness and disorder. It's throwing in the towel, in some cases, before entering the ring.

Anorexia has no real treatment, instead anorexics are made to eat until they recover weight. Basically [coerced] gainerism, like those who force feed themselves to get fat or fatter. Those surrounding the person act as "encouragers" that is people who literally exhort/support this dieting up the scale. You'll note this is the same pattern as the 'obese cure'-countering pathology with a counter pathology=balance. It's not only that stupid, it requires the false creation of fatness as a pathology in order to press it into this brilliance.

The reason enforced eating is amazingly effective in reversing anorexia- given it is not really a treatment-is in the nature of metabolic function. Hunger and its response-eating-is our natural default, its instinctive, literally a no-brainer. Deciding not to respond can be a direct conscious act. Anorexia is triggered by calorie restriction, according to the article, it also has a potential hormonal trigger. Any period of calorie restriction- including illness, stress-if that shuts down the digestive system and reduces hunger- can set it off. Presumably what weight loss gastrectomy can partially mimic the this digestive stasis in anorexics when the stomach is removed.

This goes along with the added momentum of going from pathology to health. Whereas starving fat [or any] people goes from where they are, to derangement, disorder using pathology, whether they start at health or not. That some can manage to lose weight and feel better is an advert for finding the proper way to do it. 

Not that this extent of success is deemed good enough for those who care about anorexics though, they expect far better than to have to fight an ailment for life, well meaning doesn't surpass ideological concerns/vested interests.

Across the field, psychologists, psychiatrists and dietitians have noted that positive treatment outcomes for adults with anorexia remain abysmally low. Less than half recover fully, another third show some improvement, but the rest remain chronically ill.

Read that first line again, that is what well meaning looks like. And if fat people had those odds? They'd be few fat people, we've spent lifetime chasing statistical insignificance in the form of a pathology.

Also, notice, this isn't costed. Nothing is too much for these precious folk.

The actual experimental treatment featured is based on the family therapy model pioneered at the Maudsley hospital. This version gets anorexics to nominate several people they love to cede complete control of their eating too. More than encouraging, they become the person's hunger.

This gives them no control whatsoever, despite; "Responsibility for recovery would remain firmly in each client’s hands..." That is supposed to produce "abysmally low" results. A potential client inadvertently summed the equation up beautifully;

“I need this to work,” she said. “I have nothing else to try.”

The old "rock bottom" cretinism.That's how people take out loans to get their stomachs cut out. They leave you with nothing and call it "personal responsibility." When exhausted by the failure of this, you then submit to anything on offer. You are not directing their 'science' or their preferred treatment models. The power these people have is as awesome as the power you don't have.

Peer Review indeed.

A real cure for anorexia would be to reboot hunger functioning. That would not only be humane but cost-effective and individualised in a way that would quickly become collective. What truly works for many of those concerned, works for society as a whole.

It could also inform the bringing down of heightened hunger. The denial of progress in one area tends to stymie it elsewhere. There's an on-going discussion among techno-pioneers, whether we should be scared about intelligent technology becoming more powerful than us and making us its slaves.

I used to think they were away with the fairies. But now I wonder. A real fear is the refusal to deal with the way the body actually works, this refusal to resolve issues. The giving up. The costs imposed by these inefficient and/or ineffective treatments, is what threatens to "bankrupt" health care, whatever the system.

The people who produce the science are the people in control of this denial and by the time they've finished with us, I'm wondering if we'll have regressed to such an inferior state that we'll be fit to be directed by our microwaves and mobile phones. How can we refresh, re-boot and put them on standby, but not our own functions that have merely got out of hand?

Imagine if every time any feature went wrong with your computer, that you couldn't do a damn thing about it? FGS, mentally speaking we will suffer by comparison. We probably already are.

If your computer freezes, you can reboot it. If you don't and run around trying to borrow someone else's. You can be said to have declined "personal responsibility". Because you had an option that was within your individual power, that will suffice to unfreeze your screen more often than not.

You don't have to regress to childhood and cede control to your family. Nor to wait for society to rearrange itself around restrictions that will disadvantage those most in control, who often don't want them but pretend to.

Unless and until anorexics or anyone else has that, their so called "personal responsibility" relies on chance, between the operation of the body's organisation and individual response at any one time, neither of which are direct individual or any other CHOICE. This model of denying individual agency, dumping a pretence of responsibility without power on the individual, blaming them for any failure, whilst professionals get paid for this, is curdling health care.

The doctor within is the greatest doctor, but it needs direct and intelligent manipulation. That probably requires real ground to be broken by the looks of it. Spare the flummery dressed in a shower of sub-biochemical jargon.

Hedonic and Metabolic Obesity

Palatable, hyperpalatable, healthy/unhealthy foods/people, "lifestyle", obesogenic, hedonic overeating/obesity. The crusade to turn-weight-into-social-class is inventing more and more jargon to keep alive its cherished pretence that starvation is a sustainable lifestyle.

Let's take this metabolic and hedonic obesity, it's from a doctor, but we can bear in mind the medical profession's outstanding record on helping fat people slim,

The naturally thin often have a hard time understanding the struggles of the very many who battle with overweight and obesity. 

They don't really. If they have no trouble with; I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't get the horn etc., I can't starve at all/ for the rest of my life whilst jumping up and down is less than a no-brainer. The desired pretence that they no-understandy is ballasted by the insistence on defining fat people as slim people +. Rather than whole people. Disrupting wholeness is a different prospect from decreasing (presumed) excess.

Why is losing weight -- and especially keeping it off -- so very hard? 

"Weight loss" isn't hard, our bodies are doing it all the time. Along with weight gain in a cyclical manner, like activity and rest.

It'll be self-induced starvation that's "hard", though that was never the problem. Fat people signed up for becoming slim. We accepted that it would be hard. Hard to tolerate being endlessly trashed, accused of being suicidal greedy idiot loafers. Our response was to studiously feel bad about existing in a fat state. Rarely did we truly question this out of anything more than frustration with our own perceived failure.

So please spare us, "its because its hard." We accepted hard, we did hard. What we couldn't in the end accept was damaging, useless, futile, a waste of life.

Enforced starvation is a tool of torture and death. Starvation has been used as as weapon in wars to make even the most militant surrender. I'm sorry to invoke horrors I cannot begin to imagine. But the ceaseless trivialisation of the power of hunger to justify attacking it as weight regulation makes it easy for richer countries especially to forget the visceral power of hunger and our inherent resistance to its imposition. We are simply not designed to starve, no matter how pleasant and happy the surrounds.

Or else why would people have anything to say about anorexia? How much longer can those who acknowledge the mere discomfort, let alone pain readily deny it in others? Tell us, what is fuelling that?