A New Old Life for Gabourey

The mutilation class action suit waiting to happen rolls on latest to step on board is Gabourey Sidibe. All wrapped up in using; self love, body positivity and aiming at straight at Black women as a target market for abuse of the surgical process.

After a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes she decided, no doubt on "medical advice", to go for peace of mind to save potential harm of diabetes playing on her mind. Similar factors went into Angelina Jolie's surgery.

The difference is the extent to which Gabby's story is utterly contrived by those who've striven to deny even the most minimal means of making positive adjustments to metabolic function. Jolie was seeking to head off an increased threat of a real pathology-cancer, though there are arguments about that. Whereas Gabby is doing it to alter function the wrong way, as that's the only way available. 

Everything that happened to Gabby was decided by ideology; being put on her first weight loss diet at the age of 6 by her parents, to the subsequent years of diet, regain, desperately trying to lose gains, until the (partial) nervous collapse of weight loss diet burnout.

With an often continual upward climb having to desperately embark on more wasted years often driving their weight ever upward, into the arms of mutilators.

The article says she'd been trying for 10 years to diet her weight down, as she's 33 that seems to mean she had a few years rest between burnout and that particular tranche of adult dieting career. That's how sane people can happily pay to have their healthy function butchered and feel better for it.

You can feel better for just about anything if what came before is made intolerable enough for you. Though how those falling for this hype will feel when they realise exactly what has been done to them is anyone's guess. My feeling has been the last to comprehend are likely to be the angriest, given what it takes [often unconsciously] to stay on board.

Gabby herself said this is a last resort, that it is any resort for is the decision of those who claim to care so much about health. 

From gun to tape this cult has complete control over you and your life-as a fat person- even to the way you perceive the reality of that. No-one should have this much control, it is as corrupting as it is evidence of corruption.

Getting you to act against your own interests as your default position is why it is a cult in all but name.

Unlike fat activists I say the ace held is not fat phobia, it's blocking the science.

Obfuscation, half-truths, misrepresentation, tendentious interpretation above all, a hegemony of collusion..... It perhaps this along with the extent of mercilessness that may be what ensures they do not get away with this-forever. Using alteration of hunger/appetite as a selling point is all very well, but that helps to point out that cal res is a dead duck,

“My surgeon said they’d cut my stomach in half. This would limit my hunger and capacity to eat. 

My surgeon said indeed! Same old ob wallahs speaking through fat people with their script. Prioritisation of cal res decided the removal of stomachs, this as a side effect reduced the body's ability to generate hunger and changed the way appetite functions. That wouldn't happen if hunger was all in the brain/mind-which is the basis of cal res-which was the excuse for cutting the stomach out in the first place.

They should have started from the point they're selling this mutilation on! The whole cal res experiment-including dieting- has been a waste of time. They would have started from here if they'd had any real interest in actual physiology or an ounce of compassion for real people.

Metabolic function is designed to be altered. It has to all the time just for your body to be able to maintain itself. Its just those in this business prefer to do that what they feel like. And as long as there is no alternative, they'll be able to continue to do just what they can get away with.
Here's the DM's health correspondent,

...they work by restricting amount of food the stomach can hold. With less space to hold food, the patient will consequently consume fewer calories. It involves removing 80 percent of the stomach.

Umm, not half,

"More importantly, the operation stablizes a number of gut hormones which are off-balance in obese people driving them to crave food when they don't need it. It also controls blood sugar levels....

If it's more important cutting out the stomach would be superfluous. As for hormones being "off balance" and the rest of that tendentious nonsense is the case, why is cutting out virtually the whole of a healthy functioning stomach required to 'normalise'? Don't slim people [Gabby's unlikely to become that] have whole functioning stomachs?

And why do many people regain lost weight as their bodies heal and regain function. 

So we can all agree, if you insist on reducing intake that dictates that you  reduce/alter hunger function.

We can also it seems agree cutting a stomach out to achieve this has been an irrelevant detour....

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

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

The b'stards!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heavily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media Clamour for "Obesity Science" to Start Managing Metabolic Function

Riiiight.

I'm reminded of what still isn't happening amid the clamour to monitor metabolic outliers. In this case children. If only a modicum of such attention was paid to the useful outcomes of "obesity science", well, I was going to say we wouldn't be here. But I know that we are here because people want that. This may have slipped notice if the extent of self kidology falls at the 'morbid' end.

The infinitesimal number of children concerned should give a clue that this is probably about functional issues in these children. 11 yes, eleven children have achieved an outstanding BMI of 40 and 475, 35+, well done them. It's hard to really stand out nowadays unless you are a chosen piñata for stupid adult reality-reality games.

They don't want to free you children because they still want to carrying on playing-you know how that is. 

Those children are out of a bit under 13 million people aged under 19. Together they are not even a respectable fraction of one percent.

They complain about it to (partially) convince themselves that they're against this. The idea of using fat people to achieve whatever ends others think they (ought to) want but in reality aren't necessarily so keen as they want to be, still seems to be a droit de seigneur.

That feeling is part of the attraction, feeling righteous without the consequence of having to spoil it by following through or not, with action. That same stasis to preserve a cherished fantasy applies to the whole crusade proper.

Flaccid ritual blame flaps around like a deflated balloon; "Parental irresponsibility", "How can parents allow their children's weight to go there?" Stale. Plus the more ominous,"It's bordering on the criminal." The determination to maintain this contrived state of "obesity crisis" is palpable.

A nutritionist was interviewed about this enervating click bait, who agreed this was the parents fault,  admitted that this actually incorrect blame is pointless and "gets us nowhere." The weariness with which she said this is good news, sorry, no one should feel the defeat of the trap all fat people are in than the wretched gatekeepers of it.

She switched aim to the current 'obese' cult modality, the 'obesogenic' society. This posits (ultimately) that weight must be controlled from without-the same as abusing fat people regulates/contains our weight. Headaches are trivial compared to 'obesity' zomg death propaganda, yet, imagine being told, no more painkillers, instead, we will seek reduce the [head]ache-o-genic aspects of society?

In utopian terms, one cannot say that's a bad desire or wish. But it is brutally inefficient at meeting your needs for control of how you feel. It effectively leaves people powerless-if you believe that one cannot do anything about headaches which of course I don't.  This lack of anything efficient, direct and useful to the individual is no accident.

The nutritionist had the nerve to state that vested interests perpetuate this obesogenic society. Clearly illustrating that these children's bodies-along with other fat people's-are being held ransom to in this instance the desire to dictate what people should eat.

Can you believe this is really happening?

A watch should be kept on the question of what the individual can directly do to stabilise any aspect of their metabolic function, wrt weight. And the answer remains little to nothing. Impersonating anorexia whilst training like a professional athlete does not manage metabolic function. It seeks to deprive the body of energy in order to get it to raid your fat stores. What I did was not direct.

Weight loss dieting/exercise as well as being pretty worthless in the main, are not direct either.

It's sort of the difference between being able to turn a tap on and off, varying its flow and having to have it left on at whatever rate it is flowing and arrange your life around scooping out water to stop your sink/bath from flooding your home.

This has the meanness of the truly stupid.

The complete lack of content should be obvious and it should offend the intelligence of everybody. Not simply a lack of symptomatology or aetiology but genuine context. These children often require investigation. Some of them will have been born with undiagnosed hypothalamic/brain function problems that show up at an early age [strangely enough the age of 3 keeps coming up-is that a metabolic developmental milestone?]

The unusual extent and/or duration of distress on the prospect of withdrawal of relief from hunger. The ferocity and consistency of gain is even more of a signal, which is of course, what they're actually reporting on.

There is no management of weight without techniques to alter/manage metabolic function. That would be altering something fundamental about the (dys)function going on here. The rate at which the body stores and/or spends energy. Hunger/appetite is a metabolic function, not a habit of thought, altering that, turning it down, if only to relieve the distress of excess hunger/appetite would be a start.

I say this again to "obesity science" even if you can't care about adults, for goodness sake [literally] can't you care something for these children?

Nervous System Conference

Another day and another conference. This one sounds like a breath of fresh air though. It's tag reads,

Nervous system, From stem cells to behaviour in the normal and diseased.

In my head that became-the nervous system, from cells to the way their function translates directly into behaviour. In other words, seeing the nervous system in the same kind of way we see the liver, kidneys, heart, lungs etc., anatomy as function and function as anatomy.

Rather than as if our behaviour is somehow different from the anatomy that enables the transmission of the impulses that become said behaviour/s.

This also added to the sense of bonhomie [which is of course transmitted, felt and perceived by my nervous system.]

...this meeting will include a balance of topics on human and animal models of neural development and disease:

The prospect of real science feels fresh and friendly in comparison with the stale hatefest wrought by pseudo-science. Hopefully this means/includes mapping more fully the healthy anatomy of the human nervous system. The nervous system is the system of the era we are living in. It is where many real battles around health, bodily autonomy and our understanding of ourselves and other living beings will be fought and we've barely begun to get to grips with that.

When it comes to function and health, we need to learn better how to make the nervous system interrupt itself. That, not drugs will be the way of the future. Medical and scientific professionals have failed to come to grips with this, or actually, some of them probably sense this and want to smoother any possibility out of existence.

Big pharma suits many of the way they wish to continue practising medicine.

It would be nice if this conference led in some way to the end of the tiresomely redundant Cartesian-dualism age, where people behave as if the brain is some kind of ethereal imperceptible essence of self and the mind isn't part of the body-even to the extent of at times seeing it as separate from the brain!

This all feels a bit Stone Age. I have to keep reminding myself that it still has currency.  Even to the extent that folks argue about things in an either/or way, rather than it isn't quite the right frame. i.e. "Either ladies should be able to cross their legs when they sit down, or they should keep them together without such."

That framing of women isn't a given is it? I mean, "ladies"?!

The internet is a surprise in that way. I expected it somehow to be ahead of the meatspace mainstream opinion. Perhaps due to the appearance given of constant technical innovation. Uncommonly heard rationale does feature on the nets and that makes the news to the extent of re-shaping consciousness about it.

When you actually get on it, what hits like a wall is how much of the time the opposite is true. The sheer extent of parochial idiocy and mental indolence is at times, thought-stopping. Vast oceans of people who cannot be bothered to invest a breaths worth of energy in understanding their own "opinions" let alone grasping anyone else's.

Yet do not let that stop them from disagreeing virulently with what they haven't even perceived correctly if at all, behaving like children learn to get out of in kindergarten [or should], that other people exist who work to whole different rules than they. Instead, everyone is exactly like them, thinks exactly like them. At the same time they think anyone who they perceive as differing from them is a space alien from a planet far away. Who lives only to try and knock a modicum of the most obvious reason or sense into their bone heads.

I'm digressing.

The "I live in this body" orientation could be on the long or short road to being put in its place, i.e. quaint obsolescence. That's not yours or my decision. It's that of those who'll be going to this conference and similar.

It's when they're ready.

So watch their space.

Traci Mann's Secrets

It's usually worth reading the admirable Traci Mann on diets especially, as she's one of those rarities who has the moxie to just go with the truth about eating and weight. She has a new book out, "Secrets from the Eating Lab", I'd definitely have a look. This article and interview contains some telling details.

A few points first. Diet-as in what you eat-can have "types", weight loss dieting though is purely singular. It is one thing and one thing only-consuming too few calories for your body to sustain its [current] mass. Anyone who says otherwise is pulling your pin.

What we’re told are “types” of [weight loss] diet are mainly about desperate attempts to increase the body's tolerance of diets. For example by manipulating appetite- the ratio of macro and other nutrients you eat.

High-protein [weight loss] diets appeal to those whose appetites favour protein rich foods. High carb diets make use of those whose leanings are towards carbohydrate rich foods and so on. The aim is to increase moral. Dieting is very morale sapping due to it usually being so unpleasant. 

Mann says something amusing “no one has any willpower”. I’m presuming that references dieting’s failure of everybody. Some favoured bull is spread around-that above a certain weight you’re unlikely to lose enough to become slim.
 
That's misleading, it's equally true of all weights, including thin people repeatedly shedding and re-shedding a few pounds. Obviously, if you're always thin/slim then that failure isn't apparent. The same mechanics in all of us is producing the same outcome, restoration of each size's starting mass or thereabouts.

Willful delusion forces such obvious failure to be cast elsewhere, in this case onto the dieter. That also distracts from questioning the principle of hunger-blocking as weight regulation.

Dieting becomes like god, it can never truly fail, only sinful humans fail it. 

Actually, dieting via its inherent dysfunction demands and uses up tremendous amounts of will power, it's a-lead your horse to water but can’t make it drink-type situation. Merely leading [and holding] the horse, i.e. your body to starvation drains will power to little productive end.

Dieting is broken and pretty much unfixable, certainly as a general technique, its existence doesn't even make sense. If weight is all about conscious decision-making, then stop making that decision-the end. No need for a plan beyond that.

The plan reflects the fact that hunger is not generated in the conscious mind.

It’s worth remembering not to think in terms of [why] the body fails diets, when it’s the other way around. Diets fail the body. The primacy of the body over dieting needs to be reasserted. The body does not have to answer for it's failure.

When you are dieting.......your brain becomes overly responsive to food, and especially to tasty looking food. But you don't just notice it — it actually begins to look more appetizing and tempting.

This is an action of your nervous system-your brain is the primary hub of that of course. People seem to find it hard to grasp that because all this activity operates through your own information superhighway-your nervous system-that the action of dieting, more specifically your body's response to it, can literally change the way you see, perceive and even  seeming to put thoughts in your head.

You may also remember that this feature was identified as one of the problematic eater types in that BBC Horizon doc. And that I had this exact problem as one symptom of a hyperphagic eating disorder. I would be surprised if this wasn’t a facet of Georgia Davis’s metabolic problems-and others like her.

Mann describes this as increasing [eating’s] “reward value”. I disagree; it increases the imperative to eat. In other words, it’s like having the munchies when you smoke a blunt, or the action of an overactive bladder where the urge is overpowering, even when your bladder is empty.

It’s not that eating becomes more enjoyable-it doesn't necessarily at all-it’s that the urge continues to recruit more and more nervous circuits in your brain-in other words the urge takes it over. Your will is literally overpowered and it becomes too uncomfortable to the point of distressing not too go with it.

Relief of such discomfort is hardly about pleasure. It feels way more compelling than normal hunger. Though I get that's a difficult concept for many.


As for the hormones, I’m not hot on them, but that seems more a register of your depleted energy, framing them as cause. Iow, if I jumped out at you-shocking you, your feelings would be expressed by chemical release, that didn’t cause your fright; that’s how your body both signals and registers it.

These hormones don't stop diets working, they're signalling your body's defensive response to deprivation.

Energy conservation-the body adapting to less by using less energy to function-is yet another defense-they are multifarious, showing the body is really designed to resist starvation and why it so often succeeds. This is often put down to saving you from famine, it could just as well be a defense against anorexia too, as that is a build up of a compulsion to starve, which can also takes over a person's brain. 

One of the things stopping anorexics perishing ever more quickly is this energy conservation.

“How could it [work]when you have to fight against all of that?”

Exactly. When we are this designed against proto-anorexia, it is definitely the wrong way, [not the only way]. 

There is absolutely no reason why reversal of weight must only occur through hunger blocking, unless that in itself is the true aim.

She makes a brilliant observation about the experience of dieting in a way that I hope becomes the norm.

Let's say you're in a meeting, and someone brings in a box of doughnuts. If you're dieting, now you need to resist a doughnut. That is going to take many, many acts of self-control. You don't just resist it when it comes into the room — you resist it when you look up and notice it, and that might happen 19 times, or 90 times. But if you eat it on the 20th time, it doesn't matter how good your willpower was. If you end up eating it, you don't get credit for having resisted it all those times. In virtually any other arena, that would be an A+, but in eating that's an F.

Yes! Not only is this an acute representation of dieting’s flawed hypothesis, it helps tells us what anorexia is. You aren't simply saying  no repeatedly, you are repeatedly blocking an impulse-that of hunger. At some point, this repetition becomes varying degrees of compulsive in certain subsets.

Isn't that extraordinary?

Totally unexpected. This is what we want to happen when we are trying to master a skill! Who'd have thought it could ever spontaneously self-trigger toward such a devastating end?

That could explain why many PWA can get to feeling agonies of hunger, but somehow cannot act on that. Continual blocking builds a wall between the feeling and its response.

It’s like resisting the urge to sleep. No one feels it’s purely about self control to miss sleep to do other things. It’s recognized that there’s a trade off in terms of tiredness. The absence of a sense of consequence from thwarting hunger, produces unnecessary misunderstandings.

Nor is it "impossible" to reverse weight, this simply isn't the right channel.The assessment of dieting's efficacy [or lack of it] is probabilistic. The odds of achieving it via calorie restriction dieting is very thin [yea]. If people want better, they'll have to lobby for genuine ways and means which are entirely possible. 

Starve 'n' Sweat Cannot Argue with Itself

Being dangerously overweight is all down to bad diet rather than a lack of exercise, according to a trio of doctors who have reopened the debate about whether food, sedentary lifestyles or both are responsible for the obesity epidemic.

Where to begin?

Best to deal with what I emphasized. You may not be surprised to learn, that is not a debate. That happens when two or more opposing views are aired. [Why's the @besity crusade either busy chasing or faking non-debates? Is there anything it isn't faking?] Calories in, calories out, or the diet-weight hypothesis refers to the construction of body size as the product of calorie intake minus calorie output.

They are both the same idea, calorie or energy manipulation, via opposing ends (of the same branch). Anything which deals with directly manipulating energy is just a different means to bring about said aim-that includes, stomach removal/gastric re-routing, gastric binding along with most slimming drugs.

They all advance on the same principle, reduce the amount of energy coming in and/or increase the amount going out.

What would be another idea? Theoretically, it'd have to be altering the mechanics that produce weight to change that outcome. In concrete terms, I'm not sure. Everything has been so centered on starve 'n' sweat deliberately, and our grasp of the interplay of metabolic systems so limited, that its hard to get in the mindset of other ideas.

Other routes have been gone down, which could signify other ideas.
 
Manipulating gut flora via bacterial transfer gut, obviously doesn't target fat tissue directly. It appears to have the same mechanical flaw as repeating energy manipulation-homeostasis unravels it, though there maybe a subset of people in whom its affective.

Seems that gut flora as well as acting "like an organ" is a cog in metabolic function, not a driver of metabolic outcomes.

An even further outsider is through something like meditation, yoga, or other practices that soothe/stimulate/refresh the nervous system. That pathway's a long shot because it doesn't promise any amount of weight reversal, though has the potential to if it can be directed at the right place. As usual exceptions apply.

Restorative therapies can lessen hunger and/or appetite because they target/affect/manipulate the nervous system. Cals in/out-starve 'n' sweat-targets fat tissue via suppressing hunger and appetite. Meditation and other restorative therapies affect the system that carries the various messaging and biochemically mediates the operations of metabolic function. Thus supporting greater integrity of function. 

The latter works with the body the former disrupts it. That's the "battle" as in "battle with my weight." Not your will, but your body's metabolic self regulation.

It could be comparable to taking on your immune system [starve 'n' sweat] versus supporting and improving its level of function [restorative therapies].

Starve versus sweat is a non-argument that has become sterile even to many committed fat phobes. It speaks of people who are stuck in a mental hole they refuse to get out of. It's back and forth, round and round is made from ideology above biology. Neither starving nor sweating is the route to reversing weight. Blame is not an issue, even if it mattered.

This is anatomy, not morality.

Parental Devotion

We're so used to ugly fakery and collusion with the 'obesity' crusade, even from decent and lovely people, that we've lost sight of a genuine response. Rameshbhai Nandwana who according the the UK press is proposing to sell one of his kidneys to fund specialist assessment and diagnosis for 3 of his 4 children. Yogita aged seven, Anisha aged 5 and little Harsh a boy of a year and a half. The eldest girl, Bhavika is six years old and unaffected.

Both Rameshbhai and his wife Pragna Ben look after these children with tender devotion and a civilized understanding way outside the league of western model weight rage. Despite effectively being in service to their children's severely heightened hunger.

And its not as if 'obesity' rot hasn't penetrated India;

"A few social workers have come forward to help but it’s not just about the food," he said. "If my kids continue to grow at this rapid rate they will have major health issues.

How astute of him. This is a medical problem, not another opportunity for diet fanatics to ventilate their irrelevant compulsions. These three children obviously have some kind of endocrinal disorder. They've gained weight at a phenomenal rate and suffer from rampaging hyperphagia-or excess of hunger, the non-neurotic kind.

Their bodies are primed by something to keep storing not using energy along with disturbed hunger out of kilter with their physical needs. The parents have sought treatment but this situation needs some specialist input in the form of diagnosis for one- though what specialists can do is anyone's guess. This is out of Nandwana's price range so he's proposing to sell one of his kidneys to fund, mere diagnosis.

Few people either know or can describe how unpleasant hyperphagia is. To most, food=pleasure so a high intake =hedonism. When in reality, the intake is caused by an excess of hunger, which is unpleasant to the point of being intolerable.

People assume this is just normal hunger, though it's an extension of it- like temperature, hunger is on a gradient- when it is way beyond anything like normal.

I'm not surprised these poor children scream and cry when they're not fed, that isn't being spoilt, that is piercing discomfort. The kind that is like that serious phase of depression where the agony is so intense that you feel you may have to end yourself just to stop it.

It's truly horrible to endure. That alone is worth getting rid of, before getting to whether weight can be reversed or not.  The erasure of hunger to reposition it as some kind of emotion or thought leaves it to go where it wants.

If that's normal great, if not, tough shit, if you hurt you hurt, if you die, you die.

How this can happen during a supposedly feverish global crusade that's supposed to be against weight, is evidence that the 'obesity' crusade is not about solutions or medical advance.

It still hasn't even penetrated the minds of many activists that it's not simply that those who are healthy are being attacked, their well being and health undermined, it's also that those who do actually have something wrong, are being shafted.

They're being denied the proper means of assessment, treatment and relief. Diet 'n' exercise pens everyone into the same. Solutions for the Nandwana children and others like them leads to progress for anyone and that's a big spanner in the works. So the Nandwana family have to pay the price for leveraging the threat of ill health to drive social engineering and the politicization of fatness.  

There's something bitter-sweet and telling about how those who still feel hunger as near foe can't bring themselves to starve those they love, even in this case borrowing money at times.

This is something nations whose memory is perhaps more dim actively clamour for. The further away from hunger you are, the more you discount the toll it takes. The more romance it acquires.

All those invested in 'obesity' should crowd fund this man, the least they can do for their indulgence is spare this devoted loving dad his kidney.

There's NOTHING Remotely "depressing" about the failure of calorie restriction dieting

The depressing fact, said Ochner in an interview, is that "the average adult with sustained obesity has less than a 1% chance of reattaining and maintaining a healthy body weight without surgery." These discouraging facts about the body's response to weight loss are well known to obesity researchers: Drug developers wrestle with the fact that even when their treatments induce weight loss by one means, other mechanisms spring up to limit or reverse that weight loss.

That should really be the body's response to weight loss dieting. Weight loss is outcome, WLD is the method that's supposed to bring it about.

And no there is nothing remotely, microscopically depressing in any way shape or form about the failure of weight loss dieting.

The body's triumphant refusal to yield to the stupid yearnings and desires of self abuse is inspiring. It's wonderful that an ugly degenerate pathological abusive code has failed. We are often told we're unlucky, dieting is "hard".....Bollocks. It's dysfunction.

Hard as in challenging is mastering a new language in adulthood. Getting slapped around in a relationship-that's dysfunctional not challenging or character building. Dieting isn't, on the contrary, its character dismantling.

How many people do you know who've gone from having no interesting in weight loss dieting to being all about that, whose character's improved? I don't know any. Not only that, some of the most decent lovely people I've ever meet reveal an ugliness of character that's demoralizing in a way that it isn't from shallow, hollow, follow-fashion types.

Haters are fond of saying we're "unlucky," actually its they who are. They thought they had it made. They thought their cowardy custard souls could step off their pompous self importance plunge head first into revealing themselves as thieving, scumbag, bigots and still get to pretend to be good because their emotional thuggery was all for "weight loss."

Nope shitheads, turns out nasty produces more nasty so you can piss off your soapbox and take your vile hateful credo with you.

The body's our remarkable gift. We get it for free dammit. Homeostasis defeats the crude, stupid and brutish attempt to disrupt its functioning via starvation, which some simply cannot grasp is disgusting and abusive. That is why it has been used as a weapon of genocide and war against millions.

"The Auschwitz diet" is only a "weight loss" in crass hateful heads arbeit doesn't macht slim.

Getting in sync with and using the body's amazing capacities will enable us to move forward to a new era of adjusting our own function, without drugs and/or torture equipment.

That should shut down some asinine whinnying of medical professions who feel fat bodies are infra dig.

When we get the means of reversing weight right and we will, if quack ridden "researchers" don't step up, some of us will use what means we can to help the truth along-homeostasis will regulate change as a matter of its usual course. That's why its so strong. It needs to see off all comers-unless there's something very wrong.

The fact that CRD can't regulate itself is proof in itself that its the wrong method, for everyone. Even slim people who want to be slim could do better. When we have the right method, that'll produce less, if any disorder. It will have a whole different effect.

So the answer is get on the right side of what is designed to do things properly. Stop fighting the body you're outgunned on this score.

Allow it to do what it is designed to do, what it does best, what no human has matched. Luckily, we don't have to. We just have to be a bit sneaky and use what's there. 

This is what Progress Looks Like

Here's some good news, Truvada an antiviral, has been found to reduce the spread of the HIV virus in a recent test. Though its not a particularly large scale study, the results on the face of it seem impressive and could be life changing for people, including the most marginalized, if not more so for them. This drug, which can be taken daily also treats HIV/AIDS, containing the virus.

It's always instructive to note what happens with genuine diseases. Those engaged in those respective fields of study look for real treatments, cure/s, plus even vaccines too boot-if apt.

Unlike the so called life threatening condition of 'obesity' which seeks only "prevention" i.e. don't "get it"/give us any work. As if that were all, don't forget, most medical science tends to start by dealing with those who have the most and acute pressing problems. In trying to grasp the nature of what they're dealing with more clearly. Because that would obviously be more important than people outside their field of study. 

'Obesity' pays little heed to this seemingly rational course. Turning it on its head, it seeks to center its attentions on people who aren't even its supposed target audience. Turning and using them only as cautionary tales, whilst all the while braying ceaselessly about the damage done being "evidence" of why those outside its cross hairs would do well to stay that way.

The reason why truvada and such happen is not because people liberate, stoke up and fully indulge their most bigoted urges. They happen because those in the field are totally invested in relieving suffering, avoiding ill health and death of those it exists to serve, regardless of their purported "moral" or perceived societal value or even how supposedly "easy" it is to avoid the real or imagined dis-ease.

Take HIV/AIDS. In the main, we're talking about avoiding sexual intercourse, not sex, nor even sexual gratification, no, we're talking penetration. Compared to what some of us are being asked to avoid, that hardly seems like a thing.

No matter though, that is of no concern. It becomes a thing, if, as in this case, people are trained that sex =sexual intercourse and well, it doesn't matter anyway, because the job of medical science is not moral philosophy and they aren't interested in that. Or they'd be in a different field altogether.

That is why real medical science doesn't piss away 40 years of effort on diddly squat. It makes progress and it works. Progress works and bullshit remains bullshit.

Not Tonight Irene

Fat people suffer as much from poor health as they do from poor image. They also die younger. My mother, always fat, died at 61. She suffered for years from carrying around an extra hundred pounds. She was intelligent, beautiful, loving, kind and industrious, but sadly I lost her too soon due to her being over weight. It is too bad we can't promote a healthier body along with a better image of our body.  ~ Irene

This is the kind of comment caught me unawares from the get go. Here's someone stating that their beloved mother (father/partner/ or other loved one) died of something, yet couldn't seem to care less that there was nothing available to prevent this.

You'd think that would be of primary concern. Instead we get the insipid: "...too bad we can't promote a healthier body along with a better image of our body" and the like. What?

How would "promotion" have reversed her mother's weight by 100lbs? Is this a product launch or a matter of life and death? Perhaps most puzzling of all, why do these people direct the dead hand of their minds at lay people, when it is scientists that produce science?

Legislators/politicians local and national are the ones who influence and decide the allocation of funding for said science, don't you think writing to them might start concentrating minds? Why would a group advocating for the valuing of fat people-so absent from their minds attack said advocacy?

Have you ever heard the like of this elsewhere? Because I most definitely haven't.

Even when you come across people whose relatives have traumatized them through their behaviour under the influence. They still talk with feelings of sadness, regret and love. Even if they ultimately felt they had to disconnect from the person, due to their behaviour.

I know abstinence is bunk, people's assertions that there ought to be more provision for it at least focuses on trying to help the person concerned.

Not people like Irene. Too often, they're curiously disinterested in direct assistance to their loved ones. Nor am I yet to see convincing show of grief;

My mom is slowly killing herself.  She won’t live to old age. How the fuck do you want me to feel?  And she’s not enjoying herself, either. Her joints hurt, she has breathing problems, she can’t find clothes in her size, medications don’t work properly at her weight, and when she needs a surgery she will be at a considerably higher risk of complications.  The FA movement would have me applaud her for this.  Well no.  Fuck that.  She’s my mom, and when she hurts herself she hurts me too.  You wouldn’t stand idly by while your friend committed suicide or spiraled into drug addiction, would you?”

That's exactly what these people do, do, stand idly by, that's what is so shocking about them. Does this person really think their use of "fuck" hides the absence of real emotion?  Her joints could be helped by changes the things going into her body. Her breathing might possibly be eased through exercises and her medications adjusted or other things tried.

I don't and wouldn't applaud the stasis of dieting or be damned. What for?

Why do they continue to draw attention to themselves? Presumably, they do not have a clue as to how they sound. I suspect that's partly down to the unnatural absence of response from fat people to anything fat haters say to us. This was due to the suppression of any remotely contrary feelings about dieting being an article of faith.

I'm sorry for the mother's suffering, but I'm most sorry of all that she has this unit for a child. What's amusing about this is clearly, this person has caught on that there is something profoundly wrong with how these people go on, using their often dead or dying (they say) relatives to concern troll. Or should we say, death troll? This is using the ill health/death of relatives, to tell fat people off for advocating self restoration, respect and care.

Do you feel he's gruff but with a heart of gold? I'm afraid I don't. Perhaps I've been too spoilt by hearing a lifetime of genuine expression of grief and sorrow for loved ones. It's not simply the absence of that, it's the lack of genuine feeling.

You'd have to be a bit if a brute, not to find his unconvincing straining for effect somewhat amusing. The fakeness and lack of humanity engendered by the 'obesity' crusade that seems to warp minds this way. Specifically, accepting the person is disease dehumanizes, not dehumanizing, I mean it removes the humanity from a person and the person who accepts it too.

To accept that, your critical faculties have to be switched off. And that must account for this out of tune reaction. There was controversy when the dsmv proposed enduring grief as a pathological condition to be treated with anti-depressants.

Here's a natural antidote. Get people to see their loved ones as self inflicted disease and voila, no grief. Maybe they could check out their brains to see what area's suppressed and come up with some way of replicating it for the illness of grief.

This is the outcome of avoidance of discomfort. Grief isn't nice, so you don't have to feel it, as long as you see people in the right way.

I was going to say that you cannot grieve a thing, but of course, you can. Come and see me the time when my computer locked and I couldn't use it! Looking up a way through, there was more honest show of grief in others experiencing the same fate, than any of these jokers.

One of the best things about landing on a site like Nurse Naomi's blog about her young daughter is to finally have the privilege of witnessing a person behaving as you'd expect under the circumstances.

Her daughter is a real person, not a cypher or a stick to try and beat someone else with.

She listens and relays what her daughter is experiencing. She describes Hana's feelings in subjective terms and her condition in objective terms. 

She can't sit and wait for science, she's out there researching and scouring the earth for possibilities, leads, anything that might help. Her entreaties are directed at scientists, obviously because they do the science. And she talks of saving Hana.

She seeks to garner attention for the plight of her daughter Hana and others, you know she could not sit idly by. 

And what doesn't she have time for-as far as I know? That's right, FA. Because we aren't the reason why the science in this area is so undeveloped. Hypothalamic obesity was apparently isolated in 1901.
 
Hana of course, has an actual condition. She's not just a person being defined as a condition so there's something to describe.

Trying to save the life of your loved ones with all your might is the least I'd expect you to feel moved to do, according to your abilities. Re-routing the course of metabolic function doesn't bring amateur to mind.

If the Irene's of this world made noise about the absence of any means to save their loved ones and aimed it at those with influence; politicians, medics, public healthists, scientists themselves, metabolic science would have become the worthwhile and important subject I've always suspected it is. That would help anyone reverse weight, whether triggered by tumours or not.

It would attract better minds, and they'd perhaps be an honest humane and progressive discourse, kicking into touch the debased hate-fest that passes for "debate" right now. People like Irene have had a part to play in allowing things to come to this and I can't for the life of me work out why.

So the question is, why do people like "Irene" not know how strange their behaviour is?

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.

Not a golden age of stoicism-thank goodness

Had to chuckle. Researchers are touting the prospect of a fat wasting jab (don't mind the idiot headline) containing a hormone called irisin. This supposedly has the capacity to convert white adipose cells/tissue into brown adipose.

Brown adipose wastes rather than stores energy like white stuff. Whether this is "jab" is likely to happen any time soon, isn't really in question. As predictably, it has pissed off your common or garden hare-brained fat hating too. Who doesn't have the presence of mind to attempt some half arsed concern trolling.

One even forgot themselves enough to declare;

No; enough of this research and trials. Tell them to exercise, this is so silly.

Yeah, let's crawl back to the good old Stone Age you intellectual void. The prospect of better treatment for diabetes, PCOS and other metabolic travails is such a joke, scientific progress, stupid ain't it? Urgh. 

I knew these wing nuts were regressive hate fuelled dolts who want human progress to stop. They want everything to be a reflection of their own tainted souls. 

Even from my dieting days, there's not and never has been any reason for weight loss to not be effective, efficient, available to anyone that wants it and to be pain/discomfort free. That's no more immoral than learning eating competence or to defend, nurture or restore you're instincts to move.

Even if it was, the fact that it upsets the right people would decide it for me anyway. Fuggem. That they would rather stop progress for even those suffering through what they'd agree is no fault of their own, to keep hating, makes them lower than dirt.

Most of these jokers would struggle to make their ahem 'argument' against everything from the equine strength pain pills for headaches, to the convenience of "psyche meds" being thrown around save the ardous effort of changing the way you think/feel/react.

And no, that's not rude/ ableist of me. That's CBT.

Nor do I personally object to how others choose to manage their mental health. Just, when there's preaching to fat people about gritting their teeth-where it would make little difference, when others can't be arsed to do shit, that's a conversation they need to be having with themselves. So, rumbled.

Certainly, if any of these dimwit arseholes dared to suggest anyone should be kept from mind alteration on the basis of mild aches and pains, they'd be quite a backlash. The privileging of slimz and all that.

Few in western model countries can lecture fat people about stoicism with expecting to put up with the most minimal discomfort went out with the ark for them. They probably only fetishize it in "fitness" precisely because they've squeezed out elsewhere. It's like one of those rough adventure holidays middle class people go on.

Well for a lot of fat people, continuous mental, physical, social, spiritual and psychological discomfort is their life. People not knowing about that for so long, was fat people grinning and bearing it. Take a look at the good that did.

That's why you truly won't find me gainsaying folks feeling entitled to relief for their own discomfort. My concerns lie elsewhere.

One person recently wrote. He, "Didn't believe in any unnecessary pain."Aww, that's precious. Certainly these shut it. Thin privilege doesn't make people invisible. We can see you!!!

There is nothing moral about trying and failing to impersonate a starvation disorder, nothing. It's actually a disgusting waste of people's effort, time, lives and yes, health. The whole 'obesity' crusade has been a degenerate exercise in thought regression that has generated nothing of any value from the professionals. And this kind response is exactly the kind of degeneracy it promotes.

Its clear the pro-ana approach is about satisfying the deranged emotional needs of these messed up muppets. Well, they've been hoist with their own hard, there's nowhere left to go with their imposing their cravings. Unless they want to make being fat illegal and lock people up for it. I know many hypocrites who'd love that.

They'll pop a few synthetic opiates for any conscience pangs no doubt. 

Fecal Transfer

An experiment on 8 people and some mice repeated the way fecal transfer reveals something about the mechanics of body weight-and possibly our underlying bio-chemistry.

Material is taken from a donor, mixed with water, filtered and passed down a tube into the stomach....as a way of restoring the balance of bacteria in the gut. It is thought to be successful in about 90% of cases.

Basically, four sets of twins-one fat, one slim-had their faeces put through the process. Matter from each was put into mice bred without gut bacteria of their own. The fat woman's microbes were put into slim mice and the slim woman's into fat ones. 

The fat mice lost weight and the slim ones gained it.

The usual-this could be a treatment for 'obesity'-talk ensues. That's cool, it's not to be sniffed at. It goes about weight change the right way, led by the body. It's the same process for loss as for gain is another pertinent trait. There's potential to be explored. One thinks also of implication for things like bowel cancer, said to be higher amongst fatter people.

This may be a way to deal with all cancers of the digestive system, whatever the weight of the person concerned.

The coda is as ever the holistic nature of weight. It's whole bodied and what has stopped weight from staying up or down-as required, is that any spanner in the works i.e. weight loss dieting/surgery, pills etc., has fallen at the same hurdle-homeostasis.

The body's designed to keep the circle of self regulation going along its own lines. Interrupt that and its just becomes something for it to throw off or overcome, sooner or later. If introducing differing strains of bacteria doesn't hitch a ride on that, then it will be susceptible to reverse.

In a way, the key is not so much to hijack metabolism, as to work with it and let it to get to the required destination. Another reason why this tedious pretense of disease is such an unnecessary obstacle to a clearer view. As I have always said, there's no doubt that weight can be changed and this gives some insight into that fact.

It also works, in theory, for the much forgotten, those who suffer and die because their weight will not allow them to hold on to life. Altering the gut bacteria could help them fight conditions that destroy appetite, like cancer.

The key in weight terms is whether this will be enough to bring fundamental long term change.

As usual, this is old news coming around again, so they need to get the hell on with it. It's important to say this, because we need to always keep in mind that this 30 + year campaign of fat hate has just been a way of keeping this sort of potential avenue at bay. To do nothing, whilst appearing not to. If this gives you the impression of waking up from a nightmare and starting more or less where you were before, then that's about right.

The question is why? Again, perhaps this helps to illustrate some suspicions. Do you see a role for Big Pharma in this? Or even much for the med profession? Possibly, but it's not like the usual rent back system they favour. Where they like your condition to remain whilst they sell you product to hold it at bay.

Perhaps that's a factor. 

Certainly, there's risk of it boding change. A new approach to well being, health and healing.

One that's forced to seek resolution, due to the very nature of biology. Amusingly, it's reminiscent of anti-biotics, like a precursor of them. Like the prequel coming out after the original film.

I've suspected this is part of the yearning for fat people not just to lose weight, but to lose it via the right channels i.e. calorie manipulation. The important thing about that, it its easier to parlay fatness into 'chronic disease'. Rather than just a contextual process that can signal anything; well-being, health, illness, or can just run onto being a problem with bulk.

No-one things of tallness as disease, but if a person didn't stop growing, its obvious that at some height, that becomes a problem. The issue is not being tall as such, more unchecked growth that does not stop, nor can be stopped.

It does not require someone who's 6ft to be defined as 'unhealthful' to illustrate the problems of gigantism or on the other end of the height spectrum, restricted growth. No one needs to be defined thus for these problems to be recognized. Nor to do proper scientific research. That's another agenda entirely.

Predicating research on people demeaning and dehumanizing themselves is disgusting and an intolerable abuse of power on the part of those demanding it.

The avoidance of the potential of real progress is shown by biological insights such as this. It also gives a lie to the suggestion that no useful research has been done in the past. It was obscured by the onslaught.

Because of this mess, weight has been purloined to fill in the self denuding morality play that is the post religious hangover. Hence this kind of thing, really pisses people off. Somehow, for them, it has come to be that unless fat people can be forced to be anorexic exercise bulimics....

The world will fall off its axis. 

It's even claimed that the mice only lost weight on a high fibre low fat diet and that fatty foods negate this effect. Forgive my wariness. The comments here got predictably ugly, spare yourself if you don't want to wade into the usual fat hating sewer of the entitled. It's as nasty as what's going on inside them.

It's important to know that this has nothing to do with fat people personally. We have no duty to try and counter it, putting across poor benighted fatty tropes, explaining how upsetting this all is. Appealing to pity.

This is some creepy arsed shit and way too personal to these people for that. Even if that's how you feel about being fat. We owe it to ourselves to leave them to get on with it and to stop allowing ourselves to be dragged into this mess. I'm more than guilty of that myself.

And when I say we, I don't mean fat people. I mean anyone who's had more than enough of this crap. Anyone who recognizes that no matter what they think/have been taught to think about "fat people" this is degrading and as worthless as hell.

Fat acceptance has put way too much pressure on fat people, making this derangement our responsibility. It is not, never has been, never should have been.

Do scientists own science?

It's a question for everyone to consider. If scientific fact is obvious but unacknowledged by those who claim the title of scientist, are lay people allowed to acknowledge it?

I would say yes.

If the medical profession choose to build a "consensus" of falsehood using that same rejection of fact, are lay people allowed to opt out of any attempt to impose that particular falsehood on them?

Unequivocally, yes.

Most especially if that opting out is based on repeatedly putting that falsehood into practice, forming not merely an individual result, but an overall pattern predictable amongst the overwhelming majority of people, the overwhelming majority of the time.

Real or indeed hard science is REALITY. It is recognizable, testable and the results predictable. We know the outcome of reducing calories and increasing energy output is predictable, it doesn't make or keep people slim.

We know this, we have experienced this and we can see it in the people who've dieted walking around, not being slim. We can see it in the so called 'obesity' crisis that has manifested in tandem with the growth of multi-million pound slimming and fitness industries, not to mention the growth of nutritionists who specialize in trying to manage people's weight.

And that isn't correlation, because fat people have dieted, they have used the services of all that claimed to have the power to do this, including surgery. Denial of that is the mere necessity of those who wish to trade reality for delusion. That is their choice and must be theirs alone. They must stop using any power or influence they wield to force that on others.

Whatever else dietary manipulations can manage, they cannot manage what is being asked of fat people.

This needs to be acknowledged unequivocally without any hiding behind "Lifestyle change", nor sour rancour bitterness, towards or blame of fat people. No more slander or shame, to avoid reality no matter how difficult that is for those who are dodging it. No matter how high their position and reputation may be.
 
Because until that occurs, no real progress will be made in how to understand and/or alter the course of human metabolic function.  

Some of us have to face the fact that we are asserting this, in the face of opposition from those who are usually the ones to tell us what reality is.
Usually it's the other way around. It is usually they telling the rest of us even when that runs counter to our "intuition", or against our deeply held assumptions. That includes going against what seems to us to be what is actually happening or other false consciousness.

Now it is their turn to feel what that's like and they need to get on with it.

In the end, not even scientists own science. They are in a special position to have made a profession out of discovering the nature of what is really happening despite what we may think of as "common sense".

It shouldn't need to be said that it is as unacceptable for scientists to manipulate others using incomplete or bankrupt hypothesis as it is for the public to try and silence scientists on the basis of our cherished assumptions. Neither should it be acceptable for scientists to derail genuine scientific inquiry with their own quackery or pseudo science.

Science is for everyone. 

Efficacy

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.

Corrective

Simon Jenkins has written a corrective of the arrogance of scientists. He's had the bare faced nerve to remind some of the more insecure of them that they're human beings. As opposed to the masters (usually) of rationality too many of them fancy themselves to be.

He stated basic and evident fact, that a lot of scientist aren't very bright and plenty of them are impatient with the very method they claim ownership of. Presuming as they are so brilliant, others must not know what they know can leave a person exposed.

Being expected to flatter the is one thing. Being expected to pretend we are so much more stupider than we are, becomes intolerable. Some clearly think it's unseemly of us not to wait from them to give us permission to think or to notice anything in the world around us or in our own bodies.

Why am I not more scienterrific?

I've asked myself this question a few times, especially since getting on the fatosphere. In the past, I read scientific studies in books and in reference libraries. I waded through so many that I actually began to develop a really good understanding of how to read them.

Then pretty much phutt! With regard to obesity anyway. Why? Because it became clear that quite a lot of them were shit, made up of three people and a dog, hopelessly contradictory and frankly in the main, more interesting by reading between the lines, than what they said or their so called conclusions.

The bad design, the ways they framed questions that didn't even to me seem to be the best or most interesting way to go about finding out something other than what had already been decided. Above all, the refusal of many researchers to stop pretending that formulating the questions that form the basis of any study is somehow a scientific process.

Rather than often a question of judgement, intelligence and knowledge of that and perhaps other fields. You need a stimulus. Many of them couch the things they study in modish language that is wholly inappropriate, such as when obesity is spoken of as a "disease" caused by an imbalance of chemicals. And pursued in that vein.

This is assumption, based on the reaction to fatness in a social context, rather than what has been observed. This kind of mindset has possibly lead to a lot of the Fen Phen type debacles where the 'belief' that it's sluggish metabolism that needs to be artificially speeded up when this is no more than an old quack's tale.

And yet you are asked to build a case against this unreason which is usually dismissed as 'cherry picking' anyway. Whenever anyone professesing to have an 'evidence based' understanding of a subject that you disagree with, asks what your evidence is.

If they are not 'cherry picking' themselves, why would they need to ask me? Why wouldn't they have reviewed "all sides" themselves? Really they should say what they think is wrong with any contrary evidence or conclusions.

I can't get over the idea that all knowledge must be passed through certain classes. As if it's not real or cannot even be considered unless it has appeared in print. The idea that in order to justify a thought, it has to have been thunk, first by someone who's been through the education system repels me to the point of disgust.

What does that leave for the rest of us, are we supposed to just give up thinking? Certainly that would help with the fantasy certain folks have about the supposedly innate higher intelligence of certain stratas.

If only their thoughts register, they set the terms and the rest of us have to just follow, frustrated and unable to engage with knowledge on our terms. Ones that enrich and increase the sum total of human understand, of that there is no doubt.

Having to make others look intelligent, reveals this cannot be done without the help of others playing stupid. It's similar to the way many wish fat people to play, diseased, whatever they've decided that is.

Apparently one man and his dog, showing that x group have more y = science, even if observation consistently shows the opposite. And that's really the crux of it. When I was into the endorsed lifestyle choice, I took it as unshakable that science has to explain reality.

Not the other way around. That happens in belief systems.

The rubicon was crossed years ago when significant numbers of a certain type began to justify their every point of view, using any old science paper. Before that, there was a range of support, anything from axioms, philosophy, literature and yes even from religious tomes. 

My immediate thought at the time was, this is just like those people who quote biblical verse to underline every thought. It introduce that sense of sureness, which made discussion harder. There was a false sense of conversation ending finality about this or that findings. Which seemed to coincide with an increase in mickey mouse studies.

I knew immediately this was a bad route to go down, and felt safe in the knowledge that if I knew it, others would too. They would react the same as I and be more vary of dovetailing all thought in this direction.

Apparently not! Imagine my surprise that this has totally taken over, indeed, it has extended to the point where no-one can seem to think anything without it being validated by a sort of Brahmin class who apparently have no self interest except pure altruism and goodwill to all.

If they seem biased, hateful, lazy, entitled smug and above all, stupid, well, you must be wrong. Indeed, the quantity of science, however dubious is cited as some kind of gravitas. Reason why you should shut up and behave yourself. Or be accused of being a primitive flat earther type. 

I wouldn't say I never read obesity research, but I rarely find it the slightest bit interesting. Increasingly it seems to be a boondoggle of turning round and round in a cycle, not actually going anywhere.

I can't invest science with religiosity because I've no desire for that, if I did, I'd find a real religion, I wouldn't want to hide that from myself. Having a religion does not make you a lesser person. I have not sold myself that vanity. There are times when I think the endless hyperbole produced by misusing science in this way will implode its credibility.

When people keep finding out that the stream of grim and overblown prognosis's don't turn out to be correct.

Fighting fear

Why am I so pissed off with the whole obesity establishment? Why do I say, it is not made of  greatness?

Here's a lesson on how to do some interesting research from a group funded by the US National Institute of Mental Health. They wanted to understand how to erase fear, so what did they do? Well they thought of the most erroneous asinine stereotypes around fear and tried to crowbar some research into proving themselves correct.

Sorry no, I mean they decided that because previous attempts had centred around drugs, there must be no other way, let's find some new drugs.

Nuh-uh, not that either.

No they thought maybe if you study the way the brain creates fear, you can use the way the brain works to reverse that effect. Without drugs. Oh, my, gosh.

That's what I've been trying to say about human metabolism in a nutshell. If you know that human biology can efficiently bring about an effect, and we know bodies can be slim and remain thus without much effort. Then why not find out how it does it and find a way to use that or some part of it to achieve the effect?

Warning, it might work though. Perhaps that's the real issue.