A little Bit More 'Obesity' Agnosticism

Holy Guacamole!

Courtesy of estimable Linda Bacon, I just caught up with this,

Some might say that given obesity rates, we should give these obesity researchers the benefit of the doubt and let them collect more data. But here’s the thing: obesity researchers don’t deserve our trust. And despite decades of measuring and billions of dollars of funding, obesity research has not reduced obesity rates.

If these researchers want to come anywhere near our children, they need to come with more than a 50-year track record of failure.

Lols. Round of applause for Kasey Edwards.

Yes, she's restricting her fact-based dismissal to "when it comes to handing out practical advice on nutrition........" But it's a start. It should give activists a sense that slim people aren't so special needs that they have to be pandered to endlessly.

It would seem there is a limit to how much 'obesity researchers' can interfere with childrens' esteem and sense of themselves. They don't have open house.

Decades ago I assumed children would stop this cult in its tracks. One of the more shocking things in all this has been the utter disregard and even direct targeting of children as a route to getting away with things they couldn't get away with, with adults.

If anyone wanted to know how low these drug and mutilation peddlers are it should have been that, but, hey, some times we learn hard.

One of my main motivations for getting involved in the fatsphere was a deep sense that I didn't want another generation of children to grow up in the barren wasteland of negative propaganda with no adults really seeming to speak up to defend them from this.

So it's heartening to think peak 'obesity' could be on the horizon, even if only a prospect, and only in the case of children. I'll take that. I have always said, let's agree to leave children out of this. 'Obesity' shills won't though, they know that you can unseat people's connection with their own experience only in childhood.

They truly are some of the most dishonourable people I've ever encountered. It's not that they're evil, they're just empty. You can often hear them echooooooo.

The above highlight of the utter irrelevance and failure of this noise, ought to be the first sentence anyone mentions when speaking of 'obesity'. The fifty years useless/irrelevant/ineffectual/repetitious 'obesity' industry/science/research/public health whatever, wishes to tell us more of the same old shit its been telling us all that time and promises for ever more-with their ceaseless projections of their continued pointlessness.

The findings suggest that the proportion of individuals in the population defined as overweight will decline slowly in the next 20 years. However, the proportion of the population considered obese will increase substantially and could represent as much as 45% of the entire population by 2035. The proportion of morbidly obese will also increase considerably. These trends are likely to impact the actual costs of health care considerably.

Yes, because you can absolutely guarantee that 'obesity science' will produce nothing of any earthly use, despite the current touting of gastric evisceration.  That's because "public health" bullshitters know 'obesity' is a construct and a biological non-entity.

More 'obesity' agnosticism is only just. 

Happy

Apart from the general quietness of this blog, I must admit, I've struggled to frame a response to Cancer Research UK's recent marketing bombshell, linking human bodies with cancer. The major reason is 'obesity' is a failed term and the framing of weight in terms of risk of weight is dubious and in the finish, irrelevant. Everyone knows the issue is can we reliably and permanently alter weight or not? Secondly, I'm struggling to grasp what if anything the information given could be pointing to.

Have a look for yourself, Adiposity and cancer at major anatomical sites: umbrella review of the literature. In the meanwhile, my attention was caught by an article on bulimia, as an illustration of a certain mindset.

On my way to that though, I just saw "I have prostate cancer. But I am happy". It stopped me in my tracks. I was largely indifferent to Monbiot, until this "slim chance" ugh puke [no pun intended]. After that fiasco, I linked him with irritation. Despite that, I wouldn't wish cancer on him or anyone else for that matter. Sad to say that's becoming a somewhat lofty standard.

Under the circs, it can't help but be instructive to hear from someone who actually has cancer;

It would be easy to curse my luck and start to ask “why me?”. I have never smoked and hardly drink; I have a ridiculously healthy diet and follow a severe fitness regime. I’m 20 or 30 years younger than most of the men I see in the waiting rooms. In other words, I would have had a lower risk of prostate cancer only if I had been female.

Straight in with the difference between risk and occurrence. Weight is obviously described in terms of "risk", "association" and "linked with", as that can be controlled through, ahm, statistical determinism.

Disassociation, that is being associated with low risk and being unlinked to that which is baaad cannot though protect you from occurrence. Though clearly it feels like it does. 

What about his reaction to the news, will it be what CR-UK are jonesing for?

And yet … I am happy. In fact, I’m happier than I was before my diagnosis. How can this be?

Is this "denial"?

The reason is that I’ve sought to apply the three principles which, I believe, sit at the heart of a good life.

Um, so deciding and seeking to control the way you feel can change what you feel. Let's see those principles;

The first is the most important: imagine how much worse it could be, rather than how much better. 

Oh I'm feeling that, count your blessings. No matter what people want to say or feel about weight, compared to real illness, it's an embarrassment.

The second principle is this: change what you can change, accept what you can’t.

Well, we all know the changes wrought by decades of attempts at calorie restriction induced weight loss [CRIWL].

The third principle is this: do not let fear rule your life.

Lols;

Fear hems us in, stops us from thinking clearly and prevents us from either challenging oppression or engaging calmly with the impersonal fates.

You don't say? Preach son! No matter what the news, or the intentions of others, we all have to carry on in the way that makes sense to us.

Suffice to say, the intention behind George's rules are the opposite of what crusaders wish to impose on those they consider too weighty,

There are, I believe, three steps to overcoming fear: name it, normalise it, socialise it. For too long, cancer has been locked in the drawer labelled Things We Don’t Talk About. When we call it the Big C, it becomes, as the term suggests, not smaller, but larger in our minds. He Who Must Not Be Named is diminished by being identified, and diminished further when he becomes a topic of daily conversation.

This is interesting, George is saying cancer needs to become less scary. Using cancer to make fear larger not only goes in the opposite direction, it re-invigorates fear toward sufferers."Margaret McCartney: Cancer patients should not be shamed";

....Cancer Research UK has gone large on its publicity campaign about obesity. The plain layout with warning label is reminiscent of a cigarette packet. In what Cancer Research UK itself describes as a “PR stunt,” the charity also created “fake cigarette packets with chips in to visually represent that obesity is the second biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking.” The effect of this has been somewhat predictable. Some people with cancer have told me that they have felt blamed. Other overweight people have written on social media of how they felt shamed.

Predictable indeed.

Hard though to believe though it may seem, there was a time was a time when cancer had a stigma as great as HIV/AIDS in its earlier days. Doctors even took pity on families-leaving it off death certificates. Sufferers were hidden away by their relatives who often lied about their sickness, for fear of repercussions.

People finally going from shame to anger at the lack of progress is credited as part of the momentum for Richard Nixon's famous War on Cancer, which led to a lot of advances in the treatment of the disease.

It's taken a lot for cancer stigma to be lowered to the point of now and there's obviously further to go. Those who like to fake pathology and disease also like to enforce the reactions of their targets to their various machinations. 

They can't make that realistic either because everyone responds differently to actual disease, often confounding the expectations of fakers.

6 Things The Human Body Doesn't Need

Something from the BBC's "Terrific Science" website "Five things our bodies may no longer need";

The human body is the result of millions of years of evolution. However, it isn't perfect - there are some parts that we've been left with but may not actually need any more. 

That's; wisdom teeth, ear muscles, goosebumps, appendix, tailbone. Five in all. There's a sixth one they've omitted, the human stomach. I say human because no one's trying to remove the stomachs of other animals. I say human as in a human being with a body mass inex of 30+.

...in 1956 ten Swedish women, each at least a hundred and twenty-five pounds overweight, agreed to a trial of an intestinal bypass.  ...then the bypasses were reversed. Now that the patients were at a healthier weight, it was thought, they could maintain that weight with a normal intestinal tract. However, after the reversal surgeries the women regained every pound, sometimes more.

In other words, calorie restriction, which this kind of surgery exists to assist the enforcement of-never mind the flummery about its effect on gherlin and leptin and hunger hormones. This operation says, calorie restriction cannot be usefully maintained with a normal intact body.

Nothing could illustrate the fundamental problem with calorie restriction, it is unsuited to the human body.

It requires the deliberate disabling of the body to implement it. To get a sense of how that fits in with 'health', it's like what smokers and alcoholics are accused of increasing the risk of damaging their organs particularly  the lungs and liver respectively-to the point where they can no longer function.

That is the whole point of bariatric surgery's removal of the stomach, and it directly and immediately does this. It doesn't give it the respect smokers and alcoholics do by giving their organs a chance to recover and restore.

This use of gastrectomy is closer the category of body integrity disorder than medicine which it isn't in any conceivable way. The excuses given that this helps metabolic problems -but the 'obesity' cult is in the way of that, in favouring of imposing cal res.

Body integrity disorder by the way is a dubious psychosis where a person feels the overwhelming conviction that one or more of their limbs is not a part of them or must be removed. Note that article's subtitle asks whether its a good idea or not. Our default is to defend the human body's integrity, unless a terminological construct has bypassed [geddit] your humanness. 

Surgery changes a person into a being with a different intestinal tract, a different hormonal response to food—it’s almost like becoming a member of a new species, one better adapted to our current world. 

Along with the obvious, see the puff about a different hormonal response to food, as if this person doesn't know you don't have to remove the stomach to achieve that.

Fat Feet

Or, ya feets too big.

Person A: "What do you want to study?"

Person B: "Fat feet".

Person A: "Don't you mean feet?"

Person B: "No, fat feet".

Person A: "Podiatry?"

Person B: "Fat feet".

Person A: "If fat feet is not simply feet that are bigger, how do you define fat feet?"

Person B: "When feet are above a certain size, it becomes a disease we call fat feetishness."

Person A: "But surely that just refers to feet that are fatter?"

Person B: "There are feet and then there are feet above a certain index of mass."

Person A: "Surely all feet produce their mass using the same anatomical processes? Pathologising feet on the basis of size would mean a person who has bigger feet no longer has feet, they have a disease instead?"

Person B: *Crickets*

Many years later......

Person B: "They're a person with fat feet."

Person A: *Yawn* "How does that differ from a person's feet?"

Person B: "The WHO, the AMA, the DSMV and other authoritative bodies all agree fat feet is a thing."

Person A: "Do you wish to study fat feet to find the most efficient means to stop feet getting above a certain size?"

Person B: "The priority is to overwhelm with evidence of how bad fat feet is."

Person A: "What will that do?"

Person B: "It's the only way"

Person A: "To achieve what?"

Person B: "It's obvious!"
 
Person A: "I still don't get why don't just study the anatomy and physiology of the human foot and work out the easiest way to nudge the physiological function of feet into stopping at an acceptable size. It's a question of mechanics of biology surely." 

Person B: "I don't think you understand how bad fat feet is. You seem to be enabling fat feet, because you are; addicted, disordered, not feeling your emotions, sexually abused..... You need treatment, therapy, education, pity, taxation, advice, sanction, support..."

Person A, (again): "I promise you fat feet are just feet that are bigger, they're feet just the same as any other, just the same size. Seriously, podiatry has not [yet] announced that it has broken away from any particular size of feet."

Pre-existing conditions, Schme-existing conditions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This sort of thing blunts satire's edge. 

S-s-p-l-i-ttt

That was quick. The minute you appear to be personifying the ob puppet-you are a subject for 'compassion'. Go off script by finding common ground with someone who's also had cause to question and think about that script versus your experience and boom. 

Back to the beginning. Before weight was about dressing your body to control the actions of others. Which sounds suspiciously like the way you dress is the key to seeing off assault. I'm not blaming those stuck in this, little of our discourse comes from within us and we need to be more aware of that.

Those implanting hackneyed tropes as some kind of psychological self assertion have absolutely no respect for the humiliation invoked by finding out what you are saying with your heart isn't really yours. No one gives a damn about what that might be.

More and more people are going through pyschoanalysis of various kinds and are being taught whatever memes are set out for fat people-which I'm sure I need not tell you is being presented increasingly as a mental health signifier and issue.We are then expected to pick up on this and spread it to others.

No-one feels sorry for fat people-not that its desired or needed. If they did, they'd find the failure of dieting/weight management/lifestyle-whatever euphemism to be intolerable and demand proper means of altering weight were found pronto.

Instead, they collude with people happy to shaft them any time in order to keep people stuck in a trap they can usually only escape by damaging themselves, sometimes irreparably. The only time people respond to fat people approvingly or with confirmation is when they spit up what they want us to.

...the definition of obesity has been further complicated and addled by long-standing stigmatisation and prejudice within our society, fuelled by abuse of a plethora of pejorative terms for people living with obesity. The cause of such societal rancour is likely due to a number of factors. ....lack of a clear understanding of obesity within our society and its causes is surely an important contributor

In other words its the public's fault! They're inherently stupid and bigoted that's why there's fat hate. It's nothing to do with our constant propaganda about how worthless fat people are. And inspite of even the most trolly troll constantly talking about how scientific this is, linking to much garbage 'research' to support the non-arguments contained therein. Keep thinking you're going to get away with this when the sh1t really hits the fan.

I expected the professionals to weasel out of their central role in all this nastiness, but even I did not expect such shameless displays of evasion, blaming others for their own hate campaign. 'Obesity' is their coinage, so how can anyone "addle" what was introduced, defined and controled by the authors of that narrative?

I'm seeing more people are waking up to just how incompatible the 'obesity' discourse is with anything but itself, that was the whole point of it. If it wished to include or to help it wouldn't exist. Remember, we all wanted to be slim, we used what was given to us, it didn't work. Not our fault.

There's a real split here and it isn't between lay and professional, fat v slim, those who want to be slim versus those who don't care, it's between those who wish to deal with the reality of human function and those who wish to avoid this and continue imposing their interpretation of what they want that to be. 

Invisible Free Market

Plain packs for the chips features in essence what could be deemed the [conservative/right wing] libertarian stance on weight, one incidentally found all over fat activism;

Adults should have the right to be as fat as they please. It is nobody’s business how healthy you are. And it is no one’s fault but your own if your junk food habit gives you health problems.

For the sake of clarity this doesn't and never has represented the way I feel regardless of who utters whatever version of it. I do not accept self-appointed fanatics get to set the standard for what is healthy merely because they have big mouths and know how to use hate.

Unless there's a choice not to be fat there's hardly a choice to be fat either. Calorie restriction as the only means to induce weight loss isn't choice and its an option like smoke yourself thin.

Who got to decide what does and doesn't constitute choice? The same people who created the contrived way of referring to people above a certain size, slim people, not the people concerned. This statement doesn't bother to ask what choices they actually have or would wish to have.

The writer presumes to know oh so much better.

I realised the other day that no-one in the whole of my life has ever asked me if I wanted to [weight loss] diet.

I don't mean in that snidely way of imply a person needs to, in their opinion, 'lose weight'. I mean no-one has ever asked me how I would have liked to lose weight.

This is what those who consider themselves the vanguard of defending choice condescend to define as choice, for others, not themselves. 

I'm probably not the person to go to for what the various declensions of conservatism/right-winginess. I had the impression though, that the let the market decide people and, people know what's best for them, they don't need to be dictated to by governments et al, would have a better grasp of what they supposedly believe in.

But if we are dictated to by libertarians, I suppose we should what, feel privileged?

So much for the "invisible hand".

Bob Attack

I see from Ragen that Bob Harper has had a heart attack *pause*. That's right, the main trainer on the Biggest Loser (US) has succumbed to heart trouble.

After spending years barking at fat people like a rabid dog, ordering them to starve and torture themselves with exercising till they/cry/ vomit/breakdown emotionally has up and fallen down into a dead faint needing medical intervention to save his life.

No motivation-inspiration for him, proper techniques based on biological reality that actually do what they are supposed to do. Imagine that. 

 Bob Trying to give some victims an "obesity-related" Bob Attack

Bob's situation also reinforces my oft made point that TBL shows just how healthy, healthy people are [regardless of their size]. That shitshow has never managed to give any of them a Bob Attack despite obviously trying. Summing up the extent of fakery involved in a crusade desperate for people to be unhealthy whether they are or not. Hereby being the first crusade to mandate psychosomatic illness in modern times, perhaps ever. 

Consider, how much of any of his 'work-outs' could Bob do right now? *Shudder* it beggars thought. And that my friends is what MORBIDITY actually is. Not a way to repurpose a personal yuck factor, an insult or an emotional terror tactic.

Bob representing typical fitness industry ignorance

No wonder he was driven to do so much keep fit! The poor sucker was trying to outrun his fate. Something he has in common with his victims who seek to outrun their assigned fate, it rarely works for either.

Perhaps that's why so many of these fitness types can summon up so much inexplicable "anger". It's their FEAR screaming. 

There's also displacement. Using fat people as vehicles for diet and exercise tropes doubles up as an exhortation of self-to keep going with your 'fitness' and keep these feelings at bay/keep hold of your life.

Kind of like the slimming business, where people go to keep up the restriction their bodies have succumbed to, seeking prolongation of the effect through making careers as nutritionists, personal trainers and the like.

How sneakily our inner needs manifest themselves!

I can't say if its statistically significant, but it does seem that if you throw a population at diet and exercise that an uncanny amount who are able to stick with it do seem to need some means of seeing off their fate.

It begs the question of just how much the body knows what is in store. Whether there was some 'injury' or malfunction all along waiting to implode.This is then read through the conscious insistence that all metabolic alteration must take the restriction exercise course.

If there was proper means of making adjustment, that worked with rather than against the body, that could have spared poor Bob. 

People like this would probably be better off with a more gentle way of handling their inheritance, keeping their body relaxed and their mind calm.

This is of course why so many people cannot sustain these quack fitness regimes [with the emphasis on regime]. Their bodies know what their more pliant (conscious) minds do not, that this sort of self-abuse could bring matters to a conclusion before they would like. 

According to reports, Bob did not bob, he dropped like a stone and had to be virtually snatched from the coffin by a friendly paramedic. He is at 51, literally, a coffin-dodger.

He like fat children and adults, has had the rug well and truly pulled from under him. His confidence is shaken and he'll feel vulnerable and scared. Every twinge will now bring doubt, is this the end? Welcome to our world Bob. To what it feels like to be terrorised by health.

My advice? Get over that. Overlook it and focus on the positive, take care of yourself, forgive your poor body which can only do its best.  Appreciate it and be kind to it and yourself as a person. That's what we're trying to do and what everyone like yourself is trying to put us off doing.

Imagine that.

On the road to recovery. Required to wear these monitors for a while. Thank you all for your kindness. You have no idea how much it helps. ❤ pic.twitter.com/elK68VbhC5

— Bob Harper (@MyTrainerBob) 28 February 2017

Oh we have every idea. It'll be interesting to see whether and to what extent he shows any contrition for his past actions. However that pans out, I'll be expecting a work-out and special diet for invalids, special work-outs for recovering from actual rather than pretend illness and so forth.

Or perhaps he'll go away and hide like "obesity shut-ins" have to do due to the triumphant reign of the ideology he represents/ represented, I kind of doubt that, don't you?

Other lessons are available of course; the difference between health and fitness, Bob was fit, not necessarily healthy (not right now any how). Only slim people are allowed to acknowledge the possibility of genetic inheritance, that when health becomes 'behavioural' everybody has to explain themselves.

There are millions of Bobs and Robertas, heart attacks affect as many who have none of the personal markers associated with them as do, and so on and on....

Trying to tell anyone into fitness this sort of thing though is like trying to tell a romantic that there won't necessarily be a fair maiden/man riding to their rescue. Well remember next time they're hating on you, that they could well be fighting for their own life.

Dog eat dog.

Surprise, Surprise!!!

We all learn exactly the same frame for understanding weight based on weight=calories in, minus calories expended. The first thing most capable of objective observation learn is that there's something missing from that equation.

Looking at this exchange is indicative of the limitations of a starting point that doesn't lend itself to any other than its own ideology;

you said it...in a word. Thermodynamics. It doesnt matter how few calories you eat if your body cant burn them. Even with exercise, if your thyroid and adrenal system isnt functioning properly, you wont lose weight. It's a FACT.

It's in response to a deleted comment, the response to it is one I've tidied up for your reading pleasure;

Your body burns calories merely by the exchange of oxygen through the processing of breathing, [precious flower]. The ONLY time a body isn't burning calories is when you're dead, [sweetness]. 

The most important point to make is these pieces of information do not contradict each other. I'm not sure about the specifics of how the adrenal system and thyroid function interact with the maintenance-or otherwise-of adipose tissue, so I can't really confirm or deny the comment on its face. What I can say though is that the function of the glands is key to understanding fat metabolism, of that there is little doubt.

I agree with the second comment which simply draws attention to what is missing from the much taught weight hypothesis. He goes on;

Do you realize that WHEN YOU SLEEP you, literally, burn calories. Normally, a person burns about 0.42 calories for every pound in one hour of sleep. For instance, a 150 lb. person burns about 63 calories in one hour. 

The first commenter's conclusion comes from her basis of understanding in the only one taught. She's assuming-as we all do to some extent- that fatness is all about energy or intake not being (fully) used up.

Yet as the second commenter says, the body is always using energy, so how can people store much of it beyond a certain point? His issue is the erasure of hunger. In supporting this hypothesis, it has to go from a response, to random conscious decision. From something that fits into the context of metabolic function, to something somehow outside and imposed upon it.

His criticism of her is criticism of the basis of his own rationale, rather like those who criticise HAES, just end up criticising the notion that a healthy diet/lifestyle increases, maintains or creates health.

His stance is rage and hate, but he has no real quarrel with what she's saying without having a quarrel with himself. Any lack of science literacy comes from those who provide what purports to be 'science' the same he's basing his comments on.

His quarrelsome stance uses her (fat) body as if it is making an argument against his. As with all fat haters and 'obesity' promoters, their real argument is with the true nature of biology. They just sort of anthropomorphise that into an argument with any random fat person.

Fat bodies stand in testiment to their falsity. If they can get rid of them, their delusion can triumph. If they cannot get get rid of fatness, they can get rid of fat people, from the public sphere.

This causes them to twist and turn. When the AMA made their loco-lying position, haters expected us to welcome it as some kind of status symbol. They raged against [giving us] excuses. Such velocity had their fury, that it took a while for them to catch on that few self respecting fatz had any interest in such lying nonsense.

When their brains finally adjusted, they immediately switched tack and said we were in denial. That's if they didn't just treat us as if we were the AMA.

Ditto when the phony addiction babble came up, they sneered that we felt we were better than (drug) addicts.

We are told we look for excuses, when we refuse what could be deemed excuses, we are criticised for that by the same people. They must know their fakery is becoming more and more obvious, they're just to far gone, leave them to it. 

The second commenter, like others presents this kind of thing as evidence of fat people's dishonesty-your fat body is using up so much energy, you must be taking in so much more. This is where 'obesity' mongers have always leveraged the shaming of fat people to suppress our potential input, to avoid any real progress. 

It ends up with fat people being unable to discover/reveal surprising or unexpected information about human function, but that is exactly what we have done. This refusal to allow us to offer out discoveries to others, not only reduces progress for all, it turns the surprise of being human into a symbol of slim people's status.

I say this to the white coats and freelance internet trolls: We won't be silenced anymore.

A More Apt Response

Woman "...chops off her own finger with bolt cutters." I beg to differ DM. She cut off the top two joints of her pinkie. Still the fuss about her act of self-mutilation is more than I've seen for the whole of the current drive to remove healthy functioning stomachs merely to facilitate starvation over more extended periods. 

DM calls Ms Pinkie Cutter's act "bizarre". They quote others as saying its 'crazy', 'disgusting, 'stupid'. In the comments she's described as an attention-seeking, substance user, a candidate for sectioning, a disappointment to her mother(aw), [the ubiquitous] narcissist, victim of a childhood head trauma with 'questionable' parents, and a 'sick puppy.

Ms Torz Reynolds-her actual name-indicated that she went with an aesthetic feeling and pronounced herself pleased with the result.

"Healing so well and totally love it!"

Sounds familiar, except the first part would be more a cause for sorrow. Healing tends to signal tapering off of precious weight loss.

Even Ms Pinkie Shears draws the line at seeing healing as a disappointment.

The Social Model of Dis-Abling

When I first heard about the social model of disability, I was agahst about emphatic nature of those asserting it. The social model of disability is that disabled people are disabled only by society's lack of acknowledgement of their needs, rather than their actual impairments*.

The medical model of disability views disability purely in diagnostic terms, seeing that as the primary cause of the person's difficulties. The social model clearly had a profoundly liberating effect on many disabled people, freeing them from having a burden unforeseen by people like me. The medical model, probably unwittingly dumped the burden of society's neglect of their needs on individual people.

It took the social model for me to realise this.

Subsequently activists and others have found its limitations for themsevles, this doesn't invalidate the positive.

When I came to the fatsphere especially, I said that it was not fat acceptance that was radical or extreme, it was the 'obesity' cult that was outré. What everyone fears about extremists, that they'll set the defining standard, is exactly what 'obesity' cultists and food faddists have managed to do.

The 'obesity' industry's increasing promotion of gastrectomy has presented another surprise.

Gastrectomy disables healthy function to bring about its effects, not as collateral damage for something theraputic.

By this it establishes a notion of disability as healthier state than able-bodied.

As this conclusion is the product of social disapproval, it validates a premise in the social model of disability. That real disability isn't your function, it's in other people's attitude to it.  

* Impairment is a term used by Karen Hitchcock to refer to weight "....no drug can fix the functional impairment of being obese". Though she vociferously refutes the favoured lie that 'obesity' is disease. 

Eat Drugs

Following on from yesterday's video illustration of how drug mis-use/ abuse and the mindless pursuit of cal res go together like piss and vinegar, here's a neat little satire on the- everything's chemical, drugs are just chemicals, so everybody take drugs for any and everything, 'cos you're all addicts anyway-malarkey we're increasingly subject to. Especially now with the typically derivative 'obesity' cult and its laughable fronting of "obesity medicine" with its pharmacotherapy- i.e. drug abuse by prescription. I cannot stop laughing at pharmacotherapy it's so stupid, yet cheeky and trying to hard all at once. If you want to swap an imaginery 'addiction to food' for a real abuse of drugs, say so.

The School of Life-How to be a Far Better Drug Taker

Note some relevant themes;

1. The bankrupting of terms: Definitions so loose and general that barely anything can be excluded. Meaning they implode as cogent definers (e.g. disease, [mental] illness, disability, treatment, [-]therapy, addiction etc.,)

From the video; Drug, "A thing that alters your mood, acting via either the body or the senses to make an impact upon the mind."

2. Pharmacophilia: You need more drugs in your life, no reason, you just need 'em.
b) Pharmacospecificity: Drugs work only for the purposes you intended-they don't affect other tissues, and/or they don't clash with each other or increase the toxic load.
c) Pharmacofreshness: Drugs are strangely antiseptic-clean.
d) Pharmacospirituality: Drugs enable you to do things you're capable of doing anyway-like alter your mood, thoughts, feelings, beliefs etc.,-but with the addition of the idea that you need drugs to do those things.
e) Pharmacoevolution: Drugs enable you to evolve to a higher quality of personage. Things like food are so plebian.

3. Bourgification of drug abuse: A po-faced, faux spiritual/intellectual rather than a pleasure-seeking rationale for drug taking means you aren't a junkie, you're somehow better.

4. The need for people to take far more drugs in our lives, those who want to live for drugs might feel judged otherwise, profit and such...

5. How impressed these junkies and junk-promoting hypocrites are with themselves

The best part of the vid was the definition of the task of a drug, to;

Alter moods in any positive direction compatible with fulfilling one's highest ambitions

Succinct yet flaccid, it could be 'obesity' pharmacotherapy's calling card. That's why a drug for epilepsy you don't have, is on offer because some people who take it for their epileptic seizures lose a few pounds.....as an incidental side effect. 

Certain people would rather sell you the notion that you need drugs to replace conscious intent. "You have a phony disease-by-committee, you need to take some/ it doesn't make you a bad person/This stigma against drug taking is problematic"

If this pusher act visits you, I'd consider the same mindset's use of drugs and addiction as to put people off eating food.

Stigma is not the issue. The reason people don't want to be drug abusers is their sense of autonomy. The same that resists oppression, abuse and seeks liberation and freedom. Drug dependence bolts you to something other than your aims and ambitions. It derails those in pursuit of something that's merely a perpetuation of itself, rather than in service to you. If you spent years in self- contempt because training like an athlete whilst half starved didn't pound your body into submission.

Drugs to sleep, drugs to wake up, drugs to be more alert, drugs to be more intelligent, drugs to be happy, drugs to be calm, drugs to keep believing this calorie restriction sortie will be the one are hardly going to trigger an inner geyser of self-adoration.

Rather than recognising that your body with its trillions of cells is basically an ecosystem replete with underused technology. That not simply how we use our brains is primitive, but the extent to which we suppress our own intellectual, mental and physical abilities.

It leaves us scared of machines created solely from our own minds who so often seem as alive as we are. We are surrounded by simple things we can programme, manipulate and alter with ease whilst we are told, its not remotely conceivable let alone possible that we could create a chain of effects, using our conscious minds and imagination to alter our own physical function.

Saving 'Obesity' Crusade Delusions

If you're overseas you may not know UK TV station Channel4 still thinks it has a bit of a reputation for edgy forward thinking television-out of the other big 5 terrestrial channels. Despite this, the furrow it ploughs with fatsploitation is brain dead standard issue at its most banal.

As with a lot of middle class metropolitan types, station honchos are on board with 'obesity' construct agit-prop. Tonight they're airing an episode of their long running 'Dispatches' series called "The Secret Plan to Save Fat Britain".

Indeed. 

That could be read with an unfortunate-for them-literalism, as an assessment of the last 40 years of 'obesity' campaigning. To not only save fat people from not exiting fatness, but to add to and ballast their number. Think about it, if fat people had succeeded in their plans to 'lose weight' all these decades (centuries), this wouldn't be a thing.

The calorie restriction model has saved fatness from extinction-against the will of fat people themselves.

Anyhow, this programme is apparently an 'investigation' (plz) into how the current prime minister Teresa May has "watered down" the government's scattergun grand plan to regulate metabolic function from the outside in.

This grand stratagem is driven by increasing the encroachment of the organising principle of our era-lifestyle anorexia. Stuff like making restaurants include calorie counts on their menus, stopping supermarkets from offering certain promotion deals, getting them to remove sweets from checkout areas, reducing advertising an marketing calorie dense foods and other measures to reduce intake.

Anything but the most obvious and scientific, which would be to give people the ability to lower their hunger. And no, that doesn't require drugs, just more experimentation with using our thought processes to affect our function. An area of human capacity that's sorely underdeveloped.

It needs to happen for those who have an excess of hunger function. Contrary to assertion, its relatively rare, so people do not get how disturbing it is- including fat activists and some who claim to have something called-binge eating disorder. I'm not talking about binge eating, I'm talking about excessive hunger.

After finding efficient ways to bring this about, that can be applied to normal hunger. Whether that's a good idea or not I'll leave up to the individual, but that would be the best, easiest, healthiest way to reduce intake. However, this reducing of hunger, leaves control of what you eat with the individual, clearly that's an important target for those who feel everyone else's hunger/appetite is an extension of their own.

And should therefore be under their diktat. 

The programme implies it will dig deep to uncover food industry machinations to expel policies from the lifestyle disorder manifesto. I'd be amazed if they hadn't lobbied their cause. Having been used to fat people the "obesity community" are struggling to deal with their own levels of cynicism and intransigence.

Its amusing to see the mainstream media-often bellyaching about social media's encroachment on the news agenda and how its a disaster not to leave the news agenda to metropolitan know-it-all classes.....- bending this into a conspiracyesque form.

The intimation is fat phobes would be "do something" about 'obese' if it wasn't for those pesky industrial food varmits and their underhand nefarious tactics.

In truth, this whole shebang depends on the inherent dysfunction of the calorie restriction model. The upshot of that being a success would decimate industrial food as we know it. Along with that, a lot of the transfer of employment from the heavy industries of yore.

Even this far into that process that bottom line hasn't slimmed down. Indeed, it would reverse what is keeping many millions going financially. Whether you insist fat ='overeat' or no more than anybody else, the permanent state of semi-starvation required by this method, would strike a massive blow to the food economy. Not to mention the cultural impact of a quarter, more or less of the adult population in a permanent state of hanger.

This doesn't tend to come up in these discussions. Instead you get repetition of the have cake and eat it too fantasy. Food needs to be restricted for the 'irresponsible' people who can't control themselves, but not for those who can.

It's been pointed out that if the latter are so sparing in their intake of popular calorie dense foods- they'd hardly miss them-especially given their massive self control.

The calorie restriction model is especially unsuited for liberal capitalist society. The nature of it requires a dictatorship like control/mismanagement of the food environment. Its invasive outer dictation, need to interfere with commerce and to dismantle a lot of what provide incomes for those who'd otherwise struggle gaining employment pits it against forces societies want to beat it. The almost complete lack of real opposition means no one has to face up to this. The failure of restriction is an integral part of sustaining most people's 'obesity' crusade delusions.

BMI Reparations

Hands up if you think reparations-that's compensating Black people for the consistent open ended robbery that is systemic racism, colonialism, etc., is super unspeakably radical/militant? Well, in the words of our US bretheren, you can just sit your punk ass down.

I've just caught up with an attempt by certain outfits to construct another fatty reparations model.The inversion being fat people will end up paying to be discriminated against-discrimination is robbery- as usual. Few pay more for being than fat people. We've paid and continue to pay; mentally, psychologically, physically, financially, healthwise, socially, in terms of quality of our relationships, and with our own self esteem and so on and so on. We've enriched liars and grifters at every level of society, professional and charity, governmental and private sector to degrade, butcher, mutilate and starve and run us ragged, only then to be blamed for the failure of the noose around our necks.

That's not enough though, now we have the prospect of being traded as a sort of loss commodity through a proposed system of rating companies by certain purported health measures, majoring in BMI measurements. Specifically, how many employees are in the "at risk" category, given the agit-prop produced by "obesity researchers" associating fat/ter people with lowered productivity.

The consistency and unchallenged nature of this wretched cult and its complete failure of a strategy- CRIWL means increasing the avenues to monetise discrimination. A huffpo article states this move by the "wellness industry"-yet another industry created off our backs- taxes business but that will be passed on to fat people, it already has.

You get robbed, then you get taxed for being robbed because everyone supports the construct making this possible,

“It does inadvertently put a target on employees’s backs who are dealing with obesity,”

Always accidental isn't it? In fact it is the 'obesity' construct which put not only a target but imprisons people in discrimination-full stop. I'm sure you can tell from the "dealing with obesity" where that's coming from. Those who also support the construct causing these problems. It's a tribute to the barely challenged nature of 'obese' that you can present yourself as on the side of fat people, whilst upholding the basis used to royally fleece them.

Furthermore, if you're interested, this target is being painted on all our backs using this as the entry wound. Those fat people who claim to adore slimz need to start thinking very carefully about allowing themselves to be an instrument in their downfall,

[The]....federal government is already taking the first step towards endorsing this Fat Tax by allowing companies to require employees to hand over genetic information as part of wellness programs.

When I first got into the fatsphere, I made the observation that 'obesity' was a threat to all our civil liberties. Increasingly that poison is spreading. All fat people need to start taking this into account. It's not simply about you anymore. Similarly for slim people who feel immune to the discrimination they're supporting for others, its going to bite your acceptable behind too.

Anyhoo, reparations, eminently mainstream, until it comes to certain folk obvs......

Weight Loss is Neutral, It's Dieting That's Toxic

Fat activism.

Still getting itself in a tizz about whether dieting is feminist, body positive etc., or not. The short answer is dieting is pathological. It is self-abuse. To a purpose yes, but it is everything weight is supposed to be, inherently unhealthy. Now folks have the right to get involved in it if they chose, but they cannot claim it is positive in anyway, shape or form.

It is so obviously not the way to deliberately invoke weight reversal/loss that it is barely worth arguing over.

Dieting however, is not the same as weight loss. Dieting is a means of bringing about weight loss. This is and always has been the root of this contretemps.

 (Chanel Ambrose-speaking of her experience

with CRIWL)

Never mind any nonsense about 'physics'. Calorie restriction induced weight loss-CRIWL is probably based on the observing the body wasting away from poverty, sickness and punishing hard work.

The problem with getting your body to consume itself is that it is basically a way the body dies. When you decide to starve yourself to become slim/mer, your body is not "making a mistake". That would be the small cluster of the brain we call conscious awareness.

Our bodies work without that as a necessary input, ergo it stands to reason that the conscious mind's assumptions on how the body regulates itself is somewhat of an irrelevance.

The problem with the FAM from naafa to the fat underground, fat feminism and the fatsphere is that all have accepted the widespread conflation of CRIWL with weight loss. Calorie restriction being an artificial and toxic way to "lose weight" requires a surround of such carefully managed fiction and it still crap. One of those is that weight loss is dieting, when its clear that the body loses weight of its own volition any time it pleases.

Both fat phobes and fat activists are right and wrong, for basing their understanding on that selfsame fib.

Fat phobes know the body can reverse its weight, as it does in the course of everyday. That's a no-brainer.

Fat activists are also right, they know CRIWL of which dieting is the major plan is untenable. That has got to be one of the greatest unacknowledged proven scientific facts.

Establishing a compelling philosophical question: if scientists do not unequivocally accept a scientific fact, does it cease to be science?

Where fat phobes are wrong is that they think they can hide behind the idea of CRIWL due to it being perceived as the same as weight loss.

Where fat activists get it wrong is via the same assumption. Concluding that as dieting clearly doesn't work, neither does "weight loss". Weight loss is not a technique, tactic or method, it's an aim, an outcome. It requires something to bring it about. Dieting is supposed to be that.

It's CRIWL that is everything you think weight loss is. Weight loss is well, neutral. Or should be. Wanting to reverse your weight is not unpositive, it is not self abuse, it is not classist, sexist or whatever, that is calories in/out. Reversal of weight is just a desire. Like, wanting to be able to pay your bills is fine but robbing a bank on that premise is not fine.

Dieting is a story of ends not justifying means.

There just is no other means available but CRIWL. Test that. Think of all the routes to weight loss that you think are different and ask yourself what is the means by which they bring about the desired effect (weight loss).

All either decrease/block energy input or increase output-(i.e. exercise, vomiting, other purging). ALL of them. Whatever anyone says about any special diets tricks or secrets which the body processes a different way-etc., they aim to cut your cals end of.

Wanting to lose weight is not a bad thing, dieting is.

The only exception is when some technique or other is used to affect the body in a way that leads the body to reverse either its weight or certain metabolic signals. i.e. When people re-train their body to be in a greater state of calm, that can and does alter appetite, hunger function at times significantly. Lessening intake due to differing signals is not dieting, the latter has always been the wrong way around. A fetishistic practise that has become an end in itself. Similar to sacrificial ritual of quais-spiritual cleansing.

It really is the most absurd practise. Dieters think others shame them, when really they obscure their shame behind the kind of falisity I'm talking about here. Only when they meet anyone or thing that doesn't uphold their false consciousness, does the facade come crashing down. They wrongly identify that as being shamed, when its really being acquainted with the stupidity of what they're doing.

It should be said that it's not self harming for example, to lower excessively functioning hunger.  Or even to stop having too little sleep, if that then means the body to uses energy differently and that leads to weight reversal.

What we do affects our metabolic function. And this shows you dieting is not necessary.

These little glimpses show that reversal of weight is likely to be a gentle thing, a world away from the culture of CRIWL and everything that went into and comes out of the practise of it.

No calorie counting-a well known symptom of eating disorders- or enforced activity should be required. Fitness is not the same as wasting the body for weight loss. Metabolic function is designed to be plastic. It's incredibly adaptable.

Everything about dieting/criwl should be swept away. Whether people wish to "lose weight" or not.

Those desperate to lose weight need to learn to demand proper insight and means of inducing the body to reverse weight in a proper and humane manner, from the professionals and stop creating arguments amongst activists who've done them no end of favours.

Proper means of inducing weight loss will probably require ways of using our minds to alter our physiological function that are outside the culture of health care as we know it.

The Size of You

An enjoyable article on Substantia Jones and her Adipositivity Project in New Zealand made me consider a subtle difference in attitude to weight and identity. 

I'm glad she said that she wished to "demystify" fat bodies. I'm bored of others, especially the fat hating sisterhood, insisting TAP etc., are trying to force others to find fat people beautiful. Assuming they're covering their bitching with snooty sub-lectures about how they've appointed us miners of digging for women's value beyond beauty. As if they've they're too gorgeous for that.

Give. Me. Strength. 

We've already been forced to find slim people beautiful or else, regardless. I'll have more time for this noise when it finds injustice in that. Not that pretending slim=beauty keeps me awake at night, just that slim people need to learn that the complaints they aim at fat people are usually more apt commentary on their own unresolved issues-such as this. Clearly slimz are contemptuous of their own demands. The consistency of this doesn't bode well for self-acceptance.

When SJ was young, she was thin/slim, as a child she said she was nicknamed "bones". Later;

"I liked being thin. I freaked out about my body changing, and I started dieting very young."

Indicative of many if not most thin/slim people;

As she went on one diet after another, her weight yo-yoed. It was only when she embraced her fat body that Jones actually felt happy with herself.

Ummm, "fat body".

Of the Adipositivity Project she says,

"The primary goal is that I want people to love and respect their bodies."

"Their bodies" is right. 

Both fat body and their bodies reference the same thing........at the same time, there can be a subtle difference between embracing yourself and your fatness as part of that. And embracing fatness as a defining characteristic of yourself. It means something to be aware of what you are signing on for when weight becomes you.

I never have any desire anymore to be thin. It wouldn't be me."

It's all in those last four words (the prior sentence is quoted for context). I'm not trying to catch SJ out or nitpick. Many people aim toward this. I'm querying the urge to identify indubitably with weight, whether thin or fat. Your weight is not you.

You are yourself, your size is an aspect of that. 

SJ is no more inherently fat than she was inherently thin, what remained constant was herself. Same person, same life, same body-different stages, different sizes. That's how the body is. It changes. It adapts.

The point of FA is all bodies all people are always human. Always valuable, always the body you are going to do anything with.What is precious is you, not your girth. I honestly think that's what we are all avoiding.

Whatever your size, check your response to the reality that you are the value not your slimness or your valuation of fatness.

Before we plunge into defining ourselves as must-be-fat, we need to look at the mess of a crusade given life by must-be-slim and humbly ask ourselves why we'll make a better fist of weight as identity than slim people. What have we got that they haven't?

It's not the whole story, but if so many slim people did not struggle with the idea of not being slim, we would never have gotten in this mess.

Yes, if SJ woke up tomorrow as slim as she used to be, it might well be incredibly disconcerting, but you know what? She's already gotten over a far greater shock-the loss of a weight halo. She wouldn't stop being herself, even if it altered her character. She'd get over it, or get over not getting over it, same as any change.

As important as it is to value and as she says, demystify fat bodies, until we (re-)learn to really possess our thoughts, our perceptions our sentience, autonomy, agency, narratives and experience, size will not be enough.

Behind Our Backs

Here's something for you, "Well-toned Hollywood stars tackle obesity epidemic in Philly" no pun there as far as I can tell. This concerns certain Hollywood folk hanging out in Philly to talk about the "obesity epidemic";

Along with policy makers, physicians, and health advocates, a half-dozen screen stars attended an anti-obesity luncheon in Old City Wednesday, funded by drug company Novo Nordisk.

Uh huh, using food as focal point at a gathering-how unhealthily emeaushunal. I hope its not eating disordered. Discussing your(s and my) life-funded by junk peddlers. Divine. These thoroughly respectable pushers make "an injectable medication to treat obesity".

Truly surprising given weight doesn't require "medication". Adjusting body weight up or down properly requires correct alteration of metabolic function.

I reckon it's more like adjusting your posture i.e. the set of your hips, the carriage of your shoulders, positioning of your head. The issue is not so much a 'set point' as sort of a settled point. Like with your posture. That settles into a certain countenance. This doesn't mean it was destined to be that exact way or that bits of you have to be hacked off or you drugged to alter that.

What you need is an effective approach or technique to reset/retrain aspects of or the whole of it, to unravel the way your body has settled into its default position/ing. We can see our posture in the mirror. Our interventions have a more direct influence on restoring a more vital stance.

Correcting gait by learning to "scan" our bodies internally, for sites of tension, adjusting slightly until it is eased or gone.

Not only can we slowly alter the way our bodies not only look and feel but also, the way they function. When your body is less "collapsed" downward, circulation, flexibility can improve. The efficiency of our digestion and breathing to -reducing tiredness/increasing energy.

The failure of calorie restriction does not herald any need for disease as a metaphor. It signifies diet 'n' exercise is the wrong way to adjust metabolism.

Nor is individual control an issue, any more than in the above. The real issue is the sense that something more than usual is needed. The use of our conscious mind/intent to create effects that then alter aspects of our bodies functioning.

This fundamentally challenges notions of what is within our conscious control. And that has always been a real hurdle.

But that's tough right? Because we fatz have been put in this trap to somehow achieve just that, surely.

Seeking to do things with drugs that you could do with your own mind is deemed "drug seeking" by the professionals. Us fatz are so lucky, we don't have to drug seek, the pharmacorp wish avidly to turn us on.

Isn't that nice of them?

Must be on account us being too lazy to bother with it ourselves. I think we can change or add to the meaning of 'drug seeking' to mean big pharmacopoeia and medicine desperate to get people hooked on junk, whether they like it or not. And believe me, that is the real JUNK here.

So what do they think is the point of all this gassing behind our backs?

The main point of the event, said actress Alison Pill[?] of HBO's The Newsroom, was to emphasize that obesity is a disease.

Slim people love calling stuff 'disease' don't they? So they assume we must love it too. We must have felt so left out all these years watching them doing it, stuck with the seven deadly sins diagnosis. I like the way they think they're throwing us a bone (ha), don't you? Like we get to call ourselves disease. Isn't life grand? A promotion. No longer are we gluttonous parasites, now we're "disease."

Yippee ki-yay. Lets paaaahrtay!!!

Actually not. And people like Ms Pill et al probably cannot absorb this, given we're supposedly always on the hunt for "excuses." You could say, we are highly resistant to their pathologization.

Yes, you might get some fat people to go along with this thinking that its somehow free them from abuse-that's a cheap trick-but you will also have a lot of very underwhelmed people who won't be quiet about that.

Honestly, your love affair with calling things, disease and illness for effect, is stupid and always has been.

Pill continues;

"It's an opportunity to change the narrative about what it means to be fat," Pill said. "It's not a moral failing."

As if 'disease' and 'moral failing' are opposites. Weight is neither moral failing nor disease. Goodness slim people allow themselves to get stupid on this issue.

That "changing the narrative about what it means to be fat," is going around. An attempt by those who aren't to adjust to the distance between real experience and what they seek to press on others. Heaven forfend real live fat people get to say what being fat is about, according to our experience like slimz fully expect to.

I did laugh at this though,

Physicians on a panel at the event said one effective anti-obesity tool is nutrition counseling, but they lamented that health insurers often do not pay for it.

Lol, awwwww. No money to 'treat' food deserts and genes with old rope.

Slim-Baiting

I've just started reading an article, "Why bad ideas refuse to die". It mentions a young black man-a rapper-who's caught on to someone peddling flat earth. Yes, flat earth. That seems less bothersome than it should given people in white coats go around trying to force "food addiction" as a viable conceit, because they feel entitled.

And yes, I know its referring to certain phenomena, so why not define, describe and name that it veraciously? Isn't it important enough?

The @bese construct has never really a debate. It was cast that way in a knowing attempt to hide its irrationality. It's fat people who keep indulging this pretense-helping to legitimize the uncredible. Why do we feel the need to do this?

Are we looking for slim people to break down and say, "It's a fair cop fatz, we was wrong"? Not seeing them scratch that itch, nor would it be the catharsis of our past imagining. That sort of liberation comes from within us and is in our power.

Have some compassion for slimz, they're out of their depth on this one. Its up to us, whether we like that or not.

I'm asking you for a peer-reviewed study showing that a typical fat person can become sustainably non-fat through deliberate weight-loss

Would it be exaggerating to say, anyone who truly believes anyone can reverse their weight permanently with calorie restriction is up there with the flat earthers? Mostly, I'd say not. It's like asking for proof that someone's born again in JC. It's a suspension of disbelief thing, outside the remit of science-always has been.

It's worth mentioning a fundamental tangle at the heart of all this.

"Weight loss" is entirely possible and Calorie restriction dieting doesn't work. Communiqués go full on cross purpose. One 'side' knows weight loss and reversal of weight is attainable-they're right. The other knows dieting doesn't work-they're right too.

The bottom line is weight loss is not dieting, it is the means of getting you to that destination. It is the wrong means, full stop.

Metabolic function is as plastic, as in the brain and nervous system. It is responsive, malleable, adjustable. It has to be just to fulfil its purpose. Those gatekeeping research are more interested in using fat people as hostages to get dictate the way everyone eats. "...the fight to improve the American diet."

I don't hear manipulating metabolic function in that, do you?

These people are obsessed with controlling what other people eat. Imagine reading a self proclaimed specialist in hepatic medicine's blog, only to find endless screeds about alcohol manufacturers and what ingredients/percentage proof their liquour is. 

It would score high on the WTH meter.

Though some actually seem to have some interest in how to make use of this area of human physiology, the replete disinterest public faces of the "obesity community" as Dr. Arya Sharma calls it have, still dominates as much as their food fixation.

Their lack of curiousity alone is as remarkable as their irrelevance to those who need or want to alter their functioning.

The length of Ampersand's question reflects the conflation of a perfectly reasonable aim-weight loss, that has been torpedoed by being conflated with the metabolically deranging calorie restriction.  "Deliberate weight loss" refers to cal res induced weight loss, but it could and should refer to the painless trouble free weight loss our bodies experience everyday as our bodies convert food into and use energy.

Change would be sustained by that which sustains fatness within a certain range as the overwhelming majority of fat bodies do now-self regulation. They key is a method that doesn't force the mechanics of that to fight off and correct calorie deficit or starvation. 

Reactions to his inquiry have ranged from the usual faith healing standard-that is, if a million people pray for remedy and it happens for one, then one is 100% proof, to the point of describing it as an unreasonable request,

I cannot help but feel this post is a quintessential example of an isolated demand of rigor. Very very few studies in the entirety of the social and medical sciences will fit the criteria he laid out because studies like this are very very hard to do. If this is evidence he requires to be convinced that dieting and exercise for long term weight loss works, then he’ll probably never be convinced because it seems highly unlikely such a study will ever exist, even if diet and weight loss in the long term do work.

Does that sound like someone in charge of themselves? Doesn't anyone feel anything at all about seeing people in this condition? At what point do we become culpable by our indulgence of them? Behaving as if they have a case, rather than giving them short shrift?

Instead of asking slim people the question we know the answer to, let's stop getting them to show themselves up and focus on taking positive action ourselves.

Fat Finger

After yesterday's awfulness, which I shall be returning to at some point, here's a real laugh for the fat cognoscenti especially. Straight in,

a presentation by researchers in Liverpool and Florida at the European Obesity Summit in Gothenburg, Sweden, has found that, no matter what the child’s weight at the age of four or five, if the parent perceives them to be too heavy, they will on average put on more weight, not less, than other children. That was the case whether the parent was right or wrong in thinking they were overweight.

Please my sides......pick me up off the floor.....

You'll not be surprised to know, that WE KNOW THIS. So why, some may ask, do we not say this when this sort of thing is being said?

It has been assumed that parents who realise they have an overweight child will help them exercise and follow a healthier diet.  

Oh sorry, you must be a clueless person who thinks fat people can tell the 'obesity' cult anything such as our real as opposed to imagined experience.

Wrong.

Until reality is stumbled upon and then its all a great shock.....

There's a back up of certain themes that were unloaded into the fatsphere and this was one of them. Along with other fatz, it puzzled me for a long time.

To put things in the right perspective, this study with its grinding obesideology thought branding children "fat" would lead parents to impose an obesopunishment of thin gruel and hard labour.....that sort of thing. And the research would seem to go against that.

That's not where we were coming from at all. Nooooo.

What we noted is that there is some strange hudu shit flying around, with some parents who for want of a better way of putting it. Put the fat finger on their child/ren.

I don't know what's going on!!!

I'm saying that some children seem to be marked out as fat before any visible signs of fatness or even chubbiness are present. Now, don't think this is about comparison, as in; "I thought I was sooo fat when I was 6/8/10/13 etc., Looking back at pictures of myself, I realise, I wasn't."

Though that isn't necessarily untrue, it can be removed from the context of past times. I truly mean that even in that context, certain children are told, "You're fat", before that could possibly be known and its often a big laugh-to others. It's been said to those who (were) stick thin. It's almost like being told, you're the pretty/clever/cheeky one or whatever.

One time this was touched on. A slim woman piped up, to the effect of "Yes!" You're supposed to shrug it off and be like, "No way." Show character. 

Thanks for the tip, too late. Lols. It was apparently 'done' to her.

The point is, I have no idea what its about. Whether its part of the dark arts of the family, where people love each other and yet do all kinds of strange things to one another.

But there's something going on. Is it prescience? Or is it like that woman said a sort of test of gumption? Or is it like being marked as the family sin eater, one to be kicked around? For me the most interesting question is is it something about you? I don't mean that you are fat, but something about you that lends itself to a greater possibility of?

I don't know. But it is nothing to do with health or warning you or observation or anything like that. It's almost like being assigned a role. Like back in the day when kids were picked out to be eunuchs or something.

This probably underpins the charge 'fat' has acquired. And why fat people are always accused of not knowing we're fat. And why people are desperate to tell us.

I know there's more knowledge of why people get fat than everyone's letting on. Unless its about  prediction which cannot be ruled out in some cases, but by no means all, it suggests an instinctive knowledge of how you can test the fatness of certain people.

Sadly we're stuck with the shallow tedium of obesology. Probably to stop from talking about stuff like this.

And now I can say how I feel about duty of health. It's not simply we do or don't owe society 'health', its one of those bogus arguments only used on fat people anyway. I'll say though that people often reject what purports to be "health" through instincts that often cannot be voiced. The owe health assumes health is always known or being advanced. A lot of the time, neither are true. The crusade is about promoting 'obesity' [repeat, that 'accusation' is one of many crusade confessions].

Back to McLuhan's "The Medium is the message". I wonder if he isn't talking about us, or to make it clearer, our brains. The medium-our bodies (their design) transmits itself to its own conscious aspect in dribs and drabs, by the very act of its [our] continued existence. 

And to those of you activists who keep on with this line about the crusade is all aimed at making fat people slim. I beg to differ.

Surgical Experiment

"More obese patients in the UK should be offered weight loss operations, say surgeons". This threw me for a loop the other week. I was unsure why all this push now?

In a joint statement, 45 international organisations, doctors and researchers in diabetes say surgery should be considered as a treatment option for anybody with type 2 diabetes who is obese or even mildly obese (with a body mass index of more than 30) if drugs and lifestyle changes – diets and exercise – do not succeed in keeping their glucose levels under control.

Pocket billiards to that. Weight loss gastrectomy is one big experiment. A follow on from the diet or die. Where are these people when weight outliers are being cut out of their homes, being humiliated and defenceless in plain sight for everyone to have a pop at? Where they to direct humane considerations, dignity and privacy for those people? Where are they to inject a sense of objectivity into people's perception of metabolic function?

The opposite of where they are when its about hacking the vital organs out of bodies their professions have had primary role in devaluing.......for mucho £££'s.

Looking at the subtitle of that article,

Guidance says operations to shrink stomach should be offered to anyone with condition who is obese if other methods have not succeeded

The stomach is a muscular organ, why can't it be shrunk without mutilating it? Forests of worthless "obesity research" drivel is published. Why can't any spare the effort to use anything from the mind to some kind of electronic stimulus shrink the stomach, or turn down the function of the part that they cut out?

If you are going to starve people at least have the decency to turn their hunger to a less than normal level. Or would that prevent weight loss? Hunger is a metabolic function. It seems to run parallel in some way to where metabolism is at in terms of maintaining the body. If you turn hunger down, does that have a knock on effect that reduces body's ability to use up its fat stores?

There are no "other methods" of achieving weight loss on offer. Only various means of going about the same one- calorie restriction, with less or more assistance from such as powerful yet strangely useless drugs or thought re-education.

Ironically, one thing this butchery does get right is adjusting function first with results flowing from that. Whereas willpower only dieting leaves things as they are and just expects you to hurl yourself into the abyss that is a body's superior ability to outsmart your intentions. Rather than adjusting function, it leaves that to strangle or fully/ partially amputate the stomach.

The problem with calorie restriction induced weight loss or CRIWL, is that it is the wrong means of bringing about the purported aim of weight loss. Weight loss is not a technique, its an outcome of other things. The body knows how to do it and does it all the time with ease.

What we need to do is find out how and find the best means of making adjustments to metabolic anatomy to set its mechanisms to a different end or set point. If it can be done in part or whole through the stomach, then find the means of doing that in healthy ways. If we can alter the level at which the hypothalamus is cranking out its various duties, then do that.

In other words, tweak or reset the body in ways that change its set point-then let homoeostasis take aim at that and regulate it. Don't attack the body, use it.

The right means of adjustment will not hurt, cause major discomfort, nor will unravel back to where you started, because you will have changed the start. Regain happens due to the target of homoestasis remaining the same, unless it has shifted spontaneously before, during or after the diet began.

If weight loss was dieting, you'd feel the body's constant back and forth, reversal/advance of your weight all the time. Indeed, it wouldn't happen would it? Another impossible imposed by the phony conflation of dieting with weight loss.

Surgery doesn't remove calorie restriction's imposition of "willpower," or conscious direction, it just lessens it, which is why it tends to succeed better than dieting without surgery. The thing I didn't really grasp was that the more invasive surgery tends to decimate hunger too, at least until healing has (partially?) restored it. This can vary from days, weeks, months years, though the average seems to be between a year and a year and a half. Roughly in line it seems, with the period of greatest weight loss.

A pointer to the extensive and studiously avoided adaptability of the nervous system. Also an example of how hunger doesn't come from one source. I still missed this though.

Its not that hunger is all in your stomach. It's that your whole body is to some degree involved in energy metabolism, all your body's processes run on it. All things being equal-i.e. sans; eccentricities, quirks, malformations, etc., Hunger is unlikely to be solely about the brain.

Nature usually has at least one back up, if not more, especially for things that are this central to survival.

Hunger is overseen in some way by the brain, mainly the less conscious parts, but there are other sites that can have a significant contribution to its tone, tenor and pitch.

The digestive system as a whole is so rich in nerves that it makes a kind of (relatively) primitive brain itself. Other parts of it may also be capable of altering hunger/appetite function.

Such aggression towards the body is not necessary. Its desired by those who wish to insert themselves in between people and their ability to manage their own functioning. A big lever being their on-going refusal to do much about arresting weight in any non-invasive way. No matter what, if you cannot stop a process, it's likely to cause problems at some point.

No one should have to just wait and hope their body stabilizes. It's well within our capabilities to achieve. The will(power) is just not there in sufficient amount. More powerful than that is the urge to block that.

There's been a lot recently about how weight loss gastrectomy provides some great insight into finding out how to make dieting stick. These experts find it easier to mutilate millions and stand by with their algorithms, clipboards and laptops making notes, rather than getting more of a clue about the workings of metabolic physiology.

Like children pulling the legs off daddy long legs and pushing them to see how or if they can walk, so its just so easy to go down this route when you have such a grip on others. To honour and preserve healthy organs is still too much to expect.

It all has a scent of the path of least resistence.