Starvation: "Not Too Arduous", says Jesting Boffin

With narrow ideology holding all in its rictus grip, the only direction is round and round the same circle. The slimming industry has been routinely propped up, supported and rescued by medics and scientists etc., connected with the 'obesity' industry. Over the decades, doctors have routinely sent their patients to slimming companies, "They're the experts".

Doctors have been behind virtually every kind of diet there is. Name any form of dieting; low-fat, low carb, whole grain, high protein, partial or actual fasting, there's a doctor selling it. With the recent announcement of a slimming industry mainstay, weight watchers, moving away from at least, associating loudly with starvation induced weight loss.

Weight Watchers will now be known as “WW.” The 55-year-old company* just announced that it is rebranding to focus more on overall health. Its new tagline: “Wellness that works.” 

It's about time for the usual suspects to stage an intervention to stop the starvation punishment from becoming recherche. "NHS should prescribe crash diet replacing meals with shakes and nutrition bars to tackle obesity, scientists say", by "prescription", they mean, tell you-you are doing all the work. They are doing nothing.

Partnership with commercial weight loss firms should be extended nationwide to allow GPs to prescribe, scientists add

They don't routinely "prescribe" (very low calorie) VLCD liquid diets due to past experience "Liquid Protein Mayhem", From July 14 1978, an abstract;

...Singh et al (p 115) and Brown et al (p 120) report a total of three deaths of female patients who had adhered faithfully to a liquid protein diet (providing about 300 kcal/day in the form of protein hydrolysate) for five to six months. The immediate cause of death in every case was refractory ventricular tachycardia and fibrillation. A fourth patient experienced repeated episodes of ventricular tachycardia, but, after a stormy course, her condition was controlled with phenytoin sodium. The patient subsequently recovered. The ECGs of all four patients showed gross abnormalities of repolarization characterized by prominent U waves and QT_c prolongation. All of the patients were relatively young women aged 27 to 35 years, and, except for their obesity, all had been in good health before undergoing supplemented fasting. 

Do note "had been in good health". That's being written out of reality so harms done by "starvation induced weight loss" can be filed under "obesity-related"-strictly speaking that isn't wrong, it is related to a construct and its morbid crusade.  It shows even this dubious area has degenerated under the duress of trying to enforce starvation as some kind of end in itself.

Dieting used to be all about the low cal. Folks tended to lose larger amounts of weight than in more recent years-if you insist on starving off weight, the closer to starvation dying and death, the better the thinning.

It [VCLD] is not an easy diet to follow. Apart from feeling hungry and low on energy, other side effects can include: dry mouth constipation or diarrhoea, headache, dizziness, cramps, hair thinning

Too much association with destruction and death was doing for the slimming industry, as well as evident failure of the starvation strategy, until doctors stepped in with "health". A healthy diet produced health, window-dressing dieting away from its morbidity [a proper use of that term]. This lending of medical/science legitimacy saved the on its arse grift from a descent into oblivion.

It meant people stopped losing the amounts of weight as before.

Eating shakes, soups and meal replacement bars for three meals a day helped obese patients lose nearly four times as much weight as those told to eat healthily and cut calories, a study has found. Oxford University researchers have reported “total meal replacement” diets, which restrict participants to just 810 calories per day for eight weeks, safely enabled more patients to lose more weight – and keep it off for a year with diet support.

These are the wrong wrong academics/researchers/scientists, obviously. We need ones who are actually interested in finding out how we can use our body's own abilities to regulate its own mass. So we are no longer at the mercy of this increasingly institutionalised iatrogenesis.

I hope this helps to illustrate why until this area is done and dusted, this cycle will continue, with or without self-acceptance. That is a start, a means to an end, not an end in itself. It's an attempt to begin to reverse damage done by this crusade, but it is not enough. Society needs closure and that will only come with finding out how to use our bodies abilities properly. There is nothing wrong with that and there never has been.

The survey results fly in the face of long standing criticism of “crash dieting”, amid fears it can lead to a yo-yo effect where people lose weight but immediately put it back on.

Seeing as professionals are happy to mutilate people into perma-starvation, the acceptance of that's rehabilitating starvation without mutilation.

.....the Oxford University report’s authors argue there is ample evidence such regimes can help combat a growing obesity crisis which is costing the health service billions of pounds to treat complications such as type 2 diabetes

The current message is still out there though. "Fitness guru Joe Wicks cautions against 'beach body' crash diets"

Social media health pro Joe Wicks has urged people to stay healthy and avoid “beach body” crash diets in the lead-up to the summer holidays.

It'll be interesting to see how people like Wicks incorporate this into their spiel. Probably the usual, one law for the subjects another for the objects. 

Professor Paul Aveyard, a co-author of the paper, said: “This study shows that GP referral to a total diet replacement programme in the community is an effective intervention which GPs can confidently recommend, knowing that it leads to sustainable weight loss and lowers the risk of heart disease and diabetes.”

What "intervention"? This is an imposition,  a sentence, a punishment. The targets have to endure this, the people starving them get paid.

After 12 months, the participants had lost an average 10.7kg. That compared to an average weight loss of 3.5kg for those who received their GP’s standard weight loss programme, including advice and support from a nurse and written information.

In other words, be confident docs, you now have the go-ahead, sorry. That's what 'studies' are used for nowadays.

Independent experts said it was striking virtually all participants stayed on the programme for the entire 12 months, and suggested sticking with meal replacement is not too arduous.

Independent of what? When there's only one ideology, there's only one way of thinking, unless we're talking about such as; "Marco Rubio condemns 'weirdo Salt Bae' after Venezuela president Nicolas Maduro dines at his restaurant"

Incident sparks outrage among Venezuelans, millions of whom struggle to eat three meals a day.“He is actually the overweight dictator of a nation where 30% of the people eat only once a day & infants are suffering from malnutrition.” Footage showed Mr Maduro dining on expensive steak at the Istanbul restaurant during a stop-off returning from a visit to China, drawing furore back home where millions struggle to get enough to eat and red meat is a rare luxury. Almost two-thirds of Venezuelans surveyed in a university study published in February said they had lost on average 11kg in body weight last year. 

Not too arduous**, leading to sustained weight loss and lowers the risk of heart disease, say scientists. How much has Venezuela's diabetes risk fallen by?

*  predates the "obesity crisis" yet somehow managed not to prevent it.
** I'd pay money to see & hear them tell Maduro's critics this.

Ministering to Bodies does not Equal Ownership of People

A few weeks ago a certain health authority announced that it will breathalyse smokers to make sure they've stopped smoking for 8 weeks before they can be referred for assessment for "non-urgent surgery".

They said the changes were being brought in after 85% of people who responded to a public consultation agreed that smokers should be required to quit before being referred. 

This transparent attempt at buck passing shows the architects of this know they are in the wrong, they don't want to own it. Instead they try to stick it on the usual targets, the public.

Smoking is a habit. It is not addictive, it's is not even particularly faddictive-folks still woefully underestimate the power of the human mind in real life.

Smoking has never been more self-selecting than it is today, so if anyone wants to truly make further inroads into the numbers remaining, they need to come up with techniques that actually work for those who smoke and resist urges to indulge in power games expressions punitive fee fees or crackpot vigilante justice.

To use that brilliant-as-it-is-skewif expression, check the optics: anti-smoking professionals targeting people for; reaching for a cigarette-reaching for a cigarette-reaching for a cigarette, by reaching for self righteous shock tactics-reaching for self righteous shock tactics-reaching for self righteous shock tactics.

If phoned in anti-ism equalled expertise in the formation and cessation of habits, that wouldn't have happened now would it?

If health professionals and bureaucrats wish to truly engage in public health, they need to engage with healthy behaviours to bring about that end. They can do their; "Bad for you, bad for you act, in an emergency, in the initial stages of any real or perceived health crisis- if they've not thought of anything better. After the initial loosely aligned are shaken off though, they'd better put some effort into how to actually alter what compelling about what they're complaining about.

With real demonstrations of efficacy, that can be repeated, not assertion or pseudo-science statistically massaged 'studies', or other so called "evidence-based" hocus-poci. No stupid chewing gum or horrible-as-they-are ineffectual drugs "support" either. If you are criticising using material things, why is that all you've got? If you think the answer to problems is things, what are you looking down your nose at?

Why aren't you more concerned about how to alter the behaviour and performance of your mind/body, using your mind/body? That is a real anti-thesis of habitual consumption of material objects.

If that sounds like a tall order, that's the sort of feeling you invoke in your targets.

In the past Public health was honourable and progressive. It improved society and was led by knowledge such as an understanding of the true value of hygiene and of the nature and transmission of disease.

Public health must again be about raising the health of the populace, not a pretext to assaulting mental health, inducing self hatred, creating social/moral hierarchies, or a cover for weird politics/ morality social engineering and the vaunting of one's own personal hatreds. 

Incidentally, no cure-all but smokers or trying to be ex-smokers should consider making a practise of yogic style or other breathing exercises. Even that famous warm up stretch where you take deep breaths as you raise your arms from your sides into the air- really open your chest [it's famous but I can't find a link.] And when you lower your arms whilst exhaling, really empty your lungs-without strain- and pause before taking another breath.

This won't suit everyone but it's worth a try. If your body knows its going to get some invigorating breaths, that might weaken that aspect of the attraction of fags, just don't bring that to smoking!

I can hardly finish without mentioning;

The CCGs also require obese patients to reduce their weight by 10% over nine months or reduce their BMI (body mass index) to less than 30, whichever is greater, before being referred for non-urgent surgery.

Again, whomever wrote; "reduce their weight" knows the only means made available for that-CRIWL is harmful and doesn't work. Euphemise away, you are not even fooling yourselves. Effectively this is seeking to force people to starve off weight against their will. It's seeking to mandate the ceaseless repetition of self harm and self abuse.  

Let's refresh on medical ethics;

• Respect for autonomy – the patient has the right to refuse or choose their treatment. (Voluntas aegroti suprema lex.)
• Beneficence – a practitioner should act in the best interest of the patient. (Salus aegroti suprema lex.)
• Non-maleficence – to not be the cause of harm. Also, "Utility" - to promote more good than harm
• Justice – concerns the distribution of scarce health resources, and the decision of who gets what treatment (fairness and equality). (Iustitia.)

That's a fail on all four and more.

Fat people have taken the initiative, we have done the dieting, that's how we know the results are not satisfactory to anyone.

Patronising nonsense about how people need 'support' to impersonate anorexia, be damned, this is a medical dispute.

There's an obvious vacancy here for science that seeks only to properly understand and manipulate metabolic function. That doesn't concentrate on pointless categorising of people by weight as if being above or below their arbitrary lines makes your bodily functions unrelated to each other.

Look at what that has produced. 

If medical professionals et al want to continue their blocking of real science that actually works, and promotion of pseudo-science that doesn't, they need to explain their motivation for this. They need to become accountable for the outcome.

Either way, doctors don't own fat or any other people. They can't tell us black is white and white is black or try to press us to support their science fiction.

I repeat, fat people have always wanted to slim, we have been prevented by the lack of proper method. Medics et al can only continue to bypass that for so long.

"Obesity scientists" as others choose the area of knowledge they wish to pursue, which is their right. That doesn't co-incide with the needs of those they treat as their personal quarry. No-one signed up to be their puppets, we signed on for altering weight/metabolic function in good faith. That has not been provided and is not on offer so that is that.

Neither they nor medics nor society is owed anything by fat people. We've done what we can with what we've been given.

Nor for the record, is mutilation of the stomach any more a viable option than smoking yourself slim.

Children Seen as the Weakest Link

So the burgeoning 'obesity' industry continues to target the softer route of using children to advance its increasingly profit-dredging soulless cult,

These types of interventions were often delivered by multidisciplinary teams, including pediatricians, exercise physiologists or physical therapists, dietitians or diet assistants, psychologists or social workers, or other behavioral specialists.

I'll bet, a veritable bonanza for middle/upper class professionals. Well, we owe them a living don't we? And so do children, donating their minds and bodies for the effort.

Ob industrialists are wont to tell us of the purported percentage increase in this or that version of their stupid term 'obesity' so they shouldn't be shy about the percentage increase in the diversion of funds into this money-for-nothing slush pile. I'll bet its epitastic.

In order to collar more unwilling vics, the industry wishes to "screen" children from ages 6 years upwards to see how many it can requisition for what it dubs, "Comprehensive, intensive, behavioural interventions".

Don't all rush at once.

Basically it's,

...individual sessions (both family and group); provided information about healthy eating, safe exercising, and reading food labels; encouraged the use of stimulus control (eg, limiting access to tempting foods and limiting screen time), goal setting, self-monitoring, contingent rewards, and problem solving; and included supervised physical activity sessions.

"Reading food labels" demands a serious education. And stimulus control is not "limiting access" to anything, it's altering your ability to switch off or curtail your response to stimuli. That suggestion is about removing the stimulus, without addressing the potential for response. You'd rather get rid of say a phobia that just remove or avoid the trigger/stimulus.

This is all too familiar, like 'obesity' cults favourite attack the response to hunger, but not the hunger itself.

The reason they give for insisting on a minimum of at least 26 + billable hours is their "evidence" [lols] shows any less is even more useless than the minimal effects they have the effrontery to claim make this all worthwhile.

The proper response to this would be come up with stuff that actually works, but if they were interested in that, they wouldn't be in this.

That's not all though, the real jam in the doughnut is turning your kid on to drug abuse or "phramacotherapy" as they prefer. Clearly shy of their own actions. The prospect of targeting ethnic minority children is something folks need to pay attention too.

Pass that on to the unsuspecting.

I don't know about you but six years old was around the time I was beginning to become aware of eating and weight. The notion of me being put on drugs at that age is staggering to me. There are two aspects to falling prey to drug abuse, now or in the future. One is susceptibility the other is the worship of pills as something to take as some kind of holy sacrament regardless.

Drugs are introduced in any instance possible just for the sake of it.

Drugs impose strain on the liver. Their wild mis-use sets people's minds to that direction and is a long-term risk factor for organ damage. 'Obesity' wallahs are fond of invoking 'addiction', they seem desperate to make manifest their favoured legends about fat people-as they always do.

Weight is an issue of anatomical function, neural and endocrinal. The real answers lie in altering metabolic processes through pathways we can create/connect/exploit through conscious access. The focus is on physiology not 'behaviour', character or intangibles.

This is an idea that is still in advance of our current expectations.

So alternatives?

Well, teaching children to meditate is a good idea, for their general neural and physical health. Teach them to clear their minds of all thought, pick a spot on the wall/ceiling and focus on it. The key is to return attention to that spot when it drifts, without force or frustration. A couple of minutes a day to start off with is fine-if they are jittery.

Up to 20 minutes is fine. Meditation is not a treatment by the way, its a practice that tends to help support health, its a form of mental hygiene.

Gaining control of your mind is good for resisting definitions others may seek to impose for their own gain. It also can help with lifting and resisting excessive demands on your child's energy, something that can distort hunger, especially at times of hormonal flux.

Do not under any circumstances identify your child as 'obese' or 'with obese'. Your child is always a child. A little human person, never, ever, ever a disease or "person with their own body mass." If you feel up to it, make that clear to any professionals that you do not wish to support or be involved in such terms or pathologising your child in any way- whether you use their help or not. 

When it comes to hunger teach children to respect theirs by not forcing them to override or cheat theirs. Encourage them to try various things in a spirit of adventure, but don't bribe or make them eat things they really don't want to. If its about things like veg, make them tastier.

Keep a relaxed and positive attitude around eating and food. Explain that it supports the greatness that is them *grin*. You don't have to be a godbotherer to say some form of grace-expressing gratitude for your food before you eat it. And do not get them involved in this good/bad food or talk about food as 'junk' or 'shit'. Some food is fun, silly food for snacks other food is more nourishing sustaining food.

Still other food is about celebrating occasions or seasons. 

Explain to them in terms of useful, appropriate times to eat this or that kind of food. Tell them about where food comes from, about things growing from the earth, point to plants you see around, even weeds in the pavement/sidewalk, to help explain.

Talk about how food gets turned into the state you buy it in. 

Check out people like Ellen Satter, food justice folks who work with children and urban (and rural) gardening. Most of the good ones don't harp on 'obesity' its irrelevant to people who care about real things. Put food into context, its ultimately just food, fuel, it's not physiology. It's certainly nothing to fear. Altering the body shouldn't depend on it.

If a child genuinely seems to have excessive hunger-check by observing them and gently questioning how their hunger feels before, during and after eating. How do they feel about being and not being hungry?

Explain that some people's hunger function is more excitable than others, and that you will work together to help their body bring it down to a proper rhythm. 

Don't label them 'eating disordered' or pathologise them or anything like that. Talk about their fears and reassure them that you support them in finding ways to check it. Dispel anxiety, don't create it.

Teach them to calm themselves before, during and after they eat-on top of in general, even if its just something like counting down from 10-1.

Deal with other anxieties or worries they may have about themselves and life in general help them achieve a better state overall.

In case it needs saying, don't allow your child to be turned into a little pill popper on the orders of those who are clearly no longer in charge of themselves on this issue. Be prepared to be the voice of reason, defending your child against fanaticism.

I genuinely cannot see how they will get away with this sort of quackery without being sued at some point, but that's a risk factor they need to consider. 

Remember, all any of us signed on for was to become slim nothing more and, many fat adults are ex-childhood 'obesity' cases. It didn't work then and it won't now. 

Dieting Has Proven You Can't Learn Anorexia Nervosa

"Long-term weight loss maintenance in obesity: Possible insights from anorexia nervosa?" was written by a group of "eating disorder researchers" led by Loren Gianini. It caused a kerfuffle some weeks ago. I've not had the privilege of reading it, they're shy. I'm going with the seemingly self explanatory title.

Its assertion, phrased as a 'question', rests on the ever present notion that anorexia nervosa is an acquired skillset which can be learnt. Weight loss dieting rests on that basis also, making it easy to cast the failure of weight loss dieting as a failing of the person.

This is also the logic of "pro-ana"-the desire to pursue anorexia nervosa as an acceptable lifestyle. The idea was always of a pathology to counter a pretend pathology [body mass].

Weight loss dieting is and has always been proto- or early stage anorexia.

It's well known. When so much as a squeak of concern is expressed about anorexia, the swift response is often, "We have an obesity crisis!!" In other words, anorexia is allowed as "treatment" for 'obesity', those (slim/thin people) succumbing to anorexia and wasted by AN are deemed "collateral damage".

It's tea and sympathy for them and likely a big bit of cake-to build their weight back up-plus some family or other counselling.

Apart from the illusory divide, the central offence of these researchers is the feigned innocence-presenting an inherent part of the 'obesity' playbook as a new possibility. This is typical of anything within touching distance of 'obesity' right now, things that have been around for ages are dubbed new developments just discovered by research, to save face.

You could be amused at this from those getting off on lecturing others on the value and necessity of facing uncomfortable reality head-on. It's positively monstrous of them to deny themselves the privilege.

Why oh they punish themselves?

Anyhoo, the connection between proto-anorexia as; prevention, treatment, cure of 'obesity' plus "maintenance" of nobesity and anorexia nervosa is where this begins to get [slightly] interesting, throwing up the so often self-defeating nature of "noble lying".

Anorexia nervosa [AN] is not a skillset. This is something we all nominally agree on, but we actually do not. Insiders bray, anorexia is not a choice. At the same time, they and their supporters think it is. 

Let’s spend taxpayer money to help fat people learn the magic sauce that people with anorexia have mastered.

Anorexics have not mastered anything, [perhaps you could say their body has]. AN is a susceptibility or tendency if you prefer, meeting the trigger of early stage anorexia. People don't practise and become perfect, something in the has to succumb to this pressure.

Something controlling/affecting hunger and eating's neural pathways implodes or fails.

You can be a lazy bum if you are susceptible enough. The ability to start and stay on the proto-anorexic/anorexic route is likely to be part of that tendency.

This postulate is fundamentally erroneous. It misjudges what's happening with anorexics, assuming fat people need to copy them better, when the whole of dieting 'n' exercise already tries to do that. It cannot create a tendency toward anorexia. We can't copy succumbing to anorexic stimulus. 

...further research be conducted to inform interventions to facilitate these behaviors in the higher weight group and interrupt the behaviors in the lower weight group.

You can do all the behavioural research you like-I actually assumed at first that they were doing biochemical research and were seeking to chemically trigger anorexia in some aspect.

This experiment has already been done and dusted, the urge to keep repeating it unceasingly is neurosis that should be dealt with the same as any other.'Obesity' promoters like to behave as if the past hasn't happened. Using our bodies in the way they are designed is the right way to achieve whatever metabolic outcomes are required.

As for the fat phobia of 'eating disorders', that's a no-brainer, they've always been that way, even the term "eating disorders" is a product of calories in/out modality and experience. If you are going to fit your experience into their notions you've already accepted that basis.

False disconnection of proto-anorexia or dieting from anorexia nervosa causes unnecessary confusion and suffering, making it harder to understand what AN is. Saying that anorexia nervosa is the exposure of an innate tendency shouldn't affect funding. People can't help being anorexic, but they can help dieting in the main.

This divide is the voice of people under the influence of anorexia nervosa.

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.

Real Clean Eating

Here's one for the clean eating brigade......Japanese cafe chain apologies for using detergent instead of oil to fry their doughnuts. Now that shows real commitement to dietary cleanliness. And as everyone knows, cleanliness is next to go(o)dliness.

Afternoon Tea...is recalling the affected batch of fried items after customers complained of numbness in their tongues. 

How interesting. Usually the numbness of clean eating centres its affects on undermining cognitive function. Mind you, having a numb tongue could be of assistance. Throughout history, accident has become serendipity, sparking unforeseen human advance. 

Perhaps you can whack some washing powder over the salad leaves you saw at as you would a steak. Wash it down with a shot of washing up liquid, with no feeling it your tongue it could pass as a clean creme de menthe.

Hey, if a person can 'use' food as a drug, then there's no reason detergent cannot be 'used' for food in the same way. As in not.

Binge Eating Disorder is not Hyperphagia Nervosa

It's finally clicked! *Binge eating disorder-BED is a bulimic cycle without the vomiting. Instead there's calorie restriction/starvation with or without exercise bulimia [that's exercise to induce weight loss] in response.

This cycle seems to run over days, at least, rather than the more condensed bulimic initiation and response of bingeing [consuming a high volume of intake/calories in a very short space of time] and more or less immediate purging.

Like all hunger/eating disorders, its mainly initiated by dieting. 

I've struggled in the past to grasp exactly what BED is. Not that it wasn't explained to me, the explanations just didn't add up to much in my mind.

I thought of it as a mild version of hyperphagia nervosa, which brings me what needs continual reiteration. BED is not hyperphagia nervosa. Hyperphagia nervosa does not fit into the convention anorexia model of 'eating disorder'. It is not an ED, it's a hunger disorder.

That is extremely important in this context. Hyperphagia nervosa is not 'food addiction' it is not 'eating addiction' it is hunger function that is hyperactive, hypersensitive, achieves high momentum that's takes longer to bring to a halt. It can be a combination of some or all of these things.

It is aggressive, invasive, unneeded hunger. Sometimes accompanied by other disturbing symptoms. It feels like your (nervous) system is under pressure. Not like you're trying to get drunk with food or whatever people with BED are supposed to feel (I'm not trying to go there anymore).

The difference is that with HN its usually a more constant fight, as in moment to moment. Rather than cyclical and seemingly initiated by the attempt to lose weight via dieting, as is likely with BED. For some its a moment to moment basis. The term binge eating appears to be modelled after binge drinking and applies the same assumptions about that to food.

HN is body led, and seems to be bound up with the functioning of the hypothalamic region of the brain/endocrine system. Often its trigger seems to be related to the endocrine systems efforts in regulating human growth. 3 years old keeps coming up. So I'm wondering what chemical milestone/s happen thereabouts.

7 give or take a year either way is another one. I think its safe to say this is the lead up to puberty. The process of triggering the hormonal change/increase/surge happening around then, can disrupt hunger functioning. It seems related in some way to hyperphagia/hyperhunger from lesion to hypothalamus but without any obvious sign of such injury.

I use nervosa as altering my nervous system's tension relieved it. So my guess is that although it may caused by a wonky hypothalamus it can be amenable to alteration through the nervosa system, hence nervosa which is a reference to that system.

I realise that's a case study of one, but that's what happens when people refuse to produce anything close to objective study. You're forced on to what you have. Any one wishing to conduct a genuine study is welcome to. I'll happily cite their efforts.

From what I've gleaned over time, BED yields more readily to manipulating your response to food. Like a lot of anorexia, it doesn't necessarily have to be gotten over or gotten over fully. You can work around it, as the guy described in his video. This may lessen hyperphagia but to really take a lump out of it, you have to alter the default way your body functions. Rather than chase it after the fact.

I know slimstream researchers are trying to shove hyperhunger into their little empire, as they feel they can puppet fat people and that we all think they're the wind beneath our wings etc., Theirs and the general fixation with eating is a product of an anorexic mindset and sensibility. Those who believe weight =calories in minus calories out tend to develop this compensatory fixation with food and eating.

They lack self awareness about how glaringly clunky it is. If your idea of weight is instead rooted more around metabolic function, this symptom is not invoked by this. So it just reads like a superficial, irrelevant imposition. An unwanted one.

It's key those experiencing excessive hunger make reducing that their focus rather than food which is what others want to focus on. Especially if they're seeking to involve others. If what I'm saying makes sense to you, keep their focus on what you need.

* Not recommending this video, it just happened to trigger realisation. 

Failed Approach Tax Levy

Yeah, the promise of big fat coffers tantalisingly await 'obesity' dealers.

Government skittish about sugar taxes?!* Cancel that! George Osborne, UK Chancellor announced a 2 year post-dated sugar tax on fizzy drinks in his annual budget.

The turnaround was an effort to shield himself from immediate blowback on the more controversial elements of his proposals. Such as cutting financial support for disabled people or whether his accounting adds up or not.

No wonder folks refer fondly to this as politricks.

The hiatus is supposed to give fizzy pop merchants (type that without laughing) a chance to "reformulate" their products to comply with sugar fearing fanatics barmy dictates. The last macro-nutrient these experts turned into public enemy no.1 was fat. Unfeasibly low levels were demanded to give us all eternal life and save healthcare £££'s [do their promises evah?]

Food producers replaced fat with sugar and "unhealthy" saturated fat with "healthy" polyunsaturated fats in the form of vegetable oils. Then trying to substitute animal fats their chemists ingeniously found that if you hydrogenate veg oil, you get solid, fats, trans fats as it turns out.

Oh sugar!

Now there's supposed to be a sucrose epidemic. Au secours!

It's sugar not fat is the cause of all ill health [and probably evil], despite producers already withdrawing from previous levels, when nobody was fat. Remember when you could see the sugar in a digestive biscuit? Arguing about sugar levels just feels like validating this nonsense. No reason will suffice anyhow.

Give this time, sugar'll make a comeback in some form, just like fat. 

Braying public health agitants gain zero humility from any of this. Food is still the cause of weight, except it isn't. Weight amongst other things, is decided by an individual's metabolic function.

The response to this news falls mainly between; personal responsibility. Fat people must be blamed has managed to become the last stand of western style free will. The other is, companies have a duty to reduce the sugar in their products. This tends to be presented as conservative/libertarian versus nanny-state liberal/leftists.

Fiddlesticks.

They're the same team. The ob cult specialises in creating these empty polarities.

Not only do both cast fatness as inherently blameworthy and blame fat people for being. They support the framework that created this levy. 

If you insist weight must be lost via inducing calorie deficit, it's hard to see how you think this sort of thing can be avoided. If a quarter of the adult population could induce themselves into a permanent proto-anorexic state, that would reshape the food business, putting certain business out of business.

A loud hangry mob who would trample over your rights in pursuit of a society shaped around helping to hold them as much into sub clinical state as possible. Some might say you've got part of that with slim people. Not that they are hangry. Just enjoy making sport of people.

The intended outcome of product "reformulation" and what the "child obesity strategy" will likely be about, unless it consists of putting together a crack team of real scientists who intend to do some proper science and aren't beholden to the 'obesity' cult. 

If you insist on the imposition of calorie deficit, which way of achieving the same thing is more humane? Ordering companies around and taxing them + rearranging the environment? Or pressing and setting up milliolns of people for failure, undermining them mentally and physically in the process? 

The first scenario-millions of permanent proto- anorexics isn't likely to happen. Ergo, "individual responsibility" has its cake and continues to have it, whilst the pressure on individuals continues to rachet up....... until what? You criminalize fat people? Don't laugh too hard, social workers are already involved. That's some of your 'costs of obesity' right there.

Don't ask anyone to cry for the food biz, they didn't defend people. They didn't step up. They didn't question the framing of weight.  Indeed, they too invested in it looking to make money.

Hoist with your own petard, sugar fizz.

The food biz could have made clear that its products are not to be demeaned nor used to insult and degrade people. That's still an option by the way. If your products are shit, make them better. If they aren't, do not allow them to be spoken of as if they are. Trouble is of course, the food biz does itself no favours by continually degrading many of its offerings with cheap substitutes for proper ingredients for profit, just saying.

Fat people on the other hand fall over themselves to implicate their own behvaiour; "We don't eat right/ eat too much/eat when we aren't hungry" and so on. I notice this because I always do notice the gap in this area. 

Listing fat people's purported failings makes a person feel exempt from said flaws. But if this is all 1st world problems (no I don't approve), then logic dictates those reporting this have to assume they're just as "free will" shirking themselves. Little could illustrate that better than trying to dump your real or perceived flaws on someone else, to make yourself feel better. 

In comparison with fat people's immediate uncritical embrace of weight loss dieting, incredible dedication, tenacious refusal to give up on it and stoicism in the face of defeat.

I make no bones [har] about being against this tax. Its an opening sortie in funding the parasitic 'obesity' industry-that still includes a lot of its "research 'n' science". Its real aim is to perpetuate itself. Producing nothing of any earthly use to the people it gave the world permission to despise.

If it gets away with this tax, the demands will continue and become more expansive. Why indeed should soft drinks makers pay a sugar tax when there are numerous other 'products' that contain sugar, namely fruit for one. Aaaaah but that's the good kind of sugar.....but not if you're paleo/sugar low. Even fruit has gotten caught up in the dead end that is food=weight.

I confess to having lost track of this explosion of nutritional nonsense.

Your body should be levied too. It converts a large part of your diet into a form of sugar in order for it to be available as energy. The sugar-is-poison crew don't tend to bother much with that.

Taxing food taxes the poor, not because only poor people eat sugar, merely that they consume it at all.

Men's weight is rather uniform across class, it is women's that varies substantially between the richest and poorest. My view on weight and socio-economic class is the fattest overall are not an official class per se but where the aspiring working and lower/impoverished middle classes meet. 

They tend to be permanently overstretched, overtaxed but also pressurize themselves and carry a certain shame that often comes from aspiring toward better (ergo, the implication being, what you are isn't good enough) along with the loss of as firm a sense of place. Not fitting into the class that matches your income nor that which you aspire to.

It's not bad to be there. But you can get lost in the pressures that are on you, in you, shaping you.

These kinds of chronic underlying stresses lead to shifts in the functioning of your body, i.e. altering your taste buds to favour sweetness. This is body led, your tongue is merely the end point and facilitator. It is instinctive coping and survival. It has nothing to do with "comfort eating" which is another dubious mis-conceptualization.

This is likely what's behind Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier speech were he talks of the poor wanting something a bit "tasty" rather than bland food advised. Food tastes different in different mouths and even within the same mouths in differing contexts. He too, like many of his counterparts today assumed it was purely about pleasure.

The more free range working class tend towards thinness. Though I cannot confirm it totally, there may be a greater use of eating disorder techniques, such as making yourself sick to help stablize weight, amongst better off women. There seems a lesser chance of multiple stresses, fewer insecurities, financial etc., makes it less likely that you'll fatten.

"Healthy food is more expensive" is not my personal experience. Cooking skills, styles and appetites are as diverse in poorer people as in the better off. The pretense that because poorer women seem to be fatter overall than the richest women is less down to the food eaten than the way their bodies are functioning though both reflect the contexts that they live in.

That's why some slim down when they get famous/better off. They are out of that milieu, their body's workings shift. 

The culture of shame surrounding food means people feel on the back foot when it comes to anything to do with eating. There's a sense of having to excuse and justify what you eat. Though I do think there is something in the food desert thing. I'm not sure the full story's been told on that one. It might be better to say that if you are middle class, there tends to be less need for you to have to be able to cook.

If you are poor, that is more likely to put you under immediate duress.

Healthy is more expensive is popular as few bourgies of any political hue can tolerate the fact that it takes more skill to survive in poverty with any balance, than it does in wealth.

The belief that the poor require nutritional "education" comes from the assumption that poor people are stupid/ ill educated (by their class right?!) If you are brought up eating certain kinds of things that's your 'education'. That's no different than other people eating what they've been brought up with. I was brought up the same way, I wasn't "educated" about food, I didn't need to be. My mother fed me mainly on food cooked from scratch, centered on fresh produce.

Weight disparities among some poorer groups of men and women can match those between poorer women overall and the men in their group, double. That would not be so if food was the 'cause' of weight.

Diabetes Trippy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my strictly non medical judgement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's usually called a holiday. 

Orthorexia Nervosa

I heard about Orthorexia Nervosa and swatted it away as some kind of excessive affectation. I couldn't get to the bottom of what it meant. And anyway, how many narrow declensions of eating/hunger disorders do you need? It seemed infinitely self-absorbed.

This feeling went on for years until I happened to land on Steven Bratman's own site [the guy who coined the term]. I couldn't believe it, such a precise reading of what I'd experienced. I'm sure you've had quite wide ranging/long lasting experience that you notice, but somehow don't see clearly. The WHAM, you land on it.

I didn't think of myself as a dieter. My focus was sticking with the idea of what a healthy diet was then. Thinking what would make me healthy would make me slim and vice versa- many fat phobes don't appear to realise that we've thought all their main thoughts because we received the same mental conditioning about eating and weight as everyone else. 

Not only that, orthorexia for me became an atypical trigger that led to hyperphagia.

Okay, so what's Orthorexia Nervosa [ON]?

Basically, its when a conscious ideology of eating, in this case healthy/healthist unbalances the hunger/appetite mechanisms function. Basically healthy eating tips into compulsion.

People still have problems grasping the point about eating or hunger disorders. We seem to assume, they follow a behaviour. That someone has gone to an extreme. On the whole NO. What happens is- Same behaviour differing response.

A person is anorexic, bulimic, orthorexic because their system yields to behaviours others perform with nothing more than the demands of said acts. The reason why desisting from those behaviours may cure the problem totally, is that it removes pressure, not because those behaviours can cause that unbalancing in anyone.

Note I didn't say hyperphagic because I don't understand binge eating and I only know my own type of hyperphagia, which I know was a physiological imbalance, probably brought on by stressed nervous system.

The idea of a habit of "comfort eating" doesn't fit.

Looking through an i-net search the consensus description is-an obsession with healthy eating. This is typically facile and un-illuminating. 

With anorexia, the pressure is on hunger signalling. With orthorexia, the pressure on your hunger comes THROUGH the pressure you are putting on your APPETITE to conform to what you want it to be. Which ends up obscuring and distancing you from your body needs. Ironically, you do this because you believe your body needs your idea of "healthy foods."

Weird though it might seem, our idea that our bodies need  only food classed as "healthy", isn't backed up by experience.

An anorexic, reduces overall energy intake. This can be of any particular kind of diet-though that demand may skew the proportions and types of foods they will eat. Orthorexics get into trouble due to seeking to eat certain foods and exclude others, i.e. high protein, high intake of low calorie veg and fruit, low carb, low sugar, low-fat.

The body is threatened by this as it is energy reduction, just less so.  Whereas lack of energy threatens life, restriction of types of food threatens inadequate nutrition or balance of [for your requirements]. It could go as far to poisoning if one takes in too much of foods that have toxic substances. Like some leafy greens for example- caution; we're talking a probably unpalatably high amount.

The reason we don't tend to get to that level of intake is we have such an effective disgust reflex for certain foods because they contain small amounts of toxic substances. This, not greed or self destructiveness or "food addiction is why we don't tend to crave low density veg, like we do calorie dense foods.

Terms like that and "hyperpalatability" are mis-direction, calorie dense foods are just of more use to our bodies. We can sometimes feel we can eat any amount of so called "junk" calorie dense foods, because they do not contain such.

One of the ways ON slips beneath awareness, leading up to an anorexic or other conclusion is your focus is on eating, not starving yourself. Where it gets you is your focus becomes progressively narrower without you realising it. Again, you aren't "obsessed," you are seeking to eat totally healthily, which is what you're supposed to do. In my case, it was that I wasn't getting slim, so I kept trying harder. Isn't that supposed to be why we fat people fail to slim?

All this just happens to be enough to activate an unforeseen tendency.

You too may retain skeptism, I wouldn't blame you. Others have become incredibly anguished over the mere idea of ON, taking it as some kind of personal affront against healthist eating.

In order to grasp it and probably other ED's/neuroses, its best to consider more of the context for them.

Starting with our still crude notions of free will...............

The Unbearable Emptiness of Weight Loss Diet Shills and @besity Wallahs

"Tobacco can show us the way to tackle our obesity disaster", so says Susan Jebb in "the newspaper of the year." Now I get why some don't bother with the press. They're both hosting a groundbreaking or path fracking lecture on it. Whoo hoo.

Hope springs eternal and you think; "I know diet shills have lost control of themselves and there's no one around to properly restrain them. But surely there's a level beneath which they will not stoop?" Then they just go ahead and do it again!

Yes Jebb claims deciding to no longer put lit tubers of tobacco in your gob, inhale and breathe out the smoke has some connection with engaging in a titanic battle to stop responding to your innate hunger and appetite properly- declining to eat what you wish, at the same time as engaging in the selective gluttony of making yourself eat things you may not wish in quantities you'd prefer not to anyway.

Plus, wasting time on activity you'd rather not engage in, denying yourself that time to do things you want to;

We encourage smokers to quit smoking whilst recognizing that some people may need to try several times before they succeed, yet hold back from encouraging people who are overweight to diet. 

So that's not inhaling /exhaling smoke, versus, repressing your real hunger, in favour of faking hunger you don't have and wasting the time you doing things you don't wish to whilst not doing the things you would like to do, with the people you'd like to do them with;

We're constrained by an outdated pessimism about the effectiveness of obesity treatments.

Lmao.

Research shows...many different kinds of interventions do help people lose weight.....from bariatric surgery right through to behavioural weight management services or even self help programs. 

Self help eh? You mean what most of us spent the decades of slimming madness engaged in? The efforts folks like you deny? And seriously, stop with this different kinds. Whatever you're doing it is to bring about the same end. If perfect mental health =slimness, you won't need the restriction.

Oh and prove it first in a mass long term trial, just for once.

Not doing one direct action is the same as doing multiple indirect actions, none of which is directly the thing she is complaining about;

 "The public are confused." "We may think we are rational people, but more of our behaviour in relation to food is an automatic response.

You don't say? It's as if no-one told this "nutritional scientist" that this is the way eating-the response to hunger- works. You get hungry enough, you eat. You require energy, you get hungry, you eat. Not just for people, but for other animals and many other lifeforms in some way or another.

Not smoking is natural, suppressing hunger is unnatural and causes distress, discomfort and at times disorder in response. If hunger is excessive that needs to be righted. If normal hunger is supposed to be suppressed, that is a pathology, which  also requires a functioning method. Imposing restriction isn't anything, it just puts the cart before the horse.

Trying repeatedly is how many picked up ED's that weren't as close to the surface as they should have been for the trouble they caused.

All this is no longer enough, keep up. Being "behaviourally" coached like one of Pavlov's dog-by people who clearly don't know how to behave-and having your thoughts rejigged by people who cannot tell the difference between thought and responding to biological signalling.

How does anyone really need to ask why no society can make this work long-term? Those who've come closest have a different sense of individual rights-shall we say- and merely engaged neuroses that derailed those efforts in relatively short time. It's so obviously not the right approach.

Ultimately, this message is about the conflation of two things. Reversing/advancing body mass and a desire to make people eat the way you think is right-rather like many vegetarians, carnivores insist everyone else eat as they.

Jebb thinks its okay to "nudge" and "nanny" people, telling them how to live their lives, because someone died and made her god/she has an emptiness inside she's trying to fill. It's the only pleasure she has left, now that she's squeezed it out of her own life.

Unsurprisingly, she can hardly sell this bill of crap on its own [lack of] merit, she requires the strong arm of the same stress, abuse, bullying and social exclusion that's already failed.

Failed to stop the very things she claims need to be done to reverse the "disaster" made during the 'obesity crusade' she represents. In fact they advanced on the back of "weight is an individual matter." If one were cynical, one might say she and her ilk permitted this, so they could gain a better grasp of people's lives. After all, they know all about nutrition.

@besity wallahs mention QALY's whenever you point to life expectancy. Life isn't just about quantity, it's about quality. Though the prospect of even more harassment, nagging, bullying and abuse has undoubtedly been "motivating" having to live by the dictates of others also reduces quality of life too. 

Running around suppressing hunger in order to lose and keep weight off, assuming you can even manage that, is draining to the nervous system. The grind wears out something in you, if you even can get to that point (which is why many can't). It's like spending years chasing illicit drugs and the money to buy them.

People can fake "endorphin rush" exercise-gasm all they like, when you look into the eyes of the rage, hatred and full bodied desire for the suffering and death of fat people, it speaks otherwise.

Decades of rigid investment in calories in/out as the one and only way to alter weight has done something to these people's minds. They're so mentally and emotionally dependent on this, that they'd rather harass, bully, tax and impoverish others- change whole societies- to fit align with it, rather than move on to something better suited to their [purported] aims.

Duh-oh!

She ends her unconvincing agit-prop by stating "A serious look at the preventative and treatment of 'obesity' and diet-related diseases is long overdue." Yeah, that's called science into something you've never mention.

Starting by focusing on what that's really referring to; metabolic function. Finding out how to tweak that and you can leave people to eat/not eat and do/not do whatever the heck they want-as long as its legal and doesn't hurt anyone (else).  Jebb and cohorts really need to find something else to fill the vacuum left by the way they're living.

How Many Times: Bodies Do not Cause Eating Disorders

Here we go with another tedious installment of let's stay in denial and pathologize bodies as the source of anorexia, yahwn.

Repeat, anorexia is ultimately about susceptibility, meaning that you have to have some tendency towards it to succumb to it. But, the trigger of that susceptibility, i.e. how most find it out is through the hunger/appetite blocking practice of calorie restriction. Calorie restriction is the disordered and dysfunctional basis of all available weight regulation, hence people merely trying to stay the same weight find themselves inexplicably mimicking and triggering various disorders, including those of eating.

That includes more than anorexia or starvation disorders, it includes provoking the hunger/appetite (signalling) to go hyperactive too-the latter is a defense mechanism against potential starvation the former is a succumbing to the pressure of it.

What isn't the cause of anorexia is thin bodies who you'll find are thin people. Their appearance in the fashion meejah merely reflects the value accorded them by middle and upper classes, especially. The haute fashion biz is invariably chock-a-block with that strata. They naturally disseminate the currency and values of their class experience and milieu.

Until they are prepared for a genuine re-think, they need to stop this ridiculous pantomime of attacking the adolescent girls favoured to illustrate their fashion fantasies.

This combination plus the wretched 'obesity' crusade in overdrive is a ticking timebomb waiting to implode on those unfortunate enough to become "collateral damage."

Singling out a 16 year old weight outlier for abuse is not only bullying it's dishonest and no account. It seeks to criticize in a roundabout way, attitudes approved of by those doing the criticizing-which is why they enjoy being so virulent and nasty about it. Their own sense of guilt and shame.

I'm sorry that some with varying stages of anorexia etc., feel "triggered" by people, but, they'll just have to get over that. It's outrageous to demand the banning of bodies because of your personal problems. No one with "low-self esteem" would dream of such an imposition. You can't dump that amount of responsibility on someone who has no control over you, apart from anything, it doesn't address the problem.

Part of recovering from ED desensitizing overactive reactions - you might as well get on with that. In fact, this might be a cue for those who provide treatment to make this more important. Sending people out there who can barely tolerate the sight of another strikes me as somewhat of an oversight.

And if especially privileged middle and upper class people are too silly or brutish to tell their children-models get paid for their size, for the way they look, you do not-your job is to look like yourself, then they'd better do what they usually do, employ someone to do it for them. 

Limited Horizons

Didn't expect to bother with the other two episodes of this. I completed the trio, in spite of myself and felt certain things were worth noting (my hand accidentally typed that as "nothing").
The premise, to apply a scientific approach to calorie restriction dieting (CRD) was laughable. That would obliterate the practice. It turned out really to be another desperate chapter of-operation save calorie restriction dieting. The prime motive as ever isn't to slim fat people but to keep us dieting.

At the start of each part the presenter asserted: "We know 'obesity' is caused by overeating." Tell that to the surgeons cutting stomachs out-along with added mal absoption! They clearly see the "cause" as an absence of starvation.

The programme's USP was "tailoring" diets to a person's eating [faults]. WW arrived at the same place for the same reasons with their points system. Both are an instinctive drift- realized or not- toward aping normal eating, a tacit admission of failure.

And if "overeating" i.e. an excess of hunger is the problem, why not apply a scientific approach to reversing that? Temperature too high, reduce it. Too many hunger signals? Reduce their extent and/or range, simple. Yet not a dicky bird was said about such.

Just to clarify, this would be more or less the same whether a person had normal hunger or not. Its just reducing normal hunger might lead to pathology and be rather unethical-given you'd be imposing loss of function rather than healing. [Sound familiar?]

What made me truly sit up though (and sit through to the end) was beneath the-anyone can change their weight demeanour-lay a boneheaded genetic fatalism I'd not imagined. Even I gave them way more credit than this. They literally said, whatever problems you do (or don't have) as a fat person are created by your genes and you're stuck with them.

The paucity of this vision staggered me.

I know it's become the thing to turn to genes as the explanation for and answer to everything including stigma-not so. But post neuro-plasticity and given all the insistence that fat people facing reality were "giving up", well, I hardly imagined this would be applied to weight.

This weird genetic fatalism has advanced in the mainstream without touching fat people much. Seeing it applied to aspects of this area showed it up afresh. Though I've not been backward in declaring dieting pretty much worthless, I've never doubted for a second that there are ways to properly and gently re-direct metabolic function and weight-don't conflate weight loss with calorie restriction dieting. There is just not enough real drive to find alternatives.

To recap, they'd split pre-chosen candidates into three groups of eaters; feasters- whom they said couldn't stop eating once they'd started. iow, their eating travelled from 0-100 mph but had faulty brakes. Emotional eaters-appetite was stimulated by stress etc., and constant cravers-who felt like picking at food most of the time. 

I had all of these problems and more, I had to rid myself of this.

They explained that feasters had a surfeit of a gut hormone (it was GLP-1) which was supposed to tell their brain they'd had enough. Okay, but, their attitude was this was some kind of unbending trait, that you were just supposed to live with!

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

It was at times achingly poignant to see these people dealing with these issues, whilst on a calorie restriction diet. I too spent years fighting myself and unwittingly stoking my problems further. That direct relationship wasn't mentioned either as I recall.

More than this though not even the remotest possibility of relief was alluded to, can you believe that? Imagine being told your bladder is hyperactive, its genetic, bye. Even if they've got nothing, you'd expect them to mention that was something to investigate, but no. They got no further than a fixation on fatalistic interpretations of biochemistry.

The cruelty of total blame is often mentioned, but this hollowing out of having anything to go on is overlooked. Wanting to help people deal with their people problems is key to progress. Solving problems or merely trying to leads somewhere, even if its just-that's not the way. In the absence of any need for that, there is just this kind of emptiness.

The longer this void goes on, the more self perpetuating it becomes.

This unresponsiveness reminded me how removed so many of those involved with 'obesity' are from having a true understanding of vocation.  Serving the people concerned is what ultimately propels a subject forward, without that it can't really go anywhere.

I was touched by the gratitude of the participants. Though obviously prompted they spoke in terms of the "this knowledge that has been given me." How it (finally) gave them something to go on which promised resolution, which is all people want. To be able to solve any problems they do have. It is the crusade that leaves people in this weird state of passivity, underneath the flurry of futile disordered recommendations.

People spend aeons stuck in this cycle of repeating failure. It is responsible for a lot of decline in people's attitude towards themselves. Not things like the so called "tyranny of thin."

This stymieing of people's intelligence also contributes to the sense that fat people are somewhat lacking in intelligence. Fat people are left exposed by this lack of information. Usually, people can tell you more about their state of being than others know. Not fat people as we're imprisoned in the level of disinterest others anchor us to.

There was talk of "hungry genes" being "obesity genes" and I just felt this kind of assertion has not aided progress in so many areas. And even those using it to hide behind-despise it as a cop-out. Fatz are routinely taunted with accusations that we blame genes. Now we're to be taught to parrot this trope to little useful end.

They did give an arresting coping mechanism for dealing with hunger or cravings-they're the same thing in fat people don'tchaknow-blame the food companies. For putting temptation all around you.  Hereby recruiting fat people into fat phobes phoney war against industrial food. 

It was said openly this was a way of taking some of the burden of blame off yourself. I suddenly understood more about this kind of psychological outlook. I'm not meaning to sound like a goody-two shoes, but this really feels rather clunky in the area of fatness. The idea is fat people do this anyway. But the reactions of those advised to do this- spoke to the novelty of its application.

Industrial food's hold over our environment has advanced off the back of the individuation and blame default of 'obesity'. I have my issues with IF, but ultimately the problem lies in the CR approach, which stupidly targets hunger. Treating it as an "addiction" to be erased. It's a bad target as it is designed to fight back. If enough of these defenses fall short or fail, anorexia beckons.

The "emotional eaters" were supposed to be subject to a psychological approach. This consisted of abseiling off an abandoned lighthouse-to make them see they could channel strong feelings into motivation for action. I could not see the connection. Added to that was group support in the form of a slimming club. They mentioned CBT, but didn't deign to tell us what this consisted of.

Training the nervous system to remain calmer overall, stopping activity triggering hunger/appetite would have achieved a more direct and controllable result. That along with, if necessary, dealing with traumatic events-which helps to stop further stress impacting on your energy (which can also trigger appetite in the susceptible).

It's as if the decades of dieting failure has hollowed out potential layers of expertise and the whole has regressed. Complete dependence on CRD has inflicted the same intellectual damage as occurs in others dependent on a compulsive, repetitive habit that has dominated their life. After withdrawal they go back to it because life no longer makes sense without it.

That's why these people cling to ci/co. 

It was hard not to laugh at another demonstration of how the body compensates for artificially bolted on activity-i.e. exercise. Between sessions its well known the body instinctively compensates by curtailing output-or you "slob out" as the programme put it. 

As usual its up to you to police yourself into undesired, taxing, artificial behaviour because its so logical that anyone will sustain that for the rest of their lives.

There was a ludicrous bit where a make-up artist was put through his paces on an exercise bike and told getting off the bus a couple of stops early, standing up whilst talking on his mobile and going to the shops and carrying cans in a basket (not a trolley) would waste as much energy as 30 mins hard peddling.

Yeah, perhaps after four hours! It was farcical. Later we were informed metabolic expenditure falls as you lose weight, so you'll have to reduce your calories as you lose weight. How quickly would this exceed your allotted intake, if you could sustain this long enough?

The participants were followed through the first month of the usual, initial biggest weight loss, euphoria-why has this been all my life, to the disappointment and disillusion of week 4, I'm doing all this, feeling like crap and not losing/gaining weight, through to the final weigh-in after 3 months. Collectively, they'd lost 8% of their weight, the target was 5%.

Now people are seeing through dieting (again) fat people are still trapped in and dragged back to the low expectations of those demanding of them, things they don't even know they don't ask of themselves.

Diet funk about to clear?

Finally....

“It would be all but impossible to carry out a research trial where you controlled the diets of thousands of people over many years. That’s why guidance in the UK is based on a consensus of the evidence available not just on randomised controlled trials.” Victoria Taylor, senior dietitian at the BHF

...the obvious.

There is certainly a strong argument that an overreliance in public health on saturated fat as the main dietary villain for cardiovascular disease has distracted from the risks posed by other nutrients such as carbohydrates. Yet replacing one caricature with another does not feel like a solution.

It's clear that ones diet is designed to be a bit too specific to a person's needs for dietary advice to be generalized beyond a certain point. Whether its their physiological and yes psychological make-up, their preferences according mainly though not wholly to exposure. Environment, culture, region, etc., The best way to get beyond the general advice is to learn to fine tune the interpretation and response to your own hunger and appetite.

General guidelines often seek to minimize risk to those with genetic susceptibilities. It's a bit like weight loss dieting. The insistence on this as the basis of weight regulation and "health" has left those susceptible to virtually all ED's from anorexia to hyperphagia to blunder far too often into these tendencies unwittingly.

So sacrificing minority susceptibility for, in this case, a perceived good isn't necessarily ethical. In this case it's clear that the exact nature of dieting needs to be made abundantly clear. And nor should it be the basis of anything.

When it comes to general dietary guidelines, too many have been seduced by the idea of one perfect diet. It's one thing to diagnose vitamin C deficiency and another to say, there's a diet suitable for all, which everyone should follow.

I suspect this has been invested with the desire to enforce a somewhat imagined bourgeois standard on everyone. On the grounds that this will in itself uplift society.

Finding out how diet affects health isn't particularly amenable to scientific inquiry-way too many variables- I hope this spate of admissions will hold. Recognizing limitations may actually help boffins to identify and make use of what actually is useful.

The aim needs to change too. Instead of trying to control other people, try assisting them with making better use of what comes naturally.

Process, Not Person, Not Disease

Seeing fatness i.e. 'obesity' defined numerously as a "phenotype" has got me wondering. A phenotype is defined as;

.....the set of observable characteristics of an organism that are produced by the interactions of the genotype and the environment,

Weight for me has the sense that it is a process. Definition(s); "1. A series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end." Um yeah, but not quite. 

1.2 A systematic series of mechanized or chemical operations that are performed in order to produce something

Now you're talking. I see it has used a computing context to define process. A multi-featured operating system "typically running in an environment that protects it from other processes." The latter "protective" part especially reminds me of homoeostasis.

The sense I get about weight, fatness specifically is it's likely to be, in the main, a correctly functioning process that delivers this undesired "phenotype".

One of the things that stood out in the Karen Hitchcock's creepily grotesque whinge about how much your fat body hurts doctors fee fees (we've noticed) and the attitudes/ treatment this extended sulk has produced;

Some of our patients have become so fat they can walk only five steps without needing a rest. Many are only in their 30s. My role at the clinic is to tighten up their diabetes control, make sure they don’t have a catastrophic hormonal condition that has made them fat (no one ever does)

But how would any such be perceived as causing, rather than caused by 'obesity'? Fat people don't seem to have anything apart from effects. At times we're barely allowed genes. Freelance fat phobe 'diagnosticians' of the internet have picked up on this- portentously announcing "Only 2 or 3% of fat people have a reason to be fat." That presumably means 97/8% of fat people have no pathogenic causation.

That's cheeky. Because something that isn't pathological has been labelled by you as such- to reflect your dislike-you claim that absence is not your fib, but having "no excuse". Pffutt.

How though can such a purportedly deadly dis-ease that kills/ravages virtually all known organs and parts, not appear to show its face anywhere? We've heard of (genuine) disease that is mostly silent and stealthy, but never one that doesn't appear to show any more in its acute phase than it does at any other point.

How can a disease be purely an outcome, a series of effects? Where is it located?

It apparently, doesn't even appear to show up in the functioning of the glands! Despite those playing a big role in regulation of metabolic features. Including hunger, appetite, rate of storage, body composition, reproduction, regulation of vital functions, etc.,

We are told all about effects of said dis-ease of "co-morbidities" and such, but it never seems to have been spotted inflagrante. Like a gang of vandals mounting a sustained campaign of damage, but never seen nor heard. Only leaving a fluffy calling card.

It must be restful to have the luxury of throwing around, "Fat cells don't just lay there." You're talking to the people who say our bodies are WHOLE, when you're the ones characterizing fatness as (someone like you, i.e. slim) wrapped in a fat suit. We are now told fat cells "Emit chemicals, they're like an organ."

Really? What like the microbes in your gut? They also function together as collectively and physiologically as one, they too aren't dis-ease.

This is down right peculiar unless, Occam's razor, we can take that as read, it's not (a) disease. An unchecked process of any kind, no matter how benign will ultimately require more and more adaptation and accommodation till it causes problems. Ending up dominating-rather like living a life of lifestyle anorexia-rather than serving. The point is to find ways to reverse said process.

Not to go all voodoo, with superfluous pursuit of hysteria.That's just making noise about effectively doing nothing.

Framing facets of growth, what's triggering/ facilitating it plus possible outcomes of that and of bulk itself as dis-ease is irrelevant to the point of raising a very big question mark about your real (unspoken) intent.

Ditto the sterile non-argument that dominates supposedly about health or unhealth. Pure distraction, surely, regardless of either get on and find out about the body and how it works. Get on and find out how to stem and reverse the process. That is the only issue.

Most things routinely associated with 'obesity' strike me as part of an overall process that's reached or is reaching a certain point/developing a certain branch. A bit like a river that flows with more or less force to a shorter or greater distance. Usually stabilizing itself by finding its meter, though not always.

This process seems to flow through the nervous system. The nerves throughout your body, including organs. This 'flow' has the capacity to affect shifts in the chemical balance of certain areas of the body and/or the body overall. i.e. like gut and even skin flora and fauna. It seems able to change some aspect of the formation and/or function of the tissue concerned. Vary the speed of function of a system, organ, or parts-for example, transit of matter through the digestive system, the emptying of bowels etc.,

Even things like pearls of fat building up in the liver- strikes as an aspect of a (potential) branch of a whole process, rather than some separate condition, though part or most of that must be susceptibility.

Whether that's an adjustment the liver tissue or of its mechanics, I can't even guess right now. The greater tendency to higher readings of various cardio and metabolic measures, feels like visible aspects of that overall process too. One even has to cast a beady eye on "inflammation." That's present in all growth, how much does that overlap-if at all-with any pathological swelling?

And let's not forget what we know to be capable of triggering inflammation; unyielding relentless pressure, being permanently open to abusive situations, negative self image, stigma. And do you know what helps to stem, reduce inflammation? That's right, calmness, relaxation and ease the opposite of 'obesity' and its dis-ease. But hey, any inflammation triggered by the crusade can be put down to 'obesity', so that's alright isn't it?

So the key point here is, an unchecked process and has no predictable, effective, non-pathological means of checking or permanent reversal. Any "unhealthfulness" makes that all the more urgent, not less so.  Mounting an assault on a "phenotype" that's inseparable from its characterization as (a) disease-is a whole other agenda.