Ballooney

Swallowing an inflatable device to take up room in your stomach so you can starve more easily, really? And the outcome of that would be different from just starving on your own, how?

At the end of the 16 weeks, the patients were encouraged to eat a Mediterranean diet to try to maintain their weight loss.

Maintain starvation, with what technique, procedure, process, stimulus? What modus, what pathway, what model? A placebo is defined by no active effect. This is all no active effect, just the acting out of how someone thinks metabolic function ought to work, but does not. And because they can't let go, we aren't allowed to.

No one really talks about how devastating it can be to regain weight loss so achingly slowly and punitively. It is literally Sisyphean;

In Greek legend Sisyphus was punished in Hades for his misdeeds in life by being condemned eternally to roll a heavy stone up a hill. As he neared the top, the stone rolled down again, so that his labour was everlasting and futile.

People know this though don't they? That's the whole point of it these days....punishment for sin.

Check the Code

Here's something instructive. The Nuremburg Code. It comes from the famous trials of Nazi's after WW2. It contains a 10 point list of requirements for ethical clinical trials to be carried out.

Now the question is, is the 'obesity' crusade's insistence that all weight must be lost via caloric deficit restriction, an experiment? I think honestly, we can say it is. Certainly, it is not based on fact, but hypothesis. Not physics, but that because starvation leads to weight loss, if you call it something else-weight loss dieting/lifestyle/weight management etc., that it can become fit for human regulation.

So far it is clear that this is false, yet still the experiment trundles on.

Let's see how well it adheres to the code;

No1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential

Voluntary consent are the words that leap out. With 'obese' we're expected to put our bodies into starvation mode, with as much coercion as it takes us to 'volunteer'. "The new smoking" [isn't everything?] is the latest gambit supposed to negate any need for consent.

No2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature

No, no and no. Properly objective study of actual physiological function rather than fitting stuff into a rigid unscientific construct-'obese' will undoubtedly produce better that starvation induced weight loss. Which let's be honest is why its being avoided. Therefore one can cheerfully say with confidence that we can do better, "we" just doesn't want to.

No3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study, that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment

May I say, lols. If we include humans in the "animals" of animal experimentation, that is exactly what isn't being properly studied. In this case, the study is of a constructed view of how humans (don't) function. Positing fatness as disease helps with this mis-direction of searching for something that isn't there and pressing what you find into that model.  It's physiology not pathology.

No4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, I think we can say that's a no. Recent developments have induced enough self consciousness to provoke the appearance of a volte-face. Now, we need [we are instructed] "support". Support is acquiring an increasingly sinister tone, have you noticed? Like an actor always playing goody-two shoes roles suddenly getting to play the baddie.

No5. No experiment should be conducted, where there is an apriori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.  

*Snigger* for the first part. Bariatric surgery fails that "disabling injury" bit. That's the whole point of it. Love the idea of physicians experimenting on themselves. Every doctor who pretends dieting works should be permanently on one themselves. Including the slim ones. Let them "keep off" fourteen/seven/five whatever pounds below their comfortable weight. This should be known and they should be weighed at their patients request and be distractingly hungry at all times, before, during and after eating. We'll take notes on their undoubtedly superior coping strategies.

No6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment 

Humanitarian doesn't apply if you are an 'epidemic'. Here lies the reason for 'obesity' hype. The risk of being is so baaad that you must attack yourself consistently.

No 7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death

There are tears of laughter in my eyes.  

No 8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment

Not really, no. Everyone's an expert. Except of course, fat people themselves.

No 9. During the course of the experiment, the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end, if he has reached the physical or mental state, where continuation of the experiment seemed to him to be impossible

I can only repeat ".....should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end, if he has reached the physical or mental state, where continuation of the experiment seemed to him to be impossible." Don't let the gender specificity fool you. I couldn't have summed up better why so many people decided to choose self acceptance. It is the experiment, not what they feel about their size. 

There's something truly bracing about the insouciant disregard with which other people take other people's psychological, physical, spiritual and mental exhaustion. You'd think they had no regard for their own comfort.

Finally,

No 10.  During the course of the experiment, the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgement required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

That means if your assumptions are not working out, it is in the exercise of "good faith, superior skill and careful judgement required of him," that the professionals terminate it.

Read it and weep. 

A Doctor/Patient Model Could Have Been

It has always been my contention that though doctors increasingly wax on about "personal responsibility" they simply don't want the reality that entails. One of those titles sums up, "It's difficult being a doctor in the age of the empowered patient."

Why if you wish patients to take more responsibility for themselves? That phrase "empowered patient" is somewhat redundant. Why should patient equal dis-empowered? Why should a patient be any less than the equal of any doctor they bring their body to? Who else but a patient has the potential to have a uniquely comprehensive insider view of the experience of being themselves? And how can this even be a thing when there are open assertions about sometimes, extreme lack of patient initiative?

Like all humans, medics wish to have their cake and eat it to. They want the abject docility, they've come to base their power on, without the burden that increasingly imposes on them, in an era of chronic health problems. As a profession overall, they've grown accustomed to used to the kind of passivity that serveed the contagion/magic bullet mode of disease.

Their power has to a large extent come from patient dis-empowerment, to put it bluntly.That exchange requires reformation.

They could have had this already, if they'd truly desired to. Fat people took it up themselves to follow their general prescription, to diet, diet and diet again-no matter what, and press repeat. Until our nervous systems burned out from that-because that's what happens if you keep at it long enough. Or simply wised up that these findings were consistent and repeatable. In other words, they were scientific, despite mainly going unacknowledged at best, or denied at worst by those charging themselves with that.

If instead the truth had been full recognized, our extensive co-operation and goodwill could have promoted a respectful mutual dialogue and illuminating interaction. A truly progressive exchange. As we were so committed to the experiment, it could have changed in nature being informed by our experience. That usually happens with research, progress.

Those of us that wanted to could have signed on-unofficially-for the shifts in focus that would have had to have been the product of greater intelligence collated from practice. Practice that illuminated physiological function e.g. the first thing that happens when you merely intend to start a restricting energy is hyperphagia-hunger and appetite activity goes right up.

This can be a trigger for hyperphagia nervosa [heightened appetite not knowingly related to hypothalamic compromise]. This could have been warned against, to this day, most people don't realise having restriction hanging over you long-term can have this effect. It would have acted as a break on the always be trying to lose weight culture. It would have meant switching off between attempts and that could have stopped some hunger/disordered/eating disorders from developing.

Not only reducing the number and extent of hyperphagia/cs, reducing the psychological harm that can occur when the nervous system gets repeatedly then becomes chronically overtaxed. That's simply one aspect. True acknowledgement of facts and reality, monitoring through genuine and meaningful study would have reduced stress immeasurably, giving people a sense of their own power, even if it didn't bring the desired results.

Not all of this is for medics obviously, but this would have informed communication between doctor and lay people-if not patient. All would have been ample evidence of the extent of people's efforts, that could then not be denied. It could also reassure doctors, reducing their weird sense of being victimized by their patients' weight.

When you find out that a person struggling to deny their body for years, finally somehow corners their body into reduction and finds their body loses weight from everywhere but their mountainous belly/their big arms, legs etc.,-me!!

You'll find it hard to shout, "Non-complaint" into a void made from ignorance. Indeed, there would be no void, instead a pool of facts and figures. There would be potential for progress and hope of more.

This filtering of on-going experience into an on-going real life experiment with human metabolic function would have altered the expectation of patient engagement without little duress, for either.

But of course, the medical profession as a whole didn't want that. Many still don't. Though I can grasp that, I'm still struggling with the depth of their desire to martyr themselves at the alter of fat people's supposedly refusnik will. I cannot fathom what they hoped or hope to achieve from penning us into a place where we cannot move forward, only press repeat ad infinitum often going backwards. Nor do I get how they are able to behave as if this hasn't happened.

Though I guess that's a feature of the denial of reality. 

They'll take some challenge from their social peers though as long as it's tightly within the conventional frame of boning up on acceptable available research;

Often our patients were well-informed scientists, teachers or university lecturers. They did extensive research on the unusual ailment or the latest groundbreaking medication. As a trainee GP with little experience, it was often daunting to manage these intense patient-led encounters. Whether prescribing a statin for high cholesterol or referring for investigations, everything involved negotiation with the patient. It was immaterial that there were 10-15 minutes allocated to each encounter: the consultation finished when a plan was reached.

This for me doesn't really come close to what might have been. That's about social position, not the future of medicine. We could have been part of moving the research process forward of directing it to more fruitful and useful grounds.

What a bloody waste.

Straw Police

The first line says a lot: "There is a difference between coddling and compassion." I've been trying to get this across since I got to the internet fatsphere. Those who pander to the 'obesity' agenda and its idiot mal-logic, unnecessarily reduce the level of their own ideals.

People insist, we must join the mainstream, answer their charges, normally I might agree, but the m/s defined us out of the picture. If I do not acknowledge your humanness by definition, you cannot argue with me because I've been prepared to suspend disbelief to pretend a human being is not sentient in the first place!

Responding to that, ignores this, immediately making you seem soft.

At the time I just came across like fists of fury. It still stands though. Until people like James Fell are given the chance to see exactly what they're saying and what it does or doesn't mean, they'll continue to embarrass themselves but more importantly, hold our minds in their mess.

They insist routinely, fatness is unhealth, fat people are unhealthiness in human form. Leading us straight to zomg let's get the best scientific minds on it like all other unhealth problems-to see off this deadly threat!!!

Have at it science, the floor is yours and I'm sure there's a Noble Prize or two in it, there are some fatties in authority.

The Chicago Tribune, which had published an article by Fell critical of Linda Bacon. I haven't read it, [the Trib insists the e-mail I've been using for years is invalid]. It published this correction, which to be fair, Fell reproduced himself;

… James S. Fell paraphrased nutrition professor Linda Bacon of the City College of San Francisco as saying “that being overweight is healthier.” Bacon did not say that; she said that most epidemiological studies on longevity have shown that overweight people live longest. The column also said that Bacon cited 5 percent as the number of people for whom weight loss would be sustained if they attempted it. She did mention the 5 percent figure in the discussion but did not make that conclusion. A paraphrase suggesting that she believes “burning fat causes inflammation” differed from her statement, which was, “Even during short-term dietary restriction, while people are on a diet, there is increased inflammation in the blood.”

Clear enough for you? He says he's no idea why they did this.There's nothing rough about showing Fell up for exactly what he is. For once, someone decided to apply primitive critical scrutiny to this kind of pretense of debate. I don't blame him for being surprised it wasn't quite the same bullshit as usual. Well done Trib staffer/s whoever you are!

Eeek energy that's been wasted on the Fell's of this world. They are largely irrelevant. All the patience, resilience, discipline, thought, extended to these sinkholes was needed for fat people to break down the barriers of difference between each other. Here's where the fuel needed for "intersectionality" goes/has gone.

The trouble with 'obesity' is if you accept this construct as a valid definition, your brain ends up defaulting to fat people are all the same (pathology). Your brain behaves as if real differences don't exist, it performs the same erasure as it does in others, even if you yourself are fat.

Those who seek to engage on these terms tend to be acting in bad faith (those less so tend to be quiet i.e. the silent majority), insisting the only way is to engage them constricts you into their limited illogical setting.

That ends up distorting a lot of the good sense. Fell is quick to note that "weight loss doesn't work" doesn't really scan [though not for the reasons he claims]. That's true, but the idea that calorie restriction is the same as weight loss comes from your frame Jamezzz.

If you replace "weight loss" with calorie restriction and see the former as the intended outcome, not the process that's supposed to bring it about- you get a clearer picture. It's not so much about whether weight loss is or isn't good for health. The issue is the only means chosen to bring it about not only doesn't deliver, it generates its own problems. That may have been the source of the "inflammation" or inflammatory markers LB mentioned.

If you could manipulate metabolic function so that reversing weight came as a natural consequence of that, just like it normally does everyday, you'd be able to measure the effects either way. Remember all those slim people with mental health problems, who end up stablized and fat/ter?

Metabolic function seems at times like a draw bridge, it doesn't just allow one thing through. And as ever, its context is often individual.

On the other hand, we know having histories of having calorie restriction as an ever present threat plus the energy conservation during calorie restriction can affect the way you feel. Ditto, weight gain as a product of such. There's SAD where your body goes into more of a hibernation mode, its deemed a form of depression. It's context.

What's intriguing about all this is the hostility towards HAES. Listed there as; weight Inclusivity, health Enhancement, respectful Care, eating for well-being, life-Enhancing Movement. Where's the devil's work in that?

“HAES has not done good things in terms of size acceptance. Unfortunately, HAES is like the choir talking to itself. It isn’t about dialogue and discussion, but instead confrontation and anger. That shuts down conversation. It alienates people. And it gives people who feel negative towards HAES to begin with more reasons to feel negative. There is zealotry involved. You’re not furthering your cause. You’re preaching to the converted so everyone can clap their hands, but they were already the hands that were clapping. There are no new hands there.”  ~ Yoni Freedhoff

How exquisite. Never has the crusade spoken politely, never did that make a jot difference to fat people. Watch the BL and virtually every other dieting programme. Now, apparently, we aren't able to match the delicate sensibilities of those who were and still are perfectly happy to abuse us without end.

I tell you fat people are spectacular. When fatz wise up it could really be something. The problem for Fell and his ilk is that they're in favour of fat people seeking to diet and exercise their bodies away [and mostly fail] only.

They feel debunking haes debunks FA, when in reallyy it debunks the healthism they're supposed to represent.

Fat=unhealth and healthy habits=creation of health plus slim=health.

If what are deemed healthy habits can't turn unhealth into health, that means those healthy habits don't create health. If folk don't believe restrictive diets and exercise habits create health, why act otherwise?

I must admit, I've become a tad skeptical about this myself. Even the idea that exercise is good for you, is also the reverse, the more you are able to move without that generating unpleasant feelings, the less likely you are to have had an easier life.

I used to strain to follow a healthist, healthy eating diet-as it was at the time. Whole grains, low-fat, a little lean meat, lots of leafy high-water veg and fruit, then later, less fruit. Low sugar, low-salt..... Now I know what people are going to say.

This is terrible, this is responsible for the @besity crisis, yes thanks I get it.

Please save it for the birds, IDGAD.

I'm done with the rigour which became orthorexia induced hyperphagia nervosa and this circular non-argument about diet, don't you get it, you're just going round and round in circles. Diet isn't the answer to regulating weight.

I called it a twin-track or parallel appetite. I endeavoured to eat my healthy diet and ended up with an appetite leak for what I was avoiding. I had a schzoid appetite.

Despite this, my hunger gradient still rose to highs I never imagined possible. I had episodes when it felt like the power of it was gripping my brain like a fist. 

All this came from attempts at both dietary and calorie restriction.

Though I'd never bought the idea that if I did x, y, that would =health. It was too pat. I'd seen too much as a child of what life does to people and their health to believe that. But I did feel, I'll doing my best to be healthy and this would make me slim.

Even that seemingly reasonable aim went screwball.

Investing fat people with pathology means we are seen as not healthy. Yet, haes is either no good or no one could possibly be fat and be living according to the rules, don't try it, give up, its hopeless, no chance, no way, no how....only dieting or nothing will doooo.....

Where Should HAES Go From Here? Perhaps it should just go away, because it doesn’t appear to be helping.

"Perhaps"? Oh surely, don't be so coy. This is what all FA's detractors want. It's all they've ever wanted from day one and its all you really ever want. It shows how out of touch they are that they think people who have spent years dieting would give up on their says so. I keep saying to fat people, bullying aside, you ultimately made the choice to diet and continue dieting. I know I did. And when I had to stop, I made that decision too. I did not consult any of these critics.

FAT ACCEPTANCE is still here, so I guess their requests aren't doing a lot......

It takes a hell of a lot of effort to be an 'obese'

Celebrity response to fat phobia are something I've never been invested in. Overwhelmingly, no matter how honest and positive they can be at any one moment about being human whilst fat. They'll likely be examples of them being otherwise.

Millican once make one of those execrable paedo [fat] phobe remarks about a fat boy's chest being more greatly endowed than hers. Word to the wise, never again.

I don't feel 'betrayed' by weight reversals, along with the societal pressure on everyone, the business they're in but more importantly the fact that they tend to become wealthier if not outright rich makes that pretty much an inevitability at some point-to whatever degree/time frame or other.

Mindy Kaling on wasting energy merely to remain 'normal'/chubby  

Overall, Kaling has a pretty much mainstream attitude to weight. The specific point she's making seems to me to be refutating the default brainwart that if you are anything above thin-you don't engage in calories in/out style wasting. Though the context it was said in was fat =bad. Ragen felt it was a good fatty thing [I'll get onto that later].

As some of us can see, such is the bankrupt dysfunctional inefficiency of wasting energy to supposedly regulate/ lose weight-or "weight-management" cannot reliably be expected to consistently/ permanently reverse anyone's weight, no matter their starting point. It's not an 'obese' thing as is being sold by 'obesity' quacksters and restriction diet shills. 

Common or garden "working out" and having a healthy or restrictive diet leaves most people above thin remaining pretty much where they are, give or take and those who are thin do not have to take breaks because they're dematerializing.

In fact, many of them start to gain bulk from the former, for the first time. Part of the so called "French secret" and why you don't see as many of the size that is being sized-out for being small as you did pre 'fitness culture.'

I've always wished women would come out of the closet and own up to how much cals in/out they actually practise. Regardless of weight. It might make it make more sense for fat people to say what they do also. And what some don't. Because fat people are not a monolith.

Oh!Bese etc., is convenient fiction.

Some fat people do as much as slimmer people who say they "do nothing" or do lots-the latter possibly cut down on activity elsewhere too-who knows? Polarity of slim/fat is false. Fat people vary as does everyone. The more people speak honestly, being widely varied in habits and approved effort, at the same or similar weights the better.

If that's "confusing" tough.

Fat people haven't just dieted in ways that could make honest people weep. We've also expended and suppressed a tremendous amount of energy play dehumanizing dis-ease-which of course you have to blunt yourself with insult to achieve said effect. There's having to suppress your most basic critical faculties and ultimately intelligence-to repeat the same folly over and over, expecting some other outcome as well as "fitness" and dietary restriction.

It takes most effort of all to be an 'obese' its draining and unrewarding for the effort expended. Which is of course roundly denied by all and sundry.

Often led by the fat person most of all.

Professional Rules

I'm in two minds over this recommendation. The idea is healthcare professionals should stop eating calorie dense or 'junk food', slim down and set a better example to patients;

NHS England boss Simon Stevens said staff must 'get our own act together' before it can lecture the public on cutting down on calories.

He's got the ghost of a point there. Of course it would be an outrageous condescending imposition on time-poor, caring professionals. I dislike the way 'lifestyle' picks the same easy targets; drugs, booze, fat bodies, smoking, spot the odd one out.

Why no patronizing lectures about sexual abuse/assault/harassment, bullying? Apart from being unconscionable, these "lifestyles" cost healthcare ££££'s by damaging the health of other people.

And why not press condescending marriage advice? If you can tell people what to eat, you can certainly tell them which partner to choose. The high divorce rate shows the public cannot be trusted to pick their own. Divorce increases the risks of a health problems for years after.

Or how about anger management, for the damage it can do to you and those you take it out on? As a rule, we should subject ourselves to our closest equivalent of whatever we're demanding of others. No smelly stuff about "I am so great here, you aren't". No, everyone who insisting others should engage in a punitive time consuming struggle the wrong way, should at least have to engage with their own nemeses.

Because, healthcare savings!!!

It's always bugged me that fatter medical professionals and those in positions of influence and privilege have for too long refused to exit the delusion that dieting is a sustainable way of life for most people.When they know better. It's one of the things that's enabled fat people's loss of credibility. Fat people not using their credibility to tell the truth leads to it being undermined. If you don't believe in yourself, why would anyone else?

That's what I like so much about old time drug addicts. Despite being trashed to heck by society, they still refused to permit others to overstep the mark in defining them.

That's why everyone wants to be an addict, in spite of the stigma they still attach to (real) addicts.

Why do people always think fat phobia will go round them forever? The detachment of fat people from humanness via the use of the disease metaphor has been so effective. It's like when cattle are stunned. People can't move mentally, until it stings them and breaks through the static.

Let's face it, happily assaulting the public with fat phobia has helped this to now bite them on the arse. I'm both sympathetic and not.

As for the NHS. We've had a lot of lectures about the cheapness of a diet based on fresh produce. Yet institutions from schools to its own great self consistently decide to welcome in commercial food operators for cash. Though it apparently doesn't make much out of it. Long after the 'obesity crisis was invented.

I had no idea why this was the case, till I read what med profs say on it. Turns out, it's a source of sustenance at a stressful time for patients and their visitors. A treat for children going through pain and trauma. A few may not even make it out alive.

As well as something to keep professionals going on long busy shifts or in lieu of their often unedifying canteens.

Eating's emotional.

If this does become a thing, it could spread to other public servants for example politicians and social workers.

Yet another mass long-term weight loss diet experiment on public servants, with attendant side effects could help force some much needed realism in this area.

I can't say its a nice idea, but if people won't stand up for what they know to be real. Then one has to ask how they can object to putting it into action on their own good selves?

It might be best in the long run to have this play out in the face of what could be some official scrutiny this time. 

Treating Black Women like they matter Improves their Health

Black women are often taught to put Black men first, last often always. To the extent that women can lose a sense of who they are, especially by the time it comes to parent.

Apparently, responding to them as real beings who matter. Counselling them, addressing their needs/ offering hope to that end, giving them even periodic advice, encouragement, attention relieves some of those tensions, alleviating depression. Wowsers.

Under what pretext was this tested? A study of a "weight management programme" charmingly called "Maintain, don't Gain." The aim is to stop especially black women gaining any weight through changes in diet and habits. The purpose is to prevent moving into higher risk weight categories.

It featured 185 "obese" low income women with BMI's between 25-35 [yeah].

What is it about this crusade that it never starts with the fattest people? If you are going to perform this kind of study and claim it as establishing something close to an evidentiary principle. They would be the most in need and reveal the most about any underlying technique.

Don't worry about the trope about how black women struggle to lose weight because black people are indifferent to/ glorify 'obesity'. It is a tiresome and lazy falsehood. Why aren't white attitudes to women as trophies who do nothing but reflect the glory of middle/upper class white men's ability provide or whatever, pointed to as a thing?

Not being as wholly unbalanced and deranged about weight as other races/classes does not equal fat positive. That is not metaphor. The investment in calorie restriction by western model countries has departed the shores of sanity. Yes, middle/upper class white people can do that too.

Being disinclined towards the strange and suicidal impulse to fight and repress hunger-which is part of our means of perpetuating life-as if its a pathology, is perfectly rational.

The fervent belief that white people are where human reason lives, doesn't make it so. Nor does the assumption of black people's unreason mean we don't retain rational after others have lost theirs.

I also note that the pressures of racism, are skirted over. There's an increasing urge to submerge racism [amongst other things] into "obesity." Part of the flexibility in pathologizing beings rather than naming an actual process.

The burdens of sexism aren't mentioned either.

Misogynoir, refers the different interplay between the two in black women. Being black does not invest with magic to swat this away as if its not there. Women don't sit around feeling sorry for themselves, but they aren't able to completely conjure away all feelings of being trapped by the trip wires of race and sex from doing its work on their nervous systems.

That trapped between multiple stresses factor is seen in working class women of all races who tend to be fatter. Whereas men are more likely to have a more varied spread of weight across income/class. If you wish to turn medicine into a quasi religious form of sociology, being on the receiving end of structural and social discrimination should be deemed risk factors for ill health.

The usual squawking is about "sedentary", including those working minimum wage type jobs. But what does that really mean? Contained, constricted thwarted, blocked, trapped is what it means. There's evidence that this changes the effect activity has on your body.

Some of the probable reasons for black women's purported greater difficulty have not been revealled in black women. Ellen Langer's highly underrated and revelatory study-which always felt like an exposé- points to how cynical and damaging that branding of "sedentary" has been.

I'm glad these women got 12 months of much deserved and clearly needed attention, affirmation and a sense that they matter. That their needs are valid and worth being catered to as say, the ladies who lunch. Weight stablisation doesn't introduce the threat to restrict the body's ability to nourish itself properly-including enough to cope with the demands being made on it, I make no bones about that.

This cannot be denied despite this all bodies are the same default that is often the assumed basis around any discussion of weight.

Black women have amongst the lowest suicide rates of all. Situational or structural depression, i.e. awareness of conditions you are in, rather than a condition being led more by personal trauma/upset + susceptibility.

This is itself suggested by;

These findings [of reduced depression] were not related to how well the women did in the weight management program nor whether they were taking depression medication.

It will be interesting to see whether and how this does get constructed into a "model." Whether it's to prevent disease or if it will be seen as a way to depression in poor black women and others. If this study shows anything, its that low income black women, especially, need more self-affirmation not less.

[h/t to New Black Man (in exile)]

Busted Flush

'Obesity' wallahs inability to see they're a busted flush continues its surreality. Or is it that they're so used to the general docile learned role of patient, that they just expect it? I'll bet its their perception of fat people as piteous that's doing it. I almost pity their impotence, their irrelevance.

I've been there and I got sick and tired of it. 

'Obesity' adherents, call that "overweight" or anything you please, like those who will whined about people's 'non-compliance' then took on the food industry and found out what that really means, think they're up against one thing-the human mind, when they're up against something altogether more indomitable. Nature.

Believe me, they are no match. Nature is riding them like they've been riding fatz. If this is all so important. Real intellect and no little effort is required, put up or shut up. 

Ill-thought suppositions won't do it. I doubt anyone things you know what you're talking about. I don't know whether to pity this. Many 'obesity' promoters sound more cuckoo than they want to pretend fatness is. 

This is what you could call sanity privilege. Where wrong beliefs are held to insanity within a sane mind. This is indulged way beyond anything a mind with faltering function could easily get away with. In fact, things like this can open your eyes to just how much discipline mentally ill people need to use to get by. 

Apparently, we should seek to create a binge cycle every 5 years. Erm, no thanks love. I promised my body I'd never do that to it again, after 20 years of continuous trying. I was lucky enough to have learned that if your system is sensitive or sensitized to it, the threat of calorie restriction still hanging over your body, encourages it to keep storing fat against that eventuality.

The best thing to do is reframe the way you look at yourself. Reconnect with your body, (re-)take full possession of it. Accept that if you want to do more to improve your mental and/or physical function, there's no magic weight management rainbow that will solve it all.

Once you withdraw your mental investment in the latter, you'll have that energy to spend on yourself as you are now. Because to quote the quote, you are worth it and worth it now. It's a change of direction, because a mind dedicated to restriction is not the same as one stimulated by being in touch with its own needs.

Many people spend years doing nothing, because they can conceive of little more than the diet, no matter if that's over 5, 10, 15, 20 years, one day, keep trying, don't give up, someday.

When you liberate yourself from this anchoring to the never-never, you can begin to develop a feel for what you actually need now and may even want to do. You can have a different plan, learn to dance, walk as easily/freely/fast as possible. You start to think (and think up) techniques.

Even doing what seems to be "nothing" if it is removing harm, just chilling out til you feel inclined is better than the stasis you get stuck in, trying to get your body to submit to what it mostly finds reprehensible.

No matter what you think.

It is possible that weight comes off and goes on slowly. But many more people, myself included, find calorie restriction raises activity in our hunger/appetite systems. Imagine something that makes you a bit nervous, now imagine it getting stronger and stronger until its harder and harder to ignore, taking over more and more of your mind.

Would you volunteer for that on the presumption of this person?

There are good reasons not to diet, 5% of your weight isn't much, apparently, 10% is where the body starts defending itself against weight loss. However, that's not been tested in bodies that are primed to store due to the continuous threat of starvation (on top of anything else). Until these people start studying people, rather than ways to restrict, they'll never be in a position to give the best advice possible.

To learn to get better, to be, dare I say it, worthwhile.

Reality Bites

Imitation is no substitute.

Susan Jebb says something revealing;

She said: "If you think of obesity as a chronic relapsing condition, you could say well maybe every five years you have to diet for 12 weeks – I'm not sure that feels so untenable a position when you think of what we ask people with other chronic diseases to do, whether they are injecting insulin multiple times a day to control their diabetes or whatever. Say, every five years you have to have a really concerted effort to lose 5% of your bodyweight.

We don't, because it isn't. And what "we" ask of people with actual disease is to save their own lives in ways that can often be felt by them meaningfully.

A lot of what the whole crusade has been about as been establishing this pretense-that fatness is disease. That has failed because it isn't. Yes you can use society to enforce people into a state of undermined mental, psychological and yes, physical health, especially with the person mirroring that internally. You can create a permanent state of unwellbeing. However, trust me, the body ultimately sees through that.

It's like being brought up with religion. If you're inclined towards atheism and don't know it, you can honestly absorb what's around you, eventually your truth will surface. Once it has, the hold on faith is loosened. Fat people went along with this fantasy, unwittingly and increasingly otherwise. Yet, no matter how much you dramatize fatness. No one believes it. That extent of effort alone undoes it.

Certainly not those who went ape over the idea of a 25stone man using disability legislation as his only means of fighting job discrimination. Few can think of when they know it isn't true. Even when such hugely overheated pretense as been achieved, it can't substitute for real illness. I know some killers aren't felt, however reversing that does not a strategy make.

Not a good health one anyway. 

It just should never have been a technique in the first place. It's vindictiveness should be obvious by now. You cannot pretend to be like a type 1/type 2 injecting diabetic etc., because as they say, reality bites.

What gives most pause is the suggestion that when you have a (real) disease, other people somehow own you. Clearly, that's more about 'obesity' and its artificial stigma "denormalization" and embarrassing fakery. But still, the implication is revealled.

A lot of people struggle with disease and the only thing that keeps them following instructions is that real diseases cause agony, pain and real death. Sometimes you can touch it. Slipping close to or into a few diabetic comas or collapsing with a serious asthma attack, could keep anyone complaint with even quite extraordinary demands. 

You simply cannot fake that, no matter how hard you try. That circle has never squared and trying adds harm, violating (medical) ethics. The continued  wishful thinking around this re: 'obesity' is pi-ti-ful.

Susan Jebb, doesn't have to care about any reality or nuance over in her freely chosen remove, because the failure of her silly hypotheses are always the "fault" of the unfortunates unluckily bestowed. Never hers. Never.

Has she or her ilk "confessed" yet to being wrong about weight loss dieting and apologized to fat people? Do people like this ever just stand up and acknowledge their errors or say sorry, we made an error? We did you wrong? Like virtually every fat person spent their lives doing? Apart from a few noble exceptions, both male nuh.

Don't worry, I never expected them to take even a little bit of what they've given.

No, if quangoistas like this Jebb person wish to give forth with any more tipsy hypotheses, back them up with reasonably scaled trials.

Just for once, do the bloody work first.

The Gift that keeps Giving

Fat people can't help being the gift that keeps on giving. Here we see volunteering to pay thousands for the privilege of having your digestive system messed up has proven to be serendipitous. It seems bypassing the stomach makes the intestines work harder. It's possibly a key to the reversing diabetes effect some experience after weight loss surgery, even before significant weight loss. 

The intestines have to adapt to the loss of the stomach as a viable intermediary, that also uses up  energy. As we have been saying, the body spontaneously, goes along this course to vary its own use of energy. The question is how to restore this to previous levels. No, it is not disease, this is about function and how to tweak or change it, to alter its course. Virtually any function can spontaneously alter its course.

That's why folk medicine is often overly concerned with tonics-to keep things on track-and restoratives, to get them back if derailed.

It may help point out to some fat activists why we must master human metabolic function and/or figure out how to manipulate it. This isn't just about weight loss/gain.

This hints at the prospect of further treatments for all sorts of conditions-both mental and physical. The way the body manages, uses and expends its energy is an avenue for progress in many directions. It can and should change the way medicine functions.

The key now is to find out how to promote/achieve this effect, without butchering people's systems for cash. If we are really lucky, someone might be able to work out how to do this, by using the mind as the the instigator of a chain reaction. Thereby cutting out or at least down on the middle men altogether.

That's the way to have more inclusive and affordable healthcare.

You'll note this is arse backwards for those with more valued bodies. Usually, the professionals are extremely conservative about preserving healthy function, seeking to intervene in the most direct and efficient way possible. The experimentation goes on before it result becomes product. It should go without saying that this is a good rule of thumb for all, despite their social status.

Like equal before the law.

There's getting to be quite a history of devalued bodies being used as part of medical experimentation. It's sometimes hard not to snigger when it is claimed certain experimentation could not be done today due to today's ethical constraints. Oh rilly?! I wouldn't lose hope 'experimenters'.

The tradition continues, albeit in a more improved voluntary form. Though one cannot discount the context of extreme medically induced devaluation of fat bodies. The lesson here is to be verrrry wary of the professionals ever stamping negative value on any body.