Clapped

Time after time over the years I have wondered, whenever I hear, usually a white middle/upper class girl/woman say of anorexia, binge/purge etc., stuff (exactly) like;

...it became a coping mechanism.... a safety valve, a way to comfort and forget..

They call it an "illness", currently insist it is "a serious mental health condition" and so on. I just assumed it was a cultural mode of expression. I have never related, nor found it particularly convincing, but what was, was that these people really want to keep saying this. Okay. I am not every woman. The problem came when this particular stripe of womanhood decided that they could impose this as the universal human standard, regardless of whether it is alienatingly meaningless or not.

That's a problem.

To me, eating or hunger disorders, over and above spontaneous development, are some of the consequences of inducing weight loss via calorie restriction. This leads the body to react and adapt to this triggering if it's sufficiently persistent. It is this adaptation that takes the triggering from voluntary to involuntary status. Where it can't just be stopped, some or all of it has to be dismantled to break the dynamic or cycle.

I exclaimed loudly when I came across this;

Bruch has proposed that eating disorders (obesity and anorexia nervosa) are caused by an inability to differentiate between bodily sensations and emotional states. 

Floored.

Obese persons are viewed as having a faulty awareness of physiological hunger, so that emotional states are mislabelled as hunger; this leads to an excessive intake of food.

Wow.

Schachter's theory consists of two hypotheses. The 'external hypothesis' states: ....there is growing reason to suspect that the eating behaviour of the obese is relatively unrelated to any internal gut state, but is, in large part, under external control; that is, eating behaviour is initiated and terminated by stimuli external to the organism. 

His 'internal hypothesis' states: The relationships are quite the reverse for the normal subject; his eating behaviour seems directly linked to an internal state but relatively unaffected by the external circumstances surrounding the eating routine and ritual.

~"The Experimental Psychology of Obesity" Orland W. Wooley, Susan C. Wooley

There it is.

This is what people keep repeating, this is what 'binge eaters' want in on. All this self-declamatory insistence was the product of someone's hypothesising. I'm beginning to wonder if anything people say in this area is a more or less direct report and reading of their experience.

This never occurred, so heartfelt and emphatic are people. You must explain your experience this way, you're experience will be explained to you this way. Everywhere you go people up to the most virulent trolls, concerned and not voice this sentiment.

You cannot escape it, it is the lore, you must be; "eating your feelings" or "eating for comfort". Well here, it, is. Emotional eating, comfort eating. Here's the root.

Suffice to say, I'm no more impressed than before, but at least I have a better sense of the why.

Politics

Well well well, there's me doodling on twitter and look what I found-from a side route. "Anorectic drugs: use in general practice" From, wait for it, 1976, nevermind 'obesity' this and that from the 1990's. The so called "obesity' spike" as it was called was predicted from the mid-70's, as I've repeatedly stated before it was said to have occurred, in about 1979.

And hasn't the slimming industry done a sterling "preventative" job of preventativating 'obesity'? Let's hava blast in the past;

The treatment of obesity is one of the major measures available today in the field of preventive medicine. In particular, the coronary epidemic of Western civilisation would be halted, and most cases of maturity-onset diabetes prevented, if obesity were to be treated effectively.

Yes, yes unicorns will fart rainbows, cancer and all other health problems will be solved if we can just "treat" a body mass of 30+, and not the kind of treat you like. At the same time, there's a certain sobriety to D. Craddock's abstract.

Anorectic drugs act mainly on the satiety centre in the hypothalamus to produce anorexia.

Satiety centre? That sort of talk has come back as new hasn't it? This time its just the brain. To produce anorexia eh? Possibly referring to the absence of hunger, which is the literal meaning of anorexia. The direction being the relationship between hunger and intake.

No 'lifestyle' bollox, no emo-fee fee shit, do you know what some twerp said the other week? Fatz eat to "numb our feelings", as an Irvine Welsh character might say, gittayfuq. Notice how our friend talks about the way the body actually functions, in '76, are you telling me "science" has forgotten about the endocrine system's interaction with the human nervous system? Or vice versa.

Not only that though;

Most of the drugs are related directly or indirectly to amphetamine and in addition act by increasing general physical activity.  

The urge to be active can also be increased through neural manipulation, like not being pressed into the total conviction that you're the literal representation of physical ineptitude. Not that I'm a fan of drugs, certainly not speed-this makes you wonder how many fat people have been subjected to diet drugs and what if any effect this may have had. The principle is that we need to learn how to use our system(s) better.

Certainly though, attacking and demoralising people isn't the way to increase the urge to move.

There is a direct relationship between the way we use our minds, imagination and our neural structures, we can use that as a launch pad to learn to alter our function using our own mind. But not with this crude circle of exortation.

This is somewhat of a testament to the way this quack crusade has gotten beyond any real urge to merely slenderise and is about something else entirely. It's become an outlet for the exercise of power. In other words, it is highly politicised and that's what its about. Politics.

"Obese is a Slur"

Well, I can co-sign this "Obese is a Slur". There was a time when I wanted to avoid it. The last thing fatz need is the non-term 'obesity' being weaponised as an insult. That was an error of judgement on my part. I hoped peddlers of this crap would take it back, as they were the ones who released it deliberately to brand people, straight-jacketing them into a fictionalised identity.

Would you know, they don't give a damn. In their arrogance, they're just going to keep branding people the with 'obese'. In that case one has to proceed on those terms and make the best of things.

Yes, haters will probably latch on to it as a term of abuse, and yes, these 'ob' shitheads will come with another weasel word if they have to, sad, but okay, if in the meantime this particular foul coinage is dragged through the dirt, so be it. Let these quacks put in something of a shift for once.

Allowing 'obese' to be the slur that it represents will hopefully convince more people to distance themselves from it. It may even spark in them the urge to defend themselves from the cult as a whole, in ways that still don't make sense to many. And maybe, just maybe that will make it easier for people to distance themselves from the whole 'obesity' canard all together. Even going so far as to recognise that it has nothing to do with anyone but those bandying it around.

'Obesity', not simply the term, but everything that goes with it, is like going out of your house to realise it is surrounded by water, as in the midst of a flood. You have to wade through the water, so to speak to get in and out of your home. Your body and mind adapts to these conditions-this changes you-that's internalisation [the changes below your conscious awareness]. But one thing you know above all else is that this water, though surrounding you, though everyone's talking about it, pointing to it, using it as the basis for discussion-did not come from you/your body.

It's all outside you, it does not represent you.

You can tell this about 'obesity' by the fact that it does not describe your life. It doesn't respond to or even name your needs. It does not react to your feelings no matter how vivid, rational and evident they are. It only reacts to the feelings of those who expect us to submit slavishly and serve it.

It is a cult, because a cult, unlike even religion seeks to replace your own thoughts, with the ones it wants you to have. The 'obesity' cult, has always erased your real experience, along with any sense that weight is an aspect of your experience which has made an impression on your intellect and psyche.

Instead crusaders expect to dictate what those are and you should memorise them, speak them out as if they have something to do with you. Speaking the untruth to empower them. They literally use you to always be talking to themselves.

That's the real slur.

Invisible Free Market

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

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

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

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

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

The writer presumes to know oh so much better.

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

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

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

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

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

So much for the "invisible hand".

Target, Hunger

Intriguing news of a fresh attempt to defeat the menace that is hunger. That's not referring to ending hunger in the world. It's a reference to the vital business of ignoring hunger in order to prompt weight loss. This potential calorie restriction diet aide is something called "gastric artery emobolization".

It consists of injecting beads into those gastric arteries, reducing the blood flow to the stomach. That is intended to reduce the extent and power of hunger signalling, because eating is a response to (the provocation of) hunger, not emeaushuns.

Gastric artery embolization apparently targets the "fundus" or end of the stomach, said to generate a tranche of chemicals deemed to relate to/express feelings of hunger. That could explain why a slightly less radical weight loss surgery still seems as effective, as it appears to remove this part of the stomach too.

One wonders whether the mind cannot be trained to achieve the same reduction in blood flow or even hunger. According to the study-this effect faded quickly over time.

Hunger is a scale. It has the capacity to be increased and decreased, like temperature or blood pressure. "Suppression" would be aimed at reducing normal hunger to the pathological low required for this means of weight loss. Suppression prompts continuing attempts to recover whatever level of performance hunger is set at, especially if that is  normal and therefore healthy.

Ask yourself why you need to suppress normal hunger or hunger full stop? Excessive hunger requires a mechanical decrease, i.e. one that maintains itself homoeostatically, most of all.

An attempt is made to get round this by aiming the procedure at those more talented in fatness than the average fatzo, or the 'morbidly obese' as they're called in hope and expectation by [disappointed] 'obesity' wallahs. Alluding to the assumption that they must all 'overeat', which would indicate that those of lesser weight eat less than they. Both are false.

It has been tested on the sum total of 7 people, so perhaps its value is more in the tacit admission of the real target of the crusade. If you wish to target hunger, you'd be better off attacking it, rather than people's mental and physical health. Though it has to be repeated, attacking hunger is an attack on health.

Repeat disclaimer: Whether hunger is excessive or normal doesn't matter when it comes to calorie restriction induced weight loss- CRIWL. 

This urge to deny reality is epitomised by a response from "fair2middlin" to the article. I can't relate enough to this mentality to do it justice otherwise;

Most morbidly obese people over eat to alleviate emotional/psychological issues, not physical hunger. Most eat long past the point of fullness - some eat until they actually feel (or are) sick. Nobody needs 10,000 calories a day to stave off physical hunger. If this works for some, then great! If it works long term, and is affordable for more folks than bypass operations, then even better.

This of course ignores many things. All weight loss has to be through CRIWL even for the acceptably weighted, who presumably have unimpeachable hunger (if not appetites). What really appals though, [yet again] is the sheer depth of self-absorbed presumption. That because you have not had nor can imagine an experience, that it must not exist.

It's just too stupid for words, yet many people have this assumption-that hunger has no meter. We're all feeling the same thing in the same context.

Hunger has to be able to go from the normal levels we mostly tend to reference, to unimaginable power. Starvation has caused people to eat all sorts just in vain hope of relief. That speaks to its capacity. The surprise is that such levels can be triggered erroneously.

That hunger is real. It's just that it isn't apt. This isn't hard to grasp. It's the exact pattern of medical (rather than social) phobias. Acute fear is triggered in the absence of real threat to the person.

The fear is real. Ending it is a question of disabling the misfiring of that response. Not in pretending because there is no sabre toothed tiger that the fear isn't there. That would not be credible. But then phobias happen to slim people. So does hyperphagia too, that is erased by ideology.

The eating until you vomit then even continuing to eat should give a rational person a clue as to just how powerful such a response has become. It's like a moving car with no breaks rolling over everything in its path, even vomit.

I've never experienced such myself, given that I like many hyperphagiacs had palpable emetophobia. As that was symptomatic, there must be different types of hyperphagia.

This-nobody needs w/e calories-is beyond belief. The issue is malfunction. Those who lose little time in telling us how wrong fat bodies are, have an extraordinary inability to accept malfunctioning hunger.

Bigotry does make idiots out of people.

Make no mistake though, I quoted that bilge because it's exactly the unthink 'obesity' wallahs have been hiding behind all these years in order to support their pretence that CRIWL is either a rational or viable means to manage weight.

Despite their wretched and favoured butchery providing a massive clue that the better way to starve is to minimise hunger. Their denial is their invocation of "healthy." If they just admitted they want people to lose weight in an unhealthy way, they wouldn't need to engage in these mental charades.

Not that any of this delivers much slimness. We know the majority of the gastrically assaulted do not exit heavyweight. The other (major) element of denial is even harder for 'obesity' wallahs to get over.

Metabolic expenditure. That lack of success in the-attack hunger model-is that it ignores the body's conservation of energy which is not only seems to be a greater factor in weight, it also seems to be a greater factor in metabolic function and health, full stop.

Let's see how long that admission takes. 

Got Fat

The Guardian started a series of reports on the National Health Service (the NHS). Last Thursday attention turned to 'obesity'. You can imagine how well that turned out.

The headline [article] goes "How Britain got Fat" no question mark. In short, lots of calorie dense food, represented by the proliferation of fried chicken shops. A pre-clusion undermined by its own subtitle.

With cheap and fattening food everywhere, there has been a shape shift that means people do not recognise obesity when they see it in the mirror

Shapes shifted before Britain went clucky. Depending on your historical perspective, societies fattening started; after WWII, from 1960/ the mid-1970’s or 1979/80. Hilde Bruch started her studies on US children in 1937.

As Bruch later told it, her inspiration was simple: she arrived in New York in 1934 and was “startled” by the number of fat kids she saw—“really fat ones, not only in clinics, but on the streets and subways, and in schools.”

This was during the Great Depression, this extended to the UK, Orwell wrote the diet of working class people at the time.

The "does not recognize you are fat is why you are fat" theme typically reveals the only model for reversing weight is drawn from [ideas about] anorexia.

See you are fat ="feel fat".

Feel fat =starve self.

Not starving oneself whilst fat = thinks [one is] thin.

If you felt fat you'd automatically starve yourself-and presumably, wouldn't be fat anyway. This kind of nonsense is replete in 'obesity' cultism.

The short answer to the headline statement is: Deliberate stimying and derailing of proper investigation into useful means to reverse weight. Not as snappy as-too much fried food.

The whole focus on the person-ad hominem -and food/eating is wholly unnecessary, an irrelevant distraction from the objective pursuit of knowledge. The issue is, you want people alter their weight. That is where the focus should be. When trained scientists have found an effective efficent means, they can after testing, present it to the public.

There is nothing mysterious or frightening. It's not like quantum physics, the body already knows how to vary its weight and does so on an every day basis. Finding out how it does this will be a useful course, one calorie restriction and character assassination can never match.

In spite of an unswerving devotion to making a show of a solution to an "obesity crisis” mention of metabolic function is absent, though an immediate central theme in rare mention of the mechanics of another metabolic outcome-height.

No one is or has ever been stopping the white coat science and health establishment from genuine pursuit of means to reverse weight effectively and effciently, but they. The way is open for the resumption of objective inquiry any time they feel like.

Which doesn't appear to be quite yet. 

The only people truly and honestly devoted to making fat people slim have been fat people.

see Oprah as the patron saint of this yearning...

None too ironically the ones most accused of the disengenousness of their tormentors.

The phony dog and pony of eat less, do more, ELDM-which manages to be both outstandingly toxic and useless, makes intrinsic demands number one being the prioritization of those who are more prone to gain, at the expense of those less able to.

Socially, the power has been with the latter. Inevitably, they just continue behaving normally, which means celebrating the food most useful to human kind -calorie dense food. Their joyful active pursuit of an environment filled with such food remains intact. They saw nothing wrong in with that-because there isn't.

Hence hospitals welcoming in fast food giants on long favourable contracts, decades after their own aggressive promotion of weight as a CRISIS. Calorie restriction makes food wrong [or right]. It makes human nature wrong. It makes the will to live, wrong, lack of desire to self harm wrong, because it sets itself against all these.

All this is easy to overlook, if no one’s demanding that you diet.

Such an against human nature route needs the dictatorship of minimizing energy to be organizing principle of society. To have a hope of implimentation.

In democratic societies that flow along the lines of consumer choice and freedom. Plus increasing accessibility for individuals i.e. removing heavy doors in favour of automatic ones, lifts for stairs and such-this reduces energy wasting.

And people making conscious choices toward less activity, i.e. favouring cars and other motorized transport and so on.

Science as the only route to pursue was set not only by the suffering of fat outliers, who have various conditions that scramble their metabolic function. But by historical precident and these societies socio-economic course.

The only type of society that could have a chance at implimenting ELDM would be the kind of dictatorships that make a show of huge open air displays of physical exercises and can control food production.

An extraordinary hegemony invested in this delusion means consequences can be dodged, in favour of incantation of fantasy.  The fundamentally hostile, stigmatizing and abusive framing of 'obesity' helps maintain this canard.

'Obesity wallahs and health profession got around humans innate resistance to starvation by presenting weight loss dieting as a solitary, wholly individual pursuit. Implying slim people could continue mainly unbothered by their invasive dictates.

The lie of slim people’s possibility of exemption from the rule of calorie restriction is increasingly breaking down. More and more restrictions, penalties and harrassments are proposed, in addition to food scares, guilt and taxes. As numerous slim people cry: "Why should I be penalized for those who cannot control themselves?"

Leaving aside the thinking behind this kind of judgement, such mission creep was inevitable given the staunch refusal to accept the failure of calroie restriction dieting as a failure of it, not the person.

Even if dieting was remotely viable, millions of permanent dieters would have acted as cultural enforcers of that principle. Hungry desperate dieters, versus those who wish to be surrounded by calorie dense food, who do you think would end up dominating?

The game is in there. On some level, there’s understanding that fat people have probably been set up for failure. At the same time, there’s been hope that millions of reduced fat people will do the work of reversing the tide of normal eating for them.

What’s expected from fat people is rarely spelled out explicitly. It’s obvious that what is required of them isn’t how slim people behave or they’d have nothing to fear-it would only be duplicating their own lives after all.

That is how Britain or anywhere else, "got fat."

Farewell Jean Nidetch

The death of Jean Nidetch founder of weight watchers has been announced. It's a timely reminder of just how much fat people have been in the forefront of participating and advancing the slimming cult. Rather than the more familiar delusional assertion that slim people need to introduce fat people to the idea.  Yes, if you cognitively erase the multi-billion $$$$ businesses that comprise the now worldwide slimming industry. 

Nidetch went on to found weight watchers in 1963 after intuiting that the kind of group therapy style environment, usually used to do such as support the traumatized or maintain alcoholics and addicts in a state of abstinence would be required to support something as demanding and unnatural as starving your body down to a desired size.

WW, in existence before, during and after the famous 'ob' spike/s of the 1970's despite cleaning up financially has done little to prevent, reverse the overall drift of the weight spectrum to the right of the weight graph. Some say its further aided it. The white coat mafia are well aware of its failure. And always have been.

That has been key to the advance of slimming, the fanatical cult like belief in slimming regardless of outcome. Something about it becomes rooted in the consciousness and requires quite a sustained effort of disciplined will to overcome its cognitive distortion.

In terms of business though, Jean, was a pioneer managing to effectively flog a product that's somewhat imperceptible, if indeed it exists at all, by selling around it.

Take that i-net profiteers.

That she started this tranche of the slimming cult rolling as a result of seeking to reduce her own weight via calorie restriction is a hint that epigenetics is not simply there to whine about 'obesity'. Amongst other things, our bodies are getting cleverer at seeing off these crude and stupid attempts to use energy to manage weight after its fact.

Perhaps also the desire for greater safety has helped dieting to become even more ineffectual than it already was. If Nidetch had been born 50 years later and she had used her own company, it's far more doubtful that her body would have succumbed to quite the extent that it did.

Nidetch sold WW to Heinz in 1978 for apparently 71 million smackeroos and this useless but profitable industry is still going strong with extensive support, including a couple of doughty rescue missions from its friends in the white coat mafia.

But that's all by the by now for Jean. Goodbye formerly fat warrior against obesity, your race is run.

Starve 'n' Sweat Cannot Argue with Itself

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

Where to begin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is anatomy, not morality.

Not Tonight Irene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bricked In

Larry Evans is losing weight. He started his calorie restriction, exercise regime at 800lbs/362kgs. He's got down to at least 650lbs/254kgs. I wish him and his "team" the absolute best. May they get where they need to get, stay there and be healthy hale and hearty.

One thing I can't stand is the cheerleading chorus who are valorizing his situation and its sub-biggest loser style talk of jouneigh. Someone even claimed this was in some way heroic. Let's make something clear, this kind ofstruggle is the product of deliberate policy - trapping fat people into a the suffocating house arrest of calorie restriction with exercise bulimia- themselves too.

From the start of the 'obesity' crusade, if not before, fat people have been bricked-in to a calorie restriction/virtual starvation diet or die scenario, using contrived but acute discomfort, pain and anguish to hold us in.

Just as surely as a one strike and you're out life-sentence. And similarly, it doesn't give a damn about the costs to those unfortunate enough to be metabolic outliers. In fact, it has no problem seeing them perish if that's a part of what's going on with them.

It should be palpably disgusting that societies for the last 4 or more decades have openly said to fat people, "You're dying and that's okay." Luckily for us, it's not up to what society wants, still, that thought counts. Any nation that thinks people ought to die because of their weight or size is messed up. There's no one thin enough for me to declare their lives worthless and I cannot imagine what would get me to go along with such a notion.

It's the extent of conviction that if fat people just can't escape the relentless pursuit of everyone imposing lifestyle anorexia on us, or if it is too intolerable to be fat we will swap the stigma of fatness for the hunger of anorexia and exercise bulimia, our bodies will succumb and we'll all be okay.

We shouldn't have to be forced into "punishment" because of the displaced urges of others.  The urge to see a stocism in the face of any level of discomfort, others feel happy to shirk but not to let go of the idea of. Instead of looking to inflict pain on their own selves, they feel entitled to foist this repellent urge on those they feel its in their power and privilege to-fat people.

Hardly impressive.

Like an earthquake where the earth gives way beneath your feet, cue a manic scramble to climb out before it gives way again and you are lost to the world. That is what you are seeing, someone trying to claw their way out of a trap set by others.

It's not simply about size, it's  feeling trapped. It is well known that this can be a decisive factor in suicide. People dancing around the spectacle of this suffocation does not enoble them. Fat people are not inspirational porn.

There is nothing heroic inspiring or uplifting about witnessing the product of this mindwarp. Enjoyment here is, tawdry and shabby.  No-one, let alone a person of 800lbs should have to starve and lift weights purely to lose weight. If people wish to do those things, good luck to them, but it should be a choice for its own sake or other benefits like conditioning, not to expend energy as penitence at the imposition of fanaticism.

Calorie restricting your way to weight loss is a stupid embarrassment. The halo of slimness may be shining in these people's eyes, but your mind knows. Dieters often feel ashamed, guilty and silly. Dieting is stupid, self destructive and above all, utterly absurd. Unless you are honest enough to admit how risible it all is-even if you are going to do it inspite of that.

I say to metabolic researchers, it's long overdue that you get on and find a proper lever to reversing and advancing weight. You must be able to find at least one, there are probably many. Every day people like Larry have to take this route, risking the potential for their body to exhibit a powerful rebound manoeuvre that could leave them worse off than when they started, is a day you've failed.

Whether its people having tumours removed, or those losing their hunger, metabolic courses need to be altered in either direction and that should be obvious.

[And no, I don't see people like Larry as any less "deserving" of this than anyone else and nor should those who have the obviously low threshold for discomfort have anything to say about that.]

Man V Collateral Damage

Adam Richman is an ex-professional feeder  who presented a programme the attractions of which I simply do not understand. Seems that's due to its basis being anorexia worshipping societies boring obsessive compulsive food fixation. Even the mere veneration of it produces a displacement effect similar to that found in actual anorexics.

Anyhows, Richman stopped eating to the dictates of his career-eating amounts he doesn't want to eat and has lost some weight. He posted photos of himself on his instagram account in praise of said weight loss. One of hastags he used in this was #thinsporation which =Thin + inspiration.

This prompted a follower to get in touch with Amber Sarah who has the barefaced nerve to be a fat activist, non of this [""]. Not sure why "feminists" can't take other women seriously, probably waiting for men to do it first, giving them permission to.

She responded by, as far as I can see, calmly calling his attention to the term's inappropriate "problematic" connotations. He and others claim he had no knowledge of the origins of the term. That I doubt. It's in the air, he probably picked it up symbiotically. Funny how those who deem others guilty by existence trade so much on innocence. [Or perhaps not].

Thinspo comes from amateurs who take the 'cure' for 'obesity' to its logical conclusion and flat out define anorexia nervosa (and exercise bulimia) as a lifestyle. As indeed does the establishment-for fat people. One of the props for this turn of mind is the use of the objectification of women in the form of often doctored photos of slim and thin women to "inspire" them to continue starving themselves.

It's what a consciously induced famine requires, constant reminders to keep on doing it. All things being equal, you'd just eat when you're hungry, that's kind of a default necessity. Unless you have a form of anorexia so overwhelming that it more or less runs itself 

[There's an ironic counterpart-fatspo fat + inspiration. Referring to the fact that it takes just as much continual will for fat people to swim upstream against society's imposition and view yourself as fully human, as it does to constantly and consciously contrive anorexia. If not more so.]

His first response was to state he had no fuq's to give. 'K. This prompted Amber to call on her followers to let him know the significance of ED's i.e. anorexia.  

In short, Richman then went apeshit. Not merely angry but revealled he has an extent of problems way out of keeping with his cultivated image as a charming happy stuffer-shall we say. He actually called women c-nuts and went so far as to say to someone else;

seriously-grab a razor blade & draw a bath. I doubt anyone will miss you.

Can you believe that? I'm not that bothered by offense, but I found that repugnant. So much so that I forgot myself and honestly expected forthright condemnation, at least of that. You can be a fat hater and realise that crossed a line. After all, remember all the fuss about abuse on the internet of certain women on the internet.

What was I thinking? I know better.

Thinspo is persecuted by both the establishment and middle class parents with anorexic children, mainstream feminists and the like. Its the usual displacement of their own class attitudes showing up (mostly) daughters. They're keen to point the finger of blame elsewhere away from themselves, usually to where you'll find the expression of said attitudes.

Culture's a tricky one. We tend to be so much a part of it that seeing your children interpret it can be the first time you get a clear view of certain of its themes. That can be a real shock. It probably does feel emotionally like its coming from somewhere else.

In this way, thinspo has been saddled with the same kind of displacement as the fashion industry and its thin models.

Let's say, I'm unimpressed by anorexia and have a low tolerance for either its worship or Stockholmed too often fat phobic followers who insist others should also bow to the might of their friend 'ana'. What they deem insight, is too often expression of their inability to see how much of a hold it still has on their minds. To be fair, in a society that supports that.

Despite all this, I have sympathy for their position, and none for those who cynically use them to body shield their own disgusting capitulation to promoting this pathology, in the name of things like "weight management." With respect to Amber, I think any fat people joining in the point scoring about thinsproana should examine their motives more rigourously.

Fat activists need to learn to treat their own experience with a bit more respect, before joining any crude chorus of mindless disapproval, as a matter of principle. I've little problem confronting entitled pro-ana's who think they have the droit de seigner to abuse fat people. Though a little more understanding though of what drives, often children to pro-ana might be better when it comes to mainstream discourse is needed. A little less of the mindless replication of accepted hypocrisy.

Authority's persecution of "thinsproana" has always been self serving. It's motivated by keep up the pretense that there's a yawning chasm between anorexia nervosa and the imitation of it as a way of life, by anyone, including fat people. That its pure co-incidence that the amount of eating disorders have risen and disordered views of food have become the norm, indeed "healthy" during this 'obesity' crusade.

Because fat people's experience is almost completely erased, people can keep pretending calorie restriction as a "healthy lifestyle" will not keep spewing up its numerous sub-pathologies. Often assigning them to 'obesity' because they submerge the reality that fat people have already lived a pro-ana mindset and/or lifestyle in trying to slim the way we've been ordered.

They're also trying to continue the pretense that it doesn't require everyone to live by pro-ana, merely to implement it as the way of regulating weight. Society is required by that strategy to be the gastrectomy. That is in the nature of human design. Restricting necessity is unnatural, it requires rigid and constantly enforced artifice-before you think about results.

Instead, the voice of delusion continues to post-pone the day of reckoning. Those who wish to can still kid on about individuated harm free calorie restriction as the basis of weight regulation.

Hence this kind of tussle between anorexia as the 'obesity' cure and the value of thin/slim people damaged by it, occurs. You could say it will be interesting to see whether fat phobia or the value assigned slim people will win out.

Inevitable Realism

An article is making its way around the fatsphere generating no little bathos. A six hundred pound est., man entered a hospital leaving a trail of mawkish self pity and passive aggression in his wake.

“My stomach hurts,” he says, his voice surprisingly high and childlike.

It gets better;

It’s hard to tell, exactly, but I think his pain is coming from somewhere around his stomach.

Pure gold.

Now, whenever I hear about stories like this, I'm always rooting for the person concerned to assume a haughty froideur.

The hospital was not fully equipped for this guy. They couldn't x ray him and he was not surprisingly uncomfortable keeping an awkward position for too long.

We start an IV and get some blood work, all of which is normal.

Lmao. Oh man seriously, how pissed do you think they were about that?

I talk to the patient between procedures, trying to get a sense of him as a person. He recites a litany of consultants he’s seen for his back pain, his headaches, a chronic rash on his ankles, his shortness of breath, his weakness, his insomnia and his fatigue. All of them have failed me,” he says, adding that the paramedics didn’t have the proper ultra-wide, ultra-sturdy gurney to accommodate his body. The Americans with Disabilities Act says that they should have the proper equipment to handle me, the same as they do for anyone else,” he says indignantly. “I’m entitled to that. I’ll probably have to sue to get the care I really need.”

Atta boy! [I wonder if he used to be slim?] Don't take any nonsense. This is a start. I just can't stand any more tragic capitulation. At least he's trying.

This is the endgame of not listening when people tell you, doesn't work. We told them!

To rely on doesn't work in the face of what you can see, with your own yes, well, there's no happy ending for you.

It's just possible that the increasing reality of them having to deal with theirs and society's folly, will convince them to relent. To tell the field of "obesity" to get its bloody finger out and start being reality based, believe it when I see it though. 

He lies at the very large center of his own world — a world in which all the surgery mankind has to offer cannot heal the real pain he suffers.

Yeah a world in which you have to run around after him-between trying to dump him elsewhere. I could live with the doctoring/research/quackscience classes throwing up their hands, but why wouldn't they let us progress? Why did they keep shaming us into repeat, repeat, repeat until we could stand it no more? Why did they have to waste our stentorian efforts? We could have faced the truth and shared some of the load. We were so willing, we participated in the experiment with slavish devotion. Why couldn't more value have been extracted out of that? This could have been a unique experiment of partnership between lay and professional. What you could have had now!

Instead, you have a lot of exhausted people trained replace their thoughts with bullshit, which is the last thing any of us needs. 

The patient lies trapped in his own body, like a prisoner in an enormous, fleshy castle.

Oooh, get you being all picaresque. But we know you're talking about yourself and your own feelings. You are trapped by your professions' own hubris. And whatever is really at the bottom of this reluctance to get real answers.

And though he must feel wounded by the ER personnel’s remarks, he seems to find succor in knowing that there’s no comment so cutting that it can’t be soothed by the balm of 8,000 calories per day.

Oohooh bitchy, did you see that? Well, perhaps you'll seek succour in your hospital supplies of ethanol. I understand some of you do that.

Just goes to show bullying people doesn't bully biology. Margaret Thatcher used intone thunderously. "You can't buck the market." You cannot buck biology, not with denial, delusion, quack science, nor iatrogenics.

Later on in my shift, still feeling traces of the patient’s presence, I sit and stare at my 700-calorie dinner, all appetite gone, wondering where empathy ends and compassion begins.

No worries there as you haven't got any. However this reality check might start people realizing agreeing a false reality doesn't change the real one. Sorry about that.

I know why my colleagues and I are so glad to have this patient out of the ER and stowed away upstairs: he’s an oversize mirror, reminding us of our own excesses. It’s easier to look away and joke at his expense than it is to peer into his eyes and see our own appetites staring back.

Golly gosh gee whizz.

This unfeasible tv proposition achieves its popularity through the sight of punishing consumption. In the guise of fat people starving and purging away their sinful "unhealthful" countenance. Though, never unhealthful enough not to drop dead under conditions that would fell many of those baying for their sweat. This serves to purge collective guilt about rampant consumption and avarice. The voiding of fat bodies becomes an exorcism of everyone's suppressed sin and above all, fear that payment/punishment will be exacted at some future point.

Adaptation, Acclimatization, Assimiliation

The monopoly word "addiction" is obsessively in vogue. If as I say it is horribly over and falsely used, how so?

It boils down to using it to describe things that are not being recognized in their own right. Three of these things cover the basic design of the human animal. I know, sounds portentous. All mean more or less the same thing, to alter to fit in with your environment.

Adaptation

We are designed to fit in with our surrounds. To be able to function well in various climes. To adapt is to change yourself to be more in accord with your environment. If you've lived a nomadic life and settle on a farm. You have to change to adapt your rhythms and your mindset from the needs of travel to those of being settled.

Acclimatization

To become in tune with the time, tone tempo or mood of your surrounds. So if you move from a hot to a cold climate or vice versa. Your body temperature regulation, changes becoming attuned to the new outer temperature. It can be the same for things like mood. If you go from a society that expresses itself loudly with big physical gestures, to one where quieter tones and smaller gestures are favoured.

Assimilation

To assimilate is to be submerge characteristics that mark you out as different from your surround as much as you can. Often this is used when speaking about recent immigrants to a society. Or someone who 'passes' assimilates by virtue of them looking the same as those in the dominant category.

It's become fashionable to ignore these behaving as if we are somehow mechanical rather than animal. Not sure why as this is undoubtedly a regression. Perhaps it is the influence of computers on our collective psyche. In the absence of an overwhelming, human centered guiding principle-like religion-maybe we've unwittingly taken our cue from this as the way function occurs.

The same underlying principles appear for good and ill.  So for example, the reason why it can be heart wrenchingly hard to stop a habit, is the same reason why you become expert at something.

Take learning to read. Try to remember what it took you to learn that and how well you now do it. Imagine if it never got any better than when you first learnt.

Exactly.

That's how we'd have to function, to not get 'addicted' to any habits.

The structure of doing something without thinking is the structure of (gaining) expertise. Would you be without that? Where you had no prospect of a flow of actions?

What we really need to do is to find better ways to derail the process when its not or no longer felt to be to our advantage. Rather than brand everything "addiction" it's time we graduated from the pretence of pure free will or no will.

It's entirely possible to be unable to directly stop doing things you don't want to do, via pure elective will alone, certainly. It's possible to feel compelled to commit acts that can only come from your own decision. That's scary and hard, but hiding behind addiction isn't an answer. For anyone. We know this so why do we insist on setting ourselves to need to pretend otherwise?

Al fresco

Henry Porter says he's surprised by what he deems a lack of interest in defending privacy and wonders if it is he who's out of step with most other people. I think he probably is. I get his sense of privacy, but circumstances (seem to) have changed from the days when solitude was the model.

There's a bathing scene in the TV adaptation of Shogun. The main character Blackthorne-who's an English sailor shipwrecked in 17th century Japan-finds his lovely interpreter, Lady Mariko naked and bathing in her pool. He's stunned when she invites him to join her. She explains the crowded nature of Japan means they developed different forms of privacy.

Those who come from rural areas can find city folk unfriendly, its similar. All in regulating your gaze. When people post their pictures on-line, they at times object to those putting their images to uses they don't approve of. The criticism of that has been they've undermined their own privacy by publishing them in public spaces. The criticism has some validity, however, the objection also shows the shifting nature of privacy in cyberspace.

Those who administer and run things are always monitoring what the public will accept and how. 'Obesity' has already displayed that people don't object the idea of whole bodies and lives being submerged in what purports to be science. As long as that is in people they're distanced from through defining them as disease. That has been a surprise to many in authority. You can see how slow they have been to try and exploit such a comparatively open goal.

That defining people as a disease process and their lives as that unfolding, hasn't raised instinctive objections shows that people's sense of privacy as either having shifted, or being revealed as not important as it might have seemed, this time under the influence of what is and what purports to be science.

At least with your e-mails and such, the authorities are snooping on what you actually write of your own volition. Your internet footprint at least has the possibility of revealing something real about you. It is something you have some control over shaping.

The 'obesity' construct on the other hand hollows out real human existence and imposes on it a script it expects people to act out. Both 'obese' and the peer pressure chorus. I've said for a long time that you can see the desire through it. To be able to look at anyone person and see their own life.

Whether its the notion that our thoughts will soon be easy to read, our notions of privacy may soon be redundant in any case, that's the aim. The desire of those who run things to know us inside out has been evident forever.

People have willingly sold information on what they buy, for the prospect of "reward points", something akin to a coupon system.

Porter doesn't seem to have been cognisant of this, let alone its implications, just like everyone else.We notice things in our orbit that have meaning to us. The most obviously bad idea can hide in plain sight as long as it finds the right route, or targets.

Who knows, given human kind advanced from smaller tribes and villages where everyone knows everyone and most of the business, perhaps the real aberration was of privacy as based on a model of individuality and solitude. 

If 'obesity' doesn't refer to fat as disease, what's the point of it?

See anything untoward about this title?

"Obesity is not a disease"

What is 'obesity' then? A construct that exists to pretend being fat is disease.....is wrong..... about its reason for existing. How clueless in their vindictiveness are fat phobes planning to be?

Take this one;

BUT eating shitty foods and not exercising and then blaming your obesity on what you like to call a 'disease' is disgusting.

Who likes to call what disease?

These people are so mind numbed from accepting such falsehood, they can't tell many fat activists, for want of a better term, are objecting. There's seems little clamour from the public for this-except from those who demand fat people pathologize ourselves for their so called 'compassion'. There's nothing too surprising about this except the reality of such a collapse of a person's ability to reason.

Over the years I recognized fat people are taught to have the same opinions about fatness as everyone else. Therefore we are deviating from a singular thought pattern, rather than having the experience of a fat centred consciousness.

I wondered about the assumption that fat people have "fat opinions". I thought it came from the idea that we are morally weak, lacking in will to the point of being 'sick' so we are all about defending our 'sickness'.

Then I thought it was that the mal-design of 'obesity' meant no distinction between us and our so called 'disease', meant, we were deemed the voice of disease.

I finally think it's due to fat people being defined by our bodies are supposed to mean. This becomes our supposed point of view.

The latter two are more or less alike. The nuance is being the voice of disease, means you can hope to change that. If you change what that voice is saying. i.e. parrot the "I'm a sorry fatty" spiel, eyes down cast, pronounced frown, lip trembling (follow through with wobbling flesh is even more disgust invoking  moving.)

But when your body's size is the opinion, what you actually say makes little impact. As there's no need to hear what you say. Even when you tell haters directly and volubly that you really do not wish to be seen as disease, honest.

Their brain doesn't know what to do with that. Hence Michael Tanner's pitiful attempt to grind his responsibility shirking axe. None to co-incidentally, he says;

At first glance, it’s a minor story, hardly worth mentioning, 

Why would defining human beings as disease to the "Individual enterprise crew" be hardly worth mentioning? Oh right, critical faculties have already been bypassed, numbed by the appeal to baser instincts. Interesting that this so easily trumps the nominal worship of the sanctity of the individual. So much for the vaunted detestation of "identity politics" (i.e. "political correctness gone mad".)

but in reality the AMA’s move is a symptom of a disease that is seriously troubling our society: the abdication of personal responsibility and an invitation to government meddling.

Oh really sucker? Well I think you'll find you're part of the "symptom". You didn't realise that because beating people down seems emotionally in keeping with what you consider politics.


Seriously, what do people who use the term 'obesity' think it has been disseminated for? Five minutes ago, no one knew how to call anyone 'obese'. Now, no one seems able to call fat people, people. We're the "epidemic".

How is anyone who goes around blabbing 'obesity' this and that going to shirk responsibility for breaking the ground for this decision? What if people had said phooey to calling people disease? What if they'd bothered to question the difference between fat body as and person. Or whether the idea of the body as the product of a pathological countenance?

No sense of consequence, only of pleasure. Of getting someone. Well, is it worth it? All people like this think about is instant gratification of being feeling special, merely because they exist. How bad must they feel most of the time.

Repeat an old cowcake axiom: Whatever fat phobes lecture you about, is what they're about to demonstrate.

Oh and here's another one. Fat people owe you nada. 

The med prof had this nasty absolutely pegged. Appeal to the urge to scorn, vent, displace unprocessed experience, punish, despise, feel superior to and you've got opportunity. And all thought goes out the window.

Mind you, given they're operating from baser urges themselves, that's no leap. 

Stigma is not the Responsibility of the Stigmatized

Those who are demonized, debased or otherwise undermined by others, are not responsible for being in the sights of others. It's just not their responsibility. It is up to those who are participating in this  wrong doing to act in accord with their conscience. It is not for their targets to twist and turn to redefine themselves in order that others, including medical professionals may perhaps, condescend to behave properly and remember their manners.

Despite expecting little sense from the mental dessication that is fat hating, never did I expect to see any Black Person claiming dehumanization is a key to humanizing oneself. How's that worked out for Black People?

Alcoholism, that is not a person. Smoking, not a person, drug addiction, not people. 'Obesity' refers to a person. Not a habit, addiction nor thing. Body size, body weight, body mass, the whole of a person qualifies them as disease. And contrary to popular feeling, we are our bodies. 

That basic error, defining people disease, through their bodies, is not our fault either. Even the use of words for their effects should end there. Nor is it up to us to roll over for the sake of professional convenience. The vagaries of the US insurance industry does not constitute medical authority. Words mean things and they should be used to define things that match that definition. Not because use of them may generate such and such purported effect. That's a quick route to Babel.

Public health activists the medical profession scientists and researchers decided to invoke stigma to suppress weight. If they wish to make the greatest strides in ending they are free to explain clearly just how (un)likely permanent weight reduction via calorie restriction really is. They're free to state they made a mistake in blaming fat people for human design. We fat people, many of us as children did. We admitted freely that we/our bodies were wrong.

We had the calm quiet sense of honour to do that. Is everyone beginning to grasp what that meant now?

Then they can acknowledge the millions of fat people virtually everyone of us, who've spent lifetimes saying how high, when they said; "Jump!"

Whilst they're at it, they can also apologize unreservedly for using their influence to turn everyone around us into a bunch of nerve wearying nags. That they aren't doing any of this is indication enough that they have no interest in removing the stigma they're in large part responsible for.

And as for spurring research? What's "obesity research" been about up till now? For the link shy, that's two lists, one of 46443 and 85203 search results for "obesity research" respectively. Not sure of any duplications. What's this that been about? If this has all been so much pretty useless, how's the announcement going to alter its course? Getting paid more for the same old rope.............and you "hope" this will mean research into the body's underlying processes rather than how "deadly" fatness is do you? Just how will this be ensured?

Does anyone hear the distant sound of uproarious laughter? Plus kerrrching?

I should also point out that the AMA, despite trying to keep it apolitical with a small 'c' has made a scathing comment on their own country. No society that defines a third of its citizen's as disease is anything less than a degenerate, disease producing entity itself.

Professional Niceties

Asking the question;

Are doctors nicer to patients who aren't fat? 

Is all very well, but it's really about maximizing their ability to practice medicine.The problem with their professional sulk about fatness, is that it can get in the way of their professionalism.

It also reduces their own satisfaction, it must be galling to have contrived to feel someone's taking up your time unnecessarily. That only adds to fat patients original sin;

......doctors are trained to deal with immediate medical problems that have specific solutions, like a pill to lower blood pressure or emergency treatment for a heart attack. But obesity is a far more complex problem that isn’t easy to solve, and that can be frustrating to doctors. “When we can’t fix what is broken we tend to behave badly,” he [Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Yale-Griffin University Prevention Research Center] said.

It's been noted. Along with seeing the bulk of patients as more difficult to examine, handle and perform surgery on apart from the highly profitable weight loss surgery where there's understandably a more "we shall overcome" attitude.

We've so taken for granted the emollient of professional sympathy, that it seemed just to be about being nice.

I was brought up with the idea that doctors would treat murderous dictators, serial killers, anyone, about all, it was a case of ethics. They'd sworn an oath to uphold this. That meant something. Compare that with their resentful fat phobia.  

It should also be remembered that this is not about "general attitudes". The people in white coats helped sell this to the public on the back of their unquestioned gravitas. Whilst I have little patience with fat phobia, 'blaming' fatness on the fat public and fat phobia on slim hoi polloi is a pretence I'm prepared to enter into.

This is a subtler aspect of the attempt to set up the mythical fat v slim battle, many in authority are desperate for, to obscure their own cynical misbehaviour.

Divide and conquer, always.  Slim folk from around your way, did not invent 'obesity/obese'. And we all know  that.

Amour Propre, Amour de Soi

Amour propre is the self esteem that comes through the esteem of others. It's also more popularly refers to the image or reputation for esteem associated with those with higher status in society. In essence though, it refers to regard one gets from others and then feels oneself.

Armour de soi is literally, love of self. It is innate self regard. We are born that way. Our regard for ourselves is fused intimately with our existence and is indivisible from our awareness of that. Just like other living creatures. It doesn't occur to us to not like ourselves.

It doesn't actually feel like romantic love, which is often a false and hyped up idea of what love can be when mixed with sexual desire and some other stuff we won't go into here. 

Human beings especially seem to be made up of both inside out and outside in self love. Though it seems to be observable in (other) animal kingdoms.

What we learn is not so much to hate ourselves, or even to love ourselves. We learn to put things in between our inner self love and develop an armour propre. And they either support or cause our ability to heart ourselves to implode.

Too many clauses in the way of what just was, before.

We do need to learn to defend that self love from attacks not all of which by any means come in hate. And moreover, when the inevitable fall from the grace of self love is pressing enough, we must learn to repair and restore it.

It is a strange feature of our modern era that amour propre seems to have outstripped the latter to such a degree that the latter is dismissed by some as almost mythical, 'fake' or even oppressive imposition. This is a product of many influences mainly commercial inclined. Here provides a steady stream of routes in which to love oneself from the outside in.

Fat people who have other social value are learning what those of us accorded less all round have had to realise sooner. That a revival of the amour de soi is indeed possible and inevitable once ones amour propre is trashed by all and sundry.

You can see some of the above reactions are what can occur when the fat, nor other imperative isn't present. The cultivation of amour de soi feels somewhat artificial, irritating, if not down right vulgar.

Some of it is class. Middle class self regard is rigidly regulated from the outside, in the groupings they form together. Amour de soi, associated as it is with our original 'wild' animalistic lower status can feel almost grotesque in comparison to the subtle internalized cues of bourgeois esteem.

Self love, does not have to be perfect, nor can it be. We humans have not evolved to that point. If you participate in society's built more on AP, you can't expect to transcend that wholly. But changing the balance in favour of A de S is perfectly legitimate and does not need to be justified or even explained to anyone who doesn't feel the need for it.

That's sometimes how it is when you're not seeing things from the same angle.

Stigma Variations

The dull brained obesity cult is slowly working out that adults openly bullying fat children, even in an atmosphere of fat hating license, dislodges the mask of self-exalting piety.

Typically for it's regressive and brutish mentality, it's has now landed on it's twisted version an underlying truth of family therapy. No wo/man, let alone child is an island. This becomes fighting fat parents. This is defined as "fighting parental obesity" but we know 'obesity' is just a euphemism for "person or people". It's a shame because family therapy seeks to (be):

• Inclusive and considerate of the needs of each member of the family and/or other key relationships (systems) in people’s lives
• Recognise and build on peoples’ strengths and relational resources
• Work in partnership ‘with’ families and others, not ‘on’ them
• Sensitive to diverse family forms and relationships, beliefs and cultures
• Enable people to talk, together or individually, often about difficult or distressing issues, in ways that respect their experiences, invite engagement and support recovery.

My emphasis (can you imagine things ever getting to that stage with fat people?) Sometimes that's what being fat is about. Walking into what people expect for themselves and each other and realizing that should be you too but somehow isn't.

This is what's deemed thin privilege. It's not that slim people get anything they don't deserve, it's that fat people are excluded and made the poor relations. Do I need to say calorie restriction has not be a successful slimming strategy? Yeah, some people can manage to become less fat-leaving aside those who become fatter-but that isn't going to stop 'obesity'. 

If people can go from fat to slim by just laying off having a competitive attitude to eating, I have to wonder if they are fat in the way many of us are. I never lost a significant amount of weight, even when my metabolism seemed to be using up a lot of energy. Are a minority like the reverse of the reduced obese, perhaps the enlarged slim? Probably. I often find caricatures are someone's story, just not the majority.

Assumptions of insufficient motivation though signal of a point blank refusal to acknowledge the efforts of most fat people has led us more or less where we are. Though picking on (fat) parents is a pretty obvious gambit, it has the potential to drift towards the unpleasant realities the crusade loves to avoid.

I caught sight of a show called The New Normal recently. In short, it's about a gay (male) couple expecting a baby through a surrogate. She usually appears with a girl in tow. This particular scene featured thanksgiving as they and some friends were about to tuck into a seasonal tofu substitute for turkey.

They all took their first bite and spat out more or less in unison. Turns out the intent was to be supportive of the little girl's foray into vegetarianism. It's just a more fancy example of the kind of supportive-all for one and one for all that has always been glaringly absent from weight loss dieting.

From the beginning, despite the health warnings, when you (weight loss) diet, you're on your own. It's nothing to sit at a table with your beloved family, gnawing hunger inside - trying to swallow the lump in your throat, along with some offensive tasting low calorie -shit whilst your family set about their communion.

It's not so much the deprivation as the isolation. Especially in plain sight of people's relaxed fulfillment of their own needs. To break bread with those you care about is one of the everyday things that binds us together, we take it for granted. Every religion has to get involved with what you eat, indeed, it's fair to say it's the other way around too, focus on food quickly becomes a system of faith.

Focusing on the parents of fat children, specifically fat parents-it could just as well be slim parents of fat children-may be fine and dandy in the sense that any distress is shared by all. Slimz would be the most ferocious resistor's of enforced WLD, hence their role as holier than thou. Whole families dieting points to the much evaded logic of whole societies dieting.

The avoidance of which has been the purpose of individualizing weight loss dieting in the first place.

To stop fat people's WLD getting in the way of those who aren't. Let's face it, if the logic of weight loss dieting had been followed, it would have stopped the advance of industrialized food and restaurant chains that have come to dominate the food environment during the crusade.

Not a co-incidence. The manufacturing base of certain countries has been dismantled/allowed to wither. Big Food as some are trying to call it-or what used to be classed as the "service sector"-was part of what stepped into that gap, often employing people from the classes that had been put out of work by said policies.

Hence the deluded insistence that fat people individually, against the environment and against societies economic imperative, and be part of a countervailing force to derail this. Whilst the majority wanted and liked this expansion! Unsurprisingly, yet another self comforting delusion that hasn't paid off given drastically controlling the environment in the way of reversing the last 30 years, is one of few examples of a different approach-to calorie restriction.

Beating up on fatz is just a displacement activity. A way to make people feel like they're doing something, when the outcome of it would be undesired. And oh, get this;

I also agree with West that we'll never conquer the obesity epidemic if we don't face some hard truths about grain subsidies and other economic (and marketing) factors that are contributing to it. Everyone should be able to afford healthy food -- and have access to safe and affordable exercise options. There are real social justice issues here, and we need a groundswell of indignation and action.

Yeah, I discounted that ages ago on the grounds that the only way for this "indignation" to build was to develop a high value on the lives of the poor and/or fat. And the primary vehicle for getting there was actually destroying that through a relentless campaign of social stigma. 

That's why I just figured, let's just get real and concentrate on the possibility of scientific advance. That way, if weight can be adjusted successfully, there's no need for unrealistic nonsense about interrupting capitalism etc.,

What happened to our view?

Back when I was learning to break the habit of a lifetime and voice thoughts I kept unformed in the back of my mind, I remembered thinking-there is only one point of view and that is unfair.

It doesn't come across much, but there's only one view of fatness and it does not come from fat people, nor has any real honest input from us.

Zero, zilch, nada, nichts.

Barely.

Yet we adopted it the same as everyone else.

Everyone agreed the same view of fatness, decided by those who were not fat. And we fat people agreed with a view of ourselves that came not from us.

So, what happened to our view?

It was repressed from within and without.

By representing the disorder that is dietary restriction as perfectly right and feasible, the normal responses we are designed to have became the sign of sin. The conscious desire to be greedy rising up from deep within us.

We felt we had to suppress those responses, our feelings and emotions in order to get on with the process of righting ourselves. To live right and become right-or slim. To merely feel and acknowledge those feelings was seen, in itself as identifying with them, strengthening them, going along with them. It was guilt and would go against and defeat our righteous purpose.

So we had to just not acknowledge them, somehow we became detached from part of our inner selves. It wasn't a case of feeling and thinking about what that was and deciding not to tell anyone. It was, you cannot acknowledge, what's going on within. That's collusion with badness, not cultivating the rightness that had to be delivered from outside, from those who were not wrong-fat, but were right-slim. 

What we were repressing was connection with our innate defence mechanisms at work and thinking about and analyzing our emotional, intellectual and psychological responses to them. This has left an eerie silence within virtually all fat people. Something missing.

Like coming to a place where the road should be, but it runs out and there's just a hint of what should be there, but somehow obscure..........