Binge Eating Disorder is not Hyperphagia Nervosa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human Metabolism's Plasticity

No-brainer news;

“This study shows that if an overweight person is able to maintain an initial weight loss – in this case for a year – the body will eventually ‘accept’ this new weight and thus not fight against it, as is otherwise normally the case when you are in a calorie-deficit state,”

If an o/w person-or presumably any person including slims, 'cos they're people too-keeps starving themselves, after a year, their metabolic function may reset itself to that level of hunger.

The interesting uplifting news in this study is that if you are able to maintain your weight loss for a longer period of time, it seems as if you have ‘passed the critical point’, and after this point, it will actually become easier for you to maintain your weight loss than is was immediately after the initial weight loss.

I beg to differ. Its the other way round. Adjust metabolic function (first) and that will alter outcomes insomuch as your body responds to any particular [metabolic] alteration, as I've been boring on about for it seems like aeons.

If she plays her cards right, Professor Signe Sørensen Torekov  the head honcho of this study-she could be on course to be the second most famous Dane after himself. 

Isn't this magnificent? No more enforced starvation for anyone; whoo hoo: Paaaaartay!!!

This particular study's topsy-turvey findings came by measuring the levels of two chemicals GLP-1 and PYY 3-36, said to be present, in the blood, when there's "appetite inhibition". The levels of both were measured after meals in people who had lost 13% of their weight. Three measurements were taken; before they'd lost the weight, just after their weight loss and 52 weeks after sustaining said weight loss.
These chemicals increased after the 52 week period to a level reflective of a lack of unwanted hunger. According to this study, the body finally "accept(s)" lowered intake, in theory of course. That's great.

It should be simple to confirm whether these pointers are simply present along with, or are hunger cessation in action. Find a way or ways to reduce/inhibit levels of GLP-1 and PYY 3-36 directly, stand back and watch people's hunger/appetite fall without any need for privation. It will be sensational-given the desperation to stave off the global adipocalypse.

Significantly altering hunger/metabolic is nothing new. Having dieting career or merely the threat of one hanging over you, can and does significantly adjust hunger/metabolic function. Yes, merely contemplating springing a diet on yourself day after day for years is enough to trigger some of the delightful adjustments of your metabolic function and nervous system.

Repeat, some people are going to discover that what they thought was a neurotic flaky nature is actually a side effect of long-term calorie restriction or the threat of it.

I altered mine back albeit accidentally. I barely altered in weight, tricky though it undoubtedly is, altering hunger seems way easier than altering the extent to which the body stores fat.

I'm sure I've said enough times to bore people almost as much as I'm bored with saying it. There's no way bodies can only gain weight. That nonsense has been put about solely via the calories in/out assertion. All that's lacking is the means of adjusting the metabolic mechanism to trigger or set that off reversal.

Each and every force must have an equal and countervailing force.

It's obvious in the way even that weight gain does not happen at the same speed. If your weight goes up one year and less or nothing the next. That's a downward adjustment, a theoretical reversal in terms of absence of gain. The body does this without pain, privation or punishment. Suggesting all that's necessary is making adjustments at source.

If what's missing is  reducing the levels of a couple of chemicals, then vamos, let's go kiddos.

If this had been done in a timely fashion, 8 year old, Hana Tarraf wouldn't have had to have a gastric band fitted merely to try and arrest hypothalamically induced weight gain. The originator of this, a tumour, may not be so simple to permanently vanquish, but she could have been spared from the unnecessary anguish of agonising hyperphagia.

Hyperphagia-genuinely excessive/heightened hunger functioning is distressing enough to be relieved with or without weight loss. Never forget who's paying for this bizarre obsession with getting fat people and therefore everyone else, to starve themselves.

I hope this is helping you to see how that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. There is no point I can see to it, but I'll stand correction. Feel free to explain why the cart must be put before the horse, instead of the right way round.

I don't give a damn where you are coming from on this, ask yourself; Why are ob researchers avoiding directly adjusting metabolic function?

Even more fascinating still; What is it are they avoiding?

That's more of a mystery than the plasticity of metabolic function. 

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. 

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

Riiiight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you believe this is really happening?

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

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

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

This has the meanness of the truly stupid.

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

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

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

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

Another Metabolic Outlier Pays the ultimate price for the 'obesity' crusade

Samantha Packham died in hospital this July. She was 20 years old, weighed 40 stones/560lbs/254kgs. She had fierce hyperphagia at 8 years old according to her parents Jan and Michael,

“She would eat her dinner and then she would just go to the fridge and help ­herself to more food. “We tried to tell her she’d just had her ­dinner and didn’t need anything else, but she would fly into a rage. “She would swear and once she even pulled the hinges off the doors – she was that strong at the age of eight.

That 'rage' by the way is a profound distress that jumps out at you from your very nerves, your mind becomes aware of it. So what next?

"We took her to the doctors but they did absolutely nothing.”

That sums up what the 'obesity' crusade is all about. Put tremendous pressure on people to do something they aren't designed for and give them no help to even give it a good go. If you want people to deal with hunger of this magnitude, why not work on switching hunger down? Meaning doctors could have demanded this of researchers.

They've gone out of their way not to. The whole 'obesity' crusade and its acolytes have consistently argued against objective research, claiming that just gives people "excuses". It "over-complicates" things, yes you read that. More knowledge of something you clearly no little about =over-complication.  The only thing left is spontaneous recovery.

This should all be getting a tad familiar. Samantha also had learning difficulties and went to special school like Carl Thompson. Her body's level of energy conservation seemed to be even worse than his.

There's no doubt the 'obesity' is slowly being encroached by the voices of experience. There's a slow dawning realization of the mess we have been put in by this 'obesity' narrative. The Mail's original headline was,

obese daughter who weighed 40 stone and was put into care as a teenager because her parents could not control her eating dies aged 20

First off, when you write 40 stone in a sentence, you do not need to write 'obese' or 'overweight', as it was subsequently altered to-'cos that's supposed to be more polite. It isn't. I'm sure DM journos are expensively educated enough to recognize the difference between a problematic moniker and a problematic construct. I'm guessing, they expect their readers to be too low in reason to notice the difference.

No joking about the Mail readership now, that is quite contemptuous, well, why should that all be on fat people? To reiterate for the peanut gallery, it doesn't matter what you name this weight construct, it is what you are naming that is the problem. Changing terms makes no difference.

Back to that headline, how defensive is it?!

.......because her parents could not control her eating

Someone doth protest way too much. Samantha was snatched by a state agency because her parents could not control her eating eh? Now you know that is disingenuous, none such is said to the parents of children/teens wasting from anorexia nervosa. The hunger of a human being, child or not is in the body of that person, not in the head of others, whether parents, a societal bullying campaign or strictures on industrial food.

This extent of defensiveness makes it clear to me that they know on some level or t'other that the overall insistence on diet or death is the real killer here, not Samantha's parents. She was described as the youngest victim of the 'obesity' crisis. In a sense that is correct, when you consider this conceit of denying people any real means to alter the regulation of their weight, regardless.

That sets up a diet or death scenario, as I've made clear this is the latter part. I wasn't hyping, I was pointing to the obvious implication of describing something as lethal, then denying any means of altering that course.

It's called consequence, something fat phobes so shield themselves from that they've lost all sense of their own actions creating effects of their own. There's no guarantee that Samantha would have made old bones, but, there's no question that the greatest avoidable responsibility lies with those who use their hold over the discourse on weight to argue against proper scientific investigation of metabolic function.

That is those who are fixated on trying to trap people into a life of starvation and hunger blocking. All those who insist weight is "your fault/ your choice/lifestyle choice"-'obesity' wallahs, medics, amateur fat phobes, yep, you've hastened the end of people like Samantha who could not defend themselves from your self indulgence.

You are also why there was little her parents could have done except contact a specialist in a condition that they may have had no idea their child might potentially have had.

Her parents were not given a fighting chance at helping her is the truth. And not because of 'healthy eating', no one should die for following or not following someone else's ideas of a pure diet. The idea of a correct diet equalling a correct weight is just another of many facile attempts to save calories in/out model.

To be fair the press including the DM have been increasingly making a show of playing both ends, featuring fat acceptance 'role models' and such. Face it though, FA was not the answer here. FA's for removing iatrogenically induced problems. It's not a cure for true metabolic derangement, hyperphagia, overriding energy conservation, hypothalamic disorder- require actual study and unravelling.That means letting go of blame culture and putting this aspect of the body's self regulation back on a completely objective footing.

What is required is proper full investigation into metabolic function, free of the tiresome irrelevance of the 'obesity' construct. 

Heavily featured is the so called guilt of the parents who predictably blame themselves and confess to their negligence. What half decent parent would not be wracked with feelings/wishes that they could have done 'better'?

To help illustrate a truer valuation of this, I hereby confess to being the one on the grassy knoll. Despite neither being male, being able to shoot a gun or even being born. It is of course not even being accepted fact that there was a second gunman. Anyone can confess to anything, ask police investigating murders. Stop tormenting people who are dealing with the horrific situation of burying their own child.

If anyone bothered listening to them, they knew the score,

“It was like an eating disorder. 

An understatement of epic proportions. A hunger disorder isn't quite that, you could say it disorders eating-obviously-by signalling excessively, it was undoubtedly a malfunctioning that needed relieving. Forget the supposed consequence of weight, experiencing an constant excess of hunger causes unnecessary suffering of its own.

For example, ask anyone who's developed a hyperactive bladder how they feel about the excessive signalling and feeling the process at a much earlier stage, or never feeling they've emptied? 

Nor is using people like Samantha as a poster for 'obesity' justified in anyway, except to illustrate just how out of control people can get when they get drunk on the ability to abuse people at their will.

Sober up fat phobes.

This is someone who's paid for the indulgence of diet or DEATH

Two words; computer trouble.

Carl Thompson died in June of this year. He was 33. His was a life that fitted into the modern campaign for dubious hysteria about fat, with room to spare. He lived and died without a crusade that purports to be about 'obesity', being able to do a goddamned thing to prevent his untimely end.

He died of a so far unnamed cause, though he'd previously had many heart attacks. His body brought low by a recent tranche of ferocious weight gain. In 2012 his beloved mother, who was his rock, died of a BRAIN TUMOUR. Grief disturbed his system even more provoking a doubling of his weight from a previous 30sts/420lbs/190.5 kgs to 65sts/910lbs/412.7 kgs in only three years.  

There's little doubt in my mind that his health was the product of some kind of congenital brain problem, though as far as I can tell UNDIAGNOSED. He also seemed to have some level of intellectual disability. Again note, his mother's death raises the prospect of heredity. Perhaps Carl's problem was in a different place, affecting different functions.

I don't know if they did an autopsy, but if they did, no doubt they'd be looking at the fat around his organs. If I was a pathologist, I'd make straight for the centre of his brain. Check his hypothalamus, see what shape it was in. Probably other glands in the body too, i.e. his adrenal glands.

He said he'd become aware of his raging hyperhunger at the age of THREE years old. Driven to raid neighbours fridges to find food to eat, he was discovered in the process.

He would sneak downstairs at night and raid the kitchen cupboards in his childhood home in Lydden. “I was only about three or four and no one knew why I did it,” he told local media. “I would just eat anything out of the cupboards.”

That my friends is textbook hyperphagia.You can tell from the sense of bafflement in his description, that it had nothing to do with his conscious will. It was a faulty excess, hypersensitized hunger drive and signalling. Along with some kind of overactive storage of fat.

That I have to say this is tribute to how dumbed-down calories in/out + fat phobia has made minds. It's so blatantly obvious there's more going on in cases like this and thankfully more people are beginning to catch on. Despite this being beyond the reach of some 'obesity' quacks.

Joel Snape, for example, editor of a fitness magazine no less! That article was published in the Telegraph newspaper a sort of grown up more sober brother of the daily mail. Yet Snape writes for lib/ left bastion the guardian.

They're still pushing weight loss dieting as if it was invented last year.

Can you believe people would stoop to spouting who let him eat, on the taxpayer? Well yes, I'll bet you can.

Who let his hunger stay that way despite millions being thrown into 'obesity'? This so called discipline has produced nothing for people like Carl, over a century.

At the time, of his first childhood awareness of his hyperhunger, he was no more than a usual plump child going on to thin out as children do after the toddling stage becomes walking.

It wasn't till towards his teens that he became fat. It made no effective difference.

That's worth dwelling on a bit.

He could have been diagnosed early and treated but, he wasn't fat. When he became fat-which is most routinely associated with excess hunger. He wasn't diagnosed then either. 

Repeat, the 'obesity' construct means fat people can neither be healthy nor unhealthy, despite all cries of the latter. Our ill health is often dismissed as is our HEALTH.

That's an adequate summation of the usefulness of the 'obesity' crusade. And why it simply cannot be about making people slimmer or healthier, no matter what we're told.

It seeks to harass and disturb those without problems and has NOTHING for those that do.

The question the media should be asking is who "allowed" this wretched 'obesity' industry, a largely irrelevant self perpetuating entity.

Colluding with its open promotion of diet or death? Do some joined up thinking about where that will end for people like Carl through no fault of their own.

Traci Mann's Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn't that extraordinary?

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

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

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

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

Georgia Davis's Repeat Pause Repeat Ordeals

I'd wondered what was going to happen to Georgia Davis after she reappeared in the news a couple of years ago. The home she shared with her family was partially dismantled for her to be removed and taken to hospital to treat an infection.

She's surfaced again sadly for the same reason. Having recently become bedridden with water retention, an infection followed on from that. A pretty large logistical operation was set in motion, including a crane, to lift her from her home into a specially modified ambulance to take her to hospital for treatment. Not sure why she couldn't be treated at home or why so many police seemed to be involved.

That has predictably garnered the headlines. The usual phoned in cries of "self-inflicted" abound, though I detect signs this is starting to ring rather hollow. For no-one with a properly functioning brain can fail to see that there's something profoundly wrong when for instance, a person can gain 30st/420lbs/190kg in three years. Time and again cases stand out, especially when this occurs at a very early age, despite attempts to merge them with peers who are merely heavier than average. Often, other children in the same family have average weight. This I think is true in Davis's case, though I cannot find the documentary that told her story.

A few honorable souls are even beginning to mention the unmentionable, the most obvious term missing all these years.

CURE

That's perhaps a misguided reference to the coining of weight as disease, but the sentiment is correct. Resolution is required, fakery cannot even finesse this.Weight, neither thinness nor fatness passes muster as 'disease.' No process no matter how benign can go unchecked without being an expression of and/or a creator of problems.

The issue here is how to check and change alter this outcome via its source, metabolic function. Not allowing that and running around like headless chickens after the fact-for a lifetime and calling that "lifestyle."

Despite hearing all about the desperation of medics desire to avoid encountering fatness, we rarely hear the obvious need for a real understanding of what's going on. What we see here is the result of that total investment in calorie restriction as weight regulation-weight shouldn't need "management." Calorie restriction is not a treatment of any kind-it follows the trick perfected by psychiatry of replacing unacceptable pathology with an acceptable one, proto-anorexia. Everything is centered around enforcing this. Including increasingly the law and politics.

That's what the talk of "support" is about.  Supporting the investiture and maintenance of this pathology no matter the cost, whilst pretending "support" is for the person.

And its supposed to be people like Georgia who have the mental dependence.

Bariatric [spellchecks as "barbaric"] surgery is more of the same. It's just a way of cutting people into an unnatural tolerance for what all our bodies are designed around fighting off- starvation.

What's needed are actual treatment pathways for dealing with symptoms, reducing an excess of hunger/appetite re-balancing hunger to a normal range. Along with ways to set the body on course to reversing its weight for those who require or wish it.

Not dieting, but something that directly changes underlying metabolic function, calorie restriction in any form is simply not up to the job.

What's needed from the white coats above all is a complete shift in their consciousness, back to proper investigation and rigourous study of actual biology. You cannot fake or front weight. There's an equation here that requires proper deduction. How long will this keep being dodged?

And let me make it clear, this is not simply about weight loss dieting being the only channel for changing weight. It is the absence of the stages of learning that come from treating actual people as opposed to pressing them into your rigid framework.

When someone comes to medical notice with anything unusual, the default medical instinct is to work with and observe that person and their symptoms closely and objectively. Monitoring if anything at all makes their symptoms -in this case excessive hunger/voracious weight gain-better or worse in any way. Then following up these leads to try and uncover underlying function, using that to invoke and strengthen positive effects.

Avenue after avenue is tried until a path can be found that's leads to measurable effects. At the side of that further investigations are mounted into the most crucial anatomy/physiology concerned. That doesn't seem to be happening or has been arrested by the extent of devotion to calories in/out.

The learning curve is extinguished.

As you can see from the link about Mandy Sellars, even going as far as cutting something thats growth is generated at a physiological level can leave that underlying cause intact, causing a restoration of the problem, to some degree or other. 

Even more true of reducing weight via induced calorie deficit. Weight tends to restore itself according to its self regulatory or homeostatic design. This is inevitably dubbed "mental," by those invested in restriction. It has to be due to their denial of these physiological facts.

People predictably use blame to obscure fact. Her mother's the type that fed Georgia not the recommended baby diet, shall we say. Hate to inform haters but she isn't alone in that. And if it caused people to be cut out of their homes we'd have noticed.

Blame is not the way I seek to cast fat people and Davis is no different, however it has to be stated plainly that her case has been woefully mismanaged by authorities even given the abysmal standard that is the norm for 'obesity'. She's been given little chance to use her undoubted drive, willingness and energies productively. At every turn she's been mislead as to the nature of her problems, allowing her to cast blame upon herself, which is an act of cruelty.

It's been pretty noticeable that there has been something wrong with her body's functioning since she was a child.

She dates her accelerated gain from the age of 5, when her father died. That was 17 years ago. Parental bereavement has been cited as a trigger of high/heightened weight in childhood.

A subset of children body's manifest such reaction. I suspect it is a product some kind of developmental difference of the body, nervous and endocrinal systems, to be producing this extent of symptoms. I firmly see this as mainly physiological, rather than psychological. Though looking at it from a holistic point of view, the state and tension of your nervous system triggers biochemical and neural changes.

It's no good saying you can't find anything (physical) so its mental. If you are looking in mythical "disease" terms, you'll be even less likely to see what is there. The same failure that occurs with people at the top of the weight scale happens with those at the bottom who also regain minimal weight lost via calorie restriction regularly.  

Only other day I was reminded of a potential insight. Perhaps adverse experience in some, can trigger the nervous system to strip away the usually dormant feelings as the body manoeuvres about measuring its need for energy. So a person can feel it all at a rather heightened level (to whatever degree). Like some forms of chronic pain syndrome.

Just a thought.

Which is more than a lot of people are having about this.

When she first came to medical attention she weighed 33 stones/ 462lbs / 209 kg  she was told that she needed to lose 20 stones/280lbs/127.5 kg. In a matter of months she managed to lose over 14 st [196lbs/ 89 kg] at a US fat camp.

She rebounded to 40stones/ 560lbs /254kg. And so on, up to 60stones/ 840lbs/381 kg, down to 30 in hospital apparently, then back up to 60st and now supposedly 55st/770lbs/349kg.

When she first came to attention the aim should have been to try and stabilize her at 33st/462lbs/209kgs. See how good that looks now. Professionals need to learn to put their patients interests first and not their own desires.

Due to all the obsessive fixation on food-with a list of all she eats being de rigueur to stimulate the perennially disgusted, few can conceive of what it feels like to be subject to this level of hunger. The sheer discomfort of  bearing what is propelling heightened intake gets ignored.

What I can say is my experience with excessive HUNGER was it felt like a powerful presence was pressing down through the centre of my brain. 

Only recently did I realize this is around site of the hypothalamus/pituitary.When I was lucky to reverse it, my much yearned for weight loss didn't happen. But I would never have swapped that for liberation from maniacal hunger. It feels like being possessed and directed by a malevolent force at times.

Stabilizing a patient is not unique, after assessing a person, it's basic medical practice. The only thing that will bring good practice to this area is when people will no longer stand for this.

The medical establishment demanding everything and everyone change to their tune could also make such change of their own volition.

Limited Horizons

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

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

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

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

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

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

The paucity of this vision staggered me.

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C-U-R-E

Red alert! Red alert! Someone's mentioning the biggest unmentionable in 'obesity'.  No, not that fat phobic hate tropes are a (self hating) critique of mainstream's own bullshit, that fat phobes wish to re-create fat people as an underclass or even that there's a real charge of joy for good people feeling they're puppeteering other humans and want to play with them i.e. see pain register in a fat person's face etc.,

Nope, CURE.

Think about the last time you heard about a cure for 'obesity' that isn't "personal responsibility" or calorie restriction dieting? How many 'scientific papers invariably start off something like;

"Obesity' is a very serious health condition that affects 690 million people around the world." 

No mention of cure, strange given we're supposed to be pretending to be dis-ease or at least a "serious health problem". Why not at least bother with the pretense of seeking a cure? What's the point of all this fuss if not to drive a cure for said perilous affliction?

That question is being asked, not openly though. I'm hearing a lot of those involved in health insisting: "We must take this seriously." They won't directly state. " Let's start looking for that works."

When's the last time you heard people making a fuss about a disease but, no, we don't want no cure, heck no, we just want to treat it. Why so coy?

There absolutely must be a prospective cure for every disease or serious health condition that is the law of scientific medicine. Indeed, whole fields of such have that as their guiding aim. Cure. "Cure for cancer" was a phrase that entered the lexicon, not treat cancer, that's what you do whilst you're looking for a cure. That's a given.

How could such an incidental possibly be the endgame? The overriding aim?

Whether we agree with what people say or not, we can take their assertions on their own terms and ask do they make any more sense on their own terms? The absence of cure, metaphorical or otherwise is enough of a departure-and an ominous one at that-to raise questions.

The media has seen fit to let them off that too though;

Because obesity isn’t a disease.....

Wow, journalism lives.

You'll not be surprised to learn such off message talk comes from outside "obesity science." He has no surprises though. He wants to take an "appetite suppressant" based on a chemical found in the colon, cut down/suppress its flaws and unleash it on the willing public. 

Let me tell you a little something about appetite suppressing. By re-training my nervous system into a palpably calmer state-through use of various mental techniques, my body became more balanced and that allowed the excess function in my appetite/hunger mechanism to reduce to a normal range. In other words, it's not a good idea to suppress primal anatomical signals, even when they're in excess -the necessity of them tends to make them fight back. Instead, seek to reduce the production of them. Don't run around trying to deal with them after the fact. 

Feel free to use that old chap.

Ordinary

Didn't in the end watch Shut-Ins. Can't say I'm sorry. I just didn't feel up to yet another possibly sterile exercise in salvation of fat people via calorie restriction. This feeling of spiritual fatigue came over me unexpectedly.

Ever see a fat person who seems kind of passive about being fat? I don't mean they've never dieted, don't see fatness any differently than a slim person would slimness, don't operate on the terms of the 'obese' construct and haven't been marked by that.

Because upon my honour, I've yet to encounter such a person. You know what we should resolve to do in 2015? Be that person! [Hey, is that a resolution?! Better late than never]

Do know what I see when I see a fat person who hasn't wasted themselves dieting? Ordinary. I see most of us actually are like in most things related to a health or medical context. We are as passive as that fat person seems, but isn't. I see other things too obviously, but I want to concentrate on that.

This false sense of passivity is played up in fat people strangely because; a) there is a fat standard and that's way higher than the ordinary one. Say in things like; pro-activeness, initiative, responsibility etc., anything related to or seen in the framework of health/self management. So an ordinary standard in a fat person looks really baaad, buuutttt, you are catching a glimpse of yourselves people.
 
What it looks like when the niceties, courtesies and acknowledgement accorded the ordinary standard are withdrawn.

This is a bit of a tangle.

The modern doctor patient relationship, has been formed around the infectious pathology/magic bullet golden era of medicine. Progress has seen the sun is setting on that. Now, modern healthcare is being dominated by; the nervous system, managing decline, chronic conditions etc.,

This is threatening to derail healthcare budgets-including Big Pharma's charging policies-and placing exhaustive demands on medical professionals. We need to change that relationship. The patient must emerge from a position of docility and obedience to more of a partnership with professionals. Something that's a tough change for them and lay people alike.

The latter have been taught that the compassionate practice of medicine =illness is misfortune, nothing to do with you-which is fairly apt for infectious disease. Whereas the management of a chronic condition can at times turn you into your own doctor and practice nurse. It's not unusual for patients with chronic conditions to know more about them than their own doctors.

Preventative medicine requires something akin to that level of awareness. A more active engaged patient who actually expects to and does demonstrate initiative with their own self management. It's a sense of responsibility way beyond the scope of the current patient posture.

For the professionals, its tough because a lot of their status and power seems to many of them to lay in this abjectness.

Alas, the higher ups seem to have decided not to face this squarely and instead to pass the same passivity off as something else, a lack of "personal responsibility". Blaming the patient for their health and the failing of any quackery that's supposed to bring resolution. For some reason, medical systems have difficulty with saying they don't know.

Strange though it seems to say it, it's almost as if this new era has turned medics towards the psychiatric model. People trying to claim their categorizations are biologically defined, asserting disease by committee and other dubious practise.

'Obesity' has become the vehicle to pioneer this horribleness.

A lot of trying to be slim, happened outside medical aegis. It meant fat people ended up surreptitiously advancing (part of) this new relationship with medics. Alas, the nature of the pathologized and dehumanized 'obese' construct has meant we weren't allowed to really go for it.

Many fat people don't even notice how much initiative and independence they've shown in pursuit of slimness.

At times people misunderstand me. Much decorated medics and specialists in eating disorders, addiction, 'obesity', mental health, speak their piece and others listen, absorbing it as holy writ.

When I can seem incredibly dismissive, to the point of perchance seeming positively arrogant. Not so. It's just the fat standard in action.

Of course the fat standard is hardly comparable to the disabled standard, where people have to negotiate a difference in function in a world not designed to acknowledge those needs.

This seeming ambivalence towards experts is closer to a patient response we are going to have to move to, whether anyone likes it or not. We're going to have to move to a place where we no longer take personally the possibility of culpability in conditions that aren't like a broken leg, sprained ankle etc.,

We're gong to have to learn to view all sorts of conditions with the same equilibrium as we do those. In other words, we're gong to have to accept that say, neuroses can be as much our dong as a broken arm and that bothers us no more than a having broken arm would.

We will all have the have the potential to seem arrogant, scanning the utterances of highly qualified experts with the alacrity we might show a priest or a politician.

Explains the reluctance of the white coat mafia.........

Strange Taboo

It's unacceptable to say that a fat person can eat little compared to saying a slim person can eat a lot. But one rarely referred to taboo is that one can have an irresistible compulsion to eat, but not enjoy eating.

Again, there's little problem with saying that one can have a sexual compulsion-that is an overwhelming desire for sex, or to keep getting sexual relief-orgasm. Seeing as some seem to doubt sexual compulsion.

This experience is far more prevalent than one might think.  For example those who say they "Hurt themselves with food." Seem at least in part to be relaying an irrepressible drive to eat without pleasure.

I had no idea this was so until I let it slip out. The reaction from one girl was so hysterical that I felt need to withdraw it so she'd calm down. Then much later on, I remember discussing this again, after preambling it with that very incident.

As if the word irony had no been invented, a similar thing happened and I was accused of not knowing what I was talking about. Because what I said didn't match the wrong descriptions of ignorant disinterested people, who call the ED shots.

The hot button seems to be food=pleasure. Anything else is somehow unacceptable. Yet my experience is that the pleasure of eating is generated by the correct workings of the mechanics used for eating and digestion.

If your body is out of song then it either isn't generated or felt.

What's even more intriguing is the issue of control.

It's presumed that ED's mirror each other. That they have the same issues and themes despite different context, behaviours and outcomes.

One thing that's most associated with anorexia is control. This is probably due to the worship and fetishization of anorexic behaviour as the only route to inducing deliberate weight loss. Hyperphagic disorder and anything associated with it, is seen as the opposite, out of control, though there are sometimes attempts to press it into the AN mould i.e. fatness is first defined as an ED, which it isn't, then described as trying to gain control by filling a void of despair, like anorexia.

But when it comes to genuinely having a hyperphagic disorder, I'd say the control bit is more likely to be showing through any insistence that one either eats purely out of elective conscious choice, for pleasure, or to "hurt" oneself.  

Ask yourself how many times you hear a hyperphagic say anything but.

Touch Brain

Ever seen one of those old experiments where a surgeon probes an area of a person's brain via their opened up skull prompting them to feel, see vivid and visceral sensory experience?

When I first heard the definition of phobia as "an irrational fear" my mind rejected that as both wrong and unhelpful. The latter's a bit moot. I dislike lying definitions/diagnoses on the whole, but there are times when they can be false but contain useful insight. Like.... but in the main I'd say in the main, the truthtiest is most likely to be the most helpful in the long one.

Life is about extending your conceptual grasp.

That irrational fear label is misleading. It perhaps depends on a general conceptual basis about the nature of responses such as fear. We tend to presume what causes fear- the feeling invoked when facing a threat to life and limb- generates the feeling of it.

For example, being cornered with a roaring lion in front of you. Yes, but in the sense that the lion activates the parts of your system that produces and expresses that feeling. Where we seem to struggle is with the idea that this mechanism can be set in motion and produce the same or at least similar feelings-without a real threat being present. In other words, without a meaningfully fear-inducing stimulus.

Rather like that surgeon. 

In the case of a phobia, the momentum is a particular trigger, association or experience; spiders, flying, buttons even. The fear is real, it's happening, like feelings are being experienced by the patient whose brain is being prodded.

Because our impulses, instincts, feelings and emotions have to have material to come into effect through. That is usually our nervous system, rather like the fibre optic cable the internet is beamed through.

Though we know our brain and nervous system function is anatomical, we seem to forgot feeling them almost as ethereal outerbody metaphors.

It's a bit like when you've tried in the past to explain the internet to someone unfamiliar with computers. They'll ask you things like; "Where's the internet?" Though that's kind of amusing, if you've gotten past your where's the i-net phase, it's a perfectly valid question. Turns out, it is somewhere. In fibre optic cables running through actual terrain and so on.

But that's not really what they're asking. They want to know, what the stuff coming to your computer is. Not being technically minded (that way) the best I have managed is the old comparing it to a telephone (landline) and wifi to a mobile.

I think we slip in and out of a similar issue with the brain/nervous system. And eating, well, that's also disappeared down a conceptual rabbit hole. Actually a cognitive error. Though we know on some level that eating is necessary and that hunger is generated by anatomy. We've gotten lost in the calories in/out (ci/co) hypothesis. Hunger has almost become by default something akin to a mere notion, unrelated to necessity. Like me right now deciding to consider the skyline outside this window.....

We know it isn't really, but ci/co exists to support a particular outlook, set of responses and behaviours. It supports calorie restriction as the method of weight regulation. Actually regulating weight requires undesired change.  All this facilitates the compulsion to press fat people into various disordered behaviours.

In order to really progress beyond ci/co, to even understand a true eating disorder of for example, excess hunger, you have to start from the basis that hunger is a signal produced by your anatomy. It lands in your conscious brain or awareness yes more as an mid to endpoint in the process of maintaining energy. It is not created where it lands-in your conscious mind, anymore than feeling cold is created by your conscious awareness that you are cold.

And with hunger, just as the machinery of fear can be set in motion either by other triggers or even some internal self sustaining imbalance in the mechanism, so can the body can be provoked into producing and excess of hunger signalling.

No word for Snow: Why Hyperphagia Nervosa

The word anorexia means-without appetite, an- + -orexia. Hyperphagia means an excess of eating. It refers to both that and an excess of hunger/appetite signalling too. It's used for both. Anorexia experientially isn't what the word means. 

Still, we manage to learn from anorexics that it refers to a compulsive cycle of extreme (food) restriction. I hope others can dig deep and show the same grace with hyperphagia nervosa, even though its associated with being greater than slim. Though it must be said, not all with this condition are plump/fat.

Apart from because I say so, there's a specific and very important reason to locate the problem where it is, with hunger/appetite mechanics, rather than where disinterested others want it to be, with food.

It's not ego or shame. It to understand and grasp the underlying problem. In order to identify and formulate strategies to reverse and be relieved of substantially if not wholly of it. Something that has been left to lay people with this condition to do, given the uselessness of the usual ]professional] suspects and their tiresome fat phobia.

In the wake of 'obesity' panic neurosis, there have been many assertions that humans are naturally inclined totally towards fattening. That's construct related paranoia. Fatness is mysterious precisely because it happens whilst body's homeostasis is doing many things to arrest gain and/or stabilize weight.

A possible sly example of this is the unrecognized grip the use of starvation has on our consciousness. We all hate dieting. The very idea of restriction invokes repugnance and disgust in many across the weight spectrum. Strangely though, this doesn't affect the strength of the hold calorie restriction/ counting and such can gain over our minds.

Even if you barely diet a day in your life, deny yourself little, do less than a lick of exercise, it seems if calories in/out forms the basis of your understanding of hunger, food, eating and weight, that's enough to trigger one of the body's more prominent defenses against calorie restriction, becoming overly fixated with food.

As we've all been inculcated with ci/co as the default premise, we're all labouring under this fixation to some degree or another. Only when you begin to exit the pursuit of lifestyle anorexia, calories in/out and it unravels sufficiently enough, can you really appreciate the depths of this neurotic tunnel vision.

If that's not entirely clear, I'm saying that when you consider going on a wld, your nervous system averts your focus to food. People cast this as "rebellion," or "you feel like thinking about food" no, that is your nervous system directing itself and therefore you there. It is not conscious decision making. It's involuntary.

From throwing up visions of food into your conscious mind, like pop-ads. To making you gabble ceaseless paeans to your thwarted desire for _________ [insert verboten food]. This internal directive is defense by constant evocative reminder-against your imposition of lack. I'm saying, this occurs even with the potential for you doing this, it happens as a result of ideology, including your desire to impose restriction on others.

Thinking often is a tiny fraction of doing. And an action is often the power of thought in motion.  This is what the placebo effect is rooted in.

To think something is microscopic action, a form of activity in itself. If strongly charged enough, it can propel (you) straight into action, without much engagement of conscious thought.

Usually this is infinitesimal and leaves a certain mood or feeling in us, depending on our interpretation. But we know especially after, it often directs and leads to actions and influences our behaviour, responses, attitudes, expectations etc.,

This food fixation psychology seems to be why everything is focused on food and eating. Bodies come to = amounts of food. Fatter bodies, lots of/ too much food. What's effectively a starvation disorder-anorexia- is called an eating disorder.

And why a disorder of hunger/appetite mechanics, hyperphagia is called "compulsive (over)eating" and latterly "food addiction."

Hunger, not will is the cue to eat. Eating is the normal response to its anatomical signalling, not an elective decision apropos of nothing. To not eat when you are-at the right level of hunger is abnormal. 

Because hunger is generated by your anatomy, the more heightened a level it is performing, the more powerfully your body is functioning physically. And;

• the more there's an excess of physical function/tension in your body and/or nervous system-like a fist being tightly clenched 

• the more likely it is to be capable of animating/generating behaviour  without conscious input

• there more likely there are to be consequences from the energy diverted into all this excess of function, i.e. potential damage from overuse and/or exhaustion.

Shifting the focus to where the problem is, with the functioning of certain parts of your nervous system (concerned with eating), clarifies perspective to a more accurate and useful one. If I had ever seen hyperphagia only in the way it has been alluded to, I would have struggled to free myself of it to the extent that I've been lucky too.

I'm leaving binge eating disorder alone, because I'm not entirely sure of its distinctions. Nor do I claim to know for sure whether my experience is definitive. But I can describe my experience as accurately as possible, to be part of a resource for others who are going through this.

Constructive evaluation and criticism is welcome. At the same time, trying to understand those with the experience-not just me- is more important than reasserting the status quo.

No Death Penalty for Being Fat

No sooner did I write about the spectacle of a fat person losing weight, serving as inspo-porn for shamelessly empty-headed, does more construct-related grotesequerie rear its maggoty head.

diet or die

How about neither? Though one of them is guaranteed at some point or another, presenting them as two options together like that, I say no thanks to imposture. Even taking account of the sewer dwelling standards of 'obesity' bollocks, surely, surely this kind of taunting goes too far?

Apparently not. Its like an Invasion of the Brain Snatchers, sleep walking sickness. When it comes to 'obesity' the lights are on but people are switched off.

Nor is this any kind of warning. It's a direct threat. And to some, a promise. 

Again, I must point to this suppurating enigma at the heart of the crusade. Why insist weight must "prevented"/maintained or shifted via calorie manipulation rather than reversal/advance of the process (or processes) that led the body to attaining its size?

Why this route and this route alone?

What's so special, so sacred about it? The only other thing there must only be one thing of is god. Are you looking for a god bothering placeholder to believe in? Do you need a sense of certainty you feel is missing in your life? Do you want to return to a golden age of about 30 years ago? Or do you feel the need to unite with your fellow man on something you can all agree on? Why don't you buy something or get a real religion?

Fat people aren't yours. We aren't like a real life puppet show you can feel the frisson of excitement of staring into our eyes to see your handiwork register. We aren't your project.

There are reams and reams of every known product or service in an economy of any sophistication. Virtual duplication where things of the same kind differ barely, if at all. Anything to express choice even when its somewhat illusory. That's advertised as the shining path desire expresses itself through.

Can't find what you "want" because of the absence of some microscopic must-have?

Someone with a commercial interest will run around arms flapping like that really matters. Summon the best minds available on it. Inevitably someone comes up with something.... 

But the notion, that maybe there could possibly be another way of altering body composition and that is sacrilege. Entitled, spoilt, just for once, take responsibility, one strike and you're out.

You can see the displacement.

Because this of all places is really the place to draw the line. Whilst you put pressure on people to save you, healthcare, the earth, whatever. Consumer society is really tussling with it's own excesses. It just doesn't want to face that. Doesn't want the party to stop. That surfaces where no social graces are extended though. And so will remain until people face their own feelings about their own behaviour.

Like millions of others, I dieted, not because it made sense for most of the time I was doing it. I restricted because it was the only option to fulfill my stubborn aim. If I'd had an actual way, a better option or options I would have used those instead. Dieting only exists because there's nothing else and nothing coming. It is so shit that it needs to be the only game in town.

But the imposition of it being the only way has grown around the need many have for the idea of one way or the highway. Not the other way around.

It's not just that proto-anorexia is the seen as the way, the truth and the light, the saviour of all mankind, if not civilization as we know it. It's that its patiently such a useless, ugly mess. Everyone dreads and detests it. Contrary to the slimming related psycho-drivel, that's physiologically, not psychologically based.

Yes, I do know that mind is brain and brain is just a body part. I'm saying directly that this worldwide aversion is not a mental decision, it is the body's reaction sent to the mind to then be voiced.

In fact, our conscious minds seem rather susceptible to the merest suggestion of dietary restriction. Fasting, notions of clean eating, cleansing anorexia etc.,  is actually rather attractive to our minds.

Thin people are able to be the most vocal about this visceral disdain for obvious reasons. The centrality of energy to our existence makes our bodies recoil from being cut off from what sustains existence, for no good reason. 

Yet this is the way decided upon, no matter the upheaval, the invasiveness, the wastefulness, the,  jealousy, resentment, hate, disorder, the collateral damage and the continued failure this generates.

I'd be lying if I said I cared overly right this minute. All I know is this makes it clear that "losing weight" isn't the object.  It's about, this, the way it is now and keeping it that way for as long as possible.

This mess in and of itself is fulfilling a function to those invested in it. 

That's freakish and truly embarrassing so, the same old excuses come thick (yes) and fast. 

It's about morality, personal responsibility. Why then wouldn't say the medical profession object to treating genocidal dictators, serial killers, child molesters first? People can be cynical about lawyers, but they regularly air the possibility of successfully defending the potentially guilty and convicting the potentially innocent.

Imagine the potential qualms about saving the health, the life of someone who has or would go on to kill or use that health to hurt and damage others?

D'you not think they might start with them before they got to mere fatness? What better way to impose a non-judicial death penalty than by letting them die from whatever bodily process medics can leave to just keep going where it may.

Oh what's the matter, is that barbaric? Are you against capital punishment? But its just capital for fat people isn't it?

One of the women in the above links, Jennifer Bodek had a brother die when she was 15, followed her mother at 18. Do people need to die because of what may be have been triggered by grief? And no, that's not a cue to turn hate into pity.

And what about weight that's been triggered partly or wholly by crimes committed against their bodies? They are to be ultimately accountable in a way those who committed crimes against them will not? Is that the morality being referred to?

Then there's the towering: "Fat people are ugly."

Have you seen disease in action? Plagues, pustulence, body disrupting bacteria? It's not pretty. The subtle: "Fat people smell." Medical professionals examine folks piss and shit, tend to suppurating wounds, pus filled lumps, encounter necrotic stench. 

Never remotely convincing. A lazy pisspoor effort all round. You get an F.....for fail.

Nor is it the case that there are no leads. It doesn't surprise me that adjusting something like insulin levels can not only undermine excess hunger triggering, but can also increase the body's use of energy.

You know they can block the onset of precious puberty?

How can that be oh so much harder than at the very least stalling adipogenesis for those people who are just relentlessly and aggressively gaining? Is fatty tissue acquisition really more complex than changing shape, internal organs, gaining actual parts and features you didn't have before and so forth?

Intractable depression is a metabolic problem, so being able to adjust it has the potential to be a treatment pathway for various neurosis as well as heart disease which is connected to depression and anxiety disorders. And no, not because depression makes you lazy.

My guess is that if your depression seriously abates due to diet and exercise, you didn't have it. It's effectively self diagnosed in the main. 

Even anorexia, in my view, should be reversed rather than making anorexics impersonate hyperphagia, that in its way is a cruel and unnecessary shock to their state of mind. Forcing them to be the battleground for their neurosis and their will.

And the two are intertwined, reversal and advance of weight have the same basis. Denial of alternatives to reversing weight has meant the death penalty for other than fat people.

And what about that? Wasn't support for it supposed to be unspeakably primitive and bigoted? I always wondered whether support for that-once unashamedly rock solid- ebbed through shaming or the progress of rational argument-which are what again? It's wrong for the state to kill etc.,

It's odd to see so many of those quick to issue a death penalty for being fat, are the same vociferous shamers of anyone supporting it for the most heinous of crimes. I can understand not recognising the form of something in another context, we all have that in some way or another-but with something so supposedly heartfelt, you'd think some part of the mind would recognize this intellectual faux pas.

Begs the question, does there always have to be something a person can do-or in this case be-that means they deserve to forfeit their life? And if that isn't the most unspeakable things, does that impulse inevitably drift elsewhere? In this case, merely an unpoliced area? Literally, fatness has become a criminal justice issue, without either criminality or justice. 

Some kind of thwarted urge to punish the guilty is at work here. Yet it is those same minds that felt the urge to stymie that in the first place.What gives"anti-death penalty" advocates? Did you know your deep ethic beliefs were shallow and that really, you're just a person who believes what's fashionable amongst your class?

That you're really moved according to what is and isn't shameful to those of your class who can really think (or dominate). Do you truly believe in anything at all? Do any of us? Or is it a particular state of being?

No more do evil acts decide the imposition of the ultimate penalty, but merely what's unguarded. And you wonder why people often default to the on the defensive even when they're in the wrong? Who can blame them? When a simple and consistent mea culpa can bring you the most capital of punishments?

I cannot support the DP, apart from directly, there's the inevitable race/class bias. Even I though I have had cause to wonder whether my objection is based ultimately on morality or squeamishness.

But if I was to change my mind, it would not be mere slimness that inspired a change, that's for sure.

No death penalty for being fat.

*Terri Smith