Behind Our Backs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn't that nice of them?

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

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

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

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

Yippee ki-yay. Lets paaaahrtay!!!

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

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

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

Pill continues;

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

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

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

I did laugh at this though,

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

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

This is 'Obesity'

Sarai Walker's article in NYT tells us exactly what the 'obesity' construct is and is for.

I posted a link on Twitter to a 1969 interview with Jim Morrison, in which he said, “Fat is beautiful.” Minutes after posting the link, a friend responded angrily that being fat is unhealthy because it causes high blood pressure and other health problems. This response, I told the audience, is an example of what I call “Fat Derangement Syndrome,” where even people who consider themselves to be open-minded, critical thinkers become outraged if fat is spoken about in any positive way.

"Fat Derangement Syndrome" is 'obesity'. It's the applied vigiliante style, permanent chorus of disapproval, which is supposed to trigger feelings of unwellbeing in fat people. This can be pointed to as the expression of the pathology of 'obesity'/caused by 'obesity'.

Or what have you got? A lot of hysteria about unhealthy, and a lot of completely tuned out fat people going about their beeswax, being just as un/healthy as they are, no more no less? How easily can you make fool yourself with that?

The much hoped pathology that is the 'obesity' construct can only be made anything like a realistic pretense even for the desperate, with this kind of proactivity. If you really want to believe something, the urge is to act that out where you feel you can. To try and make it happen. Or else, why bother wanting it?

Unfortunately, Sarai Walker like many of the fat activist bent point blank refuse to countenance this, despite heavy prompting. 

During the audience question-and-answer period, people stood up, one after another, and made negative comments about weight.

You don't say.

I felt like a witch surrounded by torch-wielding villagers. It was clear that even for many urban sophisticates paying to attend a festival about difficult ideas, thinking about fat as anything but bad was borderline impossible.

Oh its possible alright, it just not desirable to these folk. If they're so sophisticated, why would this be anything but their decision? This whole rackety ob act wouldn't exist without serious interventions from the white coat mafia, true. However, no-one's stopping the keepers of all human intellect and compassion from seeing right through that. Basic critical thinking would do that.

No one's in a better position to dismantle it than they. If they'd have wanted, they could have saved us all from this by seeing it as beneath their dignity-which it is. The 'obesity' crusade has always been aimed straight at Walker's audience. It knows them, because it is them. It is how they think, especially about those of the lower orders.

Walker can't believe her audience doesn't recognize her. I'm one of you!

Fat activists, those who see themselves as white, middle/upper class educated intelligent etc., refuse to acknowledge that given no comebacks, they too can choose to feel liberated by bigotry. The implications on self identity are sharp but why is that any different for the rest of us?

How do you think I feel about Black people, especially self-declared militant activists, accepting the idea that Black people are lazy and stupid, as long as they're 'obese'? We are talking about their mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts who worked all hours for them and theirs.

I did not need to know it was this easy. But I'm not going to pretend that hasn't happened.

I can see, despite the assumption that Black people live to cry "racism" at every turn, the sheer fatigue with politics. How wonderful to be able to achieve radical change that's wholly internal? The power is yours.

Black or otherwise, fat people are imbued with the magic of totally existing in an ether untouched by the laws and mechanisms of society.

If I ignored all this and pretended its purely about don't know, it would be erasing and ignoring those feelings. Whilst I don't respect the craven submission to 'obesity' folklore. There is something deeply condescending about behaving as if they're under any real duress to feel this way. It's collusion pure and simple.

Something else;

Backstage, the moderator of the event asked if I was O.K. This wasn’t the first time someone on my tour had pulled me aside to ask that question. I said I was fine, but in the hotel that night, I crawled into bed, relieved that I no longer had to perform as a professional fatty. I wanted to go home and hide. I am ashamed of this response. I wrote a novel to give fat women a voice, but then became exhausted using mine.

That is the best description of "political correctness" I think I've ever read. How ironic that she thinks that's the source of her pain! Rather than her refusal to see people want her to feel bad, feel ill, so they can say-that is what we are talking about. So they can validate their assertions. That's how brittle and willfil the ob cult is. 

The real consideration is not to feel like you're fronting with an insouciant 'tude. It's to recognize the limits of identity. That you have to be able to be more important than whatever group you feel part of. That you can and must be capable of standing aloof from them. Knowing that they are wrong and you are right.

If the boot was on the other foot, wouldn't you want them to stand their ground against your wrongness? How many times have your mistakes been corrected by those who refused to submit to you[r identity]?

Nutritional Vanity-Buster

Oh, it turns out that people of low socio-economic status (LSES) know as much or as little about nutrition as middle/upper class folk and eat just as well too, if not better?

I've been saying this forever, but, of course when it comes to dieeet, people won't be told. It's not what is true, it's what's supposed to be true that rules. And middle/upper class folk should know more in general than the degenerates unfortunates who aren't economically secure. Otherwise, why else are they more favoured?

It must be virtue.

The self declared know-it-alls put fast food in all they run, from localities to schools and hospitals within them- if they knew so much, why did they do that? Long after the crusade was in full force? If as they've asserted continually 'obesity' costs so much in health? Clearly not enough.

Diet or should I say appetite is no more about studying nutrition than weight is decided by counting calories. Apart from basic nutrition, which could be covered by teaching people to cook a variety of produce, we just need to know how to put things together well. Enthusiasm, imagination, I was going to say love, but food + emotion is verboten.

Let's just say, we need to learn balance. In fact, at a certain point-when nutrition takes the path of healthism, it can get in the way.

"Nutritional knowledge" [doesn't that convey such pretension?] is yet another self-denuding place holder, to [haute]bourgiesplain why their class/es are healthier, slimmer (if they are) better than others. Men are still more uniform in body size across most class race etc.,

The answer is that the easier, more fulfilling your life is, the more your needs have been met, the safer more secure your environment has been-the less likely your various energies are to have been or be repeatedly taxed beyond your available resources.

That's too much of a vanity buster. 

Turning the Clock Back

Michelle Obama says her Let's Move campaign has "changed the conversation" on how Americans eat and live;

In remarks to teachers, parents and others, Mrs. Obama cited documented declines in childhood obesity rates in New York City, Philadelphia, California and Mississippi. She highlighted changes to kids' menus by national restaurant chains and new labels at Wal-Mart stores that promote foods with less sugar, salt and fat.

I'd let children decide whether they like egg yolks or not but whatever. Children's bodies serve to measure the progress of this initiative. I wonder what they'd use if it was the campaign to educate and feed children properly.

Better still;

Cities are building grocery stores in underserved neighborhoods and refurbishing playgrounds and bike paths for kids, Mrs. Obama said, and schools are planting vegetable gardens, installing salad bars and replacing food fryers with steamers.

I sincerely hope this happens. The neglect of children's needs, especially those born in LSEG's has been a scandal. One that made my heart ache over the course of seeing it happen in the UK.

The obvious change is from the individualization of the 'obesity' cult, to one that stops pretending, on some level, that eating is just a hobby done on a purely individualized basis. Appros of nothing to do with the environment.

Despite the fact that human beings have always drawn sustenance from their surrounds.

The crusade that was specifically fashioned to get the conclusion of its own logic out of the way of big business interests and the wishes of the general public.  Allowing industrial food to gain a hold over the eating environment. Whilst appearing to be totally against that.

Reversing this to something more in keeping with what was taken for granted before. Feed children properly and train them physically. Don't shape the environment solely around cars. I'm glad children will have a chance to grow vegetables. It's one of the best way to interested in eating them, which the ugly substitute of good food/bad food has failed to do. You are worthless if you don't eat veg has not been a success.

If I was actually a cynical person, I'd swear this whole thing was to save the bourgeoisie from the on coming onslaught. And it's only when they could no longer do that, plus fat people's own rejection of their use in the 'obesity' narrative that has led to a more reasoned stance.

There is nothing mentioned that is anything a lot of folks took for granted at the start of the crusade. Societies like the US and UK decided to pretend these things didn't matter. When it comes to those who run things though, we can see how they really felt from how they treated their own kids.

I hope they also remember things like learning about things like cooking and food/general budgeting. The kinds of skills that make a real difference to people's lives and health. The absence of those has not felt like co-incidence. They increase self confidence too.

The next part of the "conversation" that urgently needs to change is not predicating these reversals on children's bodies which plays into the narrative this clearly goes against. Then some real lessons might be in danger of being learnt. Don't shortchange poorer children its a penny-wise, pound foolish strategy, as well as cruel. 

Nothing to my mind will ever justify using bodies for this. And those who find that annoying should consider defining themselves and their children as disease. In fact, they can insist MO gets the medical profession to declare it.

'Obesity' creates disagreement, whether there is or not

Those of you who are on a certain wavelength, will have picked up that once you change the definition of human to disease, you create a cognitive mental block. This makes it harder to know what either you and others are really talking about.

I don't mean that in the sense of being out of your depth, though there is that, more that you cannot make connections between what you think and what others think. Take;

I have always been suspicious of those elements of the fat acceptance movement that fly in the face of medical consensus, by arguing that health is independent of body weight. I see their lobbying as akin to a group of eating disorder sufferers arguing that their methods are healthy.

Somebody please do; burrup, dup, ching! 

Let's take the use here of "medical consensus". A replacement for something like; the bible/koran/torah/bhagavad gita says.

I understand the desperation of realizing the absence of overriding authority makes for harder work, but I'm unsympathetic. Instead of baiting the religious, this is the type of thing the irreligious should be engaged in working out.

Science advances through using experiments to repeat results. This indicates these results are not mere chance but underlying process. Slowly a mosaic of reality pieces builds up. Each becomes scientific consensus. Obviously, that is not of the same quality as a lot of scientists agreeing on supposition.

"health is independent of body weight."

Now, this is an knotty one. Not everyone within or outside FA agrees on this. I must say for me, it's not quite an either/or. Nor in the end is it of any real importance because nothing justifies the form the 'obesity' crusade has taken, full stop. So its academic as they say.

Its easiest for me to explain by asking a question; do you think slim people's ill health-physical or mental- is due wholly or in part to their slimness? No? Then you see things the same way as the fat people in question. Some may say, ah, ha, slim is healthful. Fine, why do slim people get the same sickness and die of the same things as fat people? Genes, heredity, environment, mental health, food, activity levels, habits?

So, not intrinsically to do with them being slim? What about the fact that overall, slimmer people are more like to commit suicide than fatter people? Is that related intrinsically to their slimness?

Mmmm..........yes and no?

Some have died because they were not fat. Or because they attacked their weight. Does that mean depressed slim people should become gainers? Or do we just accept a slim person committed suicide and all told, their weight isn't a salient factor?

Now, whether you agree with a fat person seeing fat people in general this way or not, can you still baldly state that its an extreme, irrational or disordered view?

Don't forget, seeing fatness as slimness with a fat suit on is opinion not fact, despite its triumphant hegemony. It is not shared by everyone. Nor does it stand up to biological fact. A fat body is a whole interactive unit, the same as any other size body.

The so called "eating disorder sufferers" got that one right. Whilst the 'consensus' was getting it wrong. Much of it still is. The idea of calorie restriction as weight reversal is based on the "fat suit" view of fatness. That fat bodies aren't suits is the essence of why that approach fails.

The point to reiterate is, even if one can say some slim people might have survived if they were fatter though it may or may not be true is in the end neither here nor there.

Weight, given our inability to manipulate it with ease is too crude a mechanism to stand alone or expect to be a health aid to either slim or fat. So really, the issue is, identify the real problems undermining health and deal with those, rather than attacking weight at either end.

Not to forget, this particular person and others that share her reverence for 'obesity' occultism, cannot make any distinction between fat acceptance that meets approval and that which does not, because she defines ALL fat people, regardless of their allegiance-including those who share her views-as beneath the category of human being.

That creates disagreement, whether there is or isn't. And if people like her, knew what they were talking about, they'd know that and stop defining people thus. Wait for the penny to drop, or watch some paint dry, pick your torture.

Any fat person who refuses to accept what everyone wants can be accused of being divisive. But this kind of thing shows that divisiveness comes from people who have created such a mental gulf by dehumanizing others, that they can't even recognize when they think and/or feel the same way.

They end up making a disagreement, from their own interpretations!!!

The whole point of 'obesity' is to divide fat from human, FGS.

"Nobody wants to be fat"

There's a lot of this little meme going around right now and it needs to be lanced like the sneaky little boil it is. If I'm correct, it flows from similar in conjunction with gay people. i.e. "Why would anyone choose to be gay [in light of homophobia]."

It's one of those observations that very quickly becomes an unsavoury trojan for expressing profound loathing.

We get the truth of human cowardice. Yet, equally that is countered by courage, isn't it? If not, little if any human progress could occur. So much of it has required some one or people, usually outnumbered at least at first, to defy overweening hegemony.

This repeated chant has rankled for a while, souring the conversation about sexuality. Helping to posit gay people as objects (yes) of pity. 

Now this rancid turd is being carelessly applied to fatness. Virtually everyone I've heard saying it lately hasn't been fat. The endless basting in the butter substitute of the superiority of slim is getting old. It never gets sufficiently into the meat though does it?

Okay, enough of that.

More than the one-sided premise, this sentiment misses the point, about fatness anyway.

It would not occur to people to most people to choose to be fat. Because contrary to the reams of BS written and spoken about it-there is no obvious reason to be fat. Why would you choose something that occurs not via your conscious mind, but as an adjustment your body makes to a mix of your internal and external environment?

Even gainers bodies have to co-operate with their intent. They have to have the capacity to gain and maintain. The tolerance to push themselves through barriers of boredom, discomfort if not outright pain at times.

I can only relate through my experience of trying to diet the other way. 

Social stigma is not 'proof' lack of choice. If people's need is important enough, it will out. I don't go along with the implicit ideology. That we are motivated solely or even most importantly by opprobrium or lack of it. That we have no needs, wishes dreams of our own and act solely on the basis of the avoidance of hurt.

If avoiding unhappiness is such an exemplary motivation, why did I and millions of others willingly though unwittingly sink into a mire of self hatred? Endless declarations of my senseless greed and indolence, didn't make me happy. Trying to short change my appetite especially and hunger didn't either. Nor did the constant sense of failure and trying to make up for the fault of being fat.

I noticed that I reached the point years ago where the idea of happiness doesn't particularly inspire me as I've spent so much time being unhappy.

I don't say that in any princess tiny tears way. Happiness is pretty easy. It doesn't actually require a predicate. If I put my mind to it. I can be ecstatic today. It might take 50 mental steps from here, but so what? I learned 'discipline' enough whilst experiencing the repeated failure of based-on-science. It's not that hard.

The point to note about fatness is it is spontaneous. It's a product of the body's mechanics happening outside conscious awareness and not directly under its control or direction. And that needs to be understood, whether people like it or not. It must be gotten over, that elective free will, though important is not the only the sole controller of us/our bodies. That needs to be fully understood, without kicking off any hysteria, temper tantrums or denial.

Given fatness is mostly associated with a lesser suicide rate, even at times in the face of greater suicidal ideation, seems a good reason to choose being fat. A sense of physical presence and power's another. A greater sense of emotional stability.

A gemütlichkeit physicality, sensuality. There are are as good reasons to want to be fat as to want to be slim.

Fat is one of the great survival instincts. It's about surviving relentless battering, an unforgiving grind.  I don't feel like cheapening this exposition of the will to prevail with some tawdry-historically speaking-five minute hate campaign.

I dreamt of being slim. Yearned to bring it about with all my heart. That was wholly genuine, I'd never deny that. But it was also very much my duty. Like, not being a "slag". It was thoroughly contrived, faux tho' real as they say. Like building muscles, you go to the gym regularly, lift your weights.

And you get muscled. That's real. If you stop, that lessens.

Wanting to be slim was a bit like that. It was something you just lifted up and down, up and down, in your mind. Never did you stop re-enforcing it, working it, enhancing it, till yeah, it was totally natural. Unimaginable that one could reasonably feel anything else. Usually, we call that self control.

Willpower.

And when you stopped, though not immediately, you began to forgot the feeling. Then why you wanted to be slim. Then what it felt like inside to want to be slim. I don't object to the idea of it, just that its something other than it was, with its themes of wanting to be seen to be a good person.

Weight is ultimately pretty, meaningless over and above the meanings we choose to give it.  At least, it's meanings are obscured.

I'd say its slim pickings on the self esteem front. If something has to be maintained with serious browbeating and threats, that's hardly a compliment to it. 

Labels not Beliefs

Responses to the AMA's recent decision to make the pretence that people are disease, official, have caught me off guard.

The thing that's causing the most brain freeze is the realisation that people who call themselves "humanists" or atheists, have no opinion. Or are indifferent, are not in anyway philosophically, metaphysically or intellectually engaged.

HUMANist, get it? As in human. This is from a humanist website;

a commitment to the perspective, interests and centrality of human persons; a belief in reason and autonomy as foundational aspects of human existence; a belief that reason, scepticism and the scientific method are the only appropriate instruments for discovering truth and structuring the human community; a belief that the foundations for ethics and society are to be found in autonomy and moral equality…

I've never been able to identify as a humanist though I am. This is just confirming my suspicions. What's to it really?

Those who are not religious have available to them a rich ethical outlook, all the richer indeed for being the result of reflection as opposed to conditioning.

Ha, ha, ha, dare to dream AC Grayling!

The first definition on that website was ominously "trusts to the scientific method". Sadly, this has tended to dim my mood in recent years. When it comes to 'obesity' as too many of these types have failed to properly balance that "trust." So much that a distant echo of science will sometimes do. See how easily our mind formulate worship?

Allow me to assist the chronically underwhelmed. Part of the recent fuss from British, US and other psychologists about the recent DSMV update, was the categorization of grief, as mental illness. Rather than a natural process of bereavement. So that it can be "treated." Medicine is truly becoming a replacement religion.

They were upset that feelings were being pathologized.

So how is no one exercised by the idea of humans being pathologized? It's like a palimpsest- a copy without an original. That three letter word F-A-T or is it the five letter one O-B-E-S-E? It's like mental delete button. Make no mistake, we aren't talking about a facet of you that can be (somewhat) divorced from your being. As bad as that is, we are talking bodies. I know people think you aren't your body. Whilst I appreciate the metaphysics, that simply isn't true. Anyway, it's not the point.

If pathologizing emotions exercises instincts on a visceral level, how can pathologization of all bodies not? And what about the psychological implications of that? One of the sponsors of that i-petition? "Society for Humanistic Psychology." Cute.

I felt the similarly about feminism and fat women. Leaving aside the desire to be thin, the fat phobic misogynist disgust of the (fat) female body as an accepted universal symbol of female self disgust. Or that this was deemed an appropriate way of just possibly increasing the chances of thinness.

No, what really got me was none of them seemed to have any real suspicions about such assertion of women as barely sentient. Incapable of understanding simple instruction such as ELDM (eat less do more) or as incapable of understanding their own actions.

And here's a big clue, from a bunch of patriarchs dealing in the most rigidly infested eau de bootstrap reductio ad absurdum rationale. I mean, you are "responsible" for the design of the way your body functions? You don't have to find out how it actually works and work with that?

At the same time its okay to believe you can't control your emotions, negative feelings, anxiety levels?

If there aren't enough clues there, then I've no idea what feminists actually believe in. Certainly "the radical notion that women are human."is still too radical for them. You'd think they'd want to know that.

This was on top of other things, but it still caught me by surprise because weight seems such a trivial thing, that I was totally unguarded about it. And when you're that way, your rationalization process is on standby. Like it or not, that rationalization saves your beliefs from fatal disillusionment. I thought, this is so trivial, we'll all just discuss it and work through it.

So it is with this. Except I can't say I really care. I already know better than that. It just indicates yet again that many people are carrying labels without belief. None of the elders of the tribe told them to be outraged, so they don't have a scooby. Fatz obviously don't count for human so nuts to them.

Mere emotions or responses declared mental imbalance creates real resistance. The people who generate them, nothing.

Labels not beliefs.