Indivisible

The current school of thought droning on about how people have never been so divided tend not to bother with no disagreement but one or other parties insist there is/are.

Ad hominem-literally, to the man or person.

Everybody signed on to slim down or become slimmer under their own steam. Nobody disagreed. The disagreement came when the results of a particularly singular method were deemed biologically (and politically) incorrect.

 This is the major sticking point, not simply quarrelling with biology, but blocking the proper use of biological function.

Currently George Monbiot "We’re in a new age of obesity. How did it happen? You’d be surprised" et al are saying;

.......food companies have invested heavily in designing products that use sugar to bypass our natural appetite control mechanisms, and in packaging and promoting these products to break down what remains of our defences, including through the use of subliminal scents. They employ an army of food scientists and psychologists to trick us into eating more than we need, while their advertisers use the latest findings in neuroscience to overcome our resistance.

Meaning, we have the capacity to strengthen our natural appetite control mechanisms, build up our defences against them being breached, can use psychology to trick ourselves into eating less than we need, and to use the latest neuroscience findings to triumph in leaving our resistance untroubled.

By reversing the effects purportedly achieved by Industrial Food.

The great thing about using the same mechanics to reverse his assertions is this will either uphold them or not. Which is science's usual starting point. Be sure and mention this to your medic or otherwise healthcare professional, sundry fat phobes and such.

Metabolism can be manipulated using non-drug means and Industrial Food knows all about it, according to George Monbiot. Call him.

He also mentions using "subliminal scents" to alter metabolic settings. I myself have said use of light (and probably darkness, separately and in concert) should be tried as a means to alter metabolic function via the eyes, brain and ergo neuro-endocrine glands.

Starvation and drugs are not simply too crude to do this in the right way, they are irrelevant and they poison the body as collateral damage. Plus surgery, is just violent assault. 

Roxane Gay recently reminded us of how far back this rage against the body goes with the case of Sancho I (935-966),

Sancho would....have to travel to Cordova to undergo the slimming treatment; First of all, the physician shut Sancho up in a room, where he lay on a bed with his feet and hands tied. He only left his captivity to take long walks during which he was pulled with ropes by slaves, while leaning on an assistant. When the exercise was over, Sancho was obliged to take endless steam baths.... To prevent food intake, Hasday ordered that Sancho's mouth be sewn up, with only a small opening being left so that with the aid of a straw he could sip liquids (“Hebrew herbs”), which gave him continuous diarrhea. It appears that Sancho was only fed fluids throughout his stay at Cordova, receiving daily seven infusions combining salt water, orange-flower water, water boiled with vegetables, and fruit. These very probably contained theriac, a drug consisting of a variable number of ingredients, sometimes more than 70, including opium. 

Starvation, forced labour and drugs and even some mutilation, albeit reversible, unlike the kind currently being promoted by the likes of Monbiot.

Why do 'obesity' peddlers insist on framing this as a whodunnit? How about they try whogivesafuq?

I saw a photo of myself only a few weeks ago, as a preteen already diet veteran. You would have had trouble picking me out of the photo, on the grounds of body mass. I don't know why slim people never listen to what they project onto us, as if this by definition excludes them, "Normalisation of Plus Size etc.,". If not being able to notice size fattened, Monbiot himself would be a target of his own cultism.

And if dieting had worked, I would never have been one myself. That's how it happened George. I feel like Kano, I lived it.

Cults tend to degenerate into doom laden paranoia. Self correction comes hard to them. Their articles of faith do not engage critical faculties. Round and round and round circling the same themes, tightening all the time, until there's a massive shoot out with the FBI or some such.

Sorry old bean, some of us got off that merry-go-round a long time ago.

Failed Approach Tax Levy

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

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

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

No wonder folks refer fondly to this as politricks.

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

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

Oh sugar!

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

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

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

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

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

Fiddlesticks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hoist with your own petard, sugar fizz.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hunger/Addiction

I've tried to draw attention to something over the years: Fat people have been spectacularly game.

In a society when people drug everything from their moods to reaching for a pill 'cos they've got a 'ickle head/tummy/butt boo boo. Fat people were told er, *you people are too much, you need to starve and run around till you've expended your largesse.* Then latterly, * you just need to spend your whole life feeling half starved a lifestyle change*.

Our response to this request was: "Okay, if you say our bodies are a problem doc etc., you must be right. You all seem like reasonable nice people. We'll do as you ask!"And we did.

Just. Like. That.

Not only did we accept such an insult to our form and person. We accepted the unnatural and instinctively disgusting plan of weight loss dieting.

Despite this not even this tender-hearted enthusiasm could make such dysfunction viable. Aiming to stay in a state of hunger is unnatural and pathological.That means it moves towards unhealth and ultimately death. Not always that ultimately. Some anorexics actually die the young deaths so many are desperate for fat people to.

But the point is we really, really, really tried, over and over again. Without the millions, yes, millions spent, telling people to put their litter in the bins provided... rather than on the ground...which will then have to be picked up by someone and put in a bin......

We starved, swooned, dieted, sweated, wired jaws, took pills, ran about, had organs banded, re-routed and removed. And that's only some of the least unseemly!

All because you know. When someone tells you on good authority that your body's all wrong and that seems reasonable and you know they're good people, it probably is.

The pathology of open-ended hunger used to be readily understood. And probably still is in countries where starvation is a more current or recent threat. But not in more sophisticated realms, no we aren't allowed to state openly that the cultivation of unending states of hunger is undesirable and unsustainable. The body is well constructed to defend against it.

In lieu of this agreed recognition of obvious fact. There needs to be an explanation for people's now seemingly inexplicable attachment to food.

Addiction.

You do not have hunger-a signal that your body requires nutritional replenishment, mainly made up of energy. No, your hobby of eating has hi-jacked your brain and you are now allowing it to do you the harm of 'obesity' blah, blah, blah shoddy pseudo-science emotive 'addiction' criteria. 

Regardless of whether weight is a real question for you or not, the answer's most definitely not a stat of proto-anorexia. Turns out you have to have some susceptibility for that to be remotely possible. Enough to stay this side of safe and sane yet stay on a diet for life. Who has that? Just be hungry all the time, but eat, unsatisfyingly, things you may or may not wish to eat and don't eat things you may well feel to eat. And go for the burn.

What makes me laugh is that we thought that was perfectly reasonable for so long. Not other people, who could at least preach fatuously in ignorance of your pain and discomfort, whilst taking their pills for oh, just about anything remotely disagreeable to them.....which less face it is many things a whole lot less bothersome than knawing crazy making hunger.

Has any one said hunger can make you crazy? Resisting the pulsing drive to fulfill it can literally drive you out of your mind? Even if you have such a mental block that it feels like you can barely manage to eat? Those recommending it, should try it. For a limited period, just to get a feel of never being free of hunger.

I don't mean no food-that's relatively easy once you get going. I'm talking about eating inadequately, always being dissatisfied, irritable. Eating things you don't want to eat and not eating things you do.

It's not just the psychology, it's the stripping of some emotional ballast. That increases your sense of vulnerability. The absence of the pleasure of fulfilling a necessary drive, properly. You do know the satisfaction of your hunger is part of your daily pleasure quotient? And that when it's undermined you acquire a pleasure deficit? i.e. your mood starts to sink.  In the end you'll be reaching for something to end the torment of tussling with yourself, even more than the actual physical feeling of hunger.

Being ravished by hunger is emotional.

Dodging it is boring. It repeatedly takes over your mind to the extent that you find it difficult to focus on other things. At some point you'll find there's no free bits of brain left to hold other thoughts, so much of it has been taken over by the imperative to just relieve this damn nagging urge. Its the imperative to do something that you cannot (won't) do that's even more wearying than the hunger itself.

Hurting yourself makes you feel very sorry for yourself indeed. The one safe space, yourself is no more. The one person who should nurture take care of you, is the one who's denying you and letting you suffer, for what? It's humiliating. That's the so called shame of eating disorders, anorexia-the way we're always told what genius high achieving in control anorexics are. And the poor 'over' eaters who are just ashamed they eat too damn much.

NO.

They're both ashamed because something that they were born able to do, they've managed to mess up. That it's for your weight, your "health" doesn't mean shit. You can't even eat properly, you can't meet your own needs, you're incompetent enough to have dropped that ball?!

When you are hungry enough often enough, you can forget.....you do forget....in the end you just don't care. You are too beaten and exhausted to carry on. What it for anyway? You just want your brain back, to feel alive again. To know what it feels like not to have that unchanging feeling in the background. To be able to think about something else to be able to feel something else. To not have your mind and body hi-jacked by a primal urge that you're resisting. 

This is what people mean when they allude to food addiction/overeating whether they quite realise I don't know.

Surely not? Surely "food addiction" is excess, but what is excess? Who defines it when weight is deemed the direct indicator of intake? Consider the way weight loss diet defenders think. How they refuse to acknowledge the failure of their favoured strategy, claiming its actually almost 100% success and the fault is fat people lack stoicism.
(*)
If you re-frame hunger as 'addiction' somehow you can re-frame your battle with hunger as an addict resisting the urge to fulfill an acquired craving. This will give you the same magic that addicts have when they go cold turkey (Ummmm turkeeeey). Which incidentally is FN. Well, they can use drugs to help them get off the drugs can't they?

It's a plan. Just like the one where you're supposed to tell yourself its not a diet, it's a "lifestyle choice." It's not hunger, it's addiction. It's not real hunger, look at the size of you! Which means you know, you can take drugs...for your addiction. 

I remember years ago, in my dieting days, becoming intensely frustrated and enraged, considering an overview of ceaseless attempts to get on-and stay on the straight and narrow yet again.

I remember thinking loudly, "the only way I'm going to be able to stick to this is if I was on heroin!!!*^$"

I weighed it up coolly. Heroin is highly addictive-but, having survived so many wretched attempts at self-enforced hunger how bad could it be?

I giggled. I so wasn't going to find out.

I couldn't even take diet pills.

* Decided to take this line out, it could be read as attacking drug addicts. That wasn't my feeling or my point. I was referring more to those who use drugs to ease minor aches, pains or their emotional issues, rather than alter aspects of their character personality or self-use often hiding behind 'illness' for that purpose.Then feel bad about their own lack of stoicism and outsource their own shame to fat people.

The problem with that is not that kind of drug seeking in itself it's that their attitude and framing squeezes out what is a necessary self critique they're avoiding and not resolved in their own minds. What they are saying to fat people displays this.

Fat foolishness in the media

Roll up, roll up people. There's another instance of fat people being idiotic abject sell-outs in the mejah.

If there's one thing I can't stand it's purveyors of this kind of foolishness. It is disgusting and abject. Trust me, if every group under any pressure gave way like these idiots, we'd know far less about what it means to be human.

All of us.

It is forgotten by these folk that not everyone is in as privileged a position as themselves, so their wretched po-faced arse licking is also a missed opportunity. Not to agree with me, but to be a human being whilst fat.

Tedious fat masochism of this sort is partly responsible for the regressive assault the 'obesity' cult has visited on fat people, by refusing to hold its quackmeisters to any account at all. Putting them on a pedestal by making fat people responsible for everything and everyone, including human biological design.

Many self hating fat dupes continue to insist that not behaving like a quisling house negro is a threat to getting science of any real value out of 'obesity'. When actually, the crusade has acutely derailed that.

Does anyone think pretending people are disease is science?

Even bitter ex-smoking fool Callahan admitted (hey, I can throw that word about too) that 'obese' was harder to deal with than real genuine serious disease. Something that should have woken everyone up. No doubt that's because those studying real diseases are pursuing real science. So they get real advances.
 
They'd not be able to get away with the reprehensible pantomime of fakery and flannel that useless "obesity research" has recently been cloaking itself in. Because a) people would notice and call them on it, because b) people value the genuine and dramatic loss of life that would be abetted by such quackery.

The wretched farce that is 'obesity' has achieving precious little for those who are in genuine need of relief-whatever their reasons. I stumbled over the cure for my own disorder which was if not created, certainly ramped up to quite intolerable proportions. The irrelevance of "obesity research" in this cannot be overstated.

I don't doubt for one second that I'm not alone in that. 

 Taking the kind of masochistic abjection that comes out of being discredited, having to believe in something that doesn't work, for granted has enabled them to stay worthless to those who really require genuine effort to be put in.

The "Eat as much as you want and remain slim" clickbait-which is just most thinz and slimz life right now- despite many of their somewhat deluded bullshitting- is a silly headline, borne of the messed up 'obesity' farrago.

Basically, its a report on an avenue for getting bodies to use rather than store energy.

Researchers noted the mice minus the gene ate less in comparison, moved around more and displayed other health benefits including smaller fat cells and better insulin sensitivity.

It refers to a gene called perililipin-2 which it is claimed regulates the storage of fat. Blocking it has said to have reduced fat storage in mice.

Turns out to be the fifty millionth incarnation of brown fat.

The genetically-altered mice produced more brown fat cells which, unlike typical white fat cells, have the ability to burn calories.

We are all born with this type of fat, dotted around our bodies in small amounts. In most it fades away somewhat, for some relatively early on. Apparently, this is responsible for a lot of sudden weight gain after a lifetime of slimness type phenomena.

How's finding out about how to replicate this immoral? It's a perfectly natural effect, the body will do it itself! As I've been saying for years, find out how metabolism works and use that to get the results you want. If you don't, how will progress be made?

This is so dumb. So utterly pointlessly abject and grovelling. This grotesque anti-intellectualist, faux moralising of those who reject religion without realizing that they still need its basic purpose is indulgent. Only the bourgeois classes could get away with flouting such utter stupidity.

It's also part of what makes fat people hate themselves and why we can be easy for others to have ill will toward.

No matter what fat phobes say, they know we are just as good as they are. Hence their repeated celebratory comparisons with us. If you feel someone is so beneath you, why would you be so inclined? Moreover, why would any such comparison be a cause for victory?

It's underwhelming when this extent of grovelling, refusing to stand up to any bullying at all, no matter the cost to the person. Refusing to defend ones honour at all is upsetting to others. It reminds them they could be put in that position too-see smokers. And they don't like that feeling at all. That's why they cheered that boy who opened up a can of whup-ass on a smaller bully.

They want to know they'd fight back to in the similar circumstances.

When we don't, even though we are yielding to them, it makes them feel they might be so defeated too. Then they lash out, trying to put as much distance between themselves and us.

Anything to do with using rather than storing fat has potential applications to type 2 diabetes, fatty liver and treatment of other metabolic disorder, such as PCOS. It is well needed. The current treatments on offer aren't nearly good enough.

Is that to be halted because of fat fools in the media, still down on their knees in arse lick bullies mode?

For goodness sake, get up.

Jay you are a man of no little charm and wit. Get a grip on yourself because NGAD.

Except perhaps those you're trying to impress and they're really not worth it. 

Weight has Purpose

Looking at this rather predictable effect of increased alcoholism after surgically induced weight loss (or should that be thought of that as tissue loss?) One has to wonder how much restricted access to scientific findings-too many paywalls-is affecting scientific knowledge amongst scientists;

A small group of scientists gathered last week at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to share ideas about a medical mystery: the increasing evidence that some types of weight loss surgery affect not just the stomach, but the brain as well.

That last line is a bit of a doozy. The stomach area has the second highest concentration of nerve cells outside the brain. So what "increasing evidence" would that be when this has been well known for aeons? And indeed that last link reflects the fact that it's been known of in far Eastern and Ayurvedic medicine. It even affects their attitude to posture, you can still see this.

I also get a bit agitated when clear leads are given by human anatomy. If you scroll down to the third square, you'll see a simplified illustration of how the spinal nerves are connected to organs and to the brain. Is that unconvincing?

If you take the blinkers off and recognise fatness cannot be understood in terms of pathology, any more than slimness could, you'll attain a better grasp of the situation. As I've been trying to point out since I got to the fatsphere, one of the reasons people fatten is to buoy up your mood and stop it from sinking (and you with it). I think of this effect as like a lifejacket stopping you from sinking.

It can use appetite, hunger and/or weight itself to achieve this effect, whatever's necessary. If a change of eating isn't, then your eating will hardly change, if at all. This is an adaptation to keep you afloat whilst you resolve whatever is pressuring you. Often that is a matter of circumstance, environment, upbringing and so many other factors. Your body often stabilizes at a certain point. What folks think of as their setpoint. It's intriguing.

Don't think of this as either/or. Some people are just genetically predisposed to fatness full stop. In some, they're predisposed to this particular kind of physical adaptation. Sometimes it's really anticipatory or hair-trigger as I used to call it. Before you even feel remotely stressed, it has anticipated potential trouble. For others it's more when you are under palpable strain. There are also some who have more than one of these factors, sometimes to the upper most degree. Those are probably amongst those who reach the highest weights.

For others, it doesn't seem to come into effect, they remain slim or even go the other way and lose weight. If their situation isn't resolved, or doesn't spontaneously resolve itself-which let's face it we all count on hugely-then their system may go on another stage which could be anything from an acute neurosis, to some kind of substance abuse.

If you deflate the "lifejacket" then some people's system will continue on the above course. Genetic links between fatness and alcoholism have already been noted. Alcohol is digested, it is partly a food so it can play a role similar to having fat stores because its so readily converted into energy, it removes the need for energy backup!

It's not unheard of for some families to have fatter members alongside slimmer alcoholics. It's interesting that fat people seem more likely to be teetotal. Though I've had a few go's, I've never taken to booze. I've had the feeling that I would have been a prime candidate for heavy drinking if I hadn't been fat. But who knows?

Anyhow, fatness can be a dam or barrier mechanism, in some people. If dieting wasn't so ineffective, this would probably be more clearly the reason why some are dietproof. Finding it even harder than most to lower their (food) intake at all. Regardless of how much/little that is.

And this is part of what gets crudely posited by a fat phobic mindset as 'addiction'. As I used to say, if you're in battle and someone's trying to take your shield, you're bound to instinctively tighten your grip. Because people don't recognise fat people's humanity hidden under their fatuous disease assignation. This kind of nuance doesn't appear to matter. The impulse is to crowbar it into what's gone before, even if that's mythical too.

It is fascinating. But it is not 'addiction transfer'. It's more getting rid of a barrier to going to to possibly develop some kind of substance dependence. The difference is fatness is spontaneous. The body does it itself, a bit like a magnetic field drawing iron filings. The magnetic field is the conditions your body finds conducive to altering weight.

It's interesting that when you're able to see beyond obesity dogma, even a bit, you begin to grasp this;

We don't, for instance, label drowning a disease. It is, clearly, a legitimate medical condition—worthy of treatment and insurance coverage. But the fault lies with the situation, not with ourselves—in the sense that human bodies are simply not adapted to spend too much time under water. Obesity is the same.

 Now, whilst I wouldn't make that comparison, you can see David L. Katz has reached for a similar metaphor. For me, fatness of this kind happens to keep you buoyant and when it's deflated, that's when you start to drown, or at least, require other means.

In a way you could replace "human bodies are simply not adapted to spend too much time under water." With "spend too much time under certain levels of pressure." Or with overall mood under a certain level.

This could have been looked out for, if people weren't busy insisting fatness is all bad and has no positive use. That it is merely the outcome of excess eating, that the body could not have its own plan to alter it's own function to use fatness for a purpose.

People are Disease

So apparently, the AMA-the American Medical Association has decided to pretend that being fat is a disease. The motivation for this is the deeply scientifically medical factor is insurance reimbursement

iow, so that doctors can get paid for dispensing their "obesity related" quackery. Further evidence if it were needed that it is this element in the medical profession -not the preferred baddies the slimming industry-who are amongst the most responsible for spreading fat hate.

And now they want to get paid more for this and turning all sorts of nonsense supplied by their class cronies onto fat people. Turning many more of them into the ranks of the prescription pill poppers no doubt."But it's for my disease of meeee!"

Well, it works for the supposedly svelter middle/upper classes. Which might be fine for neurosis. But weight isn't that. Changing it requires actual scientific progress to be made in the mechanics of human metabolism. Not the usual flummery one can get away with when it's about things that have a significant direct conscious input. Like thoughts, moods and levels of anxiety etc., Something that those in the field are crying off because weight is simply too objective in outcome to fudge with subjective feelings of "It's doing me good because I feel better." Instead these medics sought to;

"recognize obesity as a disease state with multiple pathophysiological aspects requiring a range of interventions to advance obesity treatment and prevention."

Yeah, if you insert people in place of microbes, bacteria or virus strains. And turn their lives into an unfolding of the life cycle of disease contaminants. Describing that in a biochemical fashion. Life does indeed become multiply "pathophysiological" in aspect, even if it's just human biology, in action. In a fat person.

As usual, it's all assertion scant worthwhile evidence. Cheekily claiming this will lessen stigma is typically sly, that could decrease in an instant by telling the truth about the results of calorie restriction and what we know about metabolic function.

This result went against the AMA's own experts in science and public health, who took against this contrivance. Amazingly, they summed up everything in a throwaway line;

..........the currently prevailing definitions of obesity do not specify its underlying causes.

That is virtually the whole of it. Fat people are human. Disease is illness. It has causes. It has aetiology. A route map of its development. It is intrinsically pathological. Being fat isn't. I have always said, 'obesity' has no aetiology, except perhaps the 'obeses' bad character. It claims deliberation, where there is none. Obesity wallahs have not identified a disease, they've pointed at people. At their bodies. That isn't good enough.

Not all doctors were on board either. How noble you may think. They're disgusted at the idea of representing people as disease. They recognize this crosses an unacceptable line. Humbled by the realization that they have no right or authority to alter the status of human beings. No wait, it's due to that potentially being discourgey of our motivationalism. Boooo. Back to the same old nonsense that weight is some kind of neurosis.

It reminds me of the recent row about the latest DSMV. UK psychologists objected to human expression of things like grief being defined as mental disorders. How damaging they felt that was! Yet there's nothing to say about the psychological effects of undermining people's humanity in this way.

I have always found the lack of comment from others the most shocking of all. Especially when they then go on to protest about the same things said in other contexts. I shouldn't be though.

Now that I mention mind doctors, the same kind of scientism used to define the mental health of people in general is being piggy backed to alter the impression of the state of fat people's mental. I've never seen more linking of 'obesity' to psychiatric categorisations such as ADHD, BPD, OCD, anxiety disorders and even things like alcohol abuse.

You'll note these "emerging links" come by targeting specificity, fat women, fat men, men who have x issue in their childhood, the fattest white women and so on, (though the drugs prescribed for these conditions are not implicated as potential triggers for weight gain). Only things such as "impulsivity" probably disenables fatz to follow weight loss diets. Not our defences which thwart them in virutally all people.

All headlines are about 'obesity' linked with so and so though. It's clear that overall, fat people cannot be demonstrated to be any crazier than the acceptably weighted. This is a pisser when you've presented people as inferior and unable to cope with life because they're emotionally stunted.

They finally got round this by deciding if one 'group' of fat people can be found to do/have more of something than the overall or comparative group of acceptables, that counts as a link.

That's overlooking the fact that fat people are actually erm ya know, people so everything turns up in diverse groups of people. This is pish. And suits the purpose of continuing the perpetual cycle of going round and round in the predictable circles of hades that is 'obesity' rationale.

The intent is always to make doing nothing look like one is doing something. Things must stay the same, except, the mounting effects on fat people.

Amour Propre, Amour de Soi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to think progressively

The European Union is planning to vote tomorrow on a proposal brought by Dutch Euro politico Kartika Liotard. Its intent, reflected in the title is to "eliminate gender stereotyping in the media", it isn't legally binding;

whereas stereotypes still exist at all levels of society and in all age groups, affecting how we perceive each other through oversimplified assumptions based on socially constructed norms, practices and beliefs that are often cultural, and religion-based and -fostered, and which reflect and perpetuate underlying power relations

This move to ban pornography is seen by many progressives as an attack on civil liberties.

Okay, I'm sure you spotted a gap there. The document lists 69 points (oh sauce) aiming to improve the status and opportunities of women. Part of that focuses on the stereotypical portraits of girls and women relayed in various forms of media from advertising to the mainstream advance of pornography;

Calls on the EU to conduct research into the links between child pornography and adult pornography and the impacts on girls, women, boys and men, as well as the relationship between pornography and sexual violence. Calls on the Member States to establish independent regulation bodies with the aim of controlling the media and advertising industry and a mandate to impose effective sanctions on companies and individuals promoting the sexualisation of girls; 

The latter is what seemed to most excite the sensibilities of progressive civil libertarians who see it as a slippery slope obviously, given it's supposed to be about ending the perpetuation of sexist stereotypes especially to supple minded youths.

Porn's okay because there's no evidence to prove it encourages sexual aggressiveness toward women. So phew, no cause for concern there. In fact, it would be a bad idea if that was being planned because apparently wanking, decreases the likelihood of sexual abuse. Convicted sex abusers say so. 

Pornography is not just the commercial proposition of anything for a toss, it's a social, nay feminist good. Keeping folk safe(r) from the more harmful elements in society. Free speech tends to go with it too.  

Large size sugary drinks on the other hand have a proven link with porn unfriendly obeastiness. Regulating these isn't any kind of attack on freedom. That's just some propaganda put about by cynical mega global food corporations. New research finally shows;

sugary drinks were found to interact with genes that affect weight, significantly amplifying any genetic risk for obesity

So there.

Could there be potential for agreement here?

whereas the alcohol industry, with its vast investment in the marketing of its products, strongly contributes to perpetuating gender stereotypes and the sexualisation of girls and women.

 Booze, drinking calories;

On any given day, about one-third of men and one-fifth of women consumed calories from beer, wine or liquor.

No way then, LOL!