Hosed Down

I'm having a bit of a moment, right now, due a video on a propaganda technique here dubbed "Firehosing".

[Vox: Why obvious lies make great propaganda]

Vox's video refers to a Rand Corporation Report by Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, its point is about firing off such a powerful and constant stream of obvious lies-like a firehose-is a distinct technique. As opposed to the usual lying that tries to sound like the truth. Firehosers almost make a point of stream of conscious-lying.

The authors named for major characteristics of "Firehosing",

1. High Volume

2. Rapid, Continuous, and repetitive

3. No commitment to objective reality

4. No commitment to consistency

Highlighting the last two as the most definitive. 

They don't care that much about the truth, much of their propaganda is either completely false or has a kernel of truth.

Paul says he comes from a background where "...credibility is king and the truth will always win". I know that one. What is happening is not belief in the way we understand it. It's more, the people peddling this have credibility invested in them plus influence and power, everyone else is going along with it, so its okay. 

People know all this doesn't make any real sense. 

This doesn't mean though that continuing to go along with this day by day, year after year, decade after decade has not warped minds. We can see this with the current idea that mutilating millions of people-largely women so far- is perfectly reasonable alternative to changing what passes for your opinion. 

Imagine that instead of dealing with letting go of an assumption, you instead wished to remove the part of the brain that lets a person know you are lying and push for mass removal, to reduce the chances you'll meet anyone who'll give you the dissonance of truth. 

Not because that will work you understand, it'll buy you more time to continue lying for as long as possible. The brain comes to accommodate and adapt to this lying so it becomes increasingly numb to how stupid it sounds and how dishonest it is.

There's a bit where the presenter is illustrating this, using a-who ate my sandwich scenario. He says instead of lying and saying no, the sandwich stealer responds; "You didn't have a sandwich". Reminiscent of "You've never tried to lose weight/diet/get healthy", when it is actually quite easy to tell people have, not least by the change in attitudes people have developed towards eating and weight. 

Still, we're told, we haven't tried. Causing a split to occur between knowing what you've done, and having the feeling that you have done it. Something I didn't know could be separated. It is the norm for the latter to be absent. People feel they haven't done what they can tell you they've done. Taken seriously what they'll tell you they've taken seriously and tried, when they can tell you they've tried way too hard for way too long. 

Being willing to not be seen as credible is okay, how many times have you thought that about 'obesity' promoters? "Food addiction", "with obesity", and recently, the food industry employs scientists to enslave you with sugar...The latest is being a disease where you are both the disease and the "host" of the disease, which is you..... 

You don't have to be credible, when you have power.

What really got me about the video is not the main players under examination-Trump and Putin, or even the technique in and of  itself, weird though that may appear. What shook me is hearing the way it feels to be on the receiving end and what that does to you.

The person who really hit the nail on the head for me was Masha Gessen. 

They just create sort of this unmanageable volume of falsehood.  

She says telling and re-telling obvious lies isn't about persuasion-yes!!-it's about power. For real. The presenter explains the power play is,

.....asserting that they are not constrained by reality. That everything, even things that are totally obvious to us can be challenged.

Gessen goes on to say;

The way they lie makes the obviousness of the lie part of the power play. "Yes I know that you know that what I'm saying is absurd. And I assert my right to say whatever I want to whenever I want to"

This to me is what fat shaming really refers to. You are not really being shamed because you are being called fatty boom boom or even "unhealthy", but really, because you are outside the loop that can lie in this way.

That is your shame. You are powerless, you are weak, you are a victim. All you have is facts and truth. Really, your position is flipped, fat people telling the truth are branded lying, even though reality backs up what we're saying. There should be no argument against the failure of calorie restriction induced weight loss, or that the body regulates its own weight or that hunger is not emotion, but it makes little difference.

You are a "liar" because you are not telling the lies that have the power.

The usual response, to fact-check, or try to, when the people who produce the 'facts' are the ones lying, things get even trickier. At least people know Trump lies and others back up that observation, but what if virtually no-one ever backed that up most of the time and on the rare occasions they did, conditionally, sometimes overridingly so? Gessen again;

There's nothing so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth.

The presenter says; "It's kind of like a schoolyard bully, degrading you by forcing you to argue the obvious."

Exactly. Gessen;

And I think that's kind of how it feels like when we fact-check trump, it's sullying. 

Exactly. Exactly.  It is degrading to keep pointing out that people cannot be disease, and for that to be treated as an argument rather than an obvious fact.

You feel like you've engaged with something that actually shouldn't be a part of the public sphere.

Treemenduhs.

This is precisely how I feel about 'obesity' and its crusade. It shouldn't be part of anything to do with science, medicine, health or anything. The body should be studied as it is, not an idea projected onto it that's obviously wrong. No one should have any time for this sort of regression into obsolete notions.

So this very simple human assumption that you can know what's true, that assumption is taken away from you, you have to work for the truth. The hope is that you'll give up and get exhausted.

 In the case of health, that is the modus operandi. People laughed at the lie that alcoholism was a disease, but that didn't stop those peddling it. Now if you say anything else, people feel that's wrong somehow.

As it is with 'obesity', no matter what you or the public say, 'obesity' promoters will keep going, they'll keep promoting.

The ultimate purpose of firehosing is to rob concepts like facts and reality of their power. 

In the end Gessen says,

There is no truth and no lie. There is only positional warfare. Whoever has a better position. Whoever objectively has more power owns reality.

Absolutely.

The American Medical Association, The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Surgeons, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the American Urological Association, the Endocrine Society, the Obesity Society, the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions and by World Health Organization, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Finally, in 2015, the Nagoya Declaration identified ‘obesity disease’ as a pathological state caused by obesity and requiring clinical intervention 

This is the sort of thing you are dealing with. And they expect to prevail.

On Holliday Again

Here we go with the Tess Holliday Cosmo cover. The breakfast show panel consists of; the editor of the UK edition, Farrah Storr, co-hosts Susanna Reid and Piers Morgan, plus actress Tina Malone who was formerly 172lbs/78kgs heavier before having a gastrectomy [she was previously in the original "Shameless".]

The ahem "discussion" was pretty much as you'd expect. I can't be arsed to go into the ins and outs of it in minute detail, but basically, Morgan objected to TH being treated as a person, and not turned into any kind of cautionary tale, with no invasive warnings issued. He claimed this was not "responsible".

Storr was constantly put in the position of being goaded into accepting or denying "this isn't a healthy weight". Which is exactly what we are all supposed to do, assume our predestined positions, rather than ask what the heck is stopping scientists from finding out how to alter metabolic function. And why if its such an emergency, they are so languid about anything bar directly inciting this kind of to and fro, along with other theatrics of irrelevance.

In the meantime, they set about pretending to be a voice of "anti-stigma" and reason when they are the instigators and maintainers of a situation that likely wouldn't be happening if not for the interventions to block genuine progress.

'Obesity' cultists set all the terms, we know this because in the end, 'obesity' is their construct. Despite proclaiming a state of peril, any instinct to query the state of scientific enquiry and its lack of delivery is typically absent. As long as that is the case, 'obesity' promoters will settle for this, its a win for them.

[GMB discussing w/e 'obesity' peddlers tell them to]

As long as we are kept busy going at each other, we'll continue not to notice this, which is the object. 

What you'll also notice, if you need reminding is there is no difference between 'obesity' and a person. None. 

The person is the pathology, and the dis-ease is the person, and that is pretty much taken for granted by at least half the panel. At one point Malone referred to "embracing it" [her body] as the same as embracing a bottle of vodka or drugs. 

The historical precedent for defining people as disease is as a prelude to violence and genocide. As far as I know, it has no prior use as a health aid.

 

The Accusation of Suicide and Suicide

Few should be judged solely by the worst of themselves and if this is the worst the now late Anthony Bourdain has done he couldn't be said to have been as bad as all that. By the accounts of many, he was kind generous and supportive to them.

Still, I feel its entirely fair to revisit this video which illustrates the weird chasm that's opened up between our more typical reaction to an apparent suicide and how accusations of suicide are thrown at fat people as a justification for saying that our purported self destruction means we deserve abuse and death.

In the past, it was uncomplicated. The focus was on the loss of a life and the meaning of that to those left behind.

 

Now one has to ask, which reaction to suicide is the real one? As usual, folks can't hear themselves. It is typical of the double consciousness surrounding weight. The extent to which we live in different lanes remains unacknowledged.

How then should one view Bourdain's end, if indeed he has committed actual suicide? [Honestly, is there anything that doesn't split into real and false in this area?] There can only be one way really.

It would be nice though if from now on people dropped this stupid "slow suicide" meme and started to listen to what they are actually saying to (some) people.

D-I-Y Stomach Shrinking

"Demoted or dismissed because of your weight?" Well don't worry, sympathy is at hand in the form of "stomach shrinking".

Stomach shrinking? (I hear you cry) How interesting, the stomach is a essentially a bag made up of [amongst other things], a couple of tiers of muscle. And what tissue is more [[[[contractible]]]] and elastic than muscle?!!!

the human stomach walls consist of an outer mucosa, and inner submucosa, muscularis externa, and serosa. The gastric mucosa....consists of the epithelium and the lamina propria (composed of loose connective tissue), with a thin layer of smooth muscle called the muscularis mucosae separating it from the submucosa beneath. The submucosa lies under the mucosa and consists of fibrous connective tissue, separating the mucosa from the next layer. Meissner's plexus is in this layer. The muscularis externa lies beneath the submucosa, and is unique from other organs of the gastrointestinal tract, consisting of three layers: ...[it] also possesses a serosa, consisting of layers of connective tissue continuous with the peritoneum.

Wow.

So how does one bring this shrinkage about? I'll bet it's willpower right? Course it is. And, after all the years fatz have spent trying to stay starved whilst forcing themselves to run about, just applying a little of that power of attention to the stomach would be easy-peasy.

We are indubtably suited to exercising extensive willpower. 

Just gently [we don't want to scare it] will the stomach to get smaller and smaller. Imagine it, like a bag, getting smaller and smaller bit by bit, if not day by day, then week by week, right? Let's take it easy!

Fantastic. And after all, we are in complete charge of our bodies right? We created them the size they are. So, no doubt we have full control of our stomachs.

We have the [will]power!!!

So ladies gents, before you engage in any mutilating gastrectomy-having your healthy functioning stomach amputated merely because it is functioning.

Surgical removal of the stomach is called a gastrectomy ....Sleeve gastrectomy is a surgical weight-loss procedure in which the stomach is reduced to about 15% of its original size, by surgical removal of a large portion of the stomach along the greater curvature.

Try instead using your mind [willpower] to shirk this eminently shrinkable organ. If the experimenters won't do the relevant experiments, do them yourselves. You owe it to your society to save your healthcare systems from "bankruptcy".

Spread the word!!!

[Seriously, relax your body shrink your own stomach. How hard can it be? Clinical trials will tell us.. D'OH!]

Got Fat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you are fat ="feel fat".

Feel fat =starve self.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which doesn't appear to be quite yet. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Sharma Says: Get off Your Knees Fatz

Well, well, well. Here's one for you self hating fatz types especially. Your friend Dr. Sharma is finally admitting that if you do not stop playing 'obese' and divest yourselves of unremitting shame, you'll continue to get what you've already gotten-the sharp end of a very long pole up your posterior end;

the only thing that will change this is when people living with obesity stand up for themselves and get “engaged”....

Got that?

We tried to tell you! Fat people's acquiescence to abusive handling is why we are in the dirt and continue to be, not due to any occasional outbreaks of resistance. If you've spent your life in abject surrender-and that brings you wrath-then surrender is the problem not the solution. No matter the dissonance that provokes in those who can't tell the difference between what feels right-because they're doing as their told-and a more rational take.

The cheeky buzzard even has the nerve to say;

It is evident that the bias, shame, blame, and discrimination that surrounds obesity is so pervasive that very few people living with this disease apparently have the courage to stand up and publicly share their stories and “demand” help and support for dealing with this condition. 

There you go. Fat people have no courage. We are so weak, we can't even stand and pretend to assert the undermined connection with our intrinsic humanness.

Oh rilly? How did that happen pray tell? Following the advice of 'science' that's how. Never being able to accept true outcomes, that's how. The disease-mongering lying that's the 'obesity' cult is how.

'Obesity' has laid waste to even the most no-nonsense large and in charge fatty's self conceptualization, to some degree or another. Does anyone really think people can endure an enforced state of body dysmorphia, panic syndrome induced by insisting we permanently catastrophize to "motivate" ourselves, whilst existing in an often permanently excruciating state of discomfort and shrug it off?

I'd love to see Sharma try that. Actually, no I wouldn't, because I wouldn't wish it on anyone but the truly wicked and I mean that. 

I'll let him into a secret, he couldn't have come out of this any better than us, don't doubt it. He hasn't a clue, because like a lot of his cronies, he's out of touch with fat people's deepest thoughts and feelings.

As much because fat people are too-when it comes to the experience of being fat, as the on-going lack of objective observation.

The only reason for such absurd expectation is fat people's incredible grace. I've said it before, fat people should be studied for the amazing extent to which we have withstood such relentless and ruthless assaults on our character and person, over such a sustained period. Sometimes from a very young age.

Living the 'obese' persona turned me into someone I despised more than the most wicked people who've ever lived-for long stretches. This damaged me, and yet, somehow......resilience. The psychopathologies-cognitive distortions etc., caused by playing 'obese' are sometimes quite noticeable. Some are easily as bad as what is diagnosed as separate neuroses in those who aren't fat.

On some level I almost guffaw at this. We are walking around in plain sight with these, yet many aren't downed by them. And don't expect the 'obesity' crew to know anything. They've so pathologized people-including their odious pity-they can barely tell.

Honestly, they're like a monkey on your back.

Intriguingly, this suggests not that its better not to know [you have a neurosis], but that the burden imposed by portentously focusing on neuroses, can be the last straw for your mind. Rather like playing 'obese' disrupts metabolic function often in the ways fat people are caricatured.

'Obesity' in modern times, though perhaps not always, has got to be one of the most useless that ever passed for what? Scholarship (?) [Oh please, I'm on the floor]. It's supposed to exist to serve fat people. How odd a notion is that?

It's supposed to be driven, unbidden, to acquire knowledge of metabolic anatomy, function in order to uncover new pathways to improve health and well being of those who need it most. It's supposed to be fully engaged with fat people's bodies, how/if they function differently and how to make the most of that.

They'd engage with fat people too, get to know them. You get to know people best by looking after their needs.

Instead, this discipline [snigger] is filled with food fixated zealots, putative social engineers and those who wish to advance the interference of the medical profession in areas many do not want them to be in.

No other has ever trashed its own supposed vehicle for study.  Not people engaged in studying paedophiles, psychopaths, violent criminals. NONE.

Every single one of those fields have humanized their subjects by default due in some part to the outcome of academic rigour. If not some fellow feeling for, or some desire to do some good. Not 'obesity.' Remarkably its recent outpourings have managed to introduce a remorseless dehumanization of those it should want to help.

That muppet Yalom  says he finds it easier to connect with those convicted of heinous crimes more than fat people. He said that with more ease than most 'obesity' wallahs could show to fat people, even when they're sweating to pity fat people. Which is not at all apt.

It is truly monstrous to have a field filled with so much hatred for those its supposed to be caring for. I honestly cannot think of any other where so many involved openly want fat people to suffer, or even to die.

I mean we hear about the fattest all the time in the media and television. Where are the Dr Sharma's, the Karen Hitchcock's, the Yoni Fredhoff's to give the benefit of their objective expertise? Name one field where that would not be the case? These might as well be in hiding.

That is why areas of knowledge about health progress. Experts in any other field would lose their shit if any hack misrepresented their area of expertise in the way the media routinely does to fat people. Private words would be had with the programme makers, broadcasters, newspapers etc., and it wouldn't be nice.

So after decades of silencing you and getting others to enforce this. You're expected to emerge pristine and presumably ready to give suitably simplistic sob story of "living with this disease." As usual, it's somehow always down to the fat public to do the professional's jobs for them.

Because suddenly behaving like a true academic discipline is so far out of sight, they can't imagine it. 

They'll have another conference though.....

Farewell Jean Nidetch

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

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

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

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

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

Take that i-net profiteers.

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

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

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

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

Starve 'n' Sweat Cannot Argue with Itself

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

Where to begin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is anatomy, not morality.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

My first response when I heard CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) was finally being waved around in conjunction with "weight management" was this should be good. Won't this expose the practice of turning of fat people's mind against themselves? [The 'obesity' construct starts its mindwarping with "child obesity" mess.]

Given the purpose of fat phobia has been to make being fat feel so bad that this unease either produces dis-ease or feels like it. The use of CBT and the like would surely expose that by turning it around? The theory behind this to provide explanation as to why diet's fail. Fat people's fatty tristesse. Why're ya sad fatso? Becasuse of my fat gut *sob.* Why d'ya have a fat gut? Because I'm sad. Neat isn't it? So, if fat people's a-hem.... mental health is improved-diets will stop failing.

Don't whatever you do ask how this affects metabolic function, after all that would technically be a scientific breakthrough.  It's the usual 'obesity' cult improvisation. They study afterward. Hey that reverses the clinical trial pathway.

I wonder if anyone's been given an award for this innovation?

Putting it bluntly, the kind of things CBT exists to combat were the techniques employed surreptitiously, to turn 'obesity' into a draining imposture. Goes something like this;

"Negative" Behaviour Cycle

Instead of the "everyone doesn't like me" it's you are disease, not a disease, the disease. That tends to produce "distortions", i.e it sets up a negative mindset. You can learn to interrupt and challenge this process, difficult though that can be (to the point where others define this kind of pattern as "illness.")

Buuuut, when the definition of you is producing it, that can become a life sentence until that [definition] is removed. 

Less sophisticated seeming societies would refer to this kind of shit as spell casting, bad magic etc., Basically through a set of culturally relevant mindwarps, you get people to mess themselves up, then claim that resultant badness/evil i.e. 'obesity' or less formally, "fat logic" is emanating from within them. Technically, a lawyer might argue that's not wholly incorrect [yes that's a double negative, enjoy.] Often the "treatments"required to expel this malevolence are quite vigourous, shall we say.

Anyway, let's see, here are ten cognitive distortions- negative expectations and beliefs that dominate your overall perceptions. How many of them will seem familiar?

1. Mental Filter- Sole focus on the worst possibilities and aspects of a situation filtering out any positives, i.e. the "obesity"construct.

2. Disqualifying the positive- Explains itself really. Any positives don't count.

3. All or Nothing Thinking-Things are either one thing or t'other, slim people are good fat people are bad, any deviation is "denial."

4. Overgeneralization-One example is universal. i.e. One person losing any amount of weight for any length of time, makes fatness "preventable."

5. Jumping to Conclusions- Events cue your pre-formed belief. Fat people are eating disordered. So fat people being enthusiastic about food signals, this eating disorder or the current craze "food addiction."

6. Catastrophization-Maximize negativity, i.e. An observation that either end of the spectrum of any trait, height, weight etc., has higher overall mortality than in between, becomes: Fat kills!!!!

7. Should's and Ought's- Please, you should be slim, you ought be on a diet. You should do whatever you're told, diet's ought to work. 


8. Personalization- Feeling to blame for what is partially or wholly outside your control. Fat people's over-responsibility feeling being fat is our fault and so's the failure of dieting, mind you, we're told that. [Also associated with those who have to look after adults from a young age.]

9. Emotional Reasoning- This is a doozy, basically the idea that because you feel something, it must be so, i.e. because others have cultivated excruciating discomfort about fatness, it's just got to be baaaad.

10. Labelling- Defining yourself, rather than the quality or nature of actions/circumstances/occasions.

And that's just ten of them. Don't hold your breath for this to be mentioned or any contrition or reversal of the 'obesity' cult mindwarp to be a direct out in the open target for the alleviation/ reversal of mental and physical health issues [yes I said physical]. Otherwise known as recovery.

What seems to be happening instead is that is deemed your neuroses. I'm not kidding. The constant panic mode insisted on by 'obesity' alarmist rhetoric, plus things like your nervousness through the aftermath of a constant threat of famine and, exorting yourself to diet and feeling angry with yourself for being fat. Is just the mismanagement of your mind.

Well, technically, that's not entirely false either. You did, but it doesn't say you felt morally obligated to go along with it.

This was wholly supported and advanced by "our betters." And they don't have the cojones to state that openly. Their courage is solely in the area of tearing up fat people pompously. Or now latterly dripping us with oleaginous pity, ((((shudder)))).

Luckily, there are some techniques that purportedly change the content of these to quite a degree to reverse the effect, as fatsphere has instinctively been doing by challenging received opinion. And connecting with our own real experience as human beings.

Or "obesity denial"/"fat logic" as our detractors should have it. 

Beasted by Them or Us

Seems its easy to say beasting fat children at a harsh military inspired fat camp in China is in preparation for their economy. Sounds like a headline written the wake of cod Chinese inflected Chinglish Susie Wong style.

As if that's not exactly the same difference elsewhere.

*What you see in the tears of a little boy forced into regimented exercise through his tear stained pain and distress. Is exactly the position fat people are in.

That's your fat hate, it's either them or us.

The Misconception:  You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate. The Truth: You grow to like the people for whom you do good things and hate the people you harm.

A while back I happened to read in a book that quoted Marx saying capitalism set the interests of children against their parents. Not sure if I got the finer details, though I immediately thought of many showbiz biogs. Where talented performers started as children and ended up making more than their parents and how that messed with child-adult relationships and the family hierarchy in general.

Calories in/out is like that.

It automatically sets the interests of those who are, for whatever reasons more prone to gaining weight, against the interests of those who, for whatever reason are less so.

Indeed, if it wasn't fat children, in this case sweating it out, or adults cutting their organs out and everything in between, it would have to be those less prone to retain who had to struggle. That's dictated by the approach.

If society followed its logic of demanding calorie restriction induced weight loss, it would create a society around that. Those less energy efficient would be engaged in just as constant a struggle to get enough calories as virtually all fatz have struggled trying to dodge and expend them all these years.

Maybe they'd have fattening camps for some, though that seems unlikely from here. 

Fat people's individuated energy restriction plan was supposed to somehow do both. Though they're incompatible. You'll recognize that kind of delusion of incompatibles, which defaults to prolonging attrition, is typical of the crusade mindset.

Currently, the rub is society's fattened and sufficiently fat phobic -because the 'crisis' is about everyone fattening, not simply fat people-for the threat of fatness to have invaded the thoughts of those who previously felt at remove.

* Link added!

A Grip on your Heart

There's a saying, the best way to create a bully is to bully someone. Equally, the best way to learn to be victimized, is to bully others yourself. Watching them for the signs of your impact of your actions on them, unwittingly trains that aspect of your own consciousness. You become ripe for someone else to exploit that in you.

The reverse of that is also true. Defending others from bullying trains your own defences.

You'd be surprised at how effective that can be. Seems, fighting back is more effective, from being in the ring for others. Defending others exercises your own defences.

It's harder from a standing start, let alone being wrong-footed by a sharp change of direction. The reason why I was so ready for FA, was not because of self absorption, in some ways, I wish! It was because a lot of the themes I speak of, I had witnessed in others before 'obesity' reached it's current pitch of impacted almost banal disdain.

Whether through race, sex and class. A lot of the consequences of its themes were not wholly unfamiliar. 

Even on a lesser more simplistic level. I'd noticed the way others on the medical shit list, i.e. drug addicts were pathologized. Then had many of their thinking, reactions and behaviours, pointed out as evidence of their innate pathology. Yet, a lot of this turned out to be just them displaying the human nature that's in all of us.

Sound familiar?

I noted the overwhelming defensiveness of "normalcy" which increasingly seems a construct born of the kind of big tent conglomeration of factions you see in political parties. What's surprising is its viciousness. Being "normal" is seen as boring and everyday. Underneath that, it reveals itself to have a vicious and visceral thuggishness, violence generating, constantly on the prowl for potential threats of revelation of its not quite so natural as all that -ness. Many artists have explored that in books and films.

I'm sorry, I drifting a bit into the purple.

People are slowly beginning to wake up to the implications of 'obesity' or, defining being human as a disease state, whether they realise that or not. It's a cliche that the way unchecked power can manage to get one over on people, is to start with those who are seen as worthless and deserving of any old treatment.

One of the many downsides of creating excessive and unnecessary social hierarchies is that authority's bad behaviour cannot be so easily seen, let alone assessed until it gets to those who's value is taken more for granted. At that point, much time has been lost-if it isn't too late. Even then, the ability to return fire has been stifled, if not stymied.

The American Heart Association just published new set of guidelines for defining risks of heart disease.

After another group of medicos defined humanness above BMI 30 as disease. The AHA are now staking their claim to interfere in people's lives on the pretext of prevention. As fat activist types have repeatedly tried to point out, heart disease as "obesity related" is disingenuous. This is where  'obesity', heart disease collide.

Apparently, hyping up risk to brand people as sick, in order to gain a control over their lives, thoughts actions and behaviours, is somehow a bad thing. Imagine that! It isn't when its people you don't care for. It's increasingly clear that between the grotesquely indulgent hate-fest that's been going on, no real discussion has been had about some of its more major themes;

• Using health dangers, realistic or contrived to gain a hold over people's lives in a way that is as invasive as any devout religion.

• The seeming irrelevance of basic notions of medical consent

• Reckless hyping of health risk, use of panic to unseat people's ability to engage with information on a rational basis. iow, getting people to act from a place of fear rather than reason. [Often by trading and manipulating deepest fears].

• The undermining of  the promise to "Above all do no harm."

• The ability of science and medical professions to bypass public accountability and eschew consultation

• Turning the process of being human, from biology to behaviour into disease processes

• The increasing blurring of sanity with insanity, health with ill health

• The use of the physical/physiological to define character, morals behaviour and thinking

• Framing illness and disability as individual choice and as cost

• The reintroduction of sickness as the wages of sin/incorrect behaviour etc.,

• Turning human behaviour into something that can or should be dictated to by med professionals

• Infantalizing adults with the irresponsible bandying around of the mis-used terms such as 'addiction', 'illness' 'disease'.

• Pathologization of childhood and children through this

• The irrelevance of privacy, from employers, society in general as well as other professionals

• The promotion of disordered eating and eating disorders, mutilation, drug dependence.

•  Being judged in a legally binding manner outside the aegis of jurisprudence, therefore the absence of access to professional, expert defence

• The taxing and potential impoverishment of you on said basis

• The pathologization of human basic needs, food, eating, and so on.

• Depoliticization of inequities and social pressures. Re-framing societal hierarchies as individual concerns i.e. things out of ones control, being defined as within ones control and the responsibility of those on the receiving end. 

Some of us have tried hard to get a discussion going but our spoiled identity (shockingly so), got in the way. When you are the disease, your voice becomes obscured to the point of silence or are perceived as an atonal whine of pathology. Now others are getting to share in such attentions.

We shall see.

This is happening in America, so I should feel removed by distance. But it's not that simple. These kinds of decisions creep elsewhere, insidiously. The places where discussion usually happens are still stuck deep in the cult of anorexia worship and 'obesity' quackery of the crudest kind. Little to no worthwhile discussion of this has been able to happen. No deviance from the 'obesity' construct and its trail of false or inflated pathologies is permitted or able to occur in terms of where people are psychologically.

Which means that this sort of thing flows into that.

I am feeling tired of this shit right now. It don't think I've ever experienced a situation that's so easy to grasp, so easy to stop from getting out of hand, where it has been made almost impossible-artificially so-to get people to consider the implications of the direction this is all taking.

Right now, I just don't care. I feel, to heck with it and everyone concerned.

Peekaboo!

Reading around things like the NSA, wikileaks and big data. One thing we can say is that those with power and influence love the idea of getting to know us intimately. Whilst of course being repelled by us being able to do the same, with them.

They don't simply wish to know us, they wish to see right through us in microscopic detail. How we think, feel and behave. It's amusing that there's an open desire to read our brains/minds and few can seem particularly exercised by the prospect of having no privacy, from the PTB even in your own skull! I like the way they talk about scientists, because this would so not find itself in the hands of commerce* and politicians?

Of course, fatz are already experiencing an earlier, primitive and somewhat skewered incarnation of this urge. I'm sure I've said before that being fat is often like being straight out of the 1950's, (at times, more like the 1850's.)

Given this, the 'obesity' construct, being ahead of the information age, turns this wishful thinking on its head. Instead of finding everything out about a generic fat type-there isn't one, but that's one of the wishes-it saves effort by making it up and projecting it on to its fat template.

The parodic elements are you are the disease to be studied like life forms are under a microscope. Oh humans are a "complex" disease. 

Instead of spying on your actions and nosing in and reading your own actual words and thoughts. It cuts out the middle man-you- helpfully, making up what's supposed to be going on in your mind. Expecting you to act according to this. Yes, you're expected to act out this is, you're admonished severely when you deviate and report your true experience.

Having established falsehood as reality. Real reality becomes the falsehood, the delusion. You are the deluded/in denial. The latter assertion, especially, is notoriously hard to refute. As that is itself seen as evidence.

The 'obesity' canard is wish-fulfillment of a certain type from a certain class born to administrate, if not rule. The desire is for them to know anything and everything about us, through any means. It's also the similar for the specific type who wish to participate in something accorded the scientific moniker, without the same mood eviscerating rigour of the real thing.

Not for them is following the truth without fear or favour, examining failure because that leads to knowledge, understanding, progress and mastery. They prefer to have all the answers beforehand. So they know what they're seeing.

*probably working on their own version/funding research as we speak

Weight as Opinion

Looking back and wondering, how did some weird historical phenomena get ahold? Why some and not others? The best I've come up with is the ones that took were capable of being all things to all people. They were able to absorb projections and fulfill needs unsatisfied elsewhere in their respective cultures. 

Being on the wrong side of these can be very hard work. One learns how much we rely on taking common premises/understandings for granted. It's not just not sharing terms, it not sharing frames. Then you can easily be cast into an oblivion of mutual imperceptibility.

Difficulties are often surprising and hard to read or fathom. One of the more simple ones is that we, fat to thin alike, were taught exactly the same ideas about being fat and slim. About weight, eating and dieting.

We absorb it in exactly the same way. So, imagine thin shaming being the law and all slim people not realizing there's anything untoward about that. Like, there is one consciousness that is shared regardless of weight.

The key differences came about not through fat people being on their own side and slim people being on their-which would be the same thing as the mainstream.  It came through the reality of being fat and not slim.

This is something I thought was patently obvious. Apparently no. Not only to many slim people, which at least makes some sense, but to many if not most fat people too. Ironically, due to seeing through the same frame.

What's freaky, is that so many slimz and fat hating fatz especially, behave as if this was not so at all. They act as if fat people have always put up a ferocious fight against this shared consciousness. This non-occurrence should have happened. That would have been normal.

It just didn't. 

Fat people did not behave that way at all. Suffice to say this was all underwritten by scientists who cited 'physics' so it was "truth". There was nothing to oppose, it wouldn't have occurred. Still, it's perfectly expected that one would defend one's honour, regardless, even if its to say; "We're not all bad." Or "Consider our good points." How about, "Let the punishment fit the [non] crime"?

Even psychopaths, caught in acts of real badness will sneakily make a case for the ordinary/good people, being as bad as they are. Perhaps lacking the(ir) moxie to follow through. Given recent experiences, a bit more believable than before.

This merging of fiction over fact is typical of the cavalier way with truth that characterizes this crusade. Virtually anything they assert goes unchallenged. Not because of bullying, but because of what? Brainwashing? Nope, that word doesn't work, Stockholm Syndrome? Nah. Not quite. I really don't have a word for reality that becomes false through the reality of your existence.

There are similarities, we are like the lapse ex-religious living in a theocracy. Yet, like so much about the experience of being [fat], it doesn't quite fit other descriptions. Science is not a religion. (Not yet anyway.)

The key to this, as ever, is realizing what being weight represents in this particular scenario. It represents opinion. Your opinion. Your weight, is your point of view, it's your argument. Fat (body) must therefore be versus slim. Despite the fact that it never really was. Except in mainly isolated corners. Your body is your fightback that never happened.

Stigma is not the Responsibility of the Stigmatized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empty Rhetoric

No more of this nonsense;

Imposing the same strict restrictions on unhealthy food and drink as tobacco will curb the country's obesity scourge, an Otago University researcher says.

Says a professor of marketing. Mind you, I'm not a snobby about sources but it might explain why this (ir)rationale is attractive to this prof. This nonsensical line is  of course being peddled a lot right now and it will not do people.

Food simply cannot be turned into cigarettes;

"Tobacco is a very unambiguous product because it is uniquely harmful - some foods are closely analogous to tobacco as they offer no nutritional benefit and the research evidence suggests changes in food supply, particularly the widespread availability of inexpensive, palatable, energy dense food have contributed to, if not at least partly caused, the rising prevalence of obesity.

Balls.

Yes tobacco is "unambiguous" in the way it taxes the body, food isn't. The psychology behind smoking is another thing altogether and that has been erased to make smokers look like self destructive idiots. In order to shame them to stopping-let's face it. Having said that, there is no known part of the body nourished by tabs, yet sugar provides calories, which are the primary nutrient human bodies need.

In fact don't all beings require energy of some sort to exist?

It is not the only nutrient required, but it is required. You'll exist a whole lot longer on honey than on vitamin pills. Oh and to the silly response that not all food is necessary. That misses the point. We are designed around the necessity of taking in energy, pathologizing any aspect of that is as senseless as it is superfluous.

In order to make this kind of false equivalence-a ubiquitous big bear of the whole crusade-one has to pretend food is something other than it is, and human beings are other than they are. No thanks. Your stupid is your own, do not impose that on others.

We can see how bad it gets when we ignore human nature with something that's not necessary to life, like smoking or drugs. How much worse still with something that is? What is the point in shaming food and people for consuming it? That achieves something similar to shaming sex and people's sexuality and sexual organs, possibly worse and more destructive.

I'd advise people to read testimony from, for example, PWA who feel repulsed by human dependence on food. We simply cannot regress human knowledge for a supposed health campaign that has already had a tremendous amount of influence and failed to show anything but introduce new problems.

If you want people to reconsider drinking their calories, campaign on that. Note, it would have been better never to have mis-labelled liquid food as, "empty calories." That's exactly the basis on which they've been marketed, as a substitute for water.

When I reminded myself they were food years ago, my attitude to them did change subtly. I did start feeling it was okay to insist on water, even when greeted by perplexed reactions of how can anyone turn down this lovely soft drink for boring old water?

I'd often felt it odd to drink food with food and at times did crave water instead as it was tasteless and would not undermine my appetite for food I was more interested in.

It was more about matching my appetite better. I prefer to eat my calories. I'm not even a fan of soup!

Now if these people insist on interfering in people's actual choices, rather than anything hard like dealing with underlying problems in economies and food environments, then they should operate on an honest basis?

Those who  insist on tinkering have a duty to make any campaign enlightened, positive and above all empowering. Because we are not dealing with acquired habit. We are dealing with appetite which is an innate part of human functioning. They cannot and must not pretend otherwise.

The campaign against smoking is hardly a model for that. The decline in smoking is not the same across the whole of societies. In those under most pressure the least. So I personally am not overly enamoured of ignoring this.

Carelessly adding more stigma to the already stigmatized is an abuse of power. If you can do nothing to help don't make things worse. Theses differences become a reason to further pathologize and discriminate against people who are even less shielded from the idea of themselves as lacking control. Invasive micromanagement of their lives is waved around.

If you wish to make inroads there, you need to meet the human need to be uplifted and enlightened. Reason must prevail, not the ceaseless indulgence of the food cults and their dubious beliefs.

Almost Anorexia

When I have in the past mentioned proto or early stage anorexia or the bitterness of failed anorexics fuelling and shaping the inexplicably aggressive and now dominant form of fat phobia. I think some may have found me a bit too aggressive. Or unsympathetic.

I'll recap the first aspect. Weight loss dieting (WLD) or it's model, calorie restriction (CR) is a supremely unnatural and unbalanced way of eating, full stop. That isn't the same as saying that a person may be better off having lost weight.

If weight could be lost the right way, it would at least in part consist of being able to a use energy more efficiently. Or what a lot of the benefits of HAES are about. Think about it, the energy your body gets from food is used to fuel the operations of your body (that includes your mind).

This means the way your body is making use of energy affects every aspect not only of your matter or body mass, but of things like your ability to think or regulate your moods.

There is effectively no real argument. There mainly appears to be one due to the presumption that being able to use energy more optimally is the same as forms of starvation or having to endure them in order to attain what would seem to represent that more efficient use-slimness.That falls down because fatness and slimness are not opposite states.

Keep your eyes on CR. That is the heart of the matter. In the past, we all presumed adipose tissue was like savings in the bank. Spend it, through exercise or less calories than you needed (CR) mais voilà; slimness.

Bad though that would still be, at least it would be TEMPORARY. Once the weight was 'spent' you could return to balance.

The flaw was the body's constant reassertion of its cycle of self regulation, spelt a big fat fail. However that wasn't accepted, instead the temporary was to become permanent. Groundhog WLD. That's really when it becomes practicing anorexia.

Again, the temporary is enough to cause a direct or domino effect, in some people. But the real cause of this is attempting to make the temporary, permanent. 

Nobody has noticed it, if you translate 'nobody' to mean many FA people and others not participating in the general delusion. Those who are haven't because FP's experience of being prescribed the practice of anorexia has been totally erased. Even the "thin/slim privileged with anorexia" routinely dismiss it.

The ideology amongst many of those active in the field-for that read anorexia and possibly bulimia-is to disconnect weight loss dieting from anorexia as that has been seen to "trivialize" the damage anorexia can do. And recently I've discovered that many thin/slim PWA feel they have to escape the overbearing assumption that AN is just about vanity and is in the control of PWA

The author of this book appears to underline what many of us have noted and that is that WLD can do so much damage that you don't even have to be a successful yo-yoer to have experienced it.

Even the mere threat of it-if that's ever present-can be enough to do a lot of psychological harm. It can even do physical harm too. So primeval is the design to resist and throw off the threat to life and limb.

A lot of you know someone who's never off a diet, yet always remains the same size as they always were or more.

This is an example of the extent of our erasure, we are 'nobody'. Even when that erasure hurts those who are deemed to be somebody.

Health Related Amnesia

It used to be understood that heart attacks are the biggest killer in western model countries full stop. Once infectious disease are vanquished by modern medicine, heart attacks are just waiting to ascend that throne.

Then came the 'obesity' crusade, along with its casting as leading player in "diseases of modern lifestyles". In reality that's the shift of survival and ageing. You can even get a sense of this in the list for developing countries. The first one after infectious conditions or caused by them is "Ischaemic heart disease". The number of deaths from diarrhea especially heartbreaking, often killing babies and young children.

Like it or not, progress in health does not necessarily go purely in a straight line. I sense some in the medical establishment are deeply disappointed with that and loathe to come to terms. Often risk shift around unpredictably alongside outright progress. We are undoubtedly better off without infectious disease, yet there's been a lot of talk about how we are unhealthier than ever, usually citing 'obesity' as the major source. 

The upshot of this distortion through hype is it keeps creating a form of amnesia as it copies a lie over truth. Like copy and paste on your computer. 

In that constructs such as 'obesity' and 'lifestyle disease' are inherently regressive in nature. 

I remember pointing out the true extent of argument made against fatness is that it's (supposedly) less healthy than being slim. This has travelled to fat="unhealthy" under the assault of framing fat and slim as opposite states. What fat people are, slim people are not, and vice versa.

This must be how anyone could have forgotten that the cardiovascular system can wear out like any other living tissue. The surprised reaction to Ancient Egyptian mummies being discovered to have plaque in their arteries? I never would have predicted it!

Wear and tear can dovetail with inborn genetic and/or epigentic susceptibilities to cause a crisis. Of course, we all hope we can seek to minimize that by the way we live. Including the way we approach life. This hope has assisted food as primary cause of arterial compromise to be oversold to the point where people have been encouraged to almost expect to be invincible through dietary means.

It reminds me of a similar erasure of reality that is in some ways deeper and that is "forgetting" that weight loss is a natural part of the process of our bodies maintaining a constant flow of energy. The idea that weight loss is calorie restriction is a contrivance of the slimming industries. They were looking to switch our connection from identifying weight loss with this aspect of our body's easeful quiet self regulation, to their often obscenely punishing route to achieving it.

Dieters were eager to go along with this, for the same reason. It was demoralizing to keep a mental link with the body's elegant ability and the WLD's dreadful inability.

Now everyone, including many fat conscious people still repeat this lie as if it's the truth. The harm this does is it enables people to be prepared to do far more torturous things to lose weight, because it provokes less dissonance with idea of weight loss as intrinsically hellish. 

With this story, the lie has not bedded down enough to be that unshakeable in the face of fact. Luckily proper science has the upper hand there.

One of the few things that have really scared me from the start of my realization about the crusade was the regression into forgetting truths for pathology generating falsehoods.

Stigma Variations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compassion Fatigue

We don't need to ask fat phobes if they've got any compassion, nothing so high falutin' is required. We are talking removing the deliberate suspension of common courtesy. I don't have one iota of compassion for a certain well known, repeated child sex abuser.

Yet when people started voicing their indifference to preserving his life, that it would be okay for him to be left to die, I instinctively drew the line. He is human and should be accorded the same rights to preserving his life as everyone else. As worthless as that life may be.

 Although it may sound a bit cheesy, there's a point where attempting to demean others demeans you in order to do it. In fact, it's quite possible that's pretty early on.

Knowing that requires no compassion whatsoever. Common decency or living up to your beliefs is not compassionate, it just feels too basic for that.

Such is the extent to which crude abuse of fat people is aired here, there and everywhere. Too often haters are flattered in appealing to their sympathetic side.When really they need to turn off their self elevating vitriol, that exists to advance themselves at the expense of someone else.

If this was one of those examples of pomposity about tax payers money BS. Then I'd say, they're plundering the mental wealth of others, leaving them to pick up the tab.

Your body is someone's libido

There's always been a dubious trope that prudishness is all about this. When the pinch faced prudery of fat phobes is cringe inducing and ill judged. As seems to be the law with fat phobes, they can't hear themselves.

There's something peculiarly sexless about someone who requires another to meet some exacting standard of physique, they no longer have merely in order for their groinal area to erm, come to life. Isn't there such a thing as an appetite for sex? Or is that just an affectation?

Either you're game or not. There's no way it's going to be all about another person. That kind of projection is the basis for behaving as if your sexual appetites are the responsibility of others provocation. Or not.

Adults are not just objects onto which sex occurs.

Some stirrings are supposed to come from within. Our expectations of our sexual desires may not always match the day to day reality in the long term.

There's nothing wrong with not wanting sex all that so much-or at all. If you've not managed to marry a thin person from a long line of lifelong thinz, then you'd better consider the possibility that your partner may gain weight. Turning it into an offense against you, is emotional blackmail.  

This line too many slimz are airing about how fat bodies are uncaring the fat person is about their fee fees needs to be quietly put to sleep and treated as a folly of the previously unaware.

Many of us realise, no one really cares about fatness. Obesitality (that's obesity + fatality) didn't start to bite until it was made all about slimz-in the guise of being all about fatz, as a cover. And boy are some of them riding that pony into the dust.

Give it a rest with your offended by someone's gut, I'm offended by your invasive and entitled prudery. Especially this Rowan Pelling who's made a career out of being........

....you guessed it, sex positive, what I hear when I hear that term? Similar to "pro-life".

What is it with these fat phobic "sex positives"? Positive for a chosen few in their own image alone? Fatz should just twiddle their thumbs (not a euphemism)? Become celibate?

I've never gone along with the idea that being bothered by looks is "shallow". It's the cultivation of extreme distress about looks, as if this makes one some kind of precious aesthete that I have little patience for. Especially when you complain that distress is being caused by the other person, rather than your own thinking.

A person is supposed to run around half starved and probably not becoming slim or for long. Yet this person can't get the hell over themselves? They cannot find a way to just calm down and chill the fug out and see if they feel the same way?

Because guess what? That's a whole lot more in your power than declaring war on your instinct to survive in the stupidest way aka weight loss dieting.  How on earth has it come to seem like the other way around?

No one should be pressuring anyone to have sex with anyone else. Equally, no one should be forced to try and become a lifestyle anorexic for someone else's cultivated distaste either.

Obviously negotiation and compromise is part of relationships. Thinking about getting into fitness, without having to disorder their eating, might be worth discussing. At the same time, the partner could take some time to get over nurturing this;

The fact is we are hardwired to find certain physical attributes attractive, and human nature means it can be difficult to over-look the loss of those qualities in our spouses.

Nope, the body is hardwired to resist and overthrow weight loss diets. That truly is fact.

Any female readers who feel this man is being over-judgemental should ask themselves whether they'd want to make love to their husbands if they had raging halitosis or huge beer bellies.

What? Bigger than mine? Comparing a person to halitosis is also pretty typical of this mindset. For people who demand so much for so little reason. They don't like to trouble their brains unduly.