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.

The Incredibles

Those cheeky hustlers at wealth watchers (aus) are continuing to mine fat acceptance to shill their worthless, oddly intangible product, (hey were there back in the day). In your face internet!! 

Apparently, we must remember how incredible we are. For real, as I keep mentioning, billions have been pissed away over the years on informing the public of onerously complex tasks like fastening the belt provided in their cars, not drinking alcohol if they intend to go ahead and drive. Or even putting litter in any bins provided and other such tremendously lifestyle rearranging tasks.

Yet, tell fatz to try semi-starvation for life, mainly in a social and media capacity-via a few white coats for good measure, et voila. Generations actually attempt this deranged act of mostly trying to forswear one of the main things that assists the continuation of your existence.

Whilst jogging about and pressing or sitting up or somesuch.

Even after decades of this stigma inducing recklessness, we're still behaving as if we have to argue that this-with the best will in the world-just hasn't worked. In a time where equine strength opiate impersonators are marketed, not for major surgery recovery, second stage cancer or even your chronic pain condition nope, for your little old headache or if your tooths hurt [actually toothache can be a btch].

Even though this could often be relieved, if not ended by just relaxing your head, neck and shoulders.

Bah, there's little "self medication" in that.

Now, what should we do with this incredibleness? Create a functioning post-capitalist paradigm, a formula to end all wars/world poverty once and for all or the sadly still current, cure for cancer?

Nawh.

We should parlay our fat fu into "refusing to give up trying".

Pardon me, wealth hoarders but I've given up on weight loss dieting and I'm not sorry, not one little bit. I don't give a damn if you take away my incredible badge. Here, take it, take it, taaaaaaake it! To sum up;

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.”
― W.C. Fields

Well, I'm sure many are feeling me when I say I went boldly and adventurously beyond the damn fool stage. The doors of perception are not only tested by mescaline.

I was torn up by trying to diet, keep up a restrictive diet and the continuous failure of all this and I bravely kept going like an absolute jackass. I used to marvel, how was it possible to get this messed up, without doing anything particularly unrespectable? Like getting high or being sexually voracious, something obvious, to explain my dissolute state.

There have been times when I almost envied drug addicts sense of purpose, so drained and tossed around was I trying to stick to my deranged course of lifestyle anorexia. I refused to give up time and time and time again. I refused.

Until I got to the point where I genuinely feared for my sanity, as the long term build up of anxiety started to implode into some kind of agoraphobia.

I cannot explain it. I was not a fanatic (seriously). I just felt that just as the sun is in the sky and the earth is beneath our feet, if you eat less calories than you expend you must get slim. It's funny, when you think you're doing the right thing and ill effects abound, they become totally disconnected from those acts. You look under every nook and cranny for the sinful, wrong doing that's creating these problems.

Only to finally trip over, it's the 'good' stuff. The things you're supposed to believe in.

What it took to stop trying really shook me up. Unbenknowst to me, all these years of trying meant my mind had fused the very essence of trying hard in order to succeed. That's why so many people can't give up on dieting. It feels like they're giving up on trying at all.

The onus on propping up calorie restriction-ergo not bothering to study fat people and/or dieters means this stuff doesn't tend to come out. 

When I was stopped from "trying" by the effects of that,  my mind seemed to interpret this as the end of the idea of a payoff for sustained effort, can you believe that? It's like a part of me lost faith in concerted effort and I'm not entirely sure I've recovered to the extent of before. Luckily I didn't realise 'till after the process of letting go.

The ad mentions a whole lot of things that show a story of everyday fortitude, including your first kiss (?!) But tell me, if you'd tried a first kiss over 16 solid years, everyday thinking planning scheming and monitoring yourself, your approach your thinking to try and kiss someone, and never quite managed it, don't you think you'd have given it up as a bad job? This is without the necessary parallel of making it ever more unlikely that you'll be kissed, as you fail to realise you've developed increasing desperation that prospective kissers can scent a mile off?

There is an underlying cruelty about continuing to play on this "keep trying" theme. It's what kept many of us to the task way beyond where it was sensible or rational. It's that insidious. 

Weight loss dieting doesn't function. If it did, it wouldn't be necessary. If weight is merely a question of choosing to eat or not, then it would be like a smoker cutting down.

It isn't hard or challenging, it's dysfunctional, pathological and a battle because of that. No amount of excellence can overcome a body that will not fail to defend you against this assault. Sticking with it has produced a degenerate cult(ure) that has regressed our understanding of human biology, the purpose and nature of food, what eating is, its necessity, threatens to label children addicts-something avoided with children addicted to drugs, turned disordered eating into the norm by which normal eating is pathologized against.

And it shows no signs of stopping there.

No wealth counters, the biggest, most courageous, epic thing any serial wld trier can do is to stare into the void, without a planB, a safety net, an alternative and say without bitterness or equivocation;

 "This continued repeatable, entirely predictable not workingness is it."