Self-inflicted difficulties

I commented yesterday on a post about blog fail , moi aussi says I, and would you know it, I read an entry from Bri and responded to it, and it just went on and on and on. Thanks Bri!

So I decided to post it here, now I confess, I've told the story many times, but I suffer from simile black hole syndrome, where you jest can't find the right illustrative comparison, therefore feel like you're trying to communicate through a soundproof barrier. (Ahem).

One thing that has come up for me is the difficulty a lot of people seem to have with the whole notion of Fat Acceptance.

Right of course, but their 'difficulty' is as tedious as it is tendentious.

I'll explain it this way; a while back there was a young guy on the radio talking about being a pagan. He was commenting on his frustration with Christian critics who keep calling him a satanist. He then said the killer line for me;

How can I be a satanist, when I don't believe in satan?

The FA critics are like that (particular kind of ) Christian, who sees their view as the way, the truth and the light, this conviction means they do not recognise the possibility of disagreement.

They therefore understand any disagreement, not on it's own terms, but can only assign it an existence, in terms of their worldview alone.

Those who claim FA is 'pro obesity' or promoting obesity, are doing exactly that, either you agree with the truth- them, or you are the opposite of truth, which must be that you promote fat. You only have one choice, opposition- to fatness- if you do any less than that you are promoting it. That includes failing to get bug eyed and declamatory, if you just said, I'm against fatties but I can't really be asked to do anything about it, you are a backslider and in danger of promoting and so on.......

It's a crusade.

What's so interesting about being against FA, unlike other pro and anti arguments, is the brittleness of the anti stance, it's genuinely hard to see, how it is possible to disagree with fat acceptance in rational way, I'm still waiting for this to happen, years after joining in.

I don't doubt it's possible , I'd love to hear it. I don't believe I've got it all right, and although it's hard, sometimes, it's only the opposition that can tell you something you need to think about it.

I miss cogent opposition, honourable and thoughtful, taking no prisoners, but actually giving you the respect of listening to- by that I mean hearing what you say, not agreeing with you- what you have to say. It makes me feel a bit sad at times.

We fatties are often told that the reason we are fat is because we don't admit we are fat. We must accept that we are obese or fat, in order to make the 'necessary' changes.

Regularly, critics have tried hilariously to dismiss fat acceptance as 'obesity acceptance'. I think wiser heads may have dropped that one, since it's been pointed out that obesity acceptance is what they stand for (oh pisspoor opposition you demean us so). The acceptance that fatness is a disease called obesity, is obesity acceptance. The fat acceptance movement, to some degree anyhow,is against 'obesity acceptance'. Yeah, try your sound and fury about that faux pas.

If you think that this not knowing what they're talking about is a co-incidence, you're being way too generous to them, because they don't. They are guided by the central tenet of faith, fat=obesity= bad, that's it. As this is patently incorrect, it requires the opposite of logic to sustain it.

Or irrationality, presented as logic, which is not has hard as it sounds ;alas.

Causing your own weight

I felt pulled in differing directions whilst reading a wonderfully direct exposition of why Frances feels she is fat. Though it can be a low percentage balancing act, it is possible honestly say, I just eat too much and that's that.

I feel the same way at times myself. Especially when people in refuting the caricature of 'obesity' repeat the eat too much, do too little, forgetting people like myself have eaten a hell of a lot and others frankly don't have small appetites.

The latter is so praised in a slim person and utterly rejected as a possibility for a fat person. That has done many of us real damage, setting us on a futile errand to tame as a pathology what is just a natural tendency.

That is meeting our needs. It's also boring to not be able to have a variety of tastes and traits amongst fat people. To be unable to be honest, not just the opprobrium, but the disconnection it encourages between you and your own feelings.

I spluttered a bit in my objection, but what I really wanted to say is that is the "cause" of being slim/slender too, is eating "too much" and doing too little.

Saying it can also be more a representation of our culture a certain kind of free will. We have to own whatever we happen to be doing as directed by our will, rather than being able to say, I definitely want to do this or that or don't care, but though this direction is coming from inside me, it's  not consciously decided by me as such, though I'm owning it.

In order to avoid saying that kind of thing because it falls almost outside the meaning our society allows, making us seem pathetic or out of control. Which isn't the point, it's about finding out not only what we can control, but finding different ways to be in control. Just like working with rather than against nature.

In order to be in sync with yourself, you have to perceive and understand what you are trying to get in tune with. That's harder when our constricted ideas of being in total consciously directed control obscures the promise of other forms or experience of control.

Impossible to lose weight?

Saying that diet's or healthy lifestyles don't make fat people thin and stay that way, is not the same as saying that it is impossible to lose weight. How can it be impossible to lose weight? How can a body maintain its energy flow if weight stores can't be used up?

The daily variance in our weight shows that we are always losing and gaining weight as part of the normal process of maintaining a supply of energy that sustains life. Something very freaky would have to be going on for those fluctuations not to occur at all. The issue is not can weight be lost, or can it be "kept off", that is not in doubt.

The questions is by what route?

The route widely thought to be the only one, restricting energy through intake and expenditure, ignores that the body is designed to restore balance. This means trying to restore any loss brought about by calorie restriction. Whatever weight one loses or maintains reflects the inefficiency or inability of that body to achieve that balance before you lose weight.

Given enough time, it tends to catch up with itself.

Imagine juggling a load of objects and then being given more and more until you drop the lot. The weight loss dieting equation's a bit like that. When you start "dropping things", you rebound. The whole obstacle course of a diet-the planning, weighing and measuring, extreme conscious watchfulness, endless calculation etc., is exhausting.

In other words the weight you lose is your (body's) failure and your inability to lose weight/get thin is its successful defence of the status quo as it is programmed to.

I have absolutely no doubt that it is possible not only to lose weight, but that it should be possible to as easy as it tends to be gained. Why not?

On the whole weight gain is spontaneous, whatever you think has caused it to occur/identify as its cause, is usually just the playing out of some cause or other. Cause may be important, but I think it should be possible to reverse weight, in at least some cases without knowing what that is.

Gaining weight/becoming fat is about some rubicon being crossed some upward pressure causing a giving way. Whatever prevents that beforehand stops occurring to the extent that prevents that (new) accumulation of fat cells and tissue.

And so on, either your body stabilises there or the process continues.

Nor should it hurt. The assumption that pain is what stops weight loss misses the point. That comes from the action of your body's defence of itself and the effects of calorie restriction.

When your body let's go of weight as a side effect of changes in your life, or using up the energy calories

Pain is a sign of the unnatural nature of imposing a famine on yourself. 

End 'obesity science'

What is the point of obesity science? Studying metabolism, the holistic definition- as well as the partial one of pure energy intake and expenditure, is to me not only valid, but exciting and interesting. As it is intertwined with all our needs physical and mental, it's an area which if mastered as potential to be an alternative route to adjusting the way our bodies and minds function.

That means mental as well as physical health. It has great potential to be drug free as they seem to be too crude to induce the subtle alterations required. It's like meditating to calm your nervous system down, you can use pills to do the same thing, however it makes more sense to reduce the stimulus, rather than try to drug the effects.

The problem of obesity is its segregation of weight and metabolic function on the basis of what only really works as a social categorisation. You can see that someone is fat, or chubby, slim or thin just by looking at them in the main.

But when studying function, that makes far less sense. Fat is not a body type it's a size, nor is it even a function as such, various metabolic types and levels of function are represented among all weights more than across, you can actually see this.

Though I'm sure it's the case that certain body types find it harder to remain slim/fat than others, so there's likely to be a different spread of within categories, if you really want to understand the biology of weight properly, you have to study all weights together.

Or else you end up getting in your own way. Your likely to come to conclusions about say fatness, that may be just as prevalent in thinness, whilst you ignore that and compare it with slimness.

Siphoning off fatness seems like the action of those who are not serious about that and are more interested in following through on a pre-destined assertion. That may be okay for an experiment, not a whole body or field.

Take down of Sandy S, not

Sometimes it's hard not to feel sad about the way this whole non debate around fatness just repeats itself, revolving around its debased heart. It doesn't even feel like debate at all, just a collection of redundant word rituals specifically designed to go nowhere whilst pretending they've gone somewhere.

The purpose is to preserve the hypothesis of dieting as the answer to fatness, not to discuss it. The best debates are supposed to have a life of their own, surprise, provoke, illuminate.

It's usually really hard to ge anything out of discussing weight with most people, they've taken fat people must diet as absolute. This supposed take down of Sandy Szwarc has already decided what it thinks yet tries to kid us it is drawn logically from scientific fact rather than personal inclination. The writer cannot back up his hyper no matter how hard he tries.

Like other critics, he deals in the worst kind of gossipy bitching inference damning through insinuation, making supposed links between Sandy and organizations which may or may not be dubious as if he is critiquing a scientific paper not a blog post.

Rather rather than trusting us to make up our own minds from carefully wrought assessment of her arguments. It's all about who said what about her and links to x, y, z, what has that to do with the defining principles of mechanics?

Thank goodness one contributor had the capacity to bring some sense of balance to the thread, which unsurprisingly ended it! Obviously, the people who run this blog are supposed to be A Grade brains, but on this particular occasion this man shows why 'obesity' has caused me to question assumptions of what intelligence is supposed to be and how it functions.

Having the nerve to question anything about the received wisdom is predictably linked by inference to creation science - that's the belief that god is the instigator of the universe and if there is evolution or a big bang then god did it, scientifically. This sounds far more like the accusers who've already decided dieting, for sure is going to succeed in making millions of fat people thin if they just stick with it, even though it hasn't yet. It will. Somehow. At some time in the unforseeable future for no reason.

Without them even so much as identifying the crucial missing factor that has prevented it from working thus far. Well, in order to do that, they'd have to admit the truth now and as you can see they can't.

They really, truly believe it in their heart of hearts and that's supposed to be good enough for those of us who know better.

Basically, Sandy did something simple and very clever, whether she pulled it off or not I cannot be sure, she used the rules of thermodynamics to explain why calorie restriction fails. The riposte seems to my amateurish eyes to be largely Blimpish windbaggery.

Making ludicrous gaps between things you couldn't slip a piece of fat reduced soyham, or sham between. There's apparently a distinct division between those who believe a calorie is a calorie-just cut intake and expend energy. And those who believe some calories count more or less than others-cut whole food groups-based on a deeply compelling premise-so that what you eat becomes so unpalatable your intake is reduced.

If he's having a quarrel with Sandy, you'd think he'd be getting pissy about the latter, but no, he treats both perfectly civilly, doesn't even mention in terms of results they are both as crap as each other. Must be out of politeness. He claims her argument is "bizarre" and "incoherent" when his own flummery it's not clear that he fully understood what she was saying nor could explain why he thought she was wrong. 

It is as if she had a reasonable, but dense, argument to make about the complexities of weight control 

There's no such thing as "weight control" the only principle on offer doesn't work. She was explaining why that doesn't work. Nor is it for this man to tell her what the scope of her own efforts should be. It's not up to her to come down to his level.

 And using that weird funky language;

"Thermodynamics must be obeyed...."

Obeyed, is he sure? Surely thermodynamics exposes the functioning of reality? It is not 'obeyed' it just is. It is a function of planet Earth that gravity pulls you toward it and keeps you down, if you jump up, you swiftly return to the ground, you do not 'obey' gravity you just do because it works. Which is more than we can say for bullshit pseudoscience.

This odd use of paternalistic authority crops up when people are trying to impress upon you that you aren't allowed to think for yourself, no matter how unavoidable that is.

I don't know if Sandy's explanation is right, but I do know he's defending what is defunct and claims to be using science, therefore I know he is bullshitting.

I have always thought there must be a way physics-thermodynamics-must be able to explain why diets don't work and it even though my grasp is virtually non existent, just the idea of it feels very exciting.

See if you can sense any of that in the post.

Pity part

Through Bilt4Cmfrt over at bigfat blog , I had to take note. It is - dig deep into your reserves of strength; pity for us obeszoids. So hopefully when the respectable are tired of their deranged hatred we have to pat them on the head for their gold plated pity. Oh joy.

Yet again our observers/ critics fall into the trap of assuming they are the receptacle of all goodness, which must be dispensed to us desperate ever receptive fatties. Our passivity is inhuman. Whether is it the admonishments born of their deep commitment to "tough loving" us out of our decadent state of obesity, or the head to the side, more sorrow than anger posing.

Hey watch out for the noble savage phase, where fat people are more authentically human and better than others who through their higher status have lost a bit of vital energy.......... that one might take a while.

They just can't let us down. We fatties are constantly awaiting this wisdom with a ravenous hunger we never usually allow ourselves (apparently). Any hope they will stop pretending they have a clue is like their hope that we will become thin. Implausible. For instance Morgan Downey, the policy director of the STOP obesity alliance, is quoted as saying;

society's disdain for overweight people often contributes to their feeling defeated, to a sense of "nihilism" that makes them just want to give up any efforts to lose weight

Yes that's right, it wasn't the exhaustion of fighting a stupid self defeating civil war, a titanic battle with your biology red in tooth and claw, NO, it was being called Fatselina Bumsquash one too many times, that made you feel bad about dieting. Note the importance isn't the hurt feelings, it's the possibility that this will lead us to stop dieting.

Funny how the focus on numbers causes a drift from the realness of being.

So, this is why I threw in the towel on my efforts to liberate my inner thinny? Something new though, being accused of having a sense of nihilism is deep for fat people, usually it's about our lacking in the calorie control department. I had to look up the term because it sounds trez dramatique. Very interesting, from wikipedia;

..... life is without meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.

That doesn't mean being a Warholite or a punk; for a fat person the withdrawal of affection from others causing us to lose the urge to try for at best another phyrric victory in a continuing and demeaning civil war is like a "real person" losing a sense that life has any meaning.

I feel almost proud, let's burn it down, let's stick it to the man, yeah! Revolution or Death ! The proposal in this article, is what counts for politeness amongst fatphobes, syrupy vomit inducing sentimentality (it's sweet to attract us via our insatiable cravings) so very badly acted too; in our desperation we will snatch at it, like a pining lonely heart going in for a grifter ready to steal their life savings because, they paid some attention.

Presumably our ever ready state of gratitude appreciates such cringe inducing behaviour. It clearly appeals the idea of us as puppy like waiting for our masters pat.

What is this organisation called The STOP (strategies to overcome and prevent) Obesity Alliance about? It's a non profit making set up out of George Washington University (well I've heard of him). They're;

Identifying and breaking down cultural and systemic biases around obesity;

Excellent, I'd love to see what is left for "anti obesity" once you take away that bias, I just can't wait for them to get in gear for that reason alone. They state their overall aim:

The Alliance's goal is to help reverse America's rising trend in obesity and related conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers.....

Well before the above, people mostly died before these things could manifest to the extent of today, mainly of infectious diseases.

Hopefully it should be at least mildly diverting to see what this turns out to mean. Let me make it easy for them, no thanks, no sympathy, just hands of our rights our minds our bodies our lives. That's all.

Diet

Diet = what you eat.

A weight loss diet is an attempt to eat according to the desire to lose weight. The prevalence of this desire lead to 'weight loss diet' being shortened to 'diet'.

I'm saying that, because some insist that this issue is complex is some way, it isn't.

To diet really, is to reduce calories, that is all it really means.

Whatever the outward appearance of calorie reduction schemes, they are all the same in essence.

This includes exercising to lose weight, the purpose is to reduce calories by spending or purging them.

Dieting is like going cutting down your hours at work and exercising is spending money freely to achieve the same end, to dig into your savings to relieve yourself of the burden of having reserves of cash. Mo' money mo' problems indeed.

Some will tell you that exercising is nothing like weight loss dieting; it is, or that it is healthier or has magical powers to slim you. It isn't and it doesn't.

This underlying model of calorie restriction extends to anorexia and/ or bulimia.
The first is starvation, famine, the latter is the same through purging.

Like dieting then like exercising to lose weight.

This is the model of weight loss that we are being asked to surrender to. All sorts of schemes have been thought up merely to facilitate the possibility of making this 'logic' check out. For instance, shutting the mouth- jaw wiring, throwing obstacles in the way of the life sustaining urge to eat.

Note this acknowledges we cannot stop it, so we must try to tire it out to enable our efforts to succeed. It's a bit pathetic really.

Jaw wiring is out anyway, now it's gastric banding/bypass. Restricting or cutting the stomach to the size of a child's, if that.

With GBS, there is an added element of bulimia through malabsorption, in addition to the threat of it through forgetting not to respond to your hunger normally.

After these operations, there are special diets, calorie reduction to add to calorie reduction, then there's advice to get active, more calorie expenditure voiding; repeat ad infinitum. The mystery is how people manage to retain any weight at all.

Pills have been created along this model, speeding up metabolism to nerve jangling proportions. This theoretically shouldn't happen, if fatness is caused by sluggish metabolism speeding it up should normalize it, but it appears to actually strain the nervous system, rather than correct a malfunction. It corrects theory and not the actual body.

This strain predictably causes a lot of the problems that being fat is supposed to, I'm sure there's something in that for curious scientists.

Lately, they've become less ambitious, resorting to tabs that can lead to anal bulimia, purging of calories by reducing the body's ability to absorb, usually, fat. Whether they are better than the laxatives sometimes abused by those with eating disorders is anybody's guess.

This is also part of the inspiration of advice to eat fibre, as the body cannot digest it, it has to void it, the principle is that it absorbs water on the way and between the two, speeds up voiding.

Respect for the body and human dignity has to be put aside when for when it comes to the goal of weight loss, the ends justify the means.

Whether we are trying to reduce calorie intake or watching those attempts founder on the equal and countervailing force- rebound, we are all just going back and forth, forth and back, it's hard to see where is the end and where the beginning.

The next thing to suggest that tweaking will fix this, is to form our lives around this dysfunction, or lifestyle change as it's called.

Don't hold your breath for a new age of elegance.