Trust insurance

I just read this and because as I read on another blog the other day, I lack the edit gene, I thought I'd just post it here. This comment caught my eye;

Underwriters use BMI when assessing mortality risk. If BMI didn’t correlate with death, the underwriters wouldn’t use it.

Sometimes it's tricky to spot whether you are just not seeing the other person's viewpoint, but I think this undermines itself, it's the highlighted part that's telling.

I don't know how BMI in general correlates with a higher death rate?, but I think it's also fair to note, that the assertion of such 'correlation', is an opportunity for the insurance industry-amongst others. To the extent that it's hard to see how they'd have any incentive to find out, especially if their targets are somewhat accepting of the situation.

If it is generally accepted by enough people with influence that fatness increases mortality in a steady line, then that is an opportunity for them to raise premiums for a substantive proportion of their customers, in one fell swoop.

Whether their pay outs match that supposition is another story isn't? The argument is framed wholly on their terms and who is going to 'disprove' it?  This is why we are having so much trouble putting our point across it's framed in a way that only allows for one POV and that is the one that backs up the crisis. So we can't actually win it, due to our position-no where.

We actually need to introduce our own framing, rather than succumb to other people's all the time. It's a very hard habit to get out of though because if you've spent years believing and acting on these beliefs yourself, it's just a continuum, which is why it is so important to overcome this. Even more than winning or losing an argument, it's important for the recovery process.

Curse words

I come from a cultural background in which notions of witchcraft and black magic are common representations of power. Though it can give me the creeps I was rather dismissive, never quite able to grasp what it was for emotionally.

My relationship with it especially when I was growing up could be summed up as incomprehension. I know they're a form of religion, but I didn't get that much, either.

Theoretically, I sensed it was a form of psychological power playing, to manipulate people mostly through fear to do your bidding. What I found so hard to grasp was the how, or even why? What was the point of it? These are in a sense a stupid questions. It's a little bit like an atheist person asking why religion?  

That seems dense now but I really remember that lack of purchase, it took me a long time to slowly realise it was about the interplay of mental energies between people. The power it was trying to contain, manage and use was the same the world over just called different things, approached in different ways.

The management systems are named differently, they rely on different central sources.

The obesity crisis has often been aimed at "worried well". Mostly seen as the middle classes who look upon their doctor like some used to look to a parish priest for guidance. They seem very into the OC, regardless of their political or intellectual affiliations to an extent suggesting it is using themes already deeply inculcated in them.

Usually the major religions start from good- god- and speaks of fighting evil. The crisis is drawn from fighting its designated evil-fatness and is concerned mainly with fighting with that. Rather than being uplifted by goodness though it does establish it's version of that-slimness; it seeks to fight fatness.

Hence its rage. It is very angry with our fatness. The fact that within each of us is there is that potential corruption waiting to appear and get a hold of us. Religion tries to save souls, the crisis, tries to destroy and punish them, in order that they be restored in goodness.

It draws people with punishment and its avoidance rather than utopia. This makes it feel like having the bad finger put on you. When the spectre of fat is raised when the word "FAT" is spat at you in rage,  when you are told you are going to become fat if you do x or y, it can make you wonder whether it is a wish a prediction or a warning.

The sense of being caught and trapped can been overwhelming, such is the extent of feeling invested in the term. To bear it can be like sinking into a depression, being under a black cloud. There is something of the occult about the use of this to control people.

When religions behave like the crisis, the irreligious are appalled yet many are happy to board this bandwagon. Getting the same out of it as others get out of various cults. I've been somewhat averse and sceptical of what Terry Eagleton calls the "Dicthkins" effect and why its really emerging.

The crisis and its little habits and quirks have actually help me to gain a more emotional sense of how these systems of mind power spread, how they work and manage to affect people so deeply. You do it to yourself in the main, it is you that feels impelled to act out your role under the influence of those whom you defer to, it's as much about that, as what is actually being put across.

Through seeing how the investment of meaning creates the weight of terms, I can grasp more of the way fear and neurosis can control people's actions. When someone feels they're living under a curse, it can be hard to meaningfully relate. But what's to be said about someone being told what they are and finding themselves just acting it out as if their lives depended on it?

Feed me

Looking through some of the archive at Harriet Brown's blog, Feed Me, I happened upon this post. It attracted me in part because I have a post with that title that I've not managed to finish. Ha! It was well worth a read, as indeed is the whole blog.

To sum it up, the post was regarding a comment along the lines of they don't get why those who are fat and healthy get pissy, when they get obesity slammed, as they must know that it doesn't apply to them only those who are fat outliers.

Which is of course the point of why obesity is a nonsense in the first place. A comment made my Jen summed things up;

If someone is morbidly obese, like, help me I can't get out of bed/haven't left my house in 10 years because I'm too big to get out the door, that's a problem.

I was about to opine when I realised that HB had closed the comments. During that time, I was staggered enough to realise that I kind of fitted into this category more than would be obvious. Before I go into that though, let me set down my problem with this analysis.

Very fat people, those at the top of the scale, how have they been helped by the crisis exactly? The one thing it could have done that health campaigns usually do is to reduce or extinguish stigma.

Have you stopped laughing yet? I'll continue. People who are against obesiness, don't give a flying fig about people who are fat way beyond more quotidien fatness. I don't see the physiotherapy set up to see not only if more can preserve or increase mobililty, but to see if there are any physical set of motions that could be discovered/ invented to help the body to soothe any pains or even help reverse their fatness enough for the same ends.

I don't see much evidence of trying to see if their weights can stabilized at all, in any way. Thing is, when it comes to studying any human condition, it is de rigeur of the science to become obsessed with the outliers of said state so much so that the lesser cases get upset at the lack of attention.

Oh to be complaining about obesity science's obsession with those who are unusually fat? Can you imagine it? All attention placed on them in a totally non judgemental way, trying to do everything to allieviate anything that might be exacerbated by weight in itself, not just out of a natural desire to relieve suffering, but because actual attempts to relieve suffering have pushed forward so much of medicine, something that is consistently underrated.

That's why the hatred is such as sign of a desire not to progress, because if you are desperate to ease pain, you barely give a rat's jack about creating negative judgements.

The above quote sounds like the 'immobility' that can be induced by depression. It's kind of sad that someone so fuses their lack of movement with a high weight, but not surprising.

Drill yourself slim

Deep brain stimulation-how ironic, it's precisely the lack of engagement of the brain which leads a person to the conclusion this could be a good idea. Ho hum.

inserting electrodes into the brain to deliver tiny bursts of electricity to alter the patient's behaviour.

This method has been used for Parkinson's disease. Now that is a real disease, a serious degenerative nerve disorder. So it would be extraordinary if this method can reduce or stop tremours yet not affect fatness.

A surgery featuring this approach was performed by Dr. Donald Whiting he says something that epitomizes what should be in the forefront of anyone's mind;

Whiting admits it is a drastic procedure - 'but obesity is a drastic problem'.

Nothing sums up better the close relationship between the hype of extinction for encouraging people to overcome their sense of self preservation, permitting these kinds of assaults on themselves. Providing a justification for their extent of desperation to lose weight which it might otherwise make more sense to contain, in the process. There's a whiff of corruption about it, a mis-use of their power of influence.

In spite of the drastic nature of drilling a hole in your skull to access and stick electrodes your brain matter, I'm still prepared to bet against it being of any use, the past should provide lessons for us all. I simply do not believe there is anything wrong with fat people's brains and certainly nothing that couldn't be altered without the need for such drastic action. It's like a way of getting human animal testing under the cover of writing off fat people's lives.

According to David Ashton "a leading obesity expert" there is a risk of stroke from this approach. Something fatness is supposed to increase the risk of.

Because being fat has been labelled disease/pathology, observation of difference in brain function is assumes "cause of disease" and therefore becomes a pathology in itself whether it is or not, merely because it is found in fat people. It could just be evidence of the underlying change/difference that permits fatness in the first place, once it is triggered.

That may sound like cause, but what I'm saying is that it could be part of the overall process allowing the body to fatten, like increased blood vessels which supply extra fat and muscle tissue, or on a more surface level stretch marks.

I always have a problem with the fixation on cranking up the metabolism when it comes to fatness via the nervous system full stop. Now they're onto the brain people should be very wary given the history of high brutality for low rewards from the guess work that has marked the history of "weight loss interventions".

Up till now, this crude aggression has just seemed to wreak destruction on other parts of the body, organs, usually the very ones implicated as being "obesity related", liver, heart, kidneys etc.,

This suggests to me that fat people's systems aren't sluggish as presumed, just like the fat cell before it was discovered to be one of the most active cells in the body.

If you don't give a damn, admit it

The left, the liberals the progressives, don't give a shit about good food and access to physical activity for the poor, one iota. If they did, believe me we'd know about it.

Yes, the obesity crisis framed as an issue of personal responsibility uses the terminology and constructs of conservatives. And yet, the broad left of the political spectrum use it and trade on it, endlessly. The fact that liberals and progressives haven't even bothered to construct their own version using their own terminology shows it chimes with their feelings.

Even if they do believe that fatness is self inflicted self abuse, they do not express it in those terms when they speak about drugs or alcohol, nor do they even tend to cast it solely in that light. But then, they're not supposed to make you look fat and common.

They seem able to contemplate a range of views and above all, they pride themselves in listening to the voices of drug and alcohol addicts themselves. This is used as a basis to formulate their opinions on the subject and a positive pride is taken in that.

They can hardly hide their scorn for those who dismiss drug and alcohol addicts as the self-inflicted, thinking them to be base and idiotic. Yet those same rules don't even begin to apply with fat people, who they treat with almost unmitigated contempt and we are not even addicts.

Or perhaps that's the real problem we aren't sensationalist enough. Don't give too many vicarious thrill stories of outlandish excess.

Even if people do think that FA underplays conditions like type 2 diabetes, I don't know why you would but let's leave that aside for now, what about all the years fat people have spent in abject obedience to the uber law of calorie counting?

Does that not show something? That we believed, we tried it, we took it seriously, we lived by it for goodness sake? When you see the arguments they make about food deserts.

Unless poorer people have never had access to vegetables, or never eaten them, somewhere between that and now, they must have lost access to them, the question is how? The crisis is often dated generally as beginning in about 1979 in the UK certainly and earlier for the US. During that time in the UK and other industrialised countries including the US, have had governments containing virtually all hues. They were doing what exactly?

We are told that fresh food is cheaper, cheaper for schools to feed it to the children then eh? And yet somehow this cheaper healthier rational healthy lifestyle, or the horror that passed for it, somehow managed to be evicted from schools, for the far more expensive industrial food effluent that some countries saw fit to feed children with.

Letters were written to which politicians by which eminent doctors? Professional bodies, organisations, unions and so on?

I say come to pass, but quite a few people can remember when these assumptions were not the dominant code, that you at least try to feed children balanced meals-even if they actually taste like pig's swill. And provide them not only with physical education, but the means and place to play, such as erm you know playing fields and such.

Yet now a lot of this has gone. It has happened over the exact span of the crisis years. So what the hell is that about? Time enough to galvanize to at least attempt to prevent it. Time to tell governments about type 2 diabetes and the terrible problems being stored up if societies continue to get fatter. Where the lobbying, the raging opinion pieces, stating that epidemic heart conditions would ensue?

Forgetting of course that an actual epidemic of heart disease began after the second world war reaching it's peak in about the 1970's only abating in more recent times (after the crisis) why let that spoil a rollicking catastrophe narrative.

And where were all those, broadly of the left to counter that? Or maybe even other voices? The truth is, that if poorer people lack access to fresh fruits and vegetables, if poor children don't have access to sporting facilities or that which will aid their physical development, it's not because no body ever thought that it was a good idea to deprive children of this, but because they calculated the value of said children to be less important than other goals.

Now the guilt of self inflicted accountability says, blame them.

There have been conflicting time pressures. Discussion about increasingly literacy standards, versus time for physical education/development, it seemed to be decided that we couldn't have both. Commitment to after hours activities from teachers waned, you can't blame them. Over and above disagreements, why can't we stop pretending choices weren't made and some things were prioritised more others? Why this ludicrously po face fake rage against the enemy rather than handling this in a mature manner admitting certain things got lost? 

Literacy standards won. That isn't bad!

It's just so much easier to go on the warpath and obscure these things.

Presumably, it was known in the 70's that lessening the amount of physical activity in schools might be an issue given the big hoo ha about the plague of heart attacks. Presumably it was calculated that those who fell victim to these purported inevitable consequence of less PE would be able to read better books whilst waiting around in hospitals.

Where have the angry brigade been all this time?

We are expected to believe that they really care about the health of the poorer citizens and their children? If feeding children industrial food slurry, shaped into patties or fun animal shapes and taking physical activity out of the school curriculum was ever thought to be a good idea, it was only felt to be a good idea for certain people's children.

I've been hearing about unconvincing so called campaigns to feed the issue of the poor fresh food and let's have physical activity in schools for all this time, nothing ever happens. Frankly I've given up on the idea. What's done is done, it would have been easier to keep and improve on what we had, if we couldn't manage that, what the hell is the point in all this pretence that anyone is going to do diddly squat in that direction any time soon?

Where you are, is where it's at

I must admit, I've not read this book , but I love the title. For me, this sums up what fat acceptance is all about. It goes just as much whether you are fat, thin, slim, plump, inbetweenie, whatever.

In all the discussions where an FA perspective is brought up, there seems to be a profound misunderstanding amongst those who set themselves against it. They are determined to be against it without grasping what it is, or what's being said.

Because they believe that the fat is intrinsically evil/ or unhealthy and that the only possible righteous position must be total opposition to that evil/ unhealthiness, that FA must be in league with evil/unhealthiness and it is formulated to be in opposition to their 'beliefs', i.e. it must be the worship of evil. Such is the cubby hole they're stuck in.

This could not be further from the truth.

It's about us, not them, it's about our opinions, not theirs. It is up to us to say what it is and what it is not, not them. They've had their say.

It's hard to think of anything more deeply uninspiring, than setting myself against those against fat, I'm not even sure I know or care exactly what that is.

I can assure you, I was thinking about myself and others like me when I got involved with FA. I was sick and tired of not being able to have a conversation about fat and/or fatness, that didn't reek of someone else's ignorant, base and ill-informed abuse. I wanted to hear something that reflected my experiences, compare notes, size up differing viewpoints and conclusions. Instead of always hearing some twisted version always putting me in a concern, ordering 'justify yourself to me, NOW'. I wanted to get away from it, not to connect myself to it, by setting myself in opposition to it. Their problem is they cannot understand.

No means no and that includes fat children as well, who's well being I would not entrust to them.

I don't think of FA as in opposition to anything, but that which is inhumane and seeks to set up yet another tedious round of false superiority/inferiority, ye gads, are we ever going to get sick and tired of that nonsense?

FA is not even essentially about being fat, it's about humanness, and what you need to feel truly alive. In the same way that people who wish to return to normal eating wish to get out of the way of their bodies magnificent capacity to regulate it's own appetite and hunger. FA is in part about wishing to get out of the way of your own self-esteem. Allowing to be restored and flow unhindered by punitive and pointless self-loathing.

We are born with self esteem, we don't know any better than to reach for love and sustenance and warmth. We need our self esteem, if we unpick it, we will have to replace it with something else and what is that likely to be? It's a false equation, it can't just go, it just creates havoc and starts to make a big mess of a person.

Just don't bother to try asking those who want you to do without it about that. I doubt they're trying it for themselves so they wouldn't know either. All they know is what they insist is supposed to happen. I'm not saying that they don't have self-esteem issues, but they are not aiming for the lack of it as a transcendent state toward self-betterment.

Yeah, sounds really stupid when you say it like that, doesn't it?

Fatty slims

Interesting times in the debate around fatness. Due to Obama's proposed health reforms and debate about the costs of obesity, one of the many comments which caught my eye was something about-because fat people can't lose weight, they are saying it can't be done.

As usual, arguing a point that is not being made. Often unsaid in all this is that slim people are also 'fatter' than they used to be. If you don't believe me, ask a woman of a certain age say late 30's plus, or her male equivalent, who's been a size 8 (or equivalent) for at least 20 or even 15 years, and has stayed at that weight/size, if their size is the same as now.

If you listen to them, they'll tell you how hard it is to get clothes now compared to the relatively recent past. Increasingly some of them are falling off the lower end of sizing. Some question whether we are fatter or that much fatter than we used to be.

I can understand their scepticism, we should question everything about the crisis as a matter of course. As for me I don't doubt it, we are fatter. Though eyes can deceive to an extent we look fatter/ bigger and more robust. We are definitely taller. And though fashions have changed, more favour baggy clothes, I find it difficult to tell by looking what size people are, in a way I never did before.

It's as if we are more uniform in overall appearance. The sizes blend together in a way they didn't before. I suspect a major part of this is exercise culture it makes people look more alike.

Our underlying shape has changed too, over the last decade or more women seem to have added inches to our waists. I've never been sure how much of this is due to the abandonment of corsetry or girdles as their more elasticated latter versions were called. Girdles were like control pants but thicker and more controlling! I suspect they trained women's waists in and some of the thickening of waists is about the absence of that compression.

Then there are other factors such as better nutrition and even the effects of stress on women as expectations have changed from the past.

Of course bigger doesn't necessarily mean fatter as in fat but hey, I don't make the rules, weight is the defining measurement of BMI not ratio of fat cells.

There are more of the fattest people around, there are more fat people around, but also more slim people are closer to a BMI of 25 than ever before. Presumably some of that's ageing as weight tends toward an upward incline with age.

There is a point of view which says, fat people are fatter, but slim people are more or less the same. I would have thought that would leave a gap between fatter and slimmer.

Obviously, I'm mainly going by eye, and I'm aware that that has to be treated with caution. But I know that the skinny people I used to see quite regularly when I was a child, are rarely if ever to be found, today. It's as if the conditions that made them have gone, as we've gotten healthier.

Kate Harding's blog did an interesting project using pictures of various people from all the BMI categories and what they actually looked like. The focus was on plump and fat people, how we couldn't tell by sight who had a BMI of 25 or 30 plus. That tacitly makes the point that if slim people looked more distinct then,  you'd by default be able to tell more easily what a BMI of 25 plus looked like.

Clearly, the overweight categorization has the biggest has also grown, it probably contains a lot of slim people who just don't "weigh" slim. Some people look slim at BMI 30, some look plump or even fat below that.

In the end, if dieting exercise and all that was so good merely requiring discipline, who's supposed to be more "disciplined" in this scenario than than slim people? Surely they'd be all be getting a bit thinner (they've got a little room) and the ranks of the "overweight" would have *thinned out too.

* Weight based pun alert.