Disease - Infection by a pathogen or the degeneration of an organ or system

Simple.

There is nothing to debate "What exactly is disease?" It's how words work. You use them for the meaning or definition you have attached them too. When you break this rule, words cease to work. You end up asking "What does x word mean?" The inability of medics to clearly define a term as central to their practise as disease is not simply a philosophical back and forth it is a genuine crisis.

One which should lead to an immediate reversal of the conditions that created it, which as far as I can tell is the application of said term to that which it does not define.

As for 'obesity'. The meaning of that term is in the mind of the beholden. It could pass for an opinion, but it is not a fact,

The Council on Scientific Affairs (CSA) previously addressed the issue. Based on its interpretations of definitions of disease in common use, the Council argued that it was premature to classify obesity as a disease, citing the lack of characteristic signs or symptoms due to obesity, as well as evidence of any true causal relationships between obesity and morbidity and/or mortality.

It is variously defined by its adherents as having a body mass index of 30+, weight increase, fat tissue, "excess" fat tissue with sometime addition of  such as "fat accumulation" and "that presents risk to health" et al. The real 'debate' around that remains, is this a thing? [Answer: Hardly!]

This balderhockey does not even sound like a disease, even if there was something to fit up. Promoters of this like to try to accumulate meaning into this void by seeking to pretend that there's some aching-agonistes around other actual diseases and/or they cite preceding faux diseases-the very ones that have led to disease's loss of meaning in the first place.

Psychological disease presumably-mental illness, is not disease, it's more metaphorical. I only got used to using the term on the Internet, when it became too hard to dodge. Cardiovascular disease, refers to the degeneration of an organ. Cancer is obviously a disease, but given my ignorance and that its coinage is in something of a flux,  I can say little more than it is a pathological process or processes that produce mutated cells, destroying tissues and organs, leading to their removal-like bariatric surgery does-except in the absence of any disease.

Risk factors like hypertension are not diseases, they are symptoms, one that's cause(s) are often obscure. "Frederick Akbar Mahomed". Nor is there anything "difficult" about the difference between high blood sugar a symptom and that which it is used to diagnose-diabetes, a disease. As for osteoporosis that presumably is the degeration of certain bone tissue.

Conclusions, cease and reverse the instrumentalisation of disease. Respect the importance of the term and do not give in to any entreaties to mis-use it. The term does not exist to 'recognise', validate or manipulate feelings.

Body mass is not disease, nor does it lend itself to disease as a metaphor. It cannot even be described as a symptom, unless possibly, if it is as a result of a specific pathology. Whether any amount of it can be dubbed 'healthy' or no, makes no odds to what is supposed to be the required response and that is to halt and/or reverse it.

This requires no pathologisation, medicalisation, assault or brutality. It requires a truthful understanding of metabolic function and gentle resetting of relevant functions.

Arguments come from the refusal to focus directly and solely on this rather than fiction. There can be no separation between a person and the size of that person. To pathologise weight is to pathologise the person. A person suffering from such a pronounced self-pathology would be diagnosable as suffering from a mental pathology.

This is cannot be diagnosis, this is iatrogenic or doctor induced injury.

People go to their doctor to relieve suffering, not to induce it.

The treatment for BED? Stop Calorie Restriction Dieting and Stop Pathologising Your Body/Self

American Addiction Centre's page called "Compulsive Overeating". The question with binge eating disorder has always been what is it?

...absolutely no control around food. Since many binge eaters restrict food intake...

If you are restricting your intake, then that's,  by these people's notion "control".

The snake swallows its tail after first slithering toward something getting hold of it in its teeth. The intensity of pursuit narrows its peripheral vision until it ends up biting its own tail. The cycle is complete and is able to perpetuate itself.

With anorexia-restriction, circuitry around the response to hunger seems to weaken and /or the circuitry around blocking is activated and becomes powerful. An ever decreasing vortex of response ensues.

With binge/purge-restricting certain foods, increases appetite for them til that becomes irresistible creating panic leading to a salvaging action of purging stomach contents (aspire assist) this reduces/threatens to reduce energy intake, which increases hunger function to compensate for lack or prospect of it. A cycle is established.

Then you have binge eating disorder, 

...defined as consuming large amounts of food within a two-hour period at least twice a week without purging, accompanied by a sense of being out of control.

That's not a cycle. Also, the equivalent of "purging" is the restriction beforehand. It's a reversal of binge/purge, instead its restrict/restore. One step forward, one step back.

That this is not really an eating disorder like anorexia or binge/purge is confirmed by this startling piece of information: "...an issue that’s remarkably responsive to treatment.." EDs aren't remarkably responsive to what passes for "treatment", because that doesn't consist of any technique that does the job of restoring response to hunger.

Responsivity to "change the way they think about and consume food" is a voluntary action. The whole point of a disorder is it has become involuntary, that's why people ask for, or end up in hospital needing help.

I've usually struggled to grasp what BED advocates were getting at, the coinage contains different cross currents of hunger and other metabolic dysfunction. The addiction folk don't get it, for them-eating=thinking. They want to fit it into their model. "...they think of food in addictive terms."  "They’re obsessed with food..." Obsessed with food is those using the diet-weight hypothesis;

...unusual relationship with food. ...they think about food...they gorge on food... ...change the way they think about and consume food. ...a great deal of food.. ...hidden foods and/or food wrappers. ...unaware of the smell or the taste of the foods... 

That's the first 6-7 paragraphs, excluding all references to eat, eating and binge. 

Food. Food, food, food, food, food, food, ........................foooooood. Food. Dammit. Foooooood. Once you step back from all this and you really begin to feel the senseless obsessiveness of it all.

From BED advocates descriptions, I'd realised it's probably an effect of chronic calorie restriction dieting. As I said, there is no yo-yo dieting, dieting is the yo-yo. If it takes at all, this heightened hunger is one reason why it doesn't.  

I had to reserve judgement in case I was missing something. They also vigorously denied this link.

Since many binge eaters restrict food intake during the day and binge at night, the goal is to get them to eat three meals a day and a snack.

Those who treat eating disorders use duress and pressure to get some restoration of a person's hunger response. Getting someone to eat three meals a day is hardly that. It's more like someone who hasn't been eating properly.

Despite "diet culture" etc., people still cannot grasp that calorie restriction dieting is inherently unbalanced. Including if not especially people who should know better by now. This may come as a surprise given the insistence that "weight loss" is an absolute no-no due to continued conflation of that with cal res dieting. 

Seems (dieting induced) weight loss is totally bad, but dieting itself can be good, so much so, that this gets in the way of perceiving the unbalancing effects of dieting. "Good dieting" is when your body overcomes the assault, not the the nature of the assault itself.

If you smoked furiously for a few years, stopped and your body did not succumb to any related probs later. That's not "good smoking" that's your body's operations standing up to that pressure. As they are designed to do but cannot in every instance.

I've put it out there that the "obesity diagnosis" is not compatible with mental health, it is an assault on it, not the "drug addiction movement" [no such thing]. Freudian slippage on "fat acceptance movement" there. Addicts do not reverse their dependence, they go through withdrawal, that doesn't demand much transferable skill.

This sort of linking of fatness to various pathologies seeks to use your acceptance of terms supposedly embedded in our psyche. Usually to do with finessing professional failures as the way its supposed to be, up to an including letting people die -yes, what Michael Buerk said. 

Whether or not one can be fully cured of binge eating depends on one’s definition of “cured.” 

That'd be normal hunger function, which is of course not their aim because they're not charged with solving anything. What they've forgotten is the current targets of their theatre are. If something is "remarkably responsive to treatment.." treatment which consists of voluntary action of stopping cal res dieting and the pathologising of yourself and your body-should fully 'cure' it.

Treatment often begins with efforts to recognize distorted, all-or-nothing thinking .....

Like;

Normal people don’t consume 4,500 calories worth of food in one sitting, or order takeout for four when dining alone. 

Yeah they do, it's the function, not the person. See how journalist generalised from the specific, typical all or nothing thinking, like 'obesity', which because someone else feels some way about your size, the whole of you must be defined by that feeling.

Metabolism, Glands, Bones, Blood, Cells, Digestion, Nerves....

In its 'obesity' overview -"the term describes a person who is very overweight, with a lot of body fat", the NHS tells us;
"Risks of obesity" are,

Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, some types of cancer , such as breast and bowel cancer and stroke....depression.

That should be post menopause breast cancer, but what's a small AM/PM detail?
"Other obesity-related problems" - "Obesity can cause a number of further problems, including difficulties with daily activities and serious health conditions."

breathlessness, increased sweating, snoring, difficulty doing physical activity, often feeling very tired, joint and back pain, low confidence and self-esteem, feeling isolated.....depression.

It continues, "Being obese can also increase your risk of developing many potential serious health conditions, including:

type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, atherosclerosis (where fatty deposits narrow your arteries), which can lead to coronary heart disease and stroke, asthma, metabolic syndrome, a combination of diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, several types of cancer....bowel...breast...womb, gastroesophageal reflux disease (GORD), where stomach acid leaks out of the stomach into the gullet, gallstones, reduced fertility, osteoarthritis, a condition involving pain and stiffness in your joints, sleep apnoea, a condition that causes interrupted breathing during sleep, which can lead to daytime sleepiness with an increased risk of road traffic accidents, as well as a greater risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, liver and kidney disease, pregnancy complications, such as gestational diabetes

Got that? Metabolism, glands, blood, cellular reproduction, digestion, nervous system. Better watch out! Being human is a serious condition, it can cause all sorts of problems, difficulties and diseases.

Clapped

Time after time over the years I have wondered, whenever I hear, usually a white middle/upper class girl/woman say of anorexia, binge/purge etc., stuff (exactly) like;

...it became a coping mechanism.... a safety valve, a way to comfort and forget..

They call it an "illness", currently insist it is "a serious mental health condition" and so on. I just assumed it was a cultural mode of expression. I have never related, nor found it particularly convincing, but what was, was that these people really want to keep saying this. Okay. I am not every woman. The problem came when this particular stripe of womanhood decided that they could impose this as the universal human standard, regardless of whether it is alienatingly meaningless or not.

That's a problem.

To me, eating or hunger disorders, over and above spontaneous development, are some of the consequences of inducing weight loss via calorie restriction. This leads the body to react and adapt to this triggering if it's sufficiently persistent. It is this adaptation that takes the triggering from voluntary to involuntary status. Where it can't just be stopped, some or all of it has to be dismantled to break the dynamic or cycle.

I exclaimed loudly when I came across this;

Bruch has proposed that eating disorders (obesity and anorexia nervosa) are caused by an inability to differentiate between bodily sensations and emotional states. 

Floored.

Obese persons are viewed as having a faulty awareness of physiological hunger, so that emotional states are mislabelled as hunger; this leads to an excessive intake of food.

Wow.

Schachter's theory consists of two hypotheses. The 'external hypothesis' states: ....there is growing reason to suspect that the eating behaviour of the obese is relatively unrelated to any internal gut state, but is, in large part, under external control; that is, eating behaviour is initiated and terminated by stimuli external to the organism. 

His 'internal hypothesis' states: The relationships are quite the reverse for the normal subject; his eating behaviour seems directly linked to an internal state but relatively unaffected by the external circumstances surrounding the eating routine and ritual.

~"The Experimental Psychology of Obesity" Orland W. Wooley, Susan C. Wooley

There it is.

This is what people keep repeating, this is what 'binge eaters' want in on. All this self-declamatory insistence was the product of someone's hypothesising. I'm beginning to wonder if anything people say in this area is a more or less direct report and reading of their experience.

This never occurred, so heartfelt and emphatic are people. You must explain your experience this way, you're experience will be explained to you this way. Everywhere you go people up to the most virulent trolls, concerned and not voice this sentiment.

You cannot escape it, it is the lore, you must be; "eating your feelings" or "eating for comfort". Well here, it, is. Emotional eating, comfort eating. Here's the root.

Suffice to say, I'm no more impressed than before, but at least I have a better sense of the why.

'Obesity' Cult Fatigue?

Michael Buerk's agent provocatoosie act, "Leave couch potatoes alone!" rests on the same diet=weight hypothesis as everyone else, at one time or another. The gist is, fat people die early saving the NHS money, people, let them!

The freedom to make bad choices is what personal autonomy, indeed democracy is all about. Give them the facts to make informed decisions by all means, "nudge" all you like, but in the end - leave the couch potatoes alone. They're weak, not ill. 

If what he said was true, that's pretty much the same position as we have for alcoholics and drug addicts. If they cannot stop drugging or drinking, much easier than a dieting life sentence, their fate is left to how long their bodies can hold out.

This is how body mass has been explained to us all. The diet=weight hypothesis as it was called. The issue is with the lie. If he'd been taught the truth; that body mass is the product of healthy functioning and altering it requires us to find pathways to adjust said function. I daresay he'd have no objections to scientific pursuit of how to achieve this.

But he hasn't.

Now, he's being offered the 'debate' point, he's given his answer-based on what 'obesity' peddlers have told him-that fatz are just bon viveur type self indulgists or even sad sacks clinging to life through living to eat [not eating to live!!!]

This latest episode in the on-going 'obesity' psyche drama is part of white coated professionals campaign to more invasively medicalise body mass, seeking to draw people to their doctor with a view to getting a diet plan from a nutritionist, drugs, injections, and mutilation as a way of saving their obviously failed calorie restriction model. They've realised we're disillusioned with endless repeatition of this failure-even if they aren't, yet wish us to carry on regardless. The only way is to be part of pressing this failure more directly;

Whether the treatment involves diets, drugs, starvation, psychotherapy, self-help groups, exercise programmes, or hormones therapists have been unable to cause many persons to lose weight.

From 1975, but it could be 1875 or even the tenth century.

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

How much do you think they wish they could lock us up? To an extent, cutting out your healthy organs replaces the need.

What has happened in response to this jiggery-pokery is something I certainly didn't see coming. Buerk is not simply arguing against their admitted LIE of disease. He's showing distinct and palpable signs of fatigue. Parallel to the kind of fatigue I and other conscious fatz went through which brought us to a desire for acceptance.

In his own way, he's basically accepting fatness, as he's been told it is. The illusion of slim through dietary glory is shattered. Given he's been told, it is science that BMI 30+ is pathology and the only possible way to reverse this is starving and exercise purging, he's vocalised what is the underlying logic of not solving a deadly issue with something that works. Everyone's on board with this non-achieving canard.

Even when I ask the kindest, nicest, cleverest people, "Why don't we just get on and find something that actually works?" Most seem non-plussed, having real trouble grasping my point. As if I suggested pissing on the roses, "Why, what good does that do?"

What does pursuing a proper grasp of how the body actually works along with ways and means to target that which would positively alter its metabolic course? I can but imagine, literally.

His answer to - Let's all LIE;

Doctors are calling it a national emergency and many think that by declaring it a disease, it will reduce the stigma of fatness and encourage people to seek treatment. 

Is;

They're wrong on almost every count. 

He's read the(ir) science on fat genes and read its conclusion, which is physiological differences make nowhere near as much difference as people yearn for. For the record, I'm not a supporter of fat genes. So that's that. He's not making that up, he's reading "obesity science" put out there by those calling him out on their own conclusions.

He's said, nah. Stick with, fatz eat too much and need to do less of that and move more. "Complex factors" just aren't doing it for the likes of Michael Buerk. Well, if you insist on turning biology into a vox populi.

As for me, I'm on the horns of a dilemma. I don't like being pressed into yet another role that isn't me. The role of drunkard without booze, druggist sans drugs. My autonomy is lost to being defined in terms of pathology, without the ability to speak on my own behalf and refute such charges.

The 'obesity' cult exists to shut down and replace my internal subjectivity through a dubious grouping of weight classes. I signed on to be slim, and move on. I did not get what I expected, proper means of achieving that end from professionals who claimed to have such, so no autonomy there either.

I would like that autonomy to be available for anyone who needs or wants to have genuine choice. I doubt people like Buerk will succeed in derailing this wretched farce with their opinings. And note, how the public is following professionals' blather, not the other way around.

But if this reaction could go so far as turning 'obesity' sanctioned interference into a bit of a non-starter, could that clear the way for metabolic function to be placed properly under real scientific inquiry?

It's a long shot, but frankly, if people like Buerk could halt 'obesity' cultists in their tracks leading to them being thrown out of the NHS and government influence, that would be an immense service to those of us watching this repellent charade continue purely on the rank driving it. Sucking up funds like a true dipso.

As long as that cleared the way for starting with the way the body actually works.

Politics

Well well well, there's me doodling on twitter and look what I found-from a side route. "Anorectic drugs: use in general practice" From, wait for it, 1976, nevermind 'obesity' this and that from the 1990's. The so called "obesity' spike" as it was called was predicted from the mid-70's, as I've repeatedly stated before it was said to have occurred, in about 1979.

And hasn't the slimming industry done a sterling "preventative" job of preventativating 'obesity'? Let's hava blast in the past;

The treatment of obesity is one of the major measures available today in the field of preventive medicine. In particular, the coronary epidemic of Western civilisation would be halted, and most cases of maturity-onset diabetes prevented, if obesity were to be treated effectively.

Yes, yes unicorns will fart rainbows, cancer and all other health problems will be solved if we can just "treat" a body mass of 30+, and not the kind of treat you like. At the same time, there's a certain sobriety to D. Craddock's abstract.

Anorectic drugs act mainly on the satiety centre in the hypothalamus to produce anorexia.

Satiety centre? That sort of talk has come back as new hasn't it? This time its just the brain. To produce anorexia eh? Possibly referring to the absence of hunger, which is the literal meaning of anorexia. The direction being the relationship between hunger and intake.

No 'lifestyle' bollox, no emo-fee fee shit, do you know what some twerp said the other week? Fatz eat to "numb our feelings", as an Irvine Welsh character might say, gittayfuq. Notice how our friend talks about the way the body actually functions, in '76, are you telling me "science" has forgotten about the endocrine system's interaction with the human nervous system? Or vice versa.

Not only that though;

Most of the drugs are related directly or indirectly to amphetamine and in addition act by increasing general physical activity.  

The urge to be active can also be increased through neural manipulation, like not being pressed into the total conviction that you're the literal representation of physical ineptitude. Not that I'm a fan of drugs, certainly not speed-this makes you wonder how many fat people have been subjected to diet drugs and what if any effect this may have had. The principle is that we need to learn how to use our system(s) better.

Certainly though, attacking and demoralising people isn't the way to increase the urge to move.

There is a direct relationship between the way we use our minds, imagination and our neural structures, we can use that as a launch pad to learn to alter our function using our own mind. But not with this crude circle of exortation.

This is somewhat of a testament to the way this quack crusade has gotten beyond any real urge to merely slenderise and is about something else entirely. It's become an outlet for the exercise of power. In other words, it is highly politicised and that's what its about. Politics.

Finesse Fail

Clarifying something I touched on in "Do Nothing Culture", breaking the phenomena into 3 sections makes it easier to reference, recognise and discuss.

1. Represents the Solution. 
2. Represents the Focal Point. 
3. Represents the Result.

Number 1. The Solution, refers to the method being applied to resolve; Number 2. The Focal Point. Number 3. the Result is the outcome of applying number 1 to number 2.

The "Do Nothing" I was referencing is when the proposed "solution" is more important than the actual result of applying it to no.2 the focal point. The result, in the case of failure, partial or total, has to be finessed. That is, made to look as if it hasn't failed.

Usually by diverting attention back to the focal point, redefining it in terms of the result. For example, insisting that it is disease ["call for obesity to be reclassified as disease", "The AMA declared alcoholism was an illness in 1956", "Disease Model of addiction"] or a very serious complex disease "obesity: a chronic relapsing disease* process". Either or alongside this, there tends to be the conveyance of a message that, the this is how things are supposed to be or there's no alternative to no.1. 

The sticking point with the solution is often cultural in nature, whether it's the kind of healing disciplines available, or some idea in the society at large of what the focal point signifies, or how to treat it. For example, no.1 can be more of a punishment, or test or rite of passage that must be negotiated, regardless of practicalities.

The FF tactic tends to be going strongest in fields that do not study an objectively material subject. For example, mental health, psychiatry, psychology study the mind, which is a construct, not say, a distinct organ or system.

The imperative behind FF is usually to shore up number 1 as a viable solution, to keep it in play.

Finesse fail differs from the scientific method, as that tends to centre around through investigation of the focal point, number 2, without fear or favour. This means solutions tend to arise out of observations gleaned from this. When the solution is applied, the results feedback into correcting, altering, jettisoning, the solution. Progress is through this self-correction.

Funnily enough, fat people have also been conditioned into such kind of rigour, in the sense that we held ourselves and are held to that account for the outcome of applying the solution to the focal point. The failure of dieting was regarded as our failure to spare dieting and keep it in play.

Finesse Fail leads to an open-ended cycle of repetition of the said 'solution', this repetition becomes a way of life or "lifestyle", an identity even, where those repeating can claim to be "in recovery" until they age out of it usually in middle age. "Most people with addiction simply grow out of it",

The idea that addiction is typically a chronic, progressive disease* that requires treatment is false, the evidence shows. Yet the ‘ageing out’ experience of the majority is ignored by treatment providers and journalists.

Time can deliver some finesse of its own.

*💩