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.

Swimming upstream

There's a post over at a day in the life expressing a lot of the frustrations of swimming against the tide. It's so easy for people to think this way, yet it can be so much harder to break up their complacency.

The emotional fall out from being a target of stigma can make you feel weak, but are we as all that? A lot of it is that we operate wholly on the premise of what is wholly antipathetic to us. We also are trying to deal in reality whereas the others have the luxury of simplistic fictions which are easy to repeat.

Truth is often elusive, hard to reach, we are seeking it and that cannot compete with the neatness of falsehood that doesn't test itself against facts, just its own constructs.

I wonder if they realise how boring it is to be them, not interpreting things for themselves receiving points of view being spoon fed by those seeking to manipulate both us and them?

The difficulty of swimming upstream is shown by those who do not, their sense of safety and security contrasts with the more vulnerable and questing hearts.

Subjective/ objective

When it comes to objecting to fat acceptance, it is often said that certain people are well meaning. This may be to distinguish them from those who are seen as most definitely not, such the weight loss diet industry, MeMe Roth etc.

I disagree, so what do I consider to be well meaning? First off, listening and hearing what the person has to say about their own experience. For instance,  an appointment with a doctor is called a consultation, not a dictation, s/he asks you what is wrong, your subjective answers, plus whatever can be observed, is filtered through the perspective of their knowledge, training and experience into an objective assessment.

It's like a piece of string, on one end is the objective-the removed observation and at the other end, is the subjective, the intimate, insider view. The objective, that which can be noted by others repeatedly and similarly, is in a way the refinement of subjectivity, now observable not just by the other, but by you. It's like a pulse of flowing data along a fibre optic cable.

The differences are in what can be seen or perceived or noticed. When you go out with your zip undone, unknowingly, anyone can observe it, objective, you can also observe it to, a subjective view of an objective fact.

Your feelings about it, you are mortified, or you find it funny, subjective. That subjectivity, can be shared invoking similar kinds of reactions in others, or other surprising ones.

The subjective informs the objective, we've all heard the doctor say, when people have x like you, they usually feel y or have response z to it. The subjective and objective have a relationship to each other, when people are not listened to, especially those having the experience, that cannot be properly understood.

If you do not want to listen, you do not wish to understand, to master, to progress, wishing to stay with what you already have, to not add to that, except perhaps on the terms of your already formed conviction.

Asking about your pain, not only where it is, but what kind, the frequency, level etc., This is drawing out subjective information, it's your pain, but how you answer helps the doctor to diagnose or confirm your condition, objectively.

There is no such thing as shunning the subjective experience and labeling it "irrelevant" or "lies" because its not what you want it to be. Any wise scholar will tell you, you can often learn far more about the group you are studying from their mistakes, errors, even lies, than you can from sketchy, objective but incomplete truth.

If fat people only lie, then interpreting those lies objectively, not false morality would be well meaning more than that, a good job.

Liz Jones knows

Excellent piece by Liz Jones. I wish women could write more often with this kind of uncompromising candour on our experiences and feelings about eating and weight.

Funnily enough, she's a writer I tend to avoid some of that is why she can write something like this. Its usually where she points her aim that causes me to give her a miss.

What her article illustrates for me is the extent to which caloric and dietary restriction can affect the way you think at a biological level, leading you to think in ways and assume attitudes that can clash with your ethical sensitivities.
 
She is at the extreme end of that, she says she is anorexic and was once hospitalized because of it. We assume this process of mental change only happens to people who have anorexia, but it clearly observable in people who believe in it as a model of how to eat-to remain slim- or to lose weight too.

Those who push dieting and dietary restriction can also be very seriously affected by similar change to their perspective, judgment and thinking.

This I believe is the primary source of fat hating.

A lot of her attitudes seem closer to those of confirmed dieters something that isn't usually heard from those with anorexia, who tend to focus on how sad it is, if not for that, this overlap would probably be more obvious. Dieting is the number one vehicle for anorexia and inducing it-as well as other eating disorders. What her piece reveals is this abuse of self fuels a lot of frustration-you can't escape yourself-which has been turned on fat people as if it is our fault that they have to put themselves through this.

The hatred and anguish against our purported gluttony, real or imagined is the fury of self denial, showing that it is far from being in control. In fact, as the appearance of 'control' tightens its grip, fat people end up being used as part of supporting that process, whether we like it or not because that person is out of control. When people hurt themselves they often feel entitled to meet their needs at the expense of others.

We are too often treated like blank Scrabble pieces. Others wish to use us or their image of us for their own purposes. It is convenient to see us as not having needs over and above serving their own, our support is meant to be food, I suppose. I'm sure that's why its so important that we eat a lot, we have to be satisfied or the use made of us would seem gratuitous.

It was only when dieting and especially dietary restriction in the form of "healthy eating" became a prevalent expectation and threat to everyone that benign and more accepting views of fat people receded. Anger replaced them and the approval of benign unquestioned authority such as medical doctors underpinned with scientific approval, gave a sense of righteousness that has helped remove restraint of showing that to fat people.

It is respectable to be staggeringly rude and abusive, any protest is seen as oversensitive, its suggested that this is something to do with why fat people are fat. It might be, but not as assumed. Deliberately distressing people is likely to add to their level of stress and woe. If that is seen as in response to what is acceptable and reasonable, it can be presented as unreasonable.

Usually writing about anorexic behaviour is an internally focused sob story seeking to distance it from weight loss dieting, this is unusual because it steps up to explore more contentious attitudes such as feelings of cleanliness and superiority, that is seen all over the crisis mentality, it is brave as its not particularly self sympathizing, in fact, not at all.

She states that she wanted to do the same as the models in magazines-she has worked in fashion for most of her career-risking seeming shallow and trivial, as a lot of people have dismissed this. But I don't feel it is, a lot of that is contempt for women really, no I feel like its about the woman you want to become. There is something about drawing your own life, represented as much by your body as about it, so intricately, through the mathematics of calorie counting that suggests a desire for security and certainty.

She has caused upset as she has not pulled her punches with regard to her feelings about fatness. I find that more forgivable than most as she has not spared herself either and given the context, I don't feel it is excessive.

What she conveys helps to explain is what is really fuelling the dark undertone of compressed fury that marks the current bullying campaign against fat people and its total lack of rationale. In this case this is against the self, therefore accountable for her actions in a way that obesity warriors are not. You will never hear such truths from them as they are self deceiving.

She I don't think is, that might be a kind of arrogance, but I can live with that.

By showing the way her feelings about calorie restriction diverge from her rational ability to assess her own behaviour as incompatible with her own ethics, she helps give real insight into how this crusade has spread, the way it can bypass the normal moral standards of those investing energy in it.

A lot of fat people wish to claim it is just instruction from above. That's about trying to find a way around the extent of coldness, it doesn't touch on the combustible power of denying yourself to fuel a hatred of fat people.

Far from the assumption that the ubiquitous fat hating of today is an extension of fat bullying of yore, it actually took a while for 'obesity' wallahs to get people on board to this extent. In fact a lot of people dismissed them and for years they couldn't give 'obesity' away (see "conclusions" at the bottom of page 105 and note the date 2001). It has always been a real Cinderella subject, which is perhaps why we know little about weight.

It's nonsense to say the crisis is deep seated.

Only when they got everyone on board with the idea of watching your weight-the idea that no matter what you weigh now, you must be doing something to prevent the possibility of fatness. We must all develop a fear fatness, the greater the better. When the amount of people on board reached a critical mass, it supports such ugliness and makes it seem OK.

In short, they've got more or less everyone on a diet, feeling like they should be on one and that this is the norm of eating which all other eating ought to be judged by, lessening every one's ability to understand what normal eating is like, which comes to seem like a disorder. The disorder becomes the norm.

That's the fury of fat hate always ready to happen, people doing it to themselves, means they can do it to us, we're alright, because we are clearly satisfying ourselves, at every one's expense.

This is what enabled it to adhere to people's minds whereas before they were somewhat indifferent or unpredictable about it. Dieting/anorexia chemistry, is what has spread and created this peculiarly aggressive strain of fat hate.

That is the glue which holds it all together.

Ask yourself, why should anyone really care so much about what anyone weighs? Do you care what slim people weigh? I know I don't, nor do I care what they eat /don't eat. You can only be made to care about that when it has a vehicle to make it personal.