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.

*💩

Fear and Loathing

Fat generates fear and loathing, and it's not about looks or the supposed Darwinian reverence for beauty, heath et al. "Obese mannequins are selling women a dangerous lie". It's a (true) burden we must all endure, trying to work out what the hell ob cultists are going on about at any one time. We are told we must "treat" ourselves with exercise.

Your GP can advise you about losing weight safely by eating a healthy, balanced diet and regular physical activity.

Presumably one might wear stuff created for such exertions promoted as the primary weapons of war. You have to remember the 'obesity' construct and its cult, including its continued promotion of CRIWL-calorie restriction induced weight loss, requires the suspension of critical (and moral) faculties. This leads people to display something akin to trance logic,

An altered mental state in which a person’s normal capacity for critical analysis is suspended, and an increased level of logical inconsistencies is tolerated...the alternate thinking process that enables ideas that would be paradoxical to the conscious self to peacefully coexist within the mind

See what I mean?

I fear that the war on obesity is lost, or has even, as is fashionable, ceased to exist, for fear of upsetting people into an early grave.

We're talking about weight change, war is not required, all that is, is to find out how to reset the body's destination with regard to its (homeostatic) restoration of its own mass. Put simply, a way to use the body to alter weight, that works. Is that Tanya's complaint? Quackery continuing in place of science, about what a disgrace that is? 

Nike Inc, the multinational company named after the Greek goddess of victory, has introduced plus-sized mannequins to its flagship store in London to “celebrate the diversity and inclusivity of sport”. They wear the famous Nike tick, which says: welcome to the mainstream.

Okay, she's talking about the un or dis-easing of fat people to the point where it surpasses the dis-easing of (repeating) the same pathological and doomed experiment of weight loss dieting. This un-easing consists mostly of; medicalisation, pathologisation, bullying, insulting, punishing, condemning, silencing and hiding the existence of people above a certain size. Tanya feels this mannequin represents a violation of those well-known medical tools. Why isn't she prepared to state this clearly?

I would never want a woman to hate herself for what she finds in the looking-glass.  

She can't bear to think of herself as the type of person who would seek to make women unhappy on account of their looks. 

Advertising has always bullied women, but this is something more insidious. I have watched the spindly, starved creature – the child ballet dancer – who was, for many years, the accepted ideal, walking down the Paris runways in so much make-up you could miss the signs of malnutrition. It was an ideal designed to induce enough self-hatred that women would shop to be rid of it.

Always bullied, really? Not, welcomed them to the "mainstream"? You know I've never found this sort of rhetoric remotely plausible, not even when I first heard it as a child. Then I assumed I'd catch on eventually. Not so. 

My view is simpler, advertisers strive to shift the product of those who pay them. Haute Couture is well known to be a province of middle and upper class folk. Fashion uses thin models to sell their clothes as female curves were felt to distract from the rags they display. In terms of its mores, its an outgrowth of middle and upper class sentiments and ideals, of what they aspire to be.

Middle and upper class [slim] women complain about this by shooting the messenger, thin women and their bodies, but what they're really complaining about is not winning at thinning. They don't want to dismantle this system of "unattainable bodies", they want to win at being the it-girl. They're uneased about that so they re-route their complaint. Rather than examine their own feelings.

If this is about poor old innocent women being made unhappy bad men in advertising, why does the notion of having something that works for all women not really interest these complainers? Winning wouldn't be exclusive then would it? You can see this in the elitism of Tanya types in her desperately trying to have her celery and munch it too, trying to be underhand in exhorting everyone to keep fat women in their place, hidden.  

This sort of argument as it is presented is dead on its auto-dialled arse. Fat phobia is ruthlessly exposing it and others,

Recovery depends not on...... personal responsibility and seeing the truth.

Personal responsibility and seeing the truth eh? What's personally responsible about insisting your mind is in the control of advertisers? That they dictate your view of yourself? If you are so personally responsible, why don't you own your mind? Either you like the perfume etc., advertised, or you don't. If you do buy it-through personally responsibly earning sufficient funds- if you dont, leave it be. 

Why are you so oppressed by images folks trying to sell you stuff use? I'm waiting for you to tell me again in a way that doesn't require you to do/be the opposite of what you insist fat women are/are failing to be. Have at it TanTan.

the truth is not so pretty; it is unease that sells clothes and bags and perfume and cosmetics as redemption

What uneases you, eases us? Presumably that is the distance between refinement and erm, being as common as fat. How does feminism make sense if women differ so fundamentally?

The fat-acceptance movement, which says that any weight is healthy if it is yours, is no friend to women, even if it does seem to have found a friend in Nike.

FAM says pretty much what Tanya said in her 2008 piece, "In defence of our fatties, let them eat cake".

For many months now, it has been clear that I'm at war with society. Or rather, that society is at war with me. Call me paranoid if you must but everywhere I look, I am denounced, oppressed and scolded. According to the advertising industry, I am unattractive; men don't want me. Or if they do, they certainly won't tell their friends about it. Clothing shops don't cater for me. In fact, they detest me. In Bond Street, I am literally waved away from the racks of precious clothes.

Well.....

...the Kim Kardashian body – was even weirder, and worse. It’s both fat and thin – a pornographic body designed by gamers – and, if you are mad enough to want it, is only really achievable by surgery and sleeping in the gym.

Those hating fat women's bodies invariably like to go in hard on other women's bodies-they're demonstrating their fairness. Word to them, spreading your mysognist gaze to other bodies, isn't saving you. I mean, "pornographic body"? Your guess is as good as mine.

She obviously does want FAT women to hate themselves for what they see in the looking glass. That doesn't sound good at all. It would be bad enough if you said you wanted women to hate themselves on account of their looks. Picking out specific women somehow sounds like trying to creep through a squeaking door. The feminist notion of "sisterhood" ergo, all women and feminism itself is on the ropes.

But to have control over your body you must first know it; to be oblivious is not to be happy, unless you are a child.

Oblivious to what hun? It's called FAT acceptance, is thin now spelled f-a-t?

To know your body is not by any means to hate it, Tanya knows this, but how to advocate for women to be pressed into doing something by making them feel like shit about themselves until they keep doing it: for some, whilst complaining any such discomfiture oppresses women, without seeming to be a sell-out biche?

Dear o' lorrr, it's a conundrum I don't envy. 

Suffice it to say again, this could all be avoided by finding the proper way to alter bodyweight rather than trying to uphold discomfort to drive people into repeating failure and deepening despair. But people like Tanya don't seem to want that either.

"Obese is a Slur"

Well, I can co-sign this "Obese is a Slur". There was a time when I wanted to avoid it. The last thing fatz need is the non-term 'obesity' being weaponised as an insult. That was an error of judgement on my part. I hoped peddlers of this crap would take it back, as they were the ones who released it deliberately to brand people, straight-jacketing them into a fictionalised identity.

Would you know, they don't give a damn. In their arrogance, they're just going to keep branding people the with 'obese'. In that case one has to proceed on those terms and make the best of things.

Yes, haters will probably latch on to it as a term of abuse, and yes, these 'ob' shitheads will come with another weasel word if they have to, sad, but okay, if in the meantime this particular foul coinage is dragged through the dirt, so be it. Let these quacks put in something of a shift for once.

Allowing 'obese' to be the slur that it represents will hopefully convince more people to distance themselves from it. It may even spark in them the urge to defend themselves from the cult as a whole, in ways that still don't make sense to many. And maybe, just maybe that will make it easier for people to distance themselves from the whole 'obesity' canard all together. Even going so far as to recognise that it has nothing to do with anyone but those bandying it around.

'Obesity', not simply the term, but everything that goes with it, is like going out of your house to realise it is surrounded by water, as in the midst of a flood. You have to wade through the water, so to speak to get in and out of your home. Your body and mind adapts to these conditions-this changes you-that's internalisation [the changes below your conscious awareness]. But one thing you know above all else is that this water, though surrounding you, though everyone's talking about it, pointing to it, using it as the basis for discussion-did not come from you/your body.

It's all outside you, it does not represent you.

You can tell this about 'obesity' by the fact that it does not describe your life. It doesn't respond to or even name your needs. It does not react to your feelings no matter how vivid, rational and evident they are. It only reacts to the feelings of those who expect us to submit slavishly and serve it.

It is a cult, because a cult, unlike even religion seeks to replace your own thoughts, with the ones it wants you to have. The 'obesity' cult, has always erased your real experience, along with any sense that weight is an aspect of your experience which has made an impression on your intellect and psyche.

Instead crusaders expect to dictate what those are and you should memorise them, speak them out as if they have something to do with you. Speaking the untruth to empower them. They literally use you to always be talking to themselves.

That's the real slur.