Wednesday 19 November 2008

Dieting one and the same as weight loss?


Dieting is not the whole of weight loss. It is a an idea of (how to attain conscious controlled) weight loss.

We've been sold this pup by the weight loss diet industry and those who've brainwashed us into believing anorexia is just a lifestyle choice open to all. It stops us comparing dieting to the way our bodies lose weight naturally or as a consequence of everyday metabolic variances. Fusing the two as one, means we compare the discomfort, pain and ineffectiveness of weight loss dieting only to itself.

Think about it, we know that weight loss is part of our every day existence. Saying that we cannot lose weight is a nonsense, virtually every one does. For instance, when we get up in the morning, we weigh less than later in the day- as we are liable to have had something to eat.

We tend to weigh less in the morning, more after eating. Through the day our weight tends to vary, maybe not by much for most people. This doesn't feel like dieting, in fact, a lot of the time it doesn't trouble us unduly. The fact that this is may not be very much isn't the point, what it shows is that weight loss isn't intrinsically unpleasant, that is weight loss dieting.

Conflating the two means weight loss gets tarred with the brush of weight loss dieting's punishing nature. That helps to facilitate weight loss dieting which would seem even more senseless than it does now. It would also put pressure on those concerned to come up with better ways, as the pseudo moralism also shoring up weight loss dieting would be shown up more clearly for the tendentious nonsense it is.

Dieting as the only form of weight loss comes from the desire to deliberate lose a determined amount of weight consistently, because we cannot key into the everyday weight loss that occurs outside our will and extend it to the amounts we wish, as a matter of course. We want control and weight loss dieting offers this and that is as far as it goes.

An idea that promising what it cannot deliver. It's the desire for this weight loss, for control and agency over our bodies, that keeps us coming back to it, we have found no substitute. I say we, by this I mean us in the West, my susicions are that many societies have found ways to deal effectively with weight.

Cutting calories doesn't translate into using up fat stores, the way it's supposed to. Your metabolism has the capacity to vary the amount of calories it expends just existing -called the basal metabolic rate. It has the capacity to vary the amount and rate at which it uses up the energy available to it. That's why people, if they do lose weight, tend to lose more weight at the start of their exertions and less, a couple of weeks or so in, as their body makes it's metabolic adaptations.

The are many other things that make diet fail a multifarious and multi layered process. These have nothing whatsoever to do with the human character, will, willpower or lack of any of these. The reasons are intrinsic to the nature of dieting itself and it's effect on human biology.

A forced famine of the deathcamp or a natural disaster cannot be compared to a voluntary famine, when you know there is no reason for you to be denied what your body needs, you internal impetus will be to fight it off. If the famine is forced that isn't much of an option.

The body's unforseen response turns out to be similar, regardless of what type of famine is being imposed on it. Putting voluntary faministas on the back foot because the conscious impulse to lose weight barely counts in this. It simply isn't the most powerful factor, our survival instincts are. The expectation that the body would just acquiesce and give in to a weight loss diet has undermined beyond any reasonable doubt. And it's time to get over that and stop being bratty about it. We cannot demand biology functions according to our fantasies. This isn't a fairy tale, it's real.

Rather than people "coming off their diets" or "returning to their old habits", the ability to sustain the diet, unravels before them. Like the ability to willfully stay awake, indefinitely, unravels as you are consumed by the body's need for sleep. It just creeps up and submerges you. You cannot fight it very well because what you're fighting with is part of that instinct to fight you. It's as hopeless as it is stupid.

Our minds are part of these defence system too, something we often overlook, cruelly, as that can fool people into thinking that they are willfully having bad thoughts and are somehow mentally compromised. When it is their nervous system's recruitment of increasing areas of available brainpower that actually creates impulses that they then rationalise.


All this happens because of weight loss dieting, not weight loss per se.

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