Saturday 27 August 2011

Proportion control

The alternative universe that is calorie fixation spews up a lot of babble to support its suspended reality. Terms that hold little or no meaning over and above expressing its misdirected rationale.

One premier fallacy is the idea that the body has little internal self-regulation of appetite, hunger (or body weight). Hunger by the way is about the amount you need to fuel you and appetite is what you need that to contain. According to them, people "mindlessly" eat whatever's in front of them without any regard to any internal dictates or requirements indicated by rising sense of satisfaction peaking in fullness and satiety.

Nor does any amount people eat ever have any affect on what they may eat later on. So for instance if someone eats a lot at lunch, they'll eat that has no effect on the amount they'll eat at dinner. If you eat a lot at one meal, you eat more overall and forever. They then reverse that, if you can just eat inadequately, you'll not get hungry any quicker that if you'd eaten what you needed and you can of course, keep that up for ever more.

Sometimes its hard to believe we've been in thrall to this for so long, oh the desperate mindset of magical thinking.

The purpose of this favoured absurdity is to hide the futility of re-drawing those bounds according to inadequate or an artificially low calorie limit who's sole imperative is to induce weight loss, rather than meeting your body's needs accurately and efficiently.

This has the exact effect its supposed to be "overcoming" it disrupts your body's hunger signals and mechanisms and often weight regulation itself. If when you cry out for your needs to be met and you're short changed. You tend to make that known, don't you?

When your body does this, it is then blamed on your greed or lack of will (to resist your body's attempt to meet its requirements) or your "emotional eating" / "eating disorder"/ "addiction". Either way, this disruption is caused by you, not the imposition of their cultism.

This shaky grasp of the purpose, point and nature of the necessity of eating and food, forms the basis of terminology.

One of their faves is "portion control".

It refers to controlling your appetite and intake by eye because the real control cannot be trusted to starve you sufficiently. The inflexible and inadequate calorie "allowance" strictures don't relate to the varied nature of  what you are served in the real world.

Now they have calorie counted menus, that is probably next. Restaurants and other eating establishments will have to weigh each serving every time and check the total is acceptable to the haphazard, though gravely delivered faddists. Exact righteous blocks of calorie allowance must me  served at all times by everyone.

Yet, with all this control which is of course supposed to be innate in slimz, why so little sense of proportion about the extent to which you will demonize fatness and fat people, in order to support and manipulate your own behaviour?

Portion control is supposed to be an understanding of how all the pieces of a picture fit together. How one part affects the other that is knock on effects. In other words, a sense of proportion. So if we are expected to believe that the portion controllers have so much of this, why do is their demonization of actual people and their bodies so unpleasant and ugly and so without any sense of limitation?

Just on the off chance that it might serve their ends?

Their control is no control and has the effect of robbing both dieter and fat people as their foils of real control over ourselves.

Force is always needed for so much cost to so little end.

2 comments:

  1. Too right!

    I like to say that I have my own built-in method of 'portion control'; it's called my stomach. As in, if I'm hungry, I will eat until I'm comfortably full, then stop. (The vast majority of the time, because there is almost nobody who doesn't sometimes overdo it at, say, Christmas, and I'm no exception.) And yet, it's odd how people don't believe you when you tell them this, as if the human body didn't come with its own means for recognizing satiety.

    Appetite varies. Hunger varies. And stomach sizes also vary hugely between normal individuals. I have an amazing old anatomy book tucked away in my office in the path lab, which shows some of those variations - as well as those in many other normal organs. We're as different on the inside as we are on the outside. Trouble is, unlike many other variations, these differences are seen as 'unacceptable'. Nobody is running classes to train anyone to go pee less often, or to control their breath so they can learn to need less oxygen...yet surgically reducing the size of normal healthy stomachs is now big business. Perspective as well as proportion is long overdue.

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  2. I like to say that I have my own built-in method of 'portion control'; it's called my stomach.

    Ha, ha! Exactly.

    Until those who think they are cleverer than our in-built design, can show they can do any better, some of us will just ignore them and make the best of what we do have.

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