Rebellion?

Something has always narked the heck out of me, our body's defences resist dietary manipulation/ restriction and it is repeatedly defined as rebellion. Rebellion against what? It's an automatic response to the threat of unmet needs, part of our survival instincts.

If someone comes at you hands raised like they're going to strike you, your instinctive response is to throw up your arms to shield yourself. Does that make you an iconoclast? Because you aren't just standing there with your chin up to give them a better shot?

Yes, I understand that;

a)  If you were rebellious person you might be more likely to defend yourself

and;

b) Impulses are read through the filter of our deeply held beliefs, we interpret through them. Hence creation of literature, art, culture, or the variety of eye witness testimony etc.,

But its the source of this interpretation that gets on my nerves. It rests on the assumption that calorie theory is as reasonable as it seems in our minds therefore our bodies reaction to it must be judged on that basis as disobedient.

This is nonsense. How can we judge the way the body by the way we've been taught it works, treating the way it actually does as if it requires an explanation that is about breaking the rules? Who's rules? Not its rules so how can it reacting the only way it can overwhelmingly be rebellious?

I know that when some of us are lectured about food we get a sharp and distinct urge to eat verboten food. Even that though is a subjective impression, what we are really responding to is the threat to our ability to nourish ourselves.

When sources of food demonized by healthists are a useful source of nourishment-due to our training in mindlessly obeying invasive dietary diktats, mention of these foods translates into our experience of the withdrawal of these foods, ergo some get the urge to eat them.

I must admit I don't but then my history is a bit unconventional and I don't heart food as such, though I feel quite averse to any food hate.

This doesn't mean we can't change or make conscious adaptations to our diet, quite profound ones in fact. It just means we should try starting from the way our bodies actually function, rather than an incomplete abstraction our conscious brain has fixated on.

Probably because it gets the starring role.