Root Cause Fallacy

Before following the last post on slimming/'obesity' industries conceptual flaws, I'd like to mention another cognitive flub. This is Jacquie Lavin again on weight loss surgery,

The message we are giving to young people.........is that they don’t really need to do anything, so long as they get to a certain weight, because it will be solved for them. 

That's exactly what it's like to be slim!

The whole reason cutting a person's stomach out is a more effective means of enforcing starvation is precisely that it is a step closer in impersonating a body maintaining its own weight. Though choosing to damage bodies rather than alter function.

Dieting is wholly artificial, another one of its multi-layered dysfunctions. That's not how the overwhelming number of slim people are slim. If this offends as a slur against the shift slim people put in to retain their figures. It may make you feel better to know that fat people put just as much if not way more effort whilst remaining and re-gaining fatness.

No? Doesn't cheer you up at all? Tough crowd.

Slim people responding with aversion and disgust at any mention of dieting, along with audible groans shows our shared antipathy toward dieting. When fat people show this, 'tis another "that's why you're fat" trope.

If slim people already lived on a diet, their aversion to any aspect of calorie restriction would not have aided a society determined to fill itself with exactly the kind of things that counter the calorie restriction contrivance. 

A central fallacy of the current 'obese' crusade is that fat people are slim people plus a carelessly acquired excess. In truth, fatness is to fat people, what slimness is to slim people.

The(ir) norm.

To make a fat person slim via this abnormal and pathological means requires the disruption of normal with the abnormal not the removal of pathology as is presented. That applies more or less the same whether a person is sick or well.

If you want to make a fat person slim, you need to recruit the body's metabolism instead of launching an assault on it.

So, about this fallacious notion of "a root cause of obesity"

Nor does it address why you’re overeating* in the first place.”

"It" refers to surgery.

Williams too backs this fanciful idea of root cause,

Surgery, of course, doesn’t get to the root cause of why so many young Britons get fat in the first place: the proliferation of fast food outlets in deprived areas, sugary drinks and high-fat, high-sugar foods, poverty, fall-off in physical education in schools, the rise of a sedentary lifestyle and the allure of computer games and laptops.

Most of this is systemic or part of a societal drift. None of it offers the individual power to affect the functioning of their own body. This is integral to the calorie restriction/'obesity' politic.

I'd describe the root cause fallacy here as the assumption that something has a direct provable cause and that any purported reversal or treating of this root cause will undo said thing. In this case weight.

The variables involved edge it out of the realms of scientific legitimacy, whether its the cause, the treatment of it-let alone whether that can be said to work in any objective or measurable way. Proposers of this could make a case if they tested it on people. Identify this so called root cause in them, treat it according to what is supposed to treat that,  then record weight as it goes into reverse, as a result. Without the imposition of calorie restriction.

The real motive for this is to excuse away the failure of calorie restriction. You're struggling with dieting because you want to be fat in order to avoid rape/because you're afraid to be slim/because you eat your feelings etc.,

In case this is overlooked, the idea of insisting people can only change their bodies as a side effect of societal change is wholly objectionable.

This idea of cause comes from fatness as a construct not as a reality. There's no singular isolatable "root cause" of being fat. It is not a fat suit on a slim body. Weight is the outcome of mechanics.

The usual story; precursor to fat =cause. i.e. "Circumstantial change meant less activity, and I gained weight" is typical. Yet, if the same happens and you stay the same weight. You don't feel, "I've maintained my physique due to becoming less active."

When builders are fat, they don't say, "My active job has put on weight"

Any precursor that doesn't go; did less and/or ate more and put on weight, is nowhere. Despite the opposite often being a precursor to gain. How do you prove this apart from after the fact fitting into the 'obesity' narrative as usual?

And the reverse to loss. i.e. You stopped working so hard, doing so much, caring so much and weight reversal followed.

Imagine being told you have to get over some adverse experience in order to be allowed any medical procedure? No doctor would dare demand such, few would want to.

.....the search for a root cause is usually a witch-hunt in disguise, trying to find someone or something to blame. If you think there is really a single cause, you eventually must identify a single person. If you stop short of that, everyone knows the process was a farce. But blaming a person is also a farce. Everyone knows that someone’s being thrown under the bus and that wasn’t the real problem.

Ain't that the truth! 

Check out the solution,

There are several solutions to this dilemma. One is to stop looking for a single root cause, and instead identify the system of conditions or dysfunctions that jointly caused the observed problem.

Systemic, understand the way the system supporting the thing observed creates it. Funny how that's almost never an "obesity research" goal. Always the bad sociology.

This allows something constructive to come out of the postmortem, instead of inexorably bringing pressure to bear on a well-meaning person who will then be sacrificed to appease the false gods of reductionist blame-gaming.

 Tell us about it. 

* ["Overeating" has no meaning beyond whatever any fat person eats whether that's famine or feast.]