Thursday 31 March 2016

Real Before and After

Ashleigh Shackleford's two-fingers at the "before" and "after" meme reminded me of the mis-directed desire to display the shift from surrender to the 'obese' construct to embracing your being.

Instead of pretending fatness is a choice, when it rarely is.

This is a better way.

There needs to be more disrupting of before and after. I'd like to see one with a fat person looking really miserable, hangdog in dowdy ratty clothes as "before" self acceptance. Then an "after" of them feeling better, either in the same clothes or ones that reflect change.

They don't have to smile, just reflect the internal shift. From puppet, to agent, from ventriloquist dummy to fully alive.

We're so caught up in viewing ourselves from the outside/in, a volatile position that lends itself to tumbling into the momentum of neurotic disorder, that we forget just how much we can see of a profound internal shift within from the outside. Our perceptions are and can be even more subtle. This in itself could become a visual antidote to framing outer tinkering as some kind of spiritual shift.

I watched a programme about a cosmetic surgery clinic and the owner said it was purely about psychology. In other words, it's all about changing the way a person feels inside.

It doesn't have to be two pictures. It could be before, during and after!! Could be a whole strip of images reflecting an internal shift in theme, reflecting the fact that life isn't one/two, a pretence of happy ever after revealed in public, unravelling in private, but a continuous stream-of-consciousness.

Expect all to be appropriated by diet shills though.

Wednesday 30 March 2016

One and All

There's no substitute for competence. A cold manner with a real grasp of a subject and ability to apply reason to practicalities, is above, the same old, same old + bags of charm any day. Way above. An article on anorexia gives an insight as to how well meaning is not much cop without useful intent.

It reports claims of an addition to "ground-breaking" treatment for anorexia;
Adults with anorexia often have distinctive traits that lock them into a destructive relationship with food. But those same traits could help them manage their illness
"Manage their illness"? Why would anyone want to manage anorexia? I thought Kenneth Tong, possibly inadvertently, summed up the 'obesity cure' pretty well. Anorexia isn't a choice though, its an unusual response to what can be an attempted choice- sustained calorie restriction.

Incidentally, can we have a discussion about the death of cure, as an aim? Since when did the aim of medical science become "management"? Management was something you did whilst you were looking for a cure. What falls short of management? Management as the endgame strikes me as a desire to make money off sickness and disorder. It's throwing in the towel, in some cases, before entering the ring.

Anorexia has no real treatment, instead anorexics are made to eat until they recover weight. Basically [coerced] gainerism, like those who force feed themselves to get fat or fatter. Those surrounding the person act as "encouragers" that is people who literally exhort/support this dieting up the scale. You'll note this is the same pattern as the 'obese cure'-countering pathology with a counter pathology=balance. It's not only that stupid, it requires the false creation of fatness as a pathology in order to press it into this brilliance.

The reason enforced eating is amazingly effective in reversing anorexia- given it is not really a treatment-is in the nature of metabolic function. Hunger and its response-eating-is our natural default, its instinctive, literally a no-brainer. Deciding not to respond can be a direct conscious act. Anorexia is triggered by calorie restriction, according to the article, it also has a potential hormonal trigger. Any period of calorie restriction- including illness, stress-if that shuts down the digestive system and reduces hunger- can set it off. Presumably what weight loss gastrectomy can partially mimic the this digestive stasis in anorexics when the stomach is removed.

This goes along with the added momentum of going from pathology to health. Whereas starving fat [or any] people goes from where they are, to derangement, disorder using pathology, whether they start at health or not. That some can manage to lose weight and feel better is an advert for finding the proper way to do it. 

Not that this extent of success is deemed good enough for those who care about anorexics though, they expect far better than to have to fight an ailment for life, well meaning doesn't surpass ideological concerns/vested interests.
Across the field, psychologists, psychiatrists and dietitians have noted that positive treatment outcomes for adults with anorexia remain abysmally low. Less than half recover fully, another third show some improvement, but the rest remain chronically ill.
Read that first line again, that is what well meaning looks like. And if fat people had those odds? They'd be few fat people, we've spent lifetime chasing statistical insignificance in the form of a pathology.

Also, notice, this isn't costed. Nothing is too much for these precious folk.

The actual experimental treatment featured is based on the family therapy model pioneered at the Maudsley hospital. This version gets anorexics to nominate several people they love to cede complete control of their eating too. More than encouraging, they become the person's hunger.

This gives them no control whatsoever, despite; "Responsibility for recovery would remain firmly in each client’s hands..." That is supposed to produce "abysmally low" results. A potential client inadvertently summed the equation up beautifully;
“I need this to work,” she said. “I have nothing else to try.”
The old "rock bottom" cretinism.That's how people take out loans to get their stomachs cut out. They leave you with nothing and call it "personal responsibility." When exhausted by the failure of this, you then submit to anything on offer. You are not directing their 'science' or their preferred treatment models. The power these people have is as awesome as the power you don't have.

Peer Review indeed.

A real cure for anorexia would be to reboot hunger functioning. That would not only be humane but cost-effective and individualised in a way that would quickly become collective. What truly works for many of those concerned, works for society as a whole.

It could also inform the bringing down of heightened hunger. The denial of progress in one area tends to stymie it elsewhere. There's an on-going discussion among techno-pioneers, whether we should be scared about intelligent technology becoming more powerful than us and making us its slaves.

I used to think they were away with the fairies. But now I wonder. A real fear is the refusal to deal with the way the body actually works, this refusal to resolve issues. The giving up. The costs imposed by these inefficient and/or ineffective treatments, is what threatens to "bankrupt" health care, whatever the system.

The people who produce the science are the people in control of this denial and by the time they've finished with us, I'm wondering if we'll have regressed to such an inferior state that we'll be fit to be directed by our microwaves and mobile phones. How can we refresh, re-boot and put them on standby, but not our own functions that have merely got out of hand?

Imagine if every time any feature went wrong with your computer, that you couldn't do a damn thing about it? FGS, mentally speaking we will suffer by comparison. We probably already are.

If your computer freezes, you can reboot it. If you don't and run around trying to borrow someone else's. You can be said to have declined "personal responsibility". Because you had an option that was within your individual power, that will suffice to unfreeze your screen more often than not.

You don't have to regress to childhood and cede control to your family. Nor to wait for society to rearrange itself around restrictions that will disadvantage those most in control, who often don't want them but pretend to.

Unless and until anorexics or anyone else has that, their so called "personal responsibility" relies on chance, between the operation of the body's organisation and individual response at any one time, neither of which are direct individual or any other CHOICE. This model of denying individual agency, dumping a pretence of responsibility without power on the individual, blaming them for any failure, whilst professionals get paid for this, is curdling health care.

The doctor within is the greatest doctor, but it needs direct and intelligent manipulation. That probably requires real ground to be broken by the looks of it. Spare the flummery dressed in a shower of sub-biochemical jargon.

Tuesday 22 March 2016

Failed Approach Tax Levy

Yeah, the promise of big fat coffers tantalisingly await 'obesity' dealers.

Government skittish about sugar taxes?!* Cancel that! George Osborne, UK Chancellor announced a 2 year post-dated sugar tax on fizzy drinks in his annual budget.

The turnaround was an effort to shield himself from immediate blowback on the more controversial elements of his proposals. Such as cutting financial support for disabled people or whether his accounting adds up or not.

No wonder folks refer fondly to this as politricks.

The hiatus is supposed to give fizzy pop merchants (type that without laughing) a chance to "reformulate" their products to comply with sugar fearing fanatics barmy dictates. The last macro-nutrient these experts turned into public enemy no.1 was fat. Unfeasibly low levels were demanded to give us all eternal life and save healthcare £££'s [do their promises evah?]

Food producers replaced fat with sugar and "unhealthy" saturated fat with "healthy" polyunsaturated fats in the form of vegetable oils. Then trying to substitute animal fats their chemists ingeniously found that if you hydrogenate veg oil, you get solid, fats, trans fats as it turns out.

Oh sugar!

Now there's supposed to be a sucrose epidemic. Au secours!

It's sugar not fat is the cause of all ill health [and probably evil], despite producers already withdrawing from previous levels, when nobody was fat. Remember when you could see the sugar in a digestive biscuit? Arguing about sugar levels just feels like validating this nonsense. No reason will suffice anyhow.

Give this time, sugar'll make a comeback in some form, just like fat

Braying public health agitants gain zero humility from any of this. Food is still the cause of weight, except it isn't. Weight amongst other things, is decided by an individual's metabolic function.

The response to this news falls mainly between; personal responsibility. Fat people must be blamed has managed to become the last stand of western style free will. The other is, companies have a duty to reduce the sugar in their products. This tends to be presented as conservative/libertarian versus nanny-state liberal/leftists.

Fiddlesticks.

They're the same team. The ob cult specialises in creating these empty polarities.

Not only do both cast fatness as inherently blameworthy and blame fat people for being. They support the framework that created this levy

If you insist weight must be lost via inducing calorie deficit, it's hard to see how you think this sort of thing can be avoided. If a quarter of the adult population could induce themselves into a permanent proto-anorexic state, that would reshape the food business, putting certain business out of business.

A loud hangry mob who would trample over your rights in pursuit of a society shaped around helping to hold them as much into sub clinical state as possible. Some might say you've got part of that with slim people. Not that they are hangry. Just enjoy making sport of people.

The intended outcome of product "reformulation" and what the "child obesity strategy" will likely be about, unless it consists of putting together a crack team of real scientists who intend to do some proper science and aren't beholden to the 'obesity' cult. 

If you insist on the imposition of calorie deficit, which way of achieving the same thing is more humane? Ordering companies around and taxing them + rearranging the environment? Or pressing and setting up milliolns of people for failure, undermining them mentally and physically in the process? 

The first scenario-millions of permanent proto- anorexics isn't likely to happen. Ergo, "individual responsibility" has its cake and continues to have it, whilst the pressure on individuals continues to rachet up....... until what? You criminalize fat people? Don't laugh too hard, social workers are already involved. That's some of your 'costs of obesity' right there.

Don't ask anyone to cry for the food biz, they didn't defend people. They didn't step up. They didn't question the framing of weight.  Indeed, they too invested in it looking to make money.

Hoist with your own petard, sugar fizz.

The food biz could have made clear that its products are not to be demeaned nor used to insult and degrade people. That's still an option by the way. If your products are shit, make them better. If they aren't, do not allow them to be spoken of as if they are. Trouble is of course, the food biz does itself no favours by continually degrading many of its offerings with cheap substitutes for proper ingredients for profit, just saying.

Fat people on the other hand fall over themselves to implicate their own behvaiour; "We don't eat right/ eat too much/eat when we aren't hungry" and so on. I notice this because I always do notice the gap in this area. 

Listing fat people's purported failings makes a person feel exempt from said flaws. But if this is all 1st world problems (no I don't approve), then logic dictates those reporting this have to assume they're just as "free will" shirking themselves. Little could illustrate that better than trying to dump your real or perceived flaws on someone else, to make yourself feel better. 

In comparison with fat people's immediate uncritical embrace of weight loss dieting, incredible dedication, tenacious refusal to give up on it and stoicism in the face of defeat.

I make no bones [har] about being against this tax. Its an opening sortie in funding the parasitic 'obesity' industry-that still includes a lot of its "research 'n' science". Its real aim is to perpetuate itself. Producing nothing of any earthly use to the people it gave the world permission to despise.

If it gets away with this tax, the demands will continue and become more expansive. Why indeed should soft drinks makers pay a sugar tax when there are numerous other 'products' that contain sugar, namely fruit for one. Aaaaah but that's the good kind of sugar.....but not if you're paleo/sugar low. Even fruit has gotten caught up in the dead end that is food=weight.

I confess to having lost track of this explosion of nutritional nonsense.

Your body should be levied too. It converts a large part of your diet into a form of sugar in order for it to be available as energy. The sugar-is-poison crew don't tend to bother much with that.

Taxing food taxes the poor, not because only poor people eat sugar, merely that they consume it at all.

Men's weight is rather uniform across class, it is women's that varies substantially between the richest and poorest. My view on weight and socio-economic class is the fattest overall are not an official class per se but where the aspiring working and lower/impoverished middle classes meet. 

They tend to be permanently overstretched, overtaxed but also pressurize themselves and carry a certain shame that often comes from aspiring toward better (ergo, the implication being, what you are isn't good enough) along with the loss of as firm a sense of place. Not fitting into the class that matches your income nor that which you aspire to.

It's not bad to be there. But you can get lost in the pressures that are on you, in you, shaping you.

These kinds of chronic underlying stresses lead to shifts in the functioning of your body, i.e. altering your taste buds to favour sweetness. This is body led, your tongue is merely the end point and facilitator. It is instinctive coping and survival. It has nothing to do with "comfort eating" which is another dubious mis-conceptualization.

This is likely what's behind Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier speech were he talks of the poor wanting something a bit "tasty" rather than bland food advised. Food tastes different in different mouths and even within the same mouths in differing contexts. He too, like many of his counterparts today assumed it was purely about pleasure.

The more free range working class tend towards thinness. Though I cannot confirm it totally, there may be a greater use of eating disorder techniques, such as making yourself sick to help stablize weight, amongst better off women. There seems a lesser chance of multiple stresses, fewer insecurities, financial etc., makes it less likely that you'll fatten.

"Healthy food is more expensive" is not my personal experience. Cooking skills, styles and appetites are as diverse in poorer people as in the better off. The pretense that because poorer women seem to be fatter overall than the richest women is less down to the food eaten than the way their bodies are functioning though both reflect the contexts that they live in.

That's why some slim down when they get famous/better off. They are out of that milieu, their body's workings shift. 

The culture of shame surrounding food means people feel on the back foot when it comes to anything to do with eating. There's a sense of having to excuse and justify what you eat. Though I do think there is something in the food desert thing. I'm not sure the full story's been told on that one. It might be better to say that if you are middle class, there tends to be less need for you to have to be able to cook.

If you are poor, that is more likely to put you under immediate duress.

Healthy is more expensive is popular as few bourgies of any political hue can tolerate the fact that it takes more skill to survive in poverty with any balance, than it does in wealth.

The belief that the poor require nutritional "education" comes from the assumption that poor people are stupid/ ill educated (by their class right?!) If you are brought up eating certain kinds of things that's your 'education'. That's no different than other people eating what they've been brought up with. I was brought up the same way, I wasn't "educated" about food, I didn't need to be. My mother fed me mainly on food cooked from scratch, centered on fresh produce.

Weight disparities among some poorer groups of men and women can match those between poorer women overall and the men in their group, double. That would not be so if food was the 'cause' of weight.

Thursday 17 March 2016

Media Clamour for "Obesity Science" to Start Managing Metabolic Function

Riiiight.

I'm reminded of what still isn't happening amid the clamour to monitor metabolic outliers. In this case children. If only a modicum of such attention was paid to the useful outcomes of "obesity science", well, I was going to say we wouldn't be here. But I know that we are here because people want that. This may have slipped notice if the extent of self kidology falls at the 'morbid' end.

The infinitesimal number of children concerned should give a clue that this is probably about functional issues in these children. 11 yes, eleven children have achieved an outstanding BMI of 40 and 475, 35+, well done them. It's hard to really stand out nowadays unless you are a chosen piƱata for stupid adult reality-reality games.

They don't want to free you children because they still want to carrying on playing-you know how that is. 

Those children are out of a bit under 13 million people aged under 19. Together they are not even a respectable fraction of one percent.

They complain about it to (partially) convince themselves that they're against this. The idea of using fat people to achieve whatever ends others think they (ought to) want but in reality aren't necessarily so keen as they want to be, still seems to be a droit de seigneur.

That feeling is part of the attraction, feeling righteous without the consequence of having to spoil it by following through or not, with action. That same stasis to preserve a cherished fantasy applies to the whole crusade proper.

Flaccid ritual blame flaps around like a deflated balloon; "Parental irresponsibility", "How can parents allow their children's weight to go there?" Stale. Plus the more ominous,"It's bordering on the criminal." The determination to maintain this contrived state of "obesity crisis" is palpable.

A nutritionist was interviewed about this enervating click bait, who agreed this was the parents fault,  admitted that this actually incorrect blame is pointless and "gets us nowhere." The weariness with which she said this is good news, sorry, no one should feel the defeat of the trap all fat people are in than the wretched gatekeepers of it.

She switched aim to the current 'obese' cult modality, the 'obesogenic' society. This posits (ultimately) that weight must be controlled from without-the same as abusing fat people regulates/contains our weight. Headaches are trivial compared to 'obesity' zomg death propaganda, yet, imagine being told, no more painkillers, instead, we will seek reduce the [head]ache-o-genic aspects of society?

In utopian terms, one cannot say that's a bad desire or wish. But it is brutally inefficient at meeting your needs for control of how you feel. It effectively leaves people powerless-if you believe that one cannot do anything about headaches which of course I don't.  This lack of anything efficient, direct and useful to the individual is no accident.

The nutritionist had the nerve to state that vested interests perpetuate this obesogenic society. Clearly illustrating that these children's bodies-along with other fat people's-are being held ransom to in this instance the desire to dictate what people should eat.

Can you believe this is really happening?

A watch should be kept on the question of what the individual can directly do to stabilise any aspect of their metabolic function, wrt weight. And the answer remains little to nothing. Impersonating anorexia whilst training like a professional athlete does not manage metabolic function. It seeks to deprive the body of energy in order to get it to raid your fat stores. What I did was not direct.

Weight loss dieting/exercise as well as being pretty worthless in the main, are not direct either.

It's sort of the difference between being able to turn a tap on and off, varying its flow and having to have it left on at whatever rate it is flowing and arrange your life around scooping out water to stop your sink/bath from flooding your home.

This has the meanness of the truly stupid.

The complete lack of content should be obvious and it should offend the intelligence of everybody. Not simply a lack of symptomatology or aetiology but genuine context. These children often require investigation. Some of them will have been born with undiagnosed hypothalamic/brain function problems that show up at an early age [strangely enough the age of 3 keeps coming up-is that a metabolic developmental milestone?]

The unusual extent and/or duration of distress on the prospect of withdrawal of relief from hunger. The ferocity and consistency of gain is even more of a signal, which is of course, what they're actually reporting on.

There is no management of weight without techniques to alter/manage metabolic function. That would be altering something fundamental about the (dys)function going on here. The rate at which the body stores and/or spends energy. Hunger/appetite is a metabolic function, not a habit of thought, altering that, turning it down, if only to relieve the distress of excess hunger/appetite would be a start.

I say this again to "obesity science" even if you can't care about adults, for goodness sake [literally] can't you care something for these children?

Tuesday 15 March 2016

Check the Code

Here's something instructive. The Nuremburg Code. It comes from the famous trials of Nazi's after WW2. It contains a 10 point list of requirements for ethical clinical trials to be carried out.

Now the question is, is the 'obesity' crusade's insistence that all weight must be lost via caloric deficit restriction, an experiment? I think honestly, we can say it is. Certainly, it is not based on fact, but hypothesis. Not physics, but that because starvation leads to weight loss, if you call it something else-weight loss dieting/lifestyle/weight management etc., that it can become fit for human regulation.

So far it is clear that this is false, yet still the experiment trundles on.

Let's see how well it adheres to the code;

No1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential

Voluntary consent are the words that leap out. With 'obese' we're expected to put our bodies into starvation mode, with as much coercion as it takes us to 'volunteer'. "The new smoking" [isn't everything?] is the latest gambit supposed to negate any need for consent.

No2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature

No, no and no. Properly objective study of actual physiological function rather than fitting stuff into a rigid unscientific construct-'obese' will undoubtedly produce better that starvation induced weight loss. Which let's be honest is why its being avoided. Therefore one can cheerfully say with confidence that we can do better, "we" just doesn't want to.

No3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study, that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment

May I say, lols. If we include humans in the "animals" of animal experimentation, that is exactly what isn't being properly studied. In this case, the study is of a constructed view of how humans (don't) function. Positing fatness as disease helps with this mis-direction of searching for something that isn't there and pressing what you find into that model.  It's physiology not pathology.

No4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, I think we can say that's a no. Recent developments have induced enough self consciousness to provoke the appearance of a volte-face. Now, we need [we are instructed] "support". Support is acquiring an increasingly sinister tone, have you noticed? Like an actor always playing goody-two shoes roles suddenly getting to play the baddie.

No5. No experiment should be conducted, where there is an apriori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.  

*Snigger* for the first part. Bariatric surgery fails that "disabling injury" bit. That's the whole point of it. Love the idea of physicians experimenting on themselves. Every doctor who pretends dieting works should be permanently on one themselves. Including the slim ones. Let them "keep off" fourteen/seven/five whatever pounds below their comfortable weight. This should be known and they should be weighed at their patients request and be distractingly hungry at all times, before, during and after eating. We'll take notes on their undoubtedly superior coping strategies.

No6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment 

Humanitarian doesn't apply if you are an 'epidemic'. Here lies the reason for 'obesity' hype. The risk of being is so baaad that you must attack yourself consistently.

No 7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death

There are tears of laughter in my eyes.  

No 8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment

Not really, no. Everyone's an expert. Except of course, fat people themselves.

No 9. During the course of the experiment, the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end, if he has reached the physical or mental state, where continuation of the experiment seemed to him to be impossible

I can only repeat ".....should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end, if he has reached the physical or mental state, where continuation of the experiment seemed to him to be impossible." Don't let the gender specificity fool you. I couldn't have summed up better why so many people decided to choose self acceptance. It is the experiment, not what they feel about their size. 

There's something truly bracing about the insouciant disregard with which other people take other people's psychological, physical, spiritual and mental exhaustion. You'd think they had no regard for their own comfort.

Finally,

No 10.  During the course of the experiment, the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgement required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

That means if your assumptions are not working out, it is in the exercise of "good faith, superior skill and careful judgement required of him," that the professionals terminate it.

Read it and weep. 

Sunday 13 March 2016

NHS Honey-Trap Tax

Honey traps are associated with cold war shenanigans where superpowers used attractive women (and men) to bait big-wigs of enemy countries. These honies then used the seductive arts to liberate important strategic information.

Simon Stevens, head of NHS England intends his honey trap to be a tax set at about 20% on the price of "unhealthy food" sold in NHS hospitals. In other words, part of the UK National Health Service wishes to continue to sell items it defines as UNHEALTHY, in order to make even more money from them than it does now.

A tax imposed on the kind of foods most people like to eat in one form or another, precisely because they're so attractive to the human palate due to their efficient delivery of energy to our bodies. I say this as more of a savoury than a sweet person.

Our bodies need energy to continue to exist, calorie dense foods obviously fulfil this better than calorie poor foods. To the extent that this can make these foods an attractive option at times, even to those not particularly fond of sweetness, so effectively do they fulfil the purpose of food.

They are not faddictive, they're useful.

Certain people simply cannot accept this though.

They want to fight the body by pretending the opposite is true. That calorie poor foods are better and calorie dense worse. This is purely intended to aid weight loss dieting by another name.

I'm not saying anyone shouldn't try living on watery veg, with a smidgen of watery fruit for a treat- if that's what they wish. Each to their own. Just that it would make more sense for them to admit they're fighting their body's underlying organization, and accept that it will protest loudly, rather than framing such resistence as evidence of innate human greed.

You can't fault the usual shamelessness. Whilst positing the motive for this as to improve public health. Instead of no longer selling this evil muck, they wish to continue selling it to make even more money, despite claiming it is draining NHS coffers by causing ill health.

Holy elementary ethics and finance fail.

Some may wonder [no names], why health claims to be flogging unhealth and moaning about the purported costs of said unhealth.  None of this old pony changes the essential design of the body, setting up a fractuous fight with our very direction of biology.

Instead of just recognizing that food or more precisely hunger is not an apt target for managing/altering weight or health (in the main). This ill conceived furrow continues to be ploughed come hell or high water, despite increasing casualities of its own making.

People like Stevens feel they have the right to requisition the free time of NHS employees and/or the public,
....schemes to increase the number of staff walking and cycling to work, and provide more opportunities for other physical activity, including team sports, fitness classes and running clubs. 
Oh really? Who appointed him director of people's free time or how they should get to work? This is undoubtedly part of the attraction of this time wasting failure. It allows "important people" to encroach into areas they have no business being in and would otherwise be shy of.

People's use of their own time is not the call of their employers. It used to be (still is in proper science) a signal of a bad remedy that it takes up too much time, especially in relation to the benefit it is supposed to generate. 

Usually, this extent of time sucking plus heavy (mental) bandwidth draining would be paired with something approaching a deadly chronic condition, when there's no better alternative. Not a hypothetical possibility of elevated risk.

Saturday 12 March 2016

Hedonic and Metabolic Obesity Cont'd

Just a reminder: I do not conflate hyperphagia/hyperhunger with being fat. Most fat people eat within an average range. I don't always repeat this fact in part because the target of those who do behave as if all fat people are hyperphagic, is the same. Whether your hunger is normal or excessive, the target weight loss dieting/ weight management/lifestyle is that hunger.

There should be no separation between "losing weight" and "keeping it off". You don't take a sleeping pill then "keep insomnia off," you just keep taking the drugs (if you want to continue their effect) because you recognize they do not permanently shift the underlying rest/activity cycle to normal. They induce /trigger temporary soporific feelings.

The existence of "keeping off" is evidence of the failure of calorie restriction induced weight loss (CRIWL), not a flub to be conquered nor more importantly, it is not failure of the person. What you are doing is attempting a sort of false homeostasis of repeated dieting. There is no 'keeping off' there is just repetition, a groundhog day, dieting everyday. Eventually your mind and/or your body will weary of this.

Do it the right way in the first place, and you'll not have to bother playing keepy-offy. 
What is it that drives us to obesity, and what can we do about it? 
Answer, the same thing that "drives" thinness, slimness or pleasingly plumpness, the performance of our varying metabolic function. It's like asking what "drives" the length of our limbs.

What keeps your weight the same/similar [thin to fat] seems to be the body's regulation of its own cells and tissues, or homoeostasis, rather than a set point as such. Our bodies have a systemic direction that comes from the constant replacing/replication of our body's cells. You can't just buck that with an ill-conceived notion stuck in your head!

Any alteration needs to happen closer to that point. It's daunting on its face. Tissue replaces itself at differing rates. Something however must contain some direction/s at to the end game as we are restored to recognisably to a version of our self. Despite changes that come with age and other developments.

It could be specific a question of altering the target of adipose tissue metabolism. This would lead restoration/ homoeostasis of fatty tissue would be recruited to regulate the amount and therefore to keep that change stable.

Pleasure is a measure of successful eating, not an end in itself. It's part of how we know our needs are being met and satisfied. It is involved in feeling satiety and is a consequence of the the uplift that comes from giving your body the energy it needs. It is hard to see how that can be usefully abstracted from that process to any meaninful degree. Unless there's something unusual going on.

I certainly didn't enjoy eating, until my hunger/appetite normalized. Even then, that pleasure isn't that much, its more like the level pleasure you get from tidying up. It's not euphoria. Maybe other people feel that, but I see little evidence of that in people who's hunger/appetite is too high.

I see it more from people who's hunger has always functioned well. 

It also ignores that for me and others, the trigger/genesis of hyperphagia was hormonal, in my case, the run up to puberty. For others who have no trouble with hunger/appetite, pregnancy messes that up. For others its PCOS, not to mention the biggest secret, a primary pre-cusor of diabetes.

You may have noticed this is all metabolic.

There is no need or purpose for a "hedonic" trigger for hunger, as it is itself a metabolic function. Hunger exists only as part of metabolic function. It has no other reason to exist.

Eating tens of thousands of calories for pleasure, doesn't make sense. If you needed pleasure that bad, you'd chose something that delivered it more efficiently, booze comes to mind. It's like trying to get a drink from the well by using a sieve. If you're thirsty, you'd be better off getting something that can contain water.

Pleasure from eating is not abstract. That is, it is not separate from your body's need for or signalling for food. Nor is it convincing as a side effect. That is, I'll make myself eat, for the pleasure. Eating is effectively digestion. You are not going to digest food to get the low levels of pleasure on offer.

Why do you think humans bothered to take plants and ferment them into alcohol? Efficiency!

And perhaps this is more of a moot point, but, if others and myself wanted pleasure that badly, why would any of us have had anything to do with playing an 'obese'? The best way of feeling better is to refrain from making yourself feel bad.

Yet, we plunged right in with a complete disregard for our own unhappiness, shame, embarrassment. Never at any point during that time did I think, "This is too much."  Never occurred to me, I was so focused on getting the slim. 

Someone this on the hunt for pleasure would instinctively, if not intellectual flinch from this pretty early on. Unless this is an allusion to saying that 'hedonistic eating' enabled us to continue to inflict this abuse ourselves. I wouldn't put that past the 'obesity' industry to set us on that course.

Fat people's stamina in the face of an onslaught of displeasure even surprises me. The people who most altered me to this was slim/mer people. Once out of the 'obese' stupor especially, its hard not to notice such profound care for even the most minute of their own discomfort and displeasure.

I'm not hating, its consistency and dedication is impressive. After all, what else is this hypothesising about, but to keep going the idea that wilful 'overeating' is why people are over their designated weight? That's all about the avoidance of the displeasure of being found wholly and viciously wrong, isn't it?

And for that, you are prepared to sacrifice those people who actually need investigation into their metabolic troubles  along with the increasing numbers falling prey to eating disorders I mean, how much has this 'obesity' bullshit waylaid potentially better treatments for diabetes -the saintly and devilish kind?

Not even that could be described as hedonism per se, it's the avoidance of a loss of face. Self inflicted of course. No one told you to set yourselves up as all knowing of fatness and you've had a long time and a heck of a lot of good will to withdraw from it. You just can't can you?

Take it from someone experienced in facing a repeated avalanche of displeasure and discomfort, you are delaying the inevitable in your dedication to salvaging the unsalvageable.

Friday 11 March 2016

Hedonic and Metabolic Obesity

Palatable, hyperpalatable, healthy/unhealthy foods/people, "lifestyle", obesogenic, hedonic overeating/obesity. The crusade to turn-weight-into-social-class is inventing more and more jargon to keep alive its cherished pretence that starvation is a sustainable lifestyle.

Let's take this metabolic and hedonic obesity, it's from a doctor, but we can bear in mind the medical profession's outstanding record on helping fat people slim,
The naturally thin often have a hard time understanding the struggles of the very many who battle with overweight and obesity. 
They don't really. If they have no trouble with; I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't get the horn etc., I can't starve at all/ for the rest of my life whilst jumping up and down is less than a no-brainer. The desired pretence that they no-understandy is ballasted by the insistence on defining fat people as slim people +. Rather than whole people. Disrupting wholeness is a different prospect from decreasing (presumed) excess.
Why is losing weight -- and especially keeping it off -- so very hard? 
"Weight loss" isn't hard, our bodies are doing it all the time. Along with weight gain in a cyclical manner, like activity and rest.

It'll be self-induced starvation that's "hard", though that was never the problem. Fat people signed up for becoming slim. We accepted that it would be hard. Hard to tolerate being endlessly trashed, accused of being suicidal greedy idiot loafers. Our response was to studiously feel bad about existing in a fat state. Rarely did we truly question this out of anything more than frustration with our own perceived failure.

So please spare us, "its because its hard." We accepted hard, we did hard. What we couldn't in the end accept was damaging, useless, futile, a waste of life.

Enforced starvation is a tool of torture and death. Starvation has been used as as weapon in wars to make even the most militant surrender. I'm sorry to invoke horrors I cannot begin to imagine. But the ceaseless trivialisation of the power of hunger to justify attacking it as weight regulation makes it easy for richer countries especially to forget the visceral power of hunger and our inherent resistance to its imposition. We are simply not designed to starve, no matter how pleasant and happy the surrounds.

Or else why would people have anything to say about anorexia? How much longer can those who acknowledge the mere discomfort, let alone pain readily deny it in others? Tell us, what is fuelling that?

Wednesday 9 March 2016

Down With Slim-Plus

There's an on-going contretemps about the term "plus-size". I'm not sure I get it, but I'm guessing someone's worked out that it basically means, "plus-slim" and they're not feeling that description. If so, join the club, welcome.

This could be reminiscent of the ruckus concerning BMI or body mass index. That's the product of an equation that takes your height and squares it-or something by your weight in order to give you a number, by which you can fit yourself into a weight category. Underweight/normal/overweight/obese.

I've never managed to be remotely offended by BMI. The issue is with the underlying premise rather than any surface realization of it. The premise is weight is a disease-like entity, beyond or even under a certain point and becomes increasingly so with each increment of increase. 

This is based on the hugely solipsistic take on fatness, that it is slimness avec a detachable plus. Rather than whole people, like slim people just simply larger than they. Such a notion is so damaging to fat people's sense of self. It also enables slim people to get off the hook for their crazed cognition and elective delusions about fat people.

They know they're wrong, they either don't want to be right, or are scared to be. Fat haters have been too revved empowered as prefect bullies by "obesity science" and medics to be reasoned with to any real degree.

Monday 7 March 2016

Disorder is the Norm

Susie Orbach's back with a re-print of her tome, "Fat is a Feminist Issue", pause for applause. To be fair, I've never been able to make myself read it. Despite numerous tries my brain refuses to submit.

At times you have to accept limits.

Not that it matters because other people have and they take their cue for much confident psychobabble projections about what being fat is all about,
Being fat was a protection against sexual attention, but also against being marketed to, having one’s body appropriated as a commercial space. Fat was a statement of solidity in the face of motherhood. It was a defence against competition, a way to dance around the painful establishment of hierarchy within your own gender.
Riiight. Can't say I recognize any of that. The only bell is the hierarchy, but that wasn't so much amongst women as other people in general.

And, am I the only one with a big fluffy question mark shaped cloud floating somewhere in my headspace at the ease with which girls/women are said to act out against themselves physically because of men? I feel most of my reactions to such pressures took the form of overcoming through thought, attitude and mindset-whether in mere contemplation or actuality.

Becoming a feminist is surely indicative.

I honestly do not remember a strong desire to undermine or destroy myself to because of men. And I don't think I'm saying that in any spirit of braggadocio. It's a surprisingly popular meme amongst feminists, even now.

I also have to question the routine equivalence drawn between hyperhunger and anorexia/hunger denial. Everyone (hur, hur) recognizes that it usually takes conscious direction to thwart hunger signalling, as you are interrupting physiologically generated sensation. That is why anorexics are thought of and still defined as exhibiting an excess of control.

If you are claiming fatness (obviously conflated with hyperphagia here) is the same, then you are saying hyperphagiacs are also acting under the influence of an excess of self control. Whilst that can definitely create a chain reaction that raises appetite/hunger, it is not direct choice. It would be more in the direction of being overloaded with responsibility or with averse or difficult emotion, for example.

I will say this again, hyperphagia is not a product of conscious direction. If anyone decides to eat without hunger, which I'm not convinced is much if anything of a thing, that isn't hyperphagia, that is their will! Hyper functioning hunger does not require the conscious direction of anorexia/blocking hunger, as it tends to be body led. Like when a person's blood pressure goes up (and stays up). You don't tell it to go up, it goes up (and stays high) in response to something else.

It's when you try to lower an excess of hunger that it can require a heck of a lot of conscious direction both direct and indirect. It usually takes (usually a lot) more to adjust than anorexia- the direction has changed.

Hunger and its response eating are normal, healthy, life-supporting. No conscious effort is required to produce hunger. Any effort of response tends to be rewarding in some way. Sustained ignoring, blocking, suppressing hunger is abnormal, unhealthy and life-averse, you are swimming against the tide of your nature.

When you stop blocking your hunger, the barrier/s to it can reduce. Underlying normalcy has a chance to reassert and restore itself. When you are seeking to turn your hunger down, its much harder because you are going against the run of your survival instinct, albeit performing in a hyper way. The target is also hidden. You just need to go around it and hope that flows onto letting hunger function reduce on its own.

Orbach's current theme is ‘Not all women used to have eating issues. Now everybody does’. Spot on, though she appears not to grasp why. She just mentions this as something "society" has done to people.

Disorder has been normalised by the promotion of weight loss dieting as a means to achieve weight change. It is disordered and capable of provoking hunger/eating disorders.

Through mandating weight must be altered via this route, the 'obesity' crusade has ensured the continued spread of hunger-denying/energy wasting behaviours, attitudes and disorders. This has increased both them and the body's usual counter-reaction raising hunger.

In those with a susceptability, that can lead to hyperphagia-hypersensitized and/or excessive hunger functioning. Disordered, calorie restriction has just about replaced normal eating, as I knew it would have to if the reign of the 'obesity' construct continued.

It is becoming increasingly rare to hear people eating norally, even rarer for that to be matched with normal attitudes to food. People default to healthist eating  rhetoric about eating, weight, health and diet.

We can see this more clearly in the spread of disorder to men. Alcoholism used to be the primary male eating disorder and men felt it many fathoms beneath them to admit to what they saw as "girly" disorders.

Dietary restriction even without energy restriction can be so inherently unbalancing or disordering, that this mindset can easily set off physiological/psychological disorder merely by imposing appetite constraints. Such as high protein, low-fat/low-carb or whatever.

For instance Muscle Dysmorphia otherwise absurdly termed 'bigorexia' (please), is an example. This is when men who wish to directly increase their muscle mass tip into an unbalanced view of their bodies where they become convinced they are lacking, even with a well developed musculature. 

They feel too small, looking at themselves pointing out a litany of non-existent deficiencies and perceived flaws with vicious self disgust. Sound familiar? This is produced when viewing yourself from the outside in becomes overly dominant. Combine that with a disordered view of eating and/or food and you end up pretty much where we are now.

That is what is being exported.

Given my failure to engage with this seminal work, I've always been somewhat ignorant about what its actually getting at and how it arrived there.

Looking at something on the Women's Therapy Centre, I've finally managed to get a clue.
women would attend meetings at the Women’s Therapy Centre saying they felt fat and unhappy, yet not do anything either to lose weight or to change their situation
The answer to that is that dieting is inherently unnatural, running counteri to our instincts. The resistence always deemed non-compliance is physiologically led.

According to this, Orbach felt that because she was seeing this in women, that this was not individual but to do with women's place in family and society.
We weren’t just weak-minded, greedy, ill-disciplined; there were specific realities to the conditions of both fat and thin that we were all chasing or escaping through our eating.
It's also interesting that I've never heard this attain the same traction with anyone as what she hypothesized about fatness,
As did thin, which carried its own freight: that you would be seen as superior and cold; that you would be overcome by your own promiscuity; that you would be perceived as selfish; that there would be no buffer between you and the world.
I find this odd, to say the least.

Orbach reminded me that she identified as being an 'overeater' who was previously fat and lost weight. I have to say I'm no longer convinced that her fatness was not a temporary thing that resolve itself during or before her self analysis epiphany.

It may even be what led her in that direction in the first place.....

Friday 4 March 2016

Shut up Catocracy

Can women pimping what they imagine is male favour just shut up. No question mark. If you are so concerned with the health of chubby or fat women, confine your comments to insisting on proper science into ways of manipulating body weight successfully and painlessly.

Rather than go all Saudi Arabia and claim fat/ter women shouldn't be seen in public. Our bodies are not obscene and do not need to be removed from view. We've already come from that. We hear it- slimness is western hijab. 'Tis the means to get there has a crater sized hole in it and keeps sinking before it reaches the bank. Deal with that or admit you just want fat people to attack themselves for your entertainment, profit and social advancement *yawhn.*

I'm not getting into arguments about whether the tag 'obese' is wrong for Ashley Graham because its insulting and she's bootiful. People still cannot seem to get that 'obesity' starts at a BMI of 30 and that most fat people fall between 30-35.

What is offensive is the way certain people have the capacity to re-name and/or re-classify and demote human beings, in order to produce a continuous stream of lies about them. The suspension of science is mortifying.

I knew this "thin models = anorexia" would be used against fat bodies. I have always regarded that as thoroughly disengenous. The size of fashion models is an expression of attitudes held by those who are trying to blame it on young women, often of their own class!

The motivation is similar, envy social jostling feeling it can be expressed behind a veneer of "concern."

It is dieting and its calories in/out basis that = [more] anorexia, bulimia, hyperphagia. Other women's bodies are not responsible for women's body ish-yous. Stop blaming them and look at the insistence that all weight loss must come about through disorder and self-punishment.

There is no such thing as "healthy dieting" there is just dieting where your body successfully defends you against the assault of starvation and stops it becoming anorexia or triggering powerful counterreactions like hyperphagia. Though individuals vary, this upshot of successful defence is the overall norm.

That is why diets /lifestyle changey-choice/weight management are doomed to fail. That isn't my opinion that is simply the way our bodies are designed.

Anorexia etc., happen when something goes wrong with some aspect of the defences against such self induced famine.

I'll spell it out for you Ms Sour Currie, hater doesn't equal diagnostician. Don't think you're kidding anyone that you don't want people to get diabetes etc., in punishment for being fat. Just like bad girls who slept with too many men should get dead too, preferably after an agonising death bed soliloquy of bitter regret.


How one should have kept one end or the other tightly shut. In order to enter the kingdom of good girl.

Even if that was to happen, it is people like you who not listening. This public ache for fat people's agony and suffering is something that should tell even the most whacked out fat phobe that they've hit the loony tunes buffer, hard. 

Get a hold of yourselves, this is in plain sight!

Supporting starvation as the only option for altering weight means you want fat people to be sentenced to a life time of painful failure? Supporting the pathologization and stigmatization of women's bodies means you want fat people to be sentence to a life time of self perpetuated neurosis, 'depression' and unhappiness.

We've already done it.

Currie is a serial offender. She was using fat hate to espouse her own personal credo. And like so many like her she cannot begin to apply her own purported rationale to herself. Edwina Currie used to be slim and thought that was all about her.

She gained weight with age. I've nothing against this. But do feel anybody who pretends weight loss via dieting is viable, has no right to gain any weight or be fat. If your body is living testament to its failure, you make a liar out of yourself in claiming otherwise.

Memo to feminists, this is what you look like when trying to find a way to shiv fat women back or front, with unconvincing health concern. One you never had for a second in all the years fat women were drowning helplessly in vitriol, inside and out. 

We rescued ourselves against your fighting us every step of the way.You're still trying to find a way to, without sounding misogynist. You too sound like promoters of catocracy, as in "cat fight." Where once you've deciding to accept your allotted societal status, you crank and fight for supremacy within that.

Bully for you.

But we know what it looks like when people like Currie genuinely care.