"This is where the obesity-as-disease concept leads us – to a situation in which people demand that medicine shoulder the responsibility."

Karen Hitchcock, an Australian doctor who works in a bariatric surgery clinic, writes about the medicalization of the obesity problem.

I ask a young 200-kilo [440-pound] patient what he snacks on. “Nothing,” he says. I look him in the eye. Nothing? He nods. I ask him about his chronic skin infections, his diabetes. He tears up: “I eat hot chips and fried dim sims and drink three bottles of Coke every afternoon. The truth is I’m addicted to eating. I’m addicted.” He punches his thigh.


Addicted. The word is useless in my clinic, a mere barrier to any hope of self-determined change. My patient is not addicted; he’s a very lonely, unemployed young man who has gradually become socially isolated to the extent that the only thing available to him for comfort and entertainment is food. He has no friends, no money to buy other consumables, little education, no partner, no job. Some days he doesn’t leave his bed. The choice for him is to eat this food or experience no pleasure. The surgeon and I discuss his situation, concerned that he may overeat after the band has been fitted. We tell him that surgery may not be appropriate for him, given his situation. The patient is perturbed. “Well, what are you going to do for me if you won’t do the operation? Don’t you have some kind of ethical responsibility to help me lose weight?”...

For whatever reason, the majority of human beings respond to advertisements inviting them to enter a pleasure state by eating a day’s worth of calories in one sitting, again and again. In the face of this, we are stuffed. We could say, “You are free agents, totally free, so pay for your own consequences.” We could make people pay at the point of choice, via a food tax, or we could limit choice. The other option, always unspoken, is: let us have our cake. Let’s just eat and eat, get fatter and fatter, and work out how best to live with it. This is where we are heading now: fatness, outside of morality, as an accepted consequence of the world as we have made it.

Much more to consume at the link. 

"A Manhattan man who sued because his real-life identity was outed on MTV's 'True Life: I'm a Chubby Chaser'..."

"... is fat out of luck, a Manhattan judge has ruled."

Tristan Watson and roommate Nadine Crosbie filed suit against the reality show's producers last year, claiming they were duped into thinking their home address would not be shown and that Watson would only be identified by the name "Tee" on the show, which focused on people who intentionally seek out extra-plump partners.

Of course, MTV makes anyone participating in this sort of show sign a written contract agreeing not to sue about anything, and the lawsuit was always doomed... which make you wonder why — if he were truly so troubled about getting outed — he'd sue, making his identity even more well known. I'd have never heard of this character if I hadn't seen this news report about the lawsuit. One must conclude that he wanted the publicity. He participated in the show, and then he drew even more attention to himself.

Watson claimed that he received a death threat "slipped under the front of his door of his apartment," but as the top comment says: "Why would he receive a death threat because he's a chubby chaser? That makes absolutely no sense." That question gets a funny reply: "maybe it was 'Fit Mom' threatening him, LOL."

(Do you know about "Fit Mom," the lady who got temporarily banned from Facebook for complaining about media boosting the self-esteem of fat people people of fatness?)

(That last link goes to Jezebel, where I am struggling very hard to resist the temptation to click on the "top story" in the sidebar: "The Epic, Disgusting Removal of a Blackhead 25 Years in the Making." Talk about the need for will power!)

"So... we should all just be thankful we don't live in France, right?"

"French pharmaceutical company HRA Pharma has just released a warning stating that the morning-after pill 'Norlevo' is completely ineffective for women weighing over 176 pounds. The pill even begins to lose effectiveness for women weighing 165."

The effort at humor in the headline deploys a logical fallacy that has a name. Can you name it?

It's the Fallacy of Accent. The fallaCEE of acksSAHN.

(To learn the names of 76 fallacies, get "76 Fallacies," which only costs 99¢ in Kindle. (Also in paperback.)

Nudging in the U.K.: labeling stairwells in public buildings with calorie counts.

"Using a dedicated website and app, people will be able to scan 'smart signs' on stairs and track their number of calories burnt over time."

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, said: “Anything that gets people more active and helps tackle obesity is a good thing in my book. This initiative is a great mix of old fashioned common sense and smart technology to track and incentivise.”

Anything?

StepJockey got a £50 million government grant for that website and app. Its founder Helen Nuki says:

"The world is a gym and we aim to label it as such. It has the added benefit of cutting carbon emissions by reducing the number of lift journeys."

Ah, these Brits, always leading the way. Shakespeare wrote:

All the world's a gym,
And all the men and women merely gymrats:
They have their sidewalks and their stairwells;
And one man in his time burns many calories...

Feminism/racism in the Lily Allen comeback video "Hard Out Here."

I don't care about this kind of music and dance, and I've never paid any attention to this lady who — I see — went away and has come back, but I've been interested in the ins and outs of the discourse of feminism since before Ms. was a magazine. And I've been observing American racial politics at least since I was 10 years old, when Life magazine featured photographs like these. Everyone read Life, but not every 10 year old had, set out next to Life on the family coffee table, the latest issue of Playboy.

So indulge me while I take a look at the race trouble that's befallen Ms. Allen and inquire into soundness of her "I'm protesting the objectification of women" story. Here's the video that went up 2 days ago and has over 2 million views.

(I have no idea whether that viewership represents actual hunger for more from an artist who'd been away for a while or virality over this race-and-sex controversy to which I'm contributing.)

The video begins with the singer submitting to the violent intrusions of the liposuction wand while a mean old white businessman type guy harangues her about her body. The lyrics bitch about all the pressure to "lose some weight 'cause we can't see your bones" and "fix your face or you'll end up on your own/Don't you want to have somebody who objectifies you?" The chorus is "It's hard out here for a bitch/It's hard, for a bitch."

So, you see, it's pretty basic, mainstream, contemporary, young-person feminism: complaining about the way other people make her obsess about her body all the time. Of course, she proceeds to show off her body and the bodies of many other females, dancing in the manner that she's supposedly so outraged about those terrible other people causing to happen. Let's leave to the side the hypocrisy and lameness of feminism like that, because Allen's in trouble about race.

Here's Ayesha A. Siddiqi writing in Vice.

In full-sleeved dresses Allen mocks her inability to twerk amidst women of color in body suits who launch into exaggerated dance moves, licking their hands and then rubbing their crotch. Her older white male manager tries to get to her to mimic them. Meanwhile she sings, “Don’t need to shake my ass for you/‘Cause I’ve got a brain.”....

It is not feminist to mock talented dancers of color for exercising skills Allen doesn’t possess. It is not feminist to claim that women who cook and dance provocatively are as damaging as a manager barking at her to lose weight. It is not feminist to remain blissfully colorblind in a world that functions along race.

As long as white womens’ empowerment requires lowering everyone else their “feminism” is just rebranded white supremacy.

"Lululemon founder Chip Wilson’s apology doesn’t pass the drishti test."

Well, there's a headline. That's in the Washington Post. I don't know what a "drishti test" is, but I got a laugh watching the "I’m sad/I’m really sad" apology video. What's he apologizing for? He said —explaining the transparency of some of his company's yoga pants — "Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work," and "It’s about the rubbing through the thighs."

I see the article explains "drishti" — which Wilson "should be aware of." It's "the gaze — outward and inward — that a yogi is supposed to apply to life."

Oh, you don't need any fancy-schmancy mystical stuff to know that if your low-quality-high-price scheme is exposed along with some ladies' asses, you shouldn't point out that the asses are fat. Having goofed that up, how should you keep the cash flowing, now that the ladies you've lured into overpaying know that your sucking up to them was just a sham? I sort of like his "I'm sad/I'm really sad" routine. It's like he's living and being real, right there on camera. Of course, it's bullshit. And is he really sorry? I sort of suspect that he's glad he got the message out that: "some women’s bodies just actually don’t work." Our clothes are not for everyone. Just the special women. The best women. 

It's the snobbery that justifies the price. Are you good enough for Lululemon?

Chris Christie, being all Governor of New Jersey + presumptive presidential candidate, on all the Sunday shows.

Did you watch? I did. All of them — if "Fox News Sunday," "Face the Nation," and "Meet the Press" constitute all of them, as they do in my DVR. Did he say anything memorable? Well, he kept saying he was about being the Governor of New Jersey and simultaneously doing a performance of "This Is How I'll Look Running for President."

His favorite word is "work." From the "Fox News Sunday" transcript: working across the aisle, getting things done... what Congress needs to do is get to work, working with each other and the president to fix a broken system... I'll work with anyone and everyone who is willing to work with me... I'm going to continue to work really hard... From "Meet the Press": I'm ready to get back to work.... I've worked hard with the Hispanic community to let them see how our policies can help their families. I've worked hard with the African-American community. I've worked hard with seniors and students.... . And it's going to give me a mandate to go back to work for the people of New Jersey and finish the job.... We've got a lot of work still to do....

And on "Fox News Sunday" he was asked how he feels about people talking about how fat he is (like Time Magazine putting a profile of him on the cover with the line "The elephant in the room").

Oh, who cares? I mean, seriously. I'm on the cover of "Time" magazine, you know? It is certainly not the first weight joke that has been thrown my way over the course of the last four years.... So you know, it doesn't matter to me.... It does not matter to me, it really doesn't, and if you're going to be bothered by that kind of stuff, then you don't belong in public leadership. They can say whatever they like, it's fine by me.

"People use me as a figurehead, and to me that misses the point and is blatantly offensive to thin women."

"Curves don't epitomize a woman."

10 least-impressive details in this NYT "Motherlode" piece by a man who's giving himself permission not to berate himself for being fat.

1. The name of the column is "Motherlode," but it's more Fatherload.

2. The man pauses, shirtless, in the middle of doing a diaper change, to gaze at himself in the mirror and contemplate his body.

3. The recipient of the diaper change is not only old enough to speak in full sentences, but is mature enough to notice his father's self-esteem issues and to boost his ego with a line — "You look great" — that's in the traditional category "Things men say to their wives" not "Things sons say to their fathers." (The latter category should not include any complete sentences delivered during diaper changes. "Things sons say to their fathers" during diaper changes should consist of little more than "da da.")

4. A grown man, who tells us he's not overweight, not only shames himself over his body, he shames himself for shaming himself and calls it "body bullying."

5. A grown man who's ashamed of his self-shaming attempts to counteract the shameful shaming by engaging in another, presumably better form of obsessing about his body which he labels "ironic 'fat talk.'"

6. It's not until the 10th paragraph that we learn he is not married to the mother of the diaper-using 2-year-old boy, and the way we find out is through one of the examples of his "ironic 'fat talk.'" He says he's "fond of asking my lady friend if clothing items are 'gripping my curves.'" Lady friend. You have a child, man. And you think banter with your girlfriend will amuse us? We're reading the "Motherlode" column, and we're still wondering about this poor boy and the effect on him. We don't enjoy this sudden appearance of the coyly named "lady friend"!

7. Finally, in paragraph 12, we get concern for the boy, which comes in the form of worrying about his inheriting the dad's physical and mental tendencies (putting on weight and self-shaming).  The concern about the contagion of bad personality traits almost immediately brings this man back to his own needs: "And at what point does being a good parent and setting a good example drain us of our personalities?"

8. His realization that he needs to refrain from self-shaming for the sake of his son immediately brings this man back to benefits for himself: "I’ll think more positively about my body and myself."

9. He's picked up that "my body, myself" duality that's been pandered to women since the 1970s. You are your body, mister. Deal with it.

10. The last 3 paragraphs don't even mention the boy. They're only about the man and his "lady friend."

"Reality"?

Upworthy has some interesting pictures from a British department store catalog and the headline is "A Catalog That Believes Reality Can Sell Clothes Better Than Photoshop." But is this "reality" or is just another kind of sensationalism? The first picture makes a nice bigger-is-better argument, but that bigger lady is fabulously large and even she has one leg angled forward and a strategically placed sarong to improve the proportions. And why the amputee models? Because of reality?

"Chubby military personnel are getting liposuction to pass Pentagon's body fat test."

One plastic surgeon says "They come in panicked about being kicked out or getting a demerit that will hurt their chances at a promotion."

Another plastic surgeon says: "I've actually had commanders recommend it to their troops... They'll deny that if you ask them. But they know some people are in really good shape and unfortunately are just built wrong."

Sucking out some fat is a stopgap, desperate effort at approximating fitness. And yet the pressure is on to change the standards:

Fitness experts and doctors agree, and are calling for the military's fitness standards to be revamped, including the weight tables the Pentagon uses. They say the tables are outdated and do not reflect that Americans are bigger, though not necessarily less healthy.

Of course, Americans will lap up this expert opinion, along with every other item of comfort food on the plate.

"There should be a packaged microwavable snack for women called Hot Handbags."

I said in the comments to the post about the lady named Joy who collects expensive handbags and doesn't know what to say to her "good friend" who "wears" "fake" — i.e., knockoff — bags. I was responding to rhhardin who said "Pockets would be simpler."

To flesh out your understanding, here's Jim Gaffingan, explaining Hot Pockets:



Googling "hot pockets," I came up with a Hollywood report from 3 days ago: "Kate Upton and Snoop Dogg's New Hot Pockets Video Arrives Fully Baked (Video)." Who knew "hot pockets" was something new and trendy? Ever stumble into some weird accidental fashionableness like that?

Two premium meats — Kate Upton and Snoop Dogg —team up for this wildly ludicrous new music video for Hot Pockets, which humorously remixes Biz Markie's 1989 hit single "Just a Friend (You Got What I Need)" as "You Got What I Eat."

I have to spend way too much time reading that article trying to figure out if it's actually an ad for Hot Pockets....

Lines like "I need your hot buttery crust" and "It's my premium meats that make your lips sing a song" are mixed in with lots of marijuana references and psychedelic imagery to produce a crispy finished product that's both fake and flavorful — just like Hot Pockets.

So obviously it's not an ad. No major corporate product — this is Nestlé — wants all that sex-and-drugs crap on their product!

"I love working with the Hot Pockets sandwiches team," Snoop says in a statement. "They let me do what I do and bring the funk out with their message, you know?..."

Oh, okay. So it is an ad. An ad for a product pitched to folks who are... what?... on drugs and needing to use food as their sex substitute?

"I love the premium meats and the buttery seasoned crusts of the new Hot Pockets sandwiches," adds Upton. "I'm excited to hear which side the fans pick in this IRRESISTIBLY HOT™ battle!"

Wait a second. I don't believe Kate Upton up and said that. And did she yell "irresistibly hot"? Did "™" appear in a word balloon over her head?

This was the level of contempt that I brought to the project of watching the ad. So why am I embedding the damned thing here, contributing to virality?



Answer: It's a great ad! It might be the greatest ad ever. 

"One of the first questions they ask you [at the Ayn-Rand-fan dating website] is about your appearance."

"I'm not sure what the difference is between 'cuddly' and 'very cuddly.' Seems like some kind of code word for fat. I picked 'very cuddly,' as I figured Objectivists are looking for a man who likes to cuddle after they get home from a long day managing a train factory or whatever."

After an interminable, seemingly random series of invasive questions about my personal proclivities, I finished my profile. I almost quit when it asked me if I was interested in the "cashflow game," which I thought was some kind of hip-hop reference, but I persevered like John Galt would have.

"While it is impossible to genetically modify humans..."

... humans will envy the results achieved in mice.

Maybe something like this can be done with diet or dietary supplements, but what if it can't and what if the results in the mice really do overcome obesity and produce an increased capacity to exercise without tiring and to be relatively muscular even if sedentary?

At what point do you think humans would reconsider the ethics of genetic modification?

Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies.

Jack Hamilton has a piece in Slate subtitled "Forget Walter White. Eastbound & Down is the most original, disturbing, wrenching show on television. (And it’s hilarious, too.)"

If we live in a golden age of great television shows, the vast majority of these shows have featured angst-ridden white male protagonists. This shift from heroes to anti-heroes has been frequently and rightly characterized as a broader interrogation of masculinity itself, one occasioned by crises of its creators, crises of culture, or both. But while current prestige-magnets like Mad Men and Breaking Bad might offer revisionist takes on white maleness, they also offer their audiences renewed fantasies of the same. Young men buy suits cut to look like Don Draper’s; aggrieved Internet communities close ranks in protection of Walter White’s right to be the One Who Knocks.

So what's great about Eastbound & Down is that it deprives the beleaguered white male of hope.

Eastbound & Down isn’t so much a show about white masculinity in transition or decline as it is a biting send-up of male fantasy itself. Powers fancies himself an alpha dog, gunslinging, rock ’n’ roll outlaw, a fiction he believes to be reality, and to which he believes himself to be entitled. Kenny Powers’ problem, in a sense, is that he’s watched too much TV. If Mad Men is a drama about the encroaching demise of a certain white male dominance, Eastbound & Down is a satire of its vacancy, and its bankruptcy. The latter is a whole lot funnier, and often more daring.

Because hopeless, pathetic decline is hilarious. To paraphrase Mel Brooks: Tragedy is when a woman or person of color feels disrespected or bullied. Comedy is when a white man falls into an open sewer and dies. (Here's the disemparaphrased Mel Brooks quote.)

I quoted the subtitle of the article above — because it made the content of the article clearer— but now I see enough additional meaning to make me want to quote the title. It's "Breaking Ball." That's not just a play on "Breaking Bad" and a reference to crushing testicles, it's an allusion to the show's milieu, baseball. Eastbound & Down shows baseball as "gross and debauched, a morass of juiced-up players, abusive fans, godforsaken locales, bored and boring spectacle."

Many of the actors on-screen... boast hilariously unathletic physiques, and seem to have last donned a glove back in the days when home plate came with a tee. It’s the ugliest depiction of the game in recent memory, a hilarious and welcome desecration of one of the old white America’s favorite civic religions.

Take that, white America.

CORRECTION: This post originally ended with this parenthetical:

(And can golf ever catch a break? It's the most coolness-resistant activity on earth. It's the sport most associated with Obama, and the man most associated with the sport is Tiger Woods, and yet it's still the domain of the old white guys — fat old white guys.)

Meade proofreads and corrects my inference that "tee" was a joke about golf. I guess that says something about the connections in my brain. Running down the out-of-shape, declining white males led me to thinking about golf. The reference is to the children's game of tee ball. I don't think children playing tee ball wear a batting glove. That's what threw me off. But obviously, they do wear a glove to play defense in tee ball.

ADDED: Meade reads my correction and informs me that children playing tee ball do wear batting gloves. I'm surprised. There's so much more gear these days, what with helmets to tricycle and knee pads to roller skate. And then as I'm writing this, Meade interrupts to inform me that the author of the article meant a fielder's glove, which I know, but my point is, when I'm reading and words are used to call up an image in the mind, and I see "tee" and "glove," I picture a person at a tee wearing a glove, and that takes me to golf, not tee ball. Or is that how the female brain works?

"In Venezuela, 17 women have died in the past 12 months as a result of liquid silicone buttock injections."

"The procedure, which according to Jesus Pereira, the president of the Veneuzelan Plastic Surgeons Association, an estimated 30 percent of Venezuelan women aged 18 to 50 have undergone, attempts to achieve a figure thought to be more attractive to Venezuelan men...."

These injections are the latest in a long list of extreme beauty procedures in this beauty-obsessed country. Other extreme self-improvement methods include fasting pacts among friends, vomit-inducing syrup, and most recently the sewing of a plastic patch onto the tongue, which renders the consumption of solid food extremely painful....

Enough about the buttocks. Let's take a look at that tongue.

Launched in 2009 by Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Nikolas Chugay, the patch is secured to the tongue with six stitches in a $2,000 procedure that takes just ten minutes.

As one patient said: 'It hurt... I'm like, Christ it does work, I can't eat!"

You know, you could save yourself a lot of pain and $2,000 if you just went on a liquid diet, which you still have to do along with the pain and $2,000.

On the other hand, it's less of an intrusion and expenditure than the stomach surgery people submit to, so there's that. And how about those Venezuelan women and the things they do to be more attractive to Venezuelan men?

"I didn't know I was skinny-fat until my Russian boyfriend told me so."

"Actually, I didn't even know that was a thing until he told me so."

The longer I stared at myself, the more I began to notice what it was that made Julio cringe. My chest was dystrophic. My arms were unformed. My neck was frail. Skin hung over the band of my underwear and, on top of that, I was hairy. Everywhere.

Yes, we're talking about 2 men here, but that doesn't let you heterosexual men off the hook. That just means that if your love partner wasn't female, he might tell you some things she's thinking but is too nice to say.

"Can you start a post and thread on the adverse economic and environmental impact of pets?"

Asked Phaedrus in the comments to "If you really care about global warming, stop all unnecessary travel."

The same tree huggers that yammer on and on about the environment allow their pets to use everyone else property, public and private as a restroom for their animal. Human waste has to be treated under all kinds of regulatory requirements. Pets are allowed to deposit equivalent waste at will wherever as if they are wild animals which they aren't. And don't get me started on what it takes to feed them, the grain, meat etc. You could feed a lot of starving people using the grain that goes into pet food.

Consider this that post. And let me also call attention to my 2010 post "If you really believed in global warming, you would turn off your air conditioning," which had an addendum with a list of 6 more things people should do to demonstrate actual belief in the coming calamity:

1. Your weight should be at the low end of normal, indicating that you are not overconsuming the products of agriculture.

2. You should not engage in vigorous physical exercise, as this will increase your caloric requirements. You may do simple weight-lifting or calisthenics to keep in shape. Check how many calories per hour are burned and choose a form of exercise that burns as few calories as possible.

3. Free time should be spent sitting or lying still without using electricity. Don't run the television or music playing device. Reading, done by sunlight is the best way to pass free time. After dark, why not have a pleasant conversation with friends or family? Word games or board games should replace sports or video games.

4. Get up at sunrise. Don't waste the natural light. Try never to turn on the electric lights in your house or workplace. Put compact fluorescent bulbs in all your light fixtures. The glow is so ugly that it will reduce the temptation to turn them on.

5. Restrict your use of transportation. Do not assume that walking or biking is less productive of carbon emissions than using a highly efficient small car. Do not go anywhere you don't have to go. When there is no food in the house to make dinner, instead of hopping in the car to go to the grocery store or a restaurant, take it as a cue to fast. As noted above, your weight should be at the low end of normal, and opportunities to reach or stay there should be greeted with a happy spirit.

6. If you have free time, such as a vacation from work, spend it in your home town. Read library books, redo old jigsaw puzzles, meditate, tell stories to your children — the list of activities is endless. Just thinking up more items to put on that list is an activity that could be on the list. Really embrace this new way of life. A deep satisfaction and mental peace can be achieved knowing that you are saving the earth.

"Gandolfini’s death prompts rampant fat-shaming."

Says Salon, displaying lots of tweets. I question whether that stuff ought to be called "shaming." What I'm seeing looks more like This should be a wake-up call to anyone who's fat.

[Fill in the blank]-shaming is a meme, and it includes defining shame downward. I get that. But let's think about whether we want "shaming" to be a commodious category or a narrow one. I'm inclined to recommend narrow, but I'm highly influenced by the time I spent at the Wisconsin protests, amongst angry people chanting "Shame, shame, shame."

In this "fat-shaming" example, we might say the death of a respected actor ought to be an occasion to praise him, and not to offer up ideas about what he might have done to avert his fate. But I don't hear shaming in that. I hear this wish to avoid death: If only he'd lost weight, he might not have died. And: Fat people need to lose weight, or they might die too. That's more fear than shame.

The person who calls the response "shame"... what's his motivation? He might think "fat-shaming" is a funny, trendy way to refer to any statement about anyone being fat. But I think it's more like: Don't you dare talk about how anyone is fat, because fat people now have a way to bounce what we hear as an insult right back at you.

"The American Medical Association has officially recognized obesity as a disease..."

"... a move that could induce physicians to pay more attention to the condition and spur more insurers to pay for treatments."

The question whether something is a disease is really beside the point, unless you define "disease" to mean: that which is helpful to view as disease.

This reminds me of those plastic surgeons who say that small breasts are a "deformity."

ADDED: Instapundit notes a discussion about a call for more "public health" research on guns and quips "[M]y suggestion to the 'public health' community is to focus on actual diseases, rather than politically-disapproved behaviors." But all you have to do is crank the rhetoric forward one turn and guns are a disease.

AND: I googled "guns are a disease" and got over 29 million hits, including: "Doctors target gun violence as a social disease" and  "I am a physician and guns are a disease" and "Treat gun violence like disease, Medical College expert says."