The freedom of thought, conscience and opinion are subject to no real restriction.  Each and every person is free to think what he or she likes without fear of outside interference, so long as his or her opinions remain private.

Freedom of choice describes a person's opportunity and autonomy to select an action from at least two available options, without being limited or restricted by others.

The freedom to make our own choices is a very important issue in our society.  Every day, each of us chooses to do the things that we do, unless we are in a situation where we have been stripped of our freedom, and then we must do as those who have control over us command us to do.

This would be the case of those in prison or those who are enslaved by force in repressive societies. Even in those circumstances people still have freedom to make certain limited choices.  For example, one can choose what kind of attitude and response to have toward one's oppressors.

  Individual freedom of choice can sometimes be restricted through social control. 
Social control refers to the way that society or government regulates individual and group behavior in order to get people to conform and comply with its specific rules.
 
One form of social control is the internalization of norms and values by a process known as socialization.  People learn social values through exposure to society's customs, norms, and mores.  Marketing and advertising industries have become very influential in establishing social values. Society uses shame, ridicule, sarcasm, criticism, and disapproval to punish individuals for behavior that it considers unacceptable.


The other form of social control is through external sanctions enforced by government to regulate society.

We live in a culture that tells us that our bodies are not good enough and never will be, but this does not dissolve our individual freedom of choice. 
No person or entity has the right to intervene in the most basic and private aspects of the adult lives of others.

In a free society, people are entitled to live their personal lives as they deem fit, absent clear and direct harm to others. 

It is important to respect the private choices of individuals and to respect their individual freedom.  Some lines should never be crossed, and this certainly includes seeking to control what and how other people choose to eat.

The diet industry knows that biology dictates that almost everyone can lose weight short term and almost everyone will gain it back long term, and they’ve done a tremendous job of taking credit for the first part and blaming their client for the second part ... though neither is accurate.
  Nobody wants to be fat. In most modern cultures, even if you are healthy, to be fat is to be perceived as weak-willed and lazy. However,  no one owes society a thin body. Fat people have the right to exist, in fat bodies, without shame, stigma, bullying or oppression.  It doesn’t matter why anyone is fat, what being fat means, or if one could be thin by some means however easy or difficult. Even if every study of weight loss showed that every person who tried to lose weight was completely successful by whatever definition, fat people would still have the right to exist.

Health is multi-dimensional and includes things in our control and things out of our control such as genetics, environment, access, stress and behaviors, and being healthy is not the same as being thin. There are healthy and unhealthy people of every shape and size.
Furthermore, one's health is nobody else’s business.   Nobody is obligated to choose "healthy" habits, by any definition.  It’s none of anybody else’s business how highly someone prioritizes their health or what their habits are.  No one owes anybody else “healthy” no matter what size they are.

Despite my personal preferences, just as I get to choose what I believe and what I do, others are allowed to run with their own prejudices, stereotypes of pre-conceived notions about fat people, body size, as well as what they think constitutes an eating disorder.  Every adult person, no matter how ignorant or biased, gets to choose the intimate details of his/her own life.. absent clear and direct harm to others.

During this past century, medical professionals have commonly believed that fat people have a “perverted appetite”.  In the 1960s, medical experts were influenced by modern marketing and public relations techniques to re-label this negative judgment in less demeaning terms, and they began referring to various appetite issues surrounding obesity as "Disordered Eating". This resulted in the label, "Eating Disorder" and further, ongoing, classificationss of specific food behaviors as Anorexic, Bulimic, Binge Eating, and (lest any fat-related eating behavior escape) ...the catchall category..  Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS). 

By the 1970s, behavioral treatments emerged involving ways to make the Fat eat like the Lean.  Even though none of those therapies has every been shown to work long-term, many of them are still with us.  In fact, today, most of the leading authorities on obesity are now psychologists and psychiatrists, who have expertise involving the ways of the mind, but little or no expertise about the ways of the body.

The Diet, and Non-Diet, Marketing Interests … including the medical profession… have achieved a great deal of Social Control as a result of labeling a very large range of various eating behaviors with the term "Eating Disorder."  For more about that subject see: Eating Disorders Revisited.

As an exercise of my own personal Freedom of Choice, I am against the dominant thinking of our Society.  My position is that all adult people have the right to make their own individual eating choices, which includes what and how much they choose to eat, as well as all other aspects of their own eating behavior, and that those choices are no one else's business.  Despite anyone's individual body size ... whether it is thin, normal, or obese ... I believe that every adult person has the right to engage in any type of dieting or non-dieting food behaviors that he/she chooses …. no matter whether others consider those behaviors to be "healthy" or "unhealthy.

                  
DietHobby is a digital Scrapbook of thoughts, opinions and graphics that interest or appeal to me. One of the nice things about having my own website is that I can post online whatever I like, whenever I wish to do so.

My ARCHIVES of articles and videos are like a handful of hearts that I am happy to share with interested others.  

                     

Several months ago, in a forum that I frequent, I came upon a post by an MD who created a specific diet, asking the forum members this question.  

"I wonder why everyone in the world isn't on this diet, and why doesn't everyone in this world stay on the diet until they reach a very thin weight? Do you think people just don't want to be thin? Do you think they don't fully understand or agree with the benefits of being thin?"

 Here is the reply that I posted:   

"Here's what I think . . .   . . . and Remember . . . You Asked. 

Following through with eating only tiny amounts of food for weeks at a time is emotionally very hard for most people, and especially hard for obese people.

22 years ago I had a RNY, and I've spent lots of time around people who've had similar weight loss surgeries. This taught me that the main reason a Gastric Bypass is so effective in causing weight-loss is not a lack of stomach hunger. It is the fact that for 6 months to a year, even a tiny bit of food cheating causes immediate and severe physical pain, but there's no longer an option to eat-a-much-as-you-want-of-what-you want because you've physically lost that choice. You can't quit.

Like a Gastric Bypass, … when followed correctly … the ______ Diet will reduce stomach size to reduce or eliminate hunger. But although overeating can cause some temporary discomfort, overeating allows hunger to return, and you retain the physical ability to choose to quit.

People, even fat people, are not all the same.

Everyone doesn't find the look of being VERY THIN attractive,
and everyone doesn't believe that being VERY THIN causes good health.
Everyone doesn't want to be VERY THIN.
I know I don't.

People have different opinions and beliefs about what constitutes beauty. Our culture is strongly influenced by what the media (with its anti-fat bias) tells us is beauty. Even so, people still have different opinions about what makes a person attractive. There are those who prefer a thin, bony look, some prefer a lean, muscular look, some prefer a soft, round look, and there are even some who prefer to see a lot of Fat. My own personal preference is the soft, round look.

Also, people, (including medical professionals) have different opinions and beliefs about what constitutes health, and what will make us healthy.

Correlation does not imply causation is such an important fact. It is the most basic tenet of research. The problem with correlational research is that it only proves that things happen at the same time, it does nothing to prove that one thing causes the other. Just because obesity and a disease are correlated, doesn't mean that obesity caused the disease.

There are no such things as fat people diseases. Thin people get all the diseases that fat people do. Health is multi-dimensional and includes behaviors (past and present), environment, genetics, stress, and more.  Some of these components are within our control and some aren’t.  People cannot control the end result and if they get a disease they will probably never know for sure exactly why it happened.

Medical professionals disagree as to whether being VERY THIN is healthier than being merely normal weight. Statistically speaking, women over 60 with BMI ranges in normal, overweight, and a bit over the obesity borderline, have been found to be healthier than those who are in the underweight or mid-to-high-obesity BMI ranges.

The descriptive terms "FAT-and-LAZY", and "FAT-and-STUPID", are like "THIN-and-HEALTHY", in that they are all independent descriptions which are often erroneously linked together.

All people are going to die.  There is no magical weight that you can be that will make you immortal.  Some obese people will get hit by a bus when they are perfectly healthy.  Some thin people will be born sick and will never be healthy.   Some obese people will be healthy until they die of old age.  Weight and health are two different things.

Health is multi-dimensional, not entirely under our control, and each person gets to choose what health means to them, how important health is to them, and what path best supports their own priorities and their own goals."
                                                        
 

I am now I'm now in my 9th year of maintaining a "normal" weight after a large weight-loss.

Accomplishing this has been incredibly hard, and, even after all these years, this task is not getting any easier for me.
See: Running DOWN the UP Escalator.

The Truth about weight-loss and maintaining weight-loss isn't something that we're EVER going to hear from Marketing Interests … (which includes most doctors and nutritionists) … however, Facing it, Understanding it, and Accepting it, can be very helpful.

Below is a recent CBS news article discussing this issue.

Obesity research confirms long-term weight-loss almost impossible. 
                          by Kelly Crowe, CBS news 6-4-14

There's a disturbing truth that is emerging from the science of obesity. After years of study, it's becoming apparent that it's nearly impossible to permanently lose weight.

As incredible as it sounds, that's what the evidence is showing. For psychologist Traci Mann, who has spent 20 years running an eating lab at the University of Minnesota, the evidence is clear. "It couldn't be easier to see," she says. "Long-term weight loss happens to only the smallest minority of people."

We all think we know someone in that rare group. They become the legends — the friend of a friend, the brother-in-law, the neighbor — the ones who really did it.

But if we check back after five or 10 years, there's a good chance they will have put the weight back on. Only about five per cent of people who try to lose weight ultimately succeed, according to the research. Those people are the outliers, but we cling to their stories as proof that losing weight is possible.

"Those kinds of stories really keep the myth alive," says University of Alberta professor Tim Caulfield, who researches and writes about health misconceptions. "You have this confirmation bias going on where people point to these very specific examples as if it's proof. But in fact those are really exceptions."

Our biology taunts us, by making short-term weight loss fairly easy. But the weight creeps back, usually after about a year, and it keeps coming back until the original weight is regained or worse.

This has been tested in randomized controlled trials where people have been separated into groups and given intense exercise and nutrition counseling.

Even in those highly controlled experimental settings, the results show only minor sustained weight loss.

When Traci Mann analyzed all of the randomized control trials on long-term weight loss, she discovered that after two years the average amount lost was only one kilogram, or about two pounds, from the original weight.

Tiptoeing around the truth

So if most scientists know that we can't eat ourselves thin, that the lost weight will ultimately bounce back, why don't they say so?

Tim Caulfield says his fellow obesity academics tend to tiptoe around the truth. "You go to these meetings and you talk to researchers, you get a sense there is almost a political correctness around it, that we don't want this message to get out there," he said.

"You'll be in a room with very knowledgeable individuals, and everyone in the room will know what the data says and still the message doesn't seem to get out."

In part, that's because it's such a harsh message. "You have to be careful about the stigmatizing nature of that kind of image," Caulfield says. "That's one of the reasons why this myth of weight loss lives on."

Health experts are also afraid people will abandon all efforts to exercise and eat a nutritious diet — behavior that is important for health and longevity — even if it doesn't result in much weight loss.

Traci Mann says the emphasis should be on measuring health, not weight. "You should still eat right, you should still exercise, doing healthy stuff is still healthy," she said. "It just doesn't make you thin."

We are biological machines

But eating right to improve health alone isn't a strong motivator. The research shows that most people are willing to exercise and limit caloric intake if it means they will look better. But if they find out their weight probably won't change much, they tend to lose motivation.

That raises another troubling question. If diets don't result in weight loss, what does? At this point the grim answer seems to be that there is no known cure for obesity, except perhaps surgically shrinking the stomach. 

Research suggests bariatric surgery can induce weight loss in the extremely obese, improving health and quality of life at the same time. But most people will still be obese after the surgery. Plus, there are risky side effects, and many will end up gaining some of that weight back.

If you listen closely you will notice that obesity specialists are quietly adjusting the message through a subtle change in language.

These days they're talking about weight maintenance or "weight management" rather than "weight loss."

It's a shift in emphasis that reflects the emerging reality. Just last week the headlines announced the world is fatter than it has ever been, with 2.1 billion people now overweight or obese, based on an analysis published in the online issue of the British medical journal The Lancet.

Researchers are divided about why weight gain seems to be irreversible, probably a combination of biological and social forces. "The fundamental reason," Caulfield says, "is that we are very efficient biological machines. We evolved not to lose weight. We evolved to keep on as much weight as we possibly can."

Lost in all of the noise about dieting and obesity is the difficult concept of prevention, of not putting weight on in the first place.

The Lancet study warned that more than one in five kids in developed countries are now overweight or obese. Statistics Canada says close to a third of Canadian kids under 17 are overweight or obese. And in a world flooded with food, with enormous economic interest in keeping people eating that food, what is required to turn this ship around is daunting.

"An appropriate rebalancing of the primal needs of humans with food availability is essential," University of Oxford epidemiologist Klim McPherson wrote in a Lancet commentary following last week's study. But to do that, he suggested, "would entail curtailing many aspects of production and marketing for food industries."

Perhaps, though, the emerging scientific reality should also be made clear, so we can navigate this obesogenic world armed with the stark truth — that we are held hostage to our biology, which is adapted to gain weight, an old evolutionary advantage that has become a dangerous metabolic liability. 

Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, whose new book, The Diet Fix is featured here in DietHobby's BookTalk section, made this comment about the above-quoted article:

 

I think what makes maintaining weight loss seem "almost impossible" are the goal posts society has generally set to measure success. 

 

No doubt, if the goal set is losing every last ounce of weight that some stupid chart says you're supposed to lose then the descriptor "almost impossible" may well be fair. 

On the other hand, if the goal is to cultivate the healthiest life that you can honestly enjoy, subtotal losses, often with significant concomitant health improvements, are definitely within your reach. 

Ragen Chastain of DanceswithFat says: 

If you read the comments on the article, you’ll see that many people subscribe to the magical power of semantics.  If you attempt intentional weight loss, but instead of dieting you call it a lifestyle change, they claim you won’t gain your weight back.  This is the second to the last stop on the denial train, at the final stop people just close their eyes, stick their fingers in their ears, and scream LA LA LA! 

Studies have shown that when people diet, their bodies change biologically for the express purpose or regaining and maintaining weight,

.... but it really doesn’t matter at this point why weight loss fails almost all the time.  The fact that it does means that weight loss does not meet the criteria of evidence based medicine.  If a prescription fails almost all the time, often having the exact opposite of the intended result, (and especially when that happens consistently for more than 50 years,) the solution is not to keep prescribing that intervention and tell people to try harder.

This is the world that diet culture built. Doctors, diet companies, internet commenters, people’s mamas and everyone else have been telling us that being thin is the only path to health and that if healthy habits don’t make us thinner than they won’t make us healthier.  Society says that the only “good” body is a thin body. Now we find that if healthy habits don’t make us thinner we “tend to lose motivation.”  I forget, what’s the word that means the opposite of “shocking”?

The solution is to stop worrying if the truth is “stigmatizing” and start telling the truth early and often.  Telling the truth with the same veracity that people post anti-fat, pro weightloss diatribes in the comment sections of every article that exists on the internet.

Public health should be about making as much true information and as many options as possible available to the public, and then letting people make their own decisions.

Health is not an obligation, a barometer of worthiness, or completely within our control. Each of us gets to choose how highly we prioritize our health and the path that we want to take to get there and those decisions can also be impacted by forces outside of our control.

The other part of the solution is to stop stigmatizing fat people. The article waxes tragic about the fact that fat people are unlikely to get thin, but the truth is we have no idea what our health would be like if fat people weren’t faced by constant stigma.  We have no idea what our health would be like if fat people stopped feeding our bodies less fuel than they need to survive in the hopes that they will eat themselves and become smaller (aka weight loss). Since statistically the best way to gain weight is to diet, we don’t know what our society body size distribution would look like if we stopped doing it. Maybe if enough people refuse to perpetuate the lie of weight loss and start telling the truth, we can find out.

My own view is, that just because something is hard, doesn't mean it is impossible.  

Losing weight is hard.
Maintaining weight-loss is hard.  
Being fat is hard.  
Choose your hard.
  

Each of us needs to decide for ourselves, whether or not we want to attempt to "climb the weight-loss mountain", and, if so, what individual path will work best for us personally. 

I've successfully followed a lot of Insane Diets,
and have this TRUTH to share.
< - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - No matter WHAT they say - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Although the "ME" in each of us
(through personal effort)
can get Thinner, 


"There's no "Perfect ME" 
waiting at the end
of the insane-diet rainbow." 

And that's okay,
Everyone is Beautiful. 
It is our choice whether or not to recognize that.
Beauty is something that we get to claim and own for ourselves
WHENEVER we want to.  

The thinner woman inside of me ... or in most of us ... doesn't look like the one in the picture above,
and it will never be my own personal "end result".
But
no matter how many "Rainbows of Wishful Thinking" that any diet guru vomits in my face,


the Best I can be is Good Enough.