Losing Myself I
Jul. 19th, 2004 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
burnunit(part one, ongoing. treat this strictly as a first draft)
Meat Day is Wednesday, July 21. Before that, though, there's a bunch of thoughts about eating and dieting. I've lost a LOT of weight this last year, and I'm on a long term program to change my relationship with food and transform my body along the way. If I am successful, I'll sell out, write my own diet book, cash in, and establish a foundation and other efforts to disrupt and discredit the fuckers who run the modern dieting industry. Or something. Anyway, look for the book in about five years, right?
Something significant before we start... or as a start:
Dieting in order to lose weight is largely a luxury of the middle and upper class. To ignore the class issues bound up in the contemporary concept of "dieting" is to ignore a very important thing. People from scientists to comedians (David Cross for example) have pointed out with differing degrees of horror, revulsion, awe, and confusion that there are huge numbers of obese persons in the lower classes. There's a lot of competing theories about this, which I find just silly. In fact, that theme is going to dominate my writing on this subject: competition and atomization, including that among analyses, are part of the problem with dieting, and the dieting and/or health industries.
It seems to me that there's a complicated combination of factors, from the cheapness of bad food, to the price of watching broadcast entertainment telelvision (free if you watch all these ads for cheap, bad foods), to the rise of convenience driven industrialization of food creation and delivery, and on and on.
What I'm getting at right now, however, is that there seems to be a queerly inverse relationship between the scope of your means and the health of your diet. For a massive number of persons (speaking largely for the USA). Poverty has long been associated with hunger, but in the US, our poor are fat. I don't know if there's a link, but there seems to be (I guess cf. the distinction between correlation and causation). That's straight fucked up.
So I wanted to acknowledge that my excursions into the sordid world of weight loss come with a heavy dose of self-awareness that I can do this because I can afford it (we're going to be doing a lot of self-awareness, folks, I invite you to stick with us). But along the way, I'd like to make a case for a diet that accounts for class difference and seek to give people the tools to be responsible to themselves and the ...uh... greater good.
NOW:
Dieting these days seems to come in several different forms. I'm not sure I've identified them all, but I'll get there in time. For now, I believe there are between four and six different dieting modalities. What I think is essential is that far too many diets and weight loss regimes do not bring sufficient meta-awareness of their structure. So that participants, particularly in the name-brand DIETS don't have any insights into what they're doing. And they don't have any recourse, any larger schema within which they can move. The diet becomes the structure, rather than a part of an over-arching framework of living.
Or, to dump that metaphor as rapidly as I made it, the diet doesn't stand on anything, it's just a single idea, or small cluster of ideas. So that the diet, as an end in itself, fails to prepare its participants for life after the weight loss; or fails to give practical tools for sticking to it. At some point, I'm going to be able to describe practical tools. For now, I want to continue my analysis, and then describe what I've been doing and where it's going.
The dieting modalities I believe I've identified so far include: conflict, structural, social, mental, medical, ethical, reflexive, and let's call them fever diets (a catchall for obsessive behaviors, illnesses, disorders, and other fevers of the mind & body). In time, that list may grow or shrink, depending on how accurate I think I can make it. Probably I'll seek to shrink that list, because I like thinking like an editor.
THe thing is, I believe most diets succeed by combining to work through these modalities on the person using them. But what I think is a failure of many diets is that they tend to attract attention to one or two of the modes, transforming the diet into an entirely conflict exercise, or an entirely medical one. Whereas moving through the modes and using them at the appropriate time seems like a better way to be healthy. In my next post, I'll describe each in more detail. But just to cite my numero uno example: Atkins (I can't wait to get those fuckers, really, but I can't until I'm a success) is largely a conflict diet. It depends on a conflict of one food type against another. But it's also a medical, structural and increasingly social one. But it uses the mode of conflict to be operational on all these fronts. From a stance (heh, is that a touch of the indie-rpg design thing creeping in?) of conflict, the Atkins diet provides a structure (ALL these things. NONE of those things!), performs a weird medical effect (ketosis is usually a byproduct of starvation. that's just the plain fact. except that if you're consuming enough protein, when your body goes into ketosis, it decides not to consume its muscle mass), and has created a shockwave social effect (which goes without saying). But at heart, it depends on conflict and works largely in the mode of conflict. I believe it does so at the expense of the other modalities, and without insight into what it's doing.
SO that's what I'm up to. Analyzing and attacking the weight loss industry, in order to clear the decks for my own loony notions and the story of my successes and failures. Keep watching this space, I guess (and comment if you like).
part 2
Meat Day is Wednesday, July 21. Before that, though, there's a bunch of thoughts about eating and dieting. I've lost a LOT of weight this last year, and I'm on a long term program to change my relationship with food and transform my body along the way. If I am successful, I'll sell out, write my own diet book, cash in, and establish a foundation and other efforts to disrupt and discredit the fuckers who run the modern dieting industry. Or something. Anyway, look for the book in about five years, right?
Something significant before we start... or as a start:
Dieting in order to lose weight is largely a luxury of the middle and upper class. To ignore the class issues bound up in the contemporary concept of "dieting" is to ignore a very important thing. People from scientists to comedians (David Cross for example) have pointed out with differing degrees of horror, revulsion, awe, and confusion that there are huge numbers of obese persons in the lower classes. There's a lot of competing theories about this, which I find just silly. In fact, that theme is going to dominate my writing on this subject: competition and atomization, including that among analyses, are part of the problem with dieting, and the dieting and/or health industries.
It seems to me that there's a complicated combination of factors, from the cheapness of bad food, to the price of watching broadcast entertainment telelvision (free if you watch all these ads for cheap, bad foods), to the rise of convenience driven industrialization of food creation and delivery, and on and on.
What I'm getting at right now, however, is that there seems to be a queerly inverse relationship between the scope of your means and the health of your diet. For a massive number of persons (speaking largely for the USA). Poverty has long been associated with hunger, but in the US, our poor are fat. I don't know if there's a link, but there seems to be (I guess cf. the distinction between correlation and causation). That's straight fucked up.
So I wanted to acknowledge that my excursions into the sordid world of weight loss come with a heavy dose of self-awareness that I can do this because I can afford it (we're going to be doing a lot of self-awareness, folks, I invite you to stick with us). But along the way, I'd like to make a case for a diet that accounts for class difference and seek to give people the tools to be responsible to themselves and the ...uh... greater good.
NOW:
Dieting these days seems to come in several different forms. I'm not sure I've identified them all, but I'll get there in time. For now, I believe there are between four and six different dieting modalities. What I think is essential is that far too many diets and weight loss regimes do not bring sufficient meta-awareness of their structure. So that participants, particularly in the name-brand DIETS don't have any insights into what they're doing. And they don't have any recourse, any larger schema within which they can move. The diet becomes the structure, rather than a part of an over-arching framework of living.
Or, to dump that metaphor as rapidly as I made it, the diet doesn't stand on anything, it's just a single idea, or small cluster of ideas. So that the diet, as an end in itself, fails to prepare its participants for life after the weight loss; or fails to give practical tools for sticking to it. At some point, I'm going to be able to describe practical tools. For now, I want to continue my analysis, and then describe what I've been doing and where it's going.
The dieting modalities I believe I've identified so far include: conflict, structural, social, mental, medical, ethical, reflexive, and let's call them fever diets (a catchall for obsessive behaviors, illnesses, disorders, and other fevers of the mind & body). In time, that list may grow or shrink, depending on how accurate I think I can make it. Probably I'll seek to shrink that list, because I like thinking like an editor.
THe thing is, I believe most diets succeed by combining to work through these modalities on the person using them. But what I think is a failure of many diets is that they tend to attract attention to one or two of the modes, transforming the diet into an entirely conflict exercise, or an entirely medical one. Whereas moving through the modes and using them at the appropriate time seems like a better way to be healthy. In my next post, I'll describe each in more detail. But just to cite my numero uno example: Atkins (I can't wait to get those fuckers, really, but I can't until I'm a success) is largely a conflict diet. It depends on a conflict of one food type against another. But it's also a medical, structural and increasingly social one. But it uses the mode of conflict to be operational on all these fronts. From a stance (heh, is that a touch of the indie-rpg design thing creeping in?) of conflict, the Atkins diet provides a structure (ALL these things. NONE of those things!), performs a weird medical effect (ketosis is usually a byproduct of starvation. that's just the plain fact. except that if you're consuming enough protein, when your body goes into ketosis, it decides not to consume its muscle mass), and has created a shockwave social effect (which goes without saying). But at heart, it depends on conflict and works largely in the mode of conflict. I believe it does so at the expense of the other modalities, and without insight into what it's doing.
SO that's what I'm up to. Analyzing and attacking the weight loss industry, in order to clear the decks for my own loony notions and the story of my successes and failures. Keep watching this space, I guess (and comment if you like).
part 2
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Date: 2004-07-19 11:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-20 06:31 am (UTC)