Thursday, November 17, 2016

Meeting the standard (page 3)

Meeting the standard:

Body shaming:

 Imagine that you were under stress and that because of the stress, over a short period of time, you gained 30 lbs. You were so shocked by this unexpected weight gain that you decided to avoid a certain amount of food. You felt like you needed to avoid the overwhelming anxiety of people telling you that your body seems absolutely disgusting. Perhaps no one even bothered telling you what they think of your body ever and, yet, you still always obsessed over this idea. You excessively exercised. You limited caloric intake, excessively. You may have tried certain diet pills. Sometimes, someone controls their caloric intake and their weight remains the same. So it may even go unnoticed.

 What does your intuition tell you? Is anything wrong? That's right - you would have an eating disorder. These are usually something like "anorexia", "bulimia", "binge eating disorder". In this scenario, it was all done in excess. Being diagnosed with eating disorders might make men feel ashamed because of that its popularly known as a "woman's disorder". However, its on the rise for men as well as it is for woman in these particular times in history.

 How could it get noticed? The effects of this excessive dieting can lead to the worsening of depression and anxiety, People may comment on your body and tell you that they thought that what you were doing was a little excessive. If you abused steroids, the damage done by them will reveal themselves to you. Weight-loss pills are usually powerful vaso-constrictor's - they can increase the heart-rate which, depending on a many number of factors, may cause blood-pressure to drop too low, causing blackouts. In severe cases, because of the effects of an these kinds of eating disorders, you can end up with anemia or actually have a heart-attack.

 "Overweight and obese youths who experience rapid weight loss are particularly vulnerable to developing eating disorders, a 2013 paper in the journal Pediatrics found."

 "Dr. Kimberli McCallum, founder and director of McCallum Place eating disorder centers in St. Louis, guesses 80 percent of eating disorders in men go undiagnosed."

 However, as I have explained earlier, disinformation can cleverly take advantage of our credibility. People are being exposed to anti-obesity messages. The media and the many people that we are interconnected with may participate in this extreme bias of things. (For some reason, I always put emphasis on the media, though. After all, the media portrays certain ideologies, celebrities, or particular phenomenon that appeals to ones emotions. Its also an indicator what is popular in the social and political realms.)

 The conclusion here to arrive at may be that politics works only one way. Its one-sided. When politics picks one significant social phenomenon and moralize it, after that, everything thing else loses its appeal.

 In regard to obesity, the media helps moralize body image through its advertising mediums so that
people become more acclimated to it. If its an issue in the political realm, the reader may assume that the media is a tool of political forces. If you look it up on a popular search engine, the puritan ethic somehow relates to how many things get moralized in our culture. Laziness and gluttony (not caring about why it happens or what its really about) are, somehow, thought of as the perfect political and economic tools of success in our contemporary times.

The message of the media:

 All day and everyday what messages can we be bombarded with in regard to body image? Who is depressed?: The obese. Who is unattractive?: The obese. Who is lazy?: the obese.

 Never does the haunting of this sociocultural deluge of stigma attached to our dietary life-style ever seem to die down. The medical community says one thing and then it says something else in place of its old research later on in time: (as an example) "high cholesterol is a risk factor for heart disease" vs. "HDL cholesterol protects against heart disease" or "Fake butter substitutes: processed oils such as margarin are better for your diet" vs "These oils contain omega 6 and trans fats - they are not balanced with omega 3's and are actually harmful"

   It seems like common sense now that I know that thin people are being glamorized (thin celebrities and thin models are in particular). People whom are thin are usually seen as healthy, moralistic, and happier.

   Even that body weight is usually not directly known through thyroid, hormonal, or cellular decay, the medical community comes up with some sensational studies - its all about that obese people have a "brain disease". Researchers declare that the western diet "weakens the blood-brain barrier". A study may show that low-socioeconomic status is linked to obesity. A study will show that obesity is linked to ADHD and depression! There are multiple genes linked to storing body weight and eating habits. Honestly, some people have a substandard biological characteristics that can be assigned to a gene variation: The "APOE4" gene variant is linked to heart disease, diabetes, and the aging of the brain. People with down syndrome can actually have two copies of this gene variant since that part of their chromosome in that abnormal copy had characterized that disease. This is why people with down-syndrome are more likely to develop Alzheimer's and dementia. However, this gene variant doesn't affect most people.

 In the midst of that, the media portrays obese people with strong condemnation, giving them attributes such as "people with a lack of self-control", "people that are self-medicating fat pigs and are the burdens to society", "People that ruin their relationships with others because of their bad habits" and "people that are both unhappy and unattractive".

 You were persuaded to think that the standard is only being thin since those people are more moralistic. Aside from that thinking, use your intuition and start wondering about this standard. You already know by now that thin people can have eating disorders which can go unnoticed. You know now that these disorders such as anorexia and substance abuse(to lose the weight) are reported to be on the rise because of the media giving anti-obesity messages etc.

 Statistical analysis also show that thin people and obese people eat the same amount of junk food. While the media portrays obese people as self-medicating their sad life-style with junk food and that the government seems coercive to tax empty calorie beverages, what does your intuition tell you about this moralistic conquest to portray certain people as incompetent in the midst of certain other people being portrayed as competent and meeting the standard? Perhaps anytime we are dealing with just obesity - not, specifically, high-blood pressure, diabetes, and high LDL cholesterol, we get into the politics of our health rather than the science. Think of this statistical fact:  "Underweight Americans consume more junk food than those who are morbidly obese".

 Fat shaming starts at a young age. In the work place or in the media, its not just sarcasm if you think that "In the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said Donald Trump called this woman "Miss Piggy" and "Miss Housekeeping," because she is Latina" is sarcasm. Skinny people are the ones to harass people with these insults. Do you see now how, in many cases, influencing certain people to think that they meet a standard creates the factors contributing to this phenomenon of narcissism? Indeed, this is significant. Its not just a small problem in the world.

   Here's another popular idea to influence peoples thinking: Having self-esteem issues and then suddenly improving in mood and self-esteem after gastric bypass surgery. Maybe your conscience is giving you a vague impression of something being weird about this. It just doesn't seem right to attach self-esteem to a medical procedure that simply constraints a bad eating habit (but can also be a factor in gut microbial interaction). Perhaps we all like to believe that our self-esteem etc relates to our relationship with food but that's just forming a belief based on our observation of how we find connections between certain things because of that we take for granted how we are influenced by our personal relationships and financial situation etc. Perhaps this information may properly counterbalance with those other claims that I had mentioned: According to the journal "JAMA surgery", people who undergo surgery for weight loss are 50% more likely to attempt suicide after the operation than before it.

   Take heed of the fact that there are three general kinds of weight-loss surgeries. One of them cannot be reversed. Gastric bypass surgery limits the nutrient uptake of food with the bypass from the stomach to a lower part of the digestive system after the stomach and into the intestine (increasing the likelihood of getting anemia etc). A rare complication of this surgery is that one cannot survive with the normal kind of food intake because of the severity by which one cannot absorb nutrients. I read that gastric bypass surgery can usually be reversed but I am not the info page expert so the reader has to look everything up as thoroughly as they usually would instead of thinking that I am not lazy and that I simply just know things pretty well.

   Of all the people whom had weight loss surgery, it is estimated that 1/3 of them regain all the weight back in approx. 36 months. Undergoing weight loss surgery is interconnected with a worrisome rise in the risk for them to abuse alcohol and all this talk about the flaw in human design makes me confused about another study: One study shows that months to years after gastric bypass surgery, for unknown reasons, the surgery has an affect on the chemistry of the urine, causing a much more significant likelihood of getting a kidney stone. You'd think that the medical community fixed the obesogenic faulty digestive system but, instead, they created new problems with its unknown and confusing causative agents which is causing this abnormalcy (by which they are still hoping to find out through some other analysis).
  
   Whenever you hear a story about peoples lives being transformed by being thin, just like everything else in this world that has a persuasive influence such as the times when there was a glorification of Prozac and Paxil in the late 1990's, instead of being credulous about it, listen to your conscience. Think of how wrong this world is to convince what is ones' key to success in life in a marketing scheme that might very cleverly make you think that you can meet a particular standard when you accept some kind of pill or medical procedure.

    Next time someone's' weight loss surgery gets a glorifying report from the people that they know, what does your intuition tell you? While its not at all bad to recover ones health, its another thing to ascribe new meaning to ones life because they meet a standard - going from being a "burden to society" to "being restored of ones sanity and reconciling the relationships around them" seems like an unrealistic expectation out of people.

    Think of the depiction of what we are dealing with: I imagine that one could start meditating on that there were different body types: ectomorph, endomorph, mesomorph. Oh, but that's not all: now that/this someone whom I imagined just figured out quickly that only two of them are associated with being healthy - the previous two before the last one is what I am talking about (by which this last one is interconnected with obesity and diabetes); Since excessive body weight can be bad for the spinal coulombs, is associated with old age and cellular insufficiency in the muscles (in other words, looking like your sickly or old?), is interconnected with the inefficient blood circulation provided by a inadequate heart muscle since its not designed for that particular body weight, and diabetes etc, you could conclude that the last one is the bad body type.

   But if you didn't include the study done showing that overweight people are more likely to survive a heart attack than the (healthy) thin people out there, then maybe you'd learn to hate any of the body types that it isn't the good kind. Maybe you wish that you looked like a skinny celebrity anyways.

   To take this notion of being affected by some kind of hereditary condition further, I suppose since its estimated that 1 out of 5 Americans are affected by mental illness and that 1 out of 10 school children are diagnosed with ADHD, I could form the idea that there are many bad genes out there. However, in contrast to that long after the astronomical amounts of ads for Prozac and Paxil after the 1990's and also long after the fact of many alleged miracle drugs found for mental health woes both being popularized and provided, how come many people resort to highly addictive drugs on the black market more then ever before at this time in history? If the human body wasn't so complicated - beyond our human ordinary minds, then why did certain studies come out these past couple of years showing the negative impact that certain therapeutic drugs have(?) - What about the black box warning being put on certain antidepressants years after they were popularized (in the 2000's era)? What about the contradictory results of certain studies done about kids taking Ritalin but then showing that this does not lead to them genuinely improving with their study habits? What about the study done that showed the negative impact that gastric bypass surgery has on pregnant woman (showing the negative impact) on the developing fetus (as in the baby being born underweight)? Perhaps the human mind will always remain separate from the workings of the universe. No human invented our biological form. Our senses do not allow us to perceive the limitless complexities of this universe. However, some people probably feel entitled to have undue control over the fate of biological life.

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