Dame Sally Davies, England’s Chief Medical Officer, rightly identifies obesity as a huge threat to our health. She wants to tax sodas and ban ‘2 for 1s’. I disagree.
A summary of her position is featured on BBC News. It’s the usual government nonsense. But in order to fix something you have to understand how it comes about, you must identify its real cause. History is littered with mistakes that demonstrate this. If you think witches cause crop failure and rouse the townsfolk to burn the witches, you shouldn’t be surprised that nothing good happens. Historically when we’ve not manifested the result we want, we step-up the number and variety of witches that need burning. This, of course, will not create an improvement in the situation yet this is exactly what the Government and Dame Sally are doing.
Dame Sally, and the government that pays her wages, wags her finger at the food industry and shouts ‘burn the witches’. Actually it’s worse than that, she points the finger at cheap sodas, ‘2 for 1’ offers and others supermarket marketing; that’s just moronic. Food, even so-called ‘junk food’ is not the cause of obesity, if it was everybody that ate junk food would be obese and clearly they are not. (It fails both the ‘necessity’ and ‘sufficiency’ requirement to be called a ‘cause’.) Go into McDonalds and actually take a look. This is something that politicians, doctors and journalists aren’t doing. There are no trails of fat people queuing out the door, yet we still believe this must be epicentre of the obesity epidemic.
Obesity is caused by chronic over-eating. Over-eating is taking in more calories than you burn each day (as an adult). It’s the unchecked imbalance between ‘calories in’ and ‘calories out’ that is the cause of obesity. If you want to eat more and stay thin you have to burn more calories to stay the same. It’s simple physics and people in authority should understand that physics trumps poor research, surveys and propaganda.
Everything we do to ignore these internal clues will sabotage our ability to stay at a healthy weight.
But what, I hear you say, is the true cause of ‘chronic overeating’. Simple, in most cases, it’s eating when you’re not physically hungry. It’s emotional eating rather than eating for fuel or nutrition. We have a biological/neurological system in place to tell us what we need to eat, when to eat and when we are full. Everything we do to ignore these internal clues will sabotage our ability to stay at a healthy weight. That’s why ‘finish your plate’ or ‘you must eat five a day to be healthy’ threatens and corrupts a system that been working well for millions of years. When you add to this the fact that we use food as treats and the cultural acceptance of eating to feel better instead of addressing problems, you see how things have gone so wrong.
Obesity is an emotional disorder, not a nutritional one. The idea of banning or taxing sodas will not address the county’s increasing problem of obesity, nor will banning 2 for 1’s. How is it possible for England’s top medical authority to not get this? That’s another good question. I think the answer is the old adage, if you’re looking for help and go to a surgeon, he’ll cut you, go to a doctor, he’ll give you pills, go to a leech guy and he’ll bleed you. Unfortunately, doctors are claiming to be experts on emotional issues when they make such pronouncements and the government listens. The same applies to depression and anxiety which is why doctors medicate rather than address and treat these issues. Why do people even go to doctors for such issues? It’s because of the NHS and the whole socialisation of medicine; don’t get me started on that!
Obesity is an emotional disorder, not a nutritional one. The idea of banning or taxing sodas will not address the county’s increasing problem of obesity, nor will banning 2 for 1’s.
Our emotional mechanism is there to keep us happy and healthy. When we ignore it or medicate the signals out of our awareness, we lose the motivation to resolve what’s wrong in our lives. We end-up carrying on as if nothing is wrong for years and years. We tread water and stop living life as it’s meant to be lived.
The government and its appointed spokespeople are also nagging us about nutrition but the more I hear these media reports, the more I’m convinced Nutrition is a Pseudo-Science. See my post on Inner Wisdom vs. the Nutrition Nazis.
When England’s top doc learns how to personally treat emotional disorders (not mask them) she might say something worth listening to; until this time we’ll keep burning witches and the crops will keep failing.
Obesity is an emotional issue, we address this correctly by identifying the cause of the emotional issue and fixing it. I don’t know how many people I’ll see this year for weight issues but I know I’ll have far more success that England’s top doc. Unfortunately the Government, the NHS and all the associated health quangos will continue to demand that the witches must be burnt. Don’t listen.
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