I answered it myself because it’s the type of question that someone exploring FA would probably wonder about.

Unlike you though, I didn’t really expect to get anywhere with S/S, not because I’m sooo clever- I wish- but because with weight, the trolling is in the stance, not the manner.

Asking for proof or evidence that DDW (or any other weight loss thus far). Is one big troll in itself.

The rotund had an article on CiF recently, one of the numerous trolls there accused her of being like an ‘AIDS denier’.
But what, I ask, did AIDS deniers do?

They ignored that people were getting sick in the same way, the sickness progressed in the same way, and said, the evidence just doesn’t support the existence/ link between HIV and AIDS. Just like the them really.

If you think of what you have to at least by default go along with to believe fat people are somehow conspiring to remain fat to piss you off. Or because dieting is like algebra. Is troll hardcore, end of.

So as civil as S/S was, he’s playing the same game a lot of literate deluders play with themselves, that of thinking up to the point their delusion will allow and then snapping back into place when there’s no more give.

If any weight trolls want to examine the other side, simply stop pretending you don’t know the truth, that is all you need to do in essence.

I disagree, actually, if we’re talking about real trolls. The problem with people like squamous and the few that occasionally get through the mod queue is that they present themselves as NOT trolls; i.e., they start out by saying they share our goals or they are trying to understand but just have one question, or something like that. They start out from a place of inquiry, and while sometimes they do something obvious like talk about the fat people they saw at Chili’s, other times they don’t. I didn’t let squamous through the mod queue because I thought “I just need to explain the blazing truth to him;” I let him through because he seemed like someone who might get something out of reading the blog if he could just shut up for a second. I was sadly mistaken in this case, but that’s how it goes.

With all due respect, you have no idea what our straight-up trolls look like, because we don’t let them see the light of day.

Though I was kind of fond of the one who just commented “lol fatties” — it was more the essence of trolling than the substance. Eau de troll?

Like the rest of the women in my family. (Except they don’t all do linear algebra.)

Thank you for this FJ, I agree, I also wasn’t trying to get at volcanista, merely explaining that she seemed a tad askew in her estimation of me.

I hope you don’t mind me saying this, ( I know you’re probably done with this thread) but I think the issue with squamous is that on one hand, we in FA tend to try and hold to incompatible attitudes when it comes to trolls.

One, we know that they’ve chosen to wilfully delude themselves.

Two, we believe that if we explain it to them, they will get it.

You are right it’s exhausting.

From the start of entering the FA fray I’ve felt that asking for proof about the efficacy of WLD’s, or fat peolple’s ability or not to change their weight. Doesn’t make any damn sense.

It’s like being in a room with the proverbial elephant; we can see smell it, feel the hairs on it’s swishing tail, we are all pressed up against the wall.

One of those people pressed up against the wall might be a waggish existentialist and say: apart from all that, prove there’s an elephant in the room.

The fact of asking for proof is proof that you’ve choosen to ignore the most obvious ‘proof’ of all; reality.

By offering logic and ‘proof’ to people who’ve wilfilly deluded themselves we have to be careful not to give validity to what we know is nonsense. The details we can query, but the upshot is utterly evident.

I say delusion- when you see the truth and suspend reality to impose something in this place. As opposed to belief, where the conclusion is neither one way or t’other, so you make a call according to what makes most sense to you.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t fight, I’m saying we can fight from belief in ourselves and our own experience, not from way inside troll territory.

Anyhoo,

This thread has been excellent and has given me much to think about.

Thank you to everyone for that, I’m grateful.

And of course “point” is a misnomer, and it’s really a range, meaning that (as an example totally pulled out of my ass) a person whose current body wants to be around 170 can still weigh 180 or 190 indefinitely with no problem if she has a chronic illness and can’t move around much, for instance. The fallacy is in thinking that if she doesn’t start exercising she will eventually go on to weigh 200, 210, 220 with no end in sight, or conversely that if she would only start exercising and restrict her food she could weigh 120 till she dies. Either one of those can be true for some people, but not most — even in the very limited-time studies Kate linked to.

I got weary of the discussion up there so I didn’t read some of your interaction with volcanista and squamous, but from what you’ve said here I don’t think you and I, at least, are in disagreement. Simplysquamous has shown himself to be a disingenuous, smarmy, egotistical sort of person, so it’s possible that he was trying to sow discord and causing people to misunderstand each other.

I’ve just caught up with this:

What wriggles is describing comes up now and then – someone who doesn’t seem to have any “setpoint” at all,

The problem I have with setpoint theory is, that it starts off with an obvious truth -that when you lose weight by manipulating calories, you mostly go back to more or less where you started.

I agree with that.

Where I part company is that I don’t agree that it follows that we are all predestined to be the weight we started at. As that is subject to many open ended variables.

Such as stress, hormones, environment. Whether we can change environment or not, it can have a significant effect on our weight.

Far from being rare, I think this is probably the majority of people, fat people even. Because statistically, something like 3/4 of people who fall into the ‘obese’ category have a BMI of between 30-35. Are they really that different to people between 25-29.9? Or even 20-24.9?

I have my doubts, the overweight category- those categories are decided by apparent statistical variance in health outcomes- used to be up to 27.

I think it is the outliers, the underweight and those at the upper end of the weight range, who are likely to be predestined to be thin or fat.

Another thing, I know that diets don’t work, if you notice, I was trying to explain that to simplysqueamous when I said:

What’s the very general sense of “genetics?”

This was about the use of the word ‘genetics’ in this point:

And thus, significant dieting is futile because a persons genetics will return a person’s weight to what is “ideal” for that peculiar person

I may have misunderstood what s/he meant. I thought s/he was saying that genes specific to individuals cause individual diet failure.

Reading it again after your correction, I’m not so sure.

What I meant was that the body is ‘programmed to ensure diet failure’. In all of us, not some. The exceptions are so minimal, that it’s difficult to come to any conclusion as to how they’ve managed to achieve/sustain significant weight loss.

Wait, what does this mean? What’s the very general sense of “genetics?” Our DNA determines most of the ways our bodies work, including how we are different from each other as individuals. Weight isn’t more general than height, which is largely determined by genes. In any case, the study on twins is careful to say “heredity,” which is mainly (but not entirely) controlled by our genetic makeup. The study showed that something like 80% of the influences on our body shape and size are hereditary, and the rest is environmental. Most environmental factors are beyond our control, but those factors do include diet and how and how much we move around, which we have limited control over. (In this case the “environment” category would also have to include things like illness, which can clearly change our bodies.) And this study did not distinguish between short- and long-term changes in body size, as far as I can remember, which means the variations included in those percentages must include very short-term excursions from a presumed setpoint. I would expect there would be even fewer factors that can influence long-term variations in weight.

wriggles, I don’t think you lacking a setpoint proves setpoints don’t exist; I think it just shows that the human body is varied and complex, so that there are exceptions to general trends. Just like how for a few, rare people, long-term large weight loss is apparently possible! In general, people do have setpoints, though, for real…