And now, from the Department of the Blindingly Obvious, this report:

CNN reports that fat children are more likely to get bullied than their peers of normal weight.

Too true, and all too sad, and it is a growing problem. - Here's what to do about it:

Tell the truth about what causes child obesity.There is altogether too much misinformation about child obesity. - When children become fat it is essentially because they are eating salty food. Children are especially vulnerable to salt because of their small size and small blood volume, and because their blood vessels are weaker than those of adults. Salt, and the water it attracts to it, can more easily distend weak blood vessels than fully mature ones. The resulting increase in blood volume and other fluid retention results in weight gain, as well as higher blood pressure and many other undesirable consequences. The smaller the child, the less salt they should have - and a baby, of course, should have no salt at all. - Babies can die if they are fed salty food.

Fat children do not need to go onto a diet or to be pressed into uncongenial exercise. As far as possible, they need to avoid salt and salty food. They do not need to cut down on calories or eat low-fat junk full of strange fillers and iffy chemicals. They need to eat real food - fresh food - not processed, high profit, low nutrition food.

See Children and Obesity

And see Sodium in foods

Lose weight

vulnerable groups

FAT RETENTION

I welcome Ehrenreich's denunciation of "the tyranny of positive thinking"

I welcome Barbara Ehrenreich's criticisms of the 'positive thinking' brigade who impose further problems and difficulties on breast cancer sufferers by exhorting them to a cheerfulness and optimism they may not feel and may consider neither appropriate nor logical. See Ehrenreich's Guardian article.

In my experience these nonsensical, exhausting extra burdens tend also to be heaped onto people suffering constant severe debilitating pain. I would include particular criticism of the self-styled Christians who tell people who are ill and/or in great pain that there is no need to be ill or in pain: they need only to accept Christ's healing. - They are credulous bullies, as are the health professionals who keep insisting to people who know that painkillers do not work for them and who do not want to take them, that the painkillers really do work and that it's the sufferer's own fault if they're in pain since they stubbornly refuse to 'try' them - ignoring the fact that it is because they have tried them - many times and unsuccessfully - and know the futility and harm of taking them, that they now refuse them.

Joan Burnie, Associate Editor of Scotland's Daily Record , was on Radio 4 Woman's Hour this morning, airing her prejudice and ignorance about obesity.

She was emphatically declaring that 'everybody knows' that they should eat less and exercise more in order not to be obese. She clearly is contemptuous of obese people and blames them for their obesity. She appeared to wish that they would die soon though claimed that she was not serious when she said it.

Centuries ago 'everybody knew' that the world was flat. - It was an assumption made because it seemed obvious. - When the hypothesis was scientifically investigated this assumption was found to be untrue and there can be few people now who still believe in the flat earth theory.

Similarly the theory that people become obese because they eat too much and exercise too little is just an assumption, as is the assumption that if they eat less and exercise more they will lose their excess weight - despite the FACT - the well-known FACT - that diets do not work. There has never been any rigorous testing of the theory. It has always been a mere assumption. - But this mere assumption and the constantly reiterated insulting and harmful advice being given by uninformed bigots like Joan Burnie and the rest of the bullying obesity 'experts' is destroying the lives, health and happiness of many millions of overweight/obese people the world over...)o:

Obesity is NOT caused by overeating and/or inactivity. It is caused by fluid retention, frequently because of taking prescribed medications, especially steroids such as prednisolone, prednisone and HRT, and anti-depressants such as amitriptyline. (When doctors prescribe drugs that cause sodium retention and water retention they should warn the patient not to eat salt, or food containing salt, while taking the medication. When they do not give this warning, the inevitable consequence is considerable weight gain.)

Obesity can be easily reduced by seriously reducing your salt/sodium intake and eating plenty of fruit and fresh vegetables. It is important not to restrict calories. - 'Slimming' or 'dieting' is unnecessary, ineffective and often harmful.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Children and Obesity

vulnerable groups

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

See FAT RETENTION

advice for pregnant mothers

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

Are you one of the unthinking majority who believe that obesity is caused by greed and laziness?

And do you try to bully people into losing weight? - Do you reckon insulting obese people is therapeutic for them?

Why don't you try using your brains and read the evidence? That's what intelligent people do...

Read The political background to obesity in Britain

and Do you believe that obesity is caused by overeating?

and Heinz Asthoff eats more than 12,000 calories a day but does not gain weight

Obesity is caused by fluid retention, not by gluttony, and is reduced not by dieting and exercise, but by eating less salt.

If you are very overweight, don't let yourself be bullied into dieting and doing lots of exercise! - It won't help you to lose weight!

Obesity is not caused by eating too much or by insufficient exercise. It is caused by sensitivity to salt and fluid retention and can easily and rapidly be reduced by avoiding eating salt and salty food.

Lose weight and improve your health in many ways by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

How to Lose weight!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

I am reading, and very much enjoying, "Cat's Eye, a novel by Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer.

I highly recommend Margaret Atwood's writing. The novels of hers which I have most enjoyed are "The Handmaid's Tale", "Oryx and Crake" and this one, "Cat's Eye".

Here is a tiny introduction to "Cat's Eye", copied from the back cover:

"Elaine Risley, a painter, returns to Toronto to find herself overwhelmed by her past. Memories of childhood - unbearable betrayals and cruelties - surface relentlessly, forcing her to confront the spectre of Cordelia, once her best friend and tormentor, who has haunted her for forty years."

And here is a quotation from the Listener:

"Not since Graham Greene or William Golding has a novelist captured so forcefully the relationship between school bully and victim... Atwood's power games are played, exquisitely, by little girls."

The bullying certainly has the powerful ring of truth, and I find that the truth and meticulous attention to detail are compellingly attractive in this novel. I have read several of Atwood's books and greatly admire her intellect, her intelligence, her deep knowledge of and familiarity with the natural world. I also, of course, admire the layers of complexity in the thoughts and thought processes of the characters Atwood creates for us - usually as here, the thoughts of the central character who is the first person narrator of the story. And of course I relish the story itself. - Atwood is a compellingly original writer.

Having said all this, I would like to quote you a paragraph from page 269 of my copy, on the first page of chapter 48, which is where I have reached in the novel, because it is of particular interest to me and I would like to make some comments about it:

"She is sitting on a stool, her buttocks squashing out sideways; her stocky back is curved, her right leg is crossed over her left at the knee, her right elbow rests on her right knee, her left arm is placed behind her with the hand on the stool. Her eyes are bored, her head droops forward, the way it has been put. She looks cramped and uncomfortable, and also cold; I can see the goose-bumps on her upper arms. She has a thick neck. Her hair is frizzly and short, red with darker roots, and I suspect she is chewing gum: every once in a while there is a slow, furtive, sideways motion of her jaw. She is not supposed to move.

I am trying to draw this woman, with a piece of charcoal. I am trying for fluidity of line. This is how the teacher has arranged her: for fluidity of line. I would rather be using a hard pencil; the charcoal gets on my fingers and smears, and is no good for hair. Also this woman frightens me. There is a lot of flesh to her, especially below the waist; there are folds across her stomach, her breasts are saggy and have enormous dark nipples. The harsh fluorescent light, falling straight down on her, turns her eye sockets to caverns, emphasises the descending lines from nose to chin; but the massiveness of her body makes her head look like an afterthought. She is not beautiful, and I am afraid of turning into that."

As a steroid victim, I have experienced actually being morbidly obese, as opposed to being simply a careful observer of someone who is morbidly obese. This life model would certainly be 'cramped and uncomfortable'; her heart will be enlarged because of her abnormally high blood volume (the cause of her obesity), and this enlarged heart and the model's greatly enlarged/distended blood vessels mean that the space available in the thoracic cavity for the lungs to expand will be much reduced. - She will not be merely uncomfortable in the position in which she has been put; she will be having some difficulty breathing and will be breathing rather shallowly and painfully and perhaps quite rapidly. - 'She has a thick neck' because of the distended blood vessels. (The neck will also appear reddened because of the nearness of these swollen blood vessels to the surface of the sensitive, thinning skin. This has not been mentioned by Elaine, the artist in the novel.)

She is most likely to be very hungry: very overweight people obviously need larger quantities of food/calories than slimmer people because they have such a heavy body to carry around and service, and because they have a larger surface area from which to lose heat. (Eating more is a consequence of being overweight, not the cause of it.) So she is chewing and she is cold and she has goose-bumps.

Elaine says of the woman: "There is a lot of flesh to her," and here I would disagree with Elaine, though that would clearly be her perception. - Actually, the woman will have LESS flesh than if she were slimmer. This is because most of the excess weight of a morbidly obese woman is not flesh, but fluid retention - excess salt and water in her bloodstream. She is one of the unfortunate people who are sensitive to salt/sodium. Frequently fluid retention causes fat retention too, because of shortage of minerals, mainly calcium and magnesium. See http://aboutsalt.blogspot.com/search/label/malnutrition She will almost certainly have tried dieting many times and will have lost much of her firm flesh and thickness of skin because the body feeds on itself when a person eats insufficient food/calories for its requirements.

The woman's breasts are 'saggy' because of all the excess salt and water they contain: water always travels downwards. When people's bodies suddenly appear to be suffering from the effects of gravity, so-called, it is actually the effects of fluid retention, exacerbated often by dieting, which thins and weakens the skin and blood vessel walls further, so that the fluid retention increases. Similarly 'the descending lines from nose to chin' are a characteristic feature of morbidly obese people and are formed because of the downward pull of the fluid in the veins and the enclosing flesh/skin being too weak to resist its pull. The 'massivenessness of her body' when compared with her head would not be a constant. - If the woman were to be lying down, a lot of the excess blood volume would naturally migrate from her body to her head and neck, which would gradually swell/enlarge and redden, causing great discomfort. She may even feel as though she is being throttled...

She - the fictional model for the life class - would greatly benefit by eating as little salt and salty food as possible.

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk and
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/vulnerable_groups.html
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

The government was today urged to set up an urgent inquiry into the plight of children forced to care for their sick and disabled relatives.

Teenager's death prompts call for young carers inquiry - Guardian

Extract:

"The government was today urged to set up an urgent inquiry into the plight of children forced to care for their sick and disabled relatives.

The call comes after an inquest last month into the death of Deanne Asamoah, 13, from Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, who had been looking after her terminally-ill mother.

The teenager fell into a coma and died after taking an overdose of the morphine prescribed for her terminally-ill mother.

The deputy coroner for Milton Keynes, Thomas Osborne, who recorded a narrative verdict, said he would write to children's minister Beverley Hughes asking why hundreds of young people are struggling to cope with such heavy responsibilities.

He called for a proper inquiry into the issue.

The Princess Royal Trust for Carers said it was "very concerned" about thousands of young carers aged under 18 who it says are in a "desperate situation" caring for sick or disabled relatives. "

I heard two of these young carers on the radio this morning, talking about their lives. - Disgracefully, in addition to all the other difficulties and problems and tasks they have to cope with, they are sometimes also subjected to bullying at school - bullying because they are carers! - Removing some of their burden should be a priority for the powers that be.

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, will today pledge to defend teachers from bullying by pupils both in the classroom and on the internet.

Clampdown on web bullying of teachers - Telegraph

Extract:

"Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, will today pledge to defend teachers from bullying by pupils both in the classroom and on the internet.

Dealing with pupils who post rude remarks and inappropriate pictures of their teachers on websites like RateMyTeachers will be a priority, he will tell the second biggest classroom union.

Teachers are also being undermined by sites which invite pupils to rate them for professional and personal qualities according to the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers at their annual conference which began in Belfast yesterday.

But bullying is not confined to the classroom, according to some delegates who say it has become part of the staffroom culture in some schools.

Teachers are being bullied by their colleagues because of their weight, sexuality or religious beliefs, say delegates who have organized a fringe meeting to discuss it."


Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)