I’m not debating, just exploring now. What’s the distinction you see between personal responsibility and plain old reponsibility? In the article, they sometimes appear to be used interchangibly, as I do. Is the word responsibility useful at all?

Here’s my take on it, from my post (link first comment): “Unfortunately, many have used the term â��personal responsibilityâ�� as a blunt weapon to demonize those who are in difficult position and suggest that their situation is fully of their own doing. This is using responsibility as analogous to blame, not power.

One way to pry blame away from responsibility: To feel responsible for everything one does, but not responsible for everything that happens to us. This may first seem like a paradox. Allow me to elaborate.

Humans are fallible. We aren�t capable to predict exactly what results our actions may trigger, but we can�t allow that uncertainty to paralyze us from action.We will fuck up. But that�s ok, if there is a sincere recognition of the error. There is conditioning we may need to emancipate ourselves from. Prejudices and fears that cloud our ability to see clearly. Pressures we may have felt from others. We have to be cautious though, to see them as influences and not excuses, since it may lead one to place blame on circumstances and simultaneously disempower ourselves from the ability to act. We can see them as obstacles to move around instead of walls that paralyze us.

Blame, duty and power relate to time as well. Blame (past), duty (future), and power (present). To live closer to the moment, it is best to frame responsibility to the present.”

I concur that there is a web of relationships, yet we each engage (or disengage) to various degrees. We can choose to some degree (I understand the restrictions of capitalism and the state) and to abdicate that, is the road to dis-empowerment and alienation.

It does bring a couple of questions.. if no one is responsible, do we have free will? Its a well worn question.. did you have any choice but to write this post.. or me to comment on it?

If one sees “personal responsibility” as blame, then the shame associated with it, its no wonder one would like to avoid it. Your friends and family shaking a finger at you doesn’t help (blame) instead of asking “How can I help?” This could come in the way of a workout buddy, offering tasty low cal recipies or sharing what they do to stay in shape.

The flip side is that to shrug responsibility aside can be disempowering, as helplessness over a situation can come in.

As far as weight is concerned, both myself and my co-blogger have lost a collective 95 lbs over the last year. We learned a few things, like never skipping breakfast, not drinking soda (one of the worst things) and doing beginner’s yoga 3x a week. Then we used resistance bands for some strength training and portion control. Recently, we are incorporating cardio, something we both tended to avoid but pivotal for fat loss. We also kept the calorie deficit LOW (around 500-700 Cal) from maintenance since lower can wreck one’s metabolism and increase the risk of binging. It took us a while to lose the weight, and it takes a while to lose it responsibly, despite what one sees in the “Biggest Loser”

I’ve heard the “fat acceptance” rationalizations and wrote about them here: http://99ppp.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/fat-acceptance-a-intriguing-idea-gone-wrong/ I’m particulary wary of their “Weight back in 5 years” mantra.. which I think is likely since many (most?) tend to eat back the way the used to after having lost the weight. Fitness and nutrition is a LIFESTYLE choice, not just a means to an end for long term results. You can check out http://www.shapefit.com/success-stories.html for some inspiration. Best wishes.

Actually, I should probably admit straight out that this is NOT a silver bullet for the issue of prep time, but it has helped me a bit.

Solar ovens rock! Most food simply can’t burn in a solar oven, and the results taste great. Hell, it’s the only way my 9 yr old daughter will eat carrots….

So, IF you have a sunny spot for one and IF you can anticipate a partly cloudy or better day, it’s a great way to cut down cooking EFFORT (not time).

*sigh* Like I said, not a silver bullet, but sometimes, I gotta pull out whatever ammo I can find to get thru the week….

But it all goes back to systems. I’ve been reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. You should too. He goes into what kind of system gave rise to misinformation about human nutrition and obesity and weight loss.

I was startled, for instance, to learn that contrary to popular belief, our fatness is not what’s left over after we’re done obtaining energy from our food. Rather, we store most of our food as fatty acids as soon as we eat it, before we’ve even made it into energy. As our bodies need energy between meals, the fatty acids are released from the adipose tissue to be burned as fuel. If there’s anything left over after that it goes back to the adipose tissue, but the storage is not supposed to be permanent–the fatty acids come and go as needed.

However, if an individual is suffering insulin resistance, that constant state of elevated insulin locks up the fatty acids in the adipose tissue. The way it plays out is thus: Say you’ve got two adult men who both need about 2000 calories a day. One of them’s putting on weight, the other is at a “normal” BMI.

Normal Guy just eats his 2000 calories a day and doesn’t think about it, since he’s Normal. He intakes 2000 calories, his adipose tissue stores the fatty acids, his lean tissue goes “ok, we need energy,” and his adipose tissue goes, “ok, here you go” and releases fatty acids for his use. Over the course of the day he tends to use up the calories he ate in one way or another.

Obese Guy is eating that 2000 calories, but he’s also developing hyperinsulinism, so his insulin is elevated a lot more than normal. So he takes in the 2000 calories, his adipose tissue stores the fatty acids, and then just when his body needs that energy released–oops, insulin is still elevated! His fat cells are “locked,” because insulin is a fat-storing hormone and cannot allow fatty acid release. So Obese Guy might actually burn, say, 1000 calories of the 2000 he’s consumed in a day, when his insulin levels manage to drop. His body needs 2000 calories, not 1000 calories. His tissues go nuts and start “screaming” at him to eat more food so they can get the energy and nutrition they need. He feels hungry, and he eats more, and the people around him tsk-tsk and say, “See? That’s why he’s fat.”

This is why you hear about hugely fat people eating twenty Big Macs a day. That’s not what made them fat, it’s a desperate effort to keep themselves nourished since their adipose tissue is locking everything away and starving them.

The movement of fatty acids was tracked back in the early 20c using a heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium. They actually documented this going on; it’s not empty hypothesis. Later on another researcher hypothesized what I said above about why obese people move slowly and eat a lot (you wouldn’t be very energetic if you couldn’t access your own stored energy), but because he got one little thing wrong in his research at some point, the rest of the scientific community turned their backs on his work. At that point two hypotheses about obesity were warring with one another for dominance; eventually the “personal responsibility”/behavioral theory of weight gain won out and that’s what’s been preached at us ever since.

I have seen fatphobic bloggers laugh at the notion that “glands” are the cause of obesity. Yet… that really is the answer. Simplified yes–we still don’t completely understand what’s going on, since decades of bad science threw us collectively off the scent and the work just wasn’t done to gain understanding.

That, coupled with the low-fat advocacy movement (also based in very bad science!), has left obese people not knowing where to turn. Occasionally someone comes out offering a low-carb diet as an alternative to the madness, but they are usually shouted down by the medical establishment and ridiculed by the media. Example of the latter: the media’s fawning over the author of The South Beach Diet because he’s a cardiologist and “knows” what he’s talking about. They never had that much deference for Dr. Atkins, who was also a cardiologist!

This is the environment in which people in this country get fat. We can’t expect people who don’t know how to lose bodyfat to accomplish it in a healthy way, but we must expect those who do lose it to have to struggle to accomplish that, and live their lives paranoid that the weight will come back again because they didn’t really pick the best approach in the first place.

All I have to do is change my diet and the weight starts coming off. Also, I suffer from physical problems related to my obesity as well, and I find they begin disappearing almost immediately when I change my diet. That’s something else the old researchers used to say, that weight management is 90 percent diet. But it doesn’t involve nearly starving yourself. The calorie amounts the system demands of us fat people are semi-starvation levels. During the time of Ancel Keys’s semistarvation studies, 1800 calories was semistarvation. Now they’re telling us to get down to 1200 to 1500 calories if we have to, 1000 if we’re really having trouble. Can you imagine? I suspect 2000 calories a day isn’t a realistic number as it is; probably many adults’ caloric requirements would prove to be higher, if they weren’t terrified of weight gain.

Sorry to blather on like this but it’s a subject that fascinates me. If you find the time, read Gary Taubes. You’ve got scientific training and I think you’ll appreciate what he’s discovered about the inner workings of the scientific community. It is every bit as bad in nutrition and bariatrics as it is in anthropology–and worse, since living people’s health is on the line.

What I find is that many who use that word, use it as a blunt club to get others to “play the game” and to blame themselves for losing, instead of not playing it at all.

I find that response-ability can be empowering and unfortunately it is too often used as analogous to duty and blame.