Monday, September 24, 2012

here i go again

...Reacting to other people's blog-posts, because what i have to say is too long for the "comments" section!  :-)

Jimmy Moore is calling attention to the rift in "ancestral dieters," wondering why people who consider themselves carbohydrate-agnostic feel the need to place a demarcation line between their contingent and what he seems to consider the majority, if not the mainstream.  I think it's all about cliques.

It looks to me as if the young, slim, athletic portion of the paleo/ancestral group don't want to share their clubhouse with middle-aged fatties.  We're just not kewl enough to belong to their club, so they put a new password in place -- MACRONUTRIENT AGNOSTIC -- and if you're not sufficiently pro-carb, the gate will remain closed against you.

The paleo-primal "movement" is wanting to feel like it's a grownup, because it's been sneered at for being a fad, a pseudo-scientific reenactment community of muscleheads, and it wants to prove itself worthy of its health-and-fitness claims.  If there is a large contingent of older, unfashionably-chubby folks in it, i suspect they think the whole group will look like a failure and a joke.  Therefore, they have to limit membership to those who fit the stereotype.

The biggest problem with the notion, i believe, is that some people will get bent out of shape because of it.  Like the lady at the AHS who felt left out....  Face it, in every group of every sort there will always be those who think themselves toocoolforschool, and trying to enact the twentieth-century rule of Everybody Gets to Play just doesn't work.  We're not in a publicly-supported venue, and clubs don't HAVE to accept everyone.

Why do you REALLY want to belong to their in-crowd anyway?  I'll bet the conversations aren't very interesting ... just like it is with most hipsters.

8 comments:

  1. I read some comment somewhere about how people on the Low-carb cruise were basically fat and those at AHS weren't. I'm sure the AHS people don't want their club to look like the low-carbers if that's the case, so that's probably a large part of it. Since it's not politically correct to just say "No Fatties Allowed" making eating carbs okay solves that problem - or does it really? Maybe their collective N=1 experiences will prove themselves wrong over time.

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  2. Low-carbers are fat and paleos thin, on average, because virtually no one eats LC by choice but because of an existing metabolic disorder. People gravitate to paleo for psychological reasons mostly, neurotic preoccupation with food, class, status etc.

    Every year the same memes. I remember last year after the AHS11 paleos were going around sneering and the pudgy red-faced LCers.

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  3. :-) i think it will be interesting to see what happens to them when middle age strikes! i expect every male will envision looking like Sisson, and up more like ... those fellows whose names came up the other day on you blog, Sid!

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  4. The clique thing could be part of it, but people like to think their successes are a result of their efforts, not luck. Obese people who are strict about their LC diet are a reminder that certain things are beyond one's control.

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  5. Spot on Sidereal! in my experience aswell 99% of people abandon LC upon reaching or nearing their goal weight.

    Lori, yup agree totally.

    So nice to see people saying exactly what I would of said, atleast I know now im not crazy! :P

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  6. we may be crazy, but we're all crazy together.... ;-)

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  7. the paleo club is like a high school when the teachers all decided to go home early and forgot to lock up. I would remind the thin young-in's (that is, if they would actually listen to something) that I was a thin vegetarian for a long long time. Oh, to be young and so sure of yourself......

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  8. yep! when i read how Donaldson told women they needed to get to their high-school weight, i chuckled, because at that age i weighed between 112-115! there's no way on god's earth i could do that now! and the things i used to eat.... :-P

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