Bad moments

Over at the notorious B-L-O-G watrd Lissa asks about being in the moment and the difficulties of getting there.

In a world of self creation/actualisation, with our plans for world domination, or just the domination of self, we can fall into the trap of always being and thinking ahead of ourselves.

The information age is one of sensationalism, and we struggle with the mundane and seek escape in fantasy. Nothing wholly wrong with this, it is part of coping with day to day life and a vital part of our ability to envisage better.

What also causes disconnection from the self in this moment or any other is the background to each and every moment, your constant beliefs, especially those about yourself.

There is a lot of talk of mindfulness and returning to it, that can be tricky to get that balance and get back into the habit. But when you get there, you will be surrounded by the self you have created, and if that is unbearable, mindfulness, will also be hard to bear.

Indeed, a toxic view of yourself may well be the driving force for evading being in the moment. How can you want to be in the moment when that moment is always horrible, because you are always horrible?

When we take it upon ourselves to view ourselves in carelessly degrading and demeaning ways, because for instance we think this is honesty and facing up to the truth, our mental and emotional defences don't just ignore that, they cannot, they must act to minimise the effects of our vandalism of ourselves.

Those defences act in ways similar to our physical defences, they attempt to void the poison, or they attempt to separate us from it. You can perceive the latter when you begin to notice that people who foul their own nest, become semi detached from it.

They often don't recognise this themselves, so caught up are they in feeling their righteous sense of honour about facing the truth of themselves, they don't notice that whilst branding themselves, they identify so much with what they consider a righteous status, that they often don't see themselves in the light they've branded themselves.

They see themselves as goodness in waiting.

This doesn't fully save them from the damage and exhaustion of their view of themselves, it merely minimises the damage. This can unfortunately prolong it by making it less clearly perceived. Though the damage limitation helps to keep worse at bay.

They are not totally unaware of the pain they feel, they tend to blame it on the what it is they've labelled themselves, not on the consequences of labelling themselves with a negative status they cannot escape.

Being in the moment requires you to live with all that you believe yourself to be underlying the moment. If it is bad, that is what you will be communing with. You will find yourself bored, easily distracted, or feeling various feelings of anxiety and panic emerge, unhindered by your usual distracted or semi-detached states. The one good thing about attempting mindfulness, is that it will give you a chance to become aware of this.

Only if you realise it though, because the moment and being in it, will only benefit you, if your moment can be lived in.

Eating predestined conclusions makes you fatuous

This report on a study soon to appear in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, claims eating quickly is responsible for overeating. Hey, isn't everything, why not that?

Overlooking the promiscuous misuse of that term to the point where it has become ill defined, we'll stick with, eating more than, less.
The habit of eating at your desk which has become more prevalent in recent times is helping to fuel the obesity epidemic.

How so?

Encouraging people to eat quickly whilst doing other things.

The study split people into groups and gave them the same amount of ice cream, 300ml. Different people ate at different speeds.

Those who took 30 minutes to finish their portion, reported feeling fuller than those who were quicker and their blood sample had higher levels of hormones that tell the brain the stomach is full.

Specifically;

Scientists believe eating quickly stops the release of a hormone that tells the brain when the stomach is full.

Believe is right, because this would mean that people eat fast to resist fullness. Fullness gives a large range of pleasureful feelings, a sense of satisfaction, which brings an emotional uplift, you know when you sit back after having had your fill, feeling like all is right with the world?

Now why would you recklessly cast this aside, to eat faster and according to this report, lessen the chances of this happening and increase the likely amount you will ingest?

Why pleasure of course. Hang on a minute: D'OH!

Let's go over that.

Eating more than you need is more likely to lead to indigestion, heartburn, sluggishness, physical discomfort etc.

And yet scientists are prepared to 'believe' this is likely.

It is much touted that fat people eat faster, on average than those less so. I don't know, all I do know is that honestly the fastest eaters I've ever witnessed happen to have been amongst the thinnest people I've ever met.

If this is more than mere anecdote, it might be in part because fat people are more likely to make a conscious effort to slow down their eating.

I once had one of the few successes I've ever had doing this. I apropos of nothing decided to do this one time.

Unsurprisingly, everything was fine at first, then even though I suffered no discomfort whatsoever, it's as if something shifted in the background-internally that is- and for the life of me, It wasn't the same.

I could get no pleasure whatsoever from eating, so I actually stopped, usually out of boredom, but strangely unsatisfied, I felt what I'd eaten, but not in the way you are supposed to feel it.

It was a feeling way out there in the distance somewhere, unconnected with anything like fullness or satisfaction, but running parrallel to it, I knew I'd eaten though.

I carried on, but that's really what did for me in the end, the inability to get any pleasure at all, eating just became, not so much a bore, as a blah. Gray meaningless somehow. This is the kicker, it didn't lessen my appetite. It didn't give up and slink off, as usual, it just became more insistent, until it all became too self defeating and I stopped.

I would not claim universality for my experience, but I'm pretty sure aspects of it are widespread, if not, certainly, the upshot is.

Which is that the same as other attempts to slip calorie reduction and the threat of starvation past the body's defences, it might in a few yield dramatic results which will be trumpeted wildly as if we've never heard it before.

And the overwhelming majority will find it short lived as the body merely adjusts. Yeah, it doesn't always cotton on/act, immediately but come on, if someone was stealing amounts from your bank account, at some point it's going to register, right?

You wish we were thin haters!

Checking out Natalie at axisoffat, I couldn't believe the nerve ofthis woman.

I do not wish to label or put down any specific weight groups, but this article does illustrate is how certain people who are relatively slim or merely plump, make sure that their chosen dissatisfaction with their own bodies (and lives) means no one else is entitled to make peace with their own.

They seem to think they own weight and who gets to be OK with themselves. They deeply resent thinner people, and cast them in the role of people who by their very existence, prove a painful reminder of their own discontent.

Yet they keep them on a pedestal, on the other hand, they despise fat people, who they think they've been given as a motivational tool, and wish to prevent them having any sense of self respect.

In her article Virginia Haussegger describes model Linda Evangelista as a freak, because Evangelista told her in an interview that she makes no effort to participate in the superstitions that are supposed to control people's weight. Good on her, she sounds like my kind of woman and I never thought I'd say that.

Thing is, anyone who's naturally thin, is the same, it's nothing to do with being a professional coat hanger. In fact, we are all 'naturally' the size we are, however we got their it was 'natural' to us as it is to Evangelista, whether we've struggled against it, or not.

She describes her as a beautiful goddess, merely because she's photogenic and doesn't diet.

Whooweee.

Well she did not tell Haussegger to call her that, that is her own view. It's part of her mission to be a weight watcher, again, her decision. Like so many who have belief systems that degrade them, she cannot suck it up, she has to share;

The appearance of fat is ugly when it reeks of sloth and a lack of discipline. Being skinny is ugly when it reeks of malnutrition and starvation.

With her mentality, she sees herself as somehow the 'wisdom of the middle' and the standard by which everyone should judge themselves. This is the ego fighting back after taking a pounding from being compared to 'goddesses'.

But that's not what most women are objecting to when they criticise skinny models in magazines.

Absolutely. Like herself, they are struggling to get out of the bind they've put themselves in with their tendentious inferiority complexes.

She then quotes Karl Largerfeld, himself a former long term fattie saying that women who complain about the size of catwalk models are fat mothers eating bags of chips; who's he kidding?

Maybe that's how it was for him when he was fat, I wouldn't be surprised, he is surrounded by thinness. That's enough to addle anyone's brain when it comes to their weight.

From this she goes on to the clincher;

Fat women hate skinny women. Maybe they console their misery with more chips.

Oh how some would love it if we were sitting there in raging at anyone thinner than ourselves- wait a minute, that's Haussegger! It's self loathing that does that, not being fat, also a very good reason to start appreciating yourself for what you are, not angling after being someone else.

Only silly people wish to partake in thin shaming. Many fat people recognise we are brothers and sisters under the skin, and vice versa. We recognise that certain people wish to demonise or be jealous of us due to their own insecurities and as you see, can't take it.

If you decide to stop hating yourself and go crazy and actively seek to like, nay love yourself, you don't feel the need to hate others, why should you? Their very existence cannot provoke insult if it's not there. You can admire beauty and not feel in any way lessened by it.

I don't and have never given a damn about the size of models, I know what they are for and have found the blaming of them to be a lot of displacement from the true culprits. As if models have any more effect on girls and women than authority figures who tell them fatness is a health risk and immoral or family members they look up to who shout out at fat people 'why don't you just stop eating?', then act really shocked when weight anxiety prompts their children to take that literally.

I have very little time for the fashion industry in general, and abuse of it's own workers should be dealt with the same way any employers who bully and are reckless with the health of their staff, but are they to blame for anorexia?

Puhr-leese.

Slut shaming

Reading an excellent post by Joy-Mari at digital immigrant on how the Internet- rather than being the great hope of meritocracy- is struggling to break free from the brain shape of the usual suspects. I was reminded of the word 'slut', it's just one of many epithets referring to a woman that has had, or does have sex with specifically; men. More than one or a lot more, it doesn't have a distinct numerical definition.

Being a feminist person, I should be wholly concerned with it's effects on women. But from the first finding out what this and other words like it meant I've been struck by what it says about what males are taught to think of themselves. That feeling has never left me.

If merely by having sex with men, a woman despoils and sullies herself to the point of ridicule and abuse, what does this say about men?

It seems to say men are in essence filthy, that the penis is an injector (and therefore voids) emptying that filth into not just women, but also other men . Men who receive a shot of this toxic load (have a lower status within and outside gay circles than the 'injectors').

Now if men are taught to and continue this disgust and loathing of themselves-that is up to them.

However, what you give to yourself, you tend to wish to give to others, that impulse enables you to rid yourself of your degradation and then attack those you leave it in, destroying them in order to destroy it.

This shows that you cannot tolerate feeling this way about yourself, and attempt to rid yourself of these feelings, understandably. So here's the thing, why don't you just stop seeing yourself in this degrading way, what purpose does it serve?

Using others in this way is an attempt to separate and distance yourself from these feelings, pointless, because after they've walked away carrying it away from you; it's a case of continue and repeat. Maybe that's it's purpose, presumably, your cannot be trusted to simply have sexual desire because, you feel like having sex.

Cease to generate the poison. Then you won't have anything to void but love. Or am I missing something?

Dismantle it in yourself, smash it to smithereens. Deal with yourself, confront your disgust and give yourself the regard you can live with, then you can cut out the middlewo/man

Where there's hate, there's money

Looking at a subtly named report on the potential price of being hated it's pretty apparent that the writer has picked up on what fat people have discovered-yet again that fact is not mentioned, because whether we are being shamed or 'rescued' it has to be done to us- that the obesity crisis wallahs are trying to bring about their prophecy of fat ill health.

Whether fatness is intrinsically unhealthy or not is a moot point if you just manipulate factors to heighten this potentiality. Namely, the prophecy of the self fulfilling kind.

Again, the purpose of the obesity crisis, is to perpetuate itself, it has nothing to do with helping people;

The motivation is generous enough: Anti-obesity rhetoric encourages people to eat less and exercise more.

Yeah, we'll be the judge of that thanks, this line might work if you've had no experience of generosity whatsoever, I have, and I know it isn't. The so called 'well meaningness' of any participants is an irrelevancy, because you don't need to stigmatize people or take part in it to help them, that is your choice. Well meaning doesn't = well doing, and if you care enough, you'll stop flattering yourself.

Note that this list of in this case, US diet industry includes along with the usual suspects of commercial diet centre chains, the lodestars of healthism; the exercise industry, dietitians. Then there's the medical professions still pretending that dieting is scientifically valid and the merry cutters of weight loss surgery,(they ought to be laughing all the way to the bank) and big Pharma. Lovely.

It also expresses why I can't really get excited about whether BMI's uselessness, it's not any more useless than any other measure;

But even the most accurate measures of fatness—like dual energy X-ray absorptiometry—don't really improve our ability to predict health outcomes across the population

Most people in FA retain still accept the likelihood that the higher up the weight scale you get and retain an open mind, still, on whether fatness in general is intrinsically a health issue, unfortunately, as usual the 'proof' of the latter, is non-human;

That's not to say obesity won't affect your body, independent of any social factors. As Muennig points out, obese lab rodents aren't likely to suffer much emotional abuse from their fellow mice, but they seem to have higher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines nonetheless.

Unsurprisingly, health bigwigs, don't take any of these concerns seriously, especially our old friend Kelly Brownell;

For Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center and a leading researcher on both health policy and weight bias, the dangers of discrimination are important but relatively modest. What about the idea that targeting obesity might be counterproductive for the fattest Americans? He doesn't buy it.

Oh really Kelly? This incidentally, is a man who started off his career plump and has grown bigger, whilst preaching to others about weight loss and the perils of fat. Without any explanation, as to why he could neither prevent his own weight gain or return to his former plumpness- I won't put on him the onerous task of acquiring thinness.

He has been well validated by the establishment, so I suppose that's his reward, all though he's been of absolutely no use to any one who might actually need help. That kind of sums it all up really.

* Amended to fix link

Smokers, stop it!

Since I cannot be bothered to wrestle with Slate comments there, I'm responding to this comment which I'll quote in full, here, it's from somebody called, Tarkol;

To the overweight. We warned you. We really did. We said you'd be next. We said food restrictions would come. We said once we were too rare a pariah they would turn on you. You didn't listen. -Smokers

Really, (thin)smokers, I wish you wouldn't. What is the point in your investment in this myth? I suspect as you love calling yourself addicts, this is addicts hubris borne of the constant competition for who's addiction is the hardest to give up, etc.,

Sorry smokers, you told me nothing, that I hadn't been learning for the last 30 years. I was in the playground when I realised things had changed because the medical profession had got on board with fat hating. This meant that it took on it's current triumphant sense of righteousness and sense of legitimacy that it had never had before when people could choose whether to be bullying about it or not.

Try to understand that you like others who aren't fat, shield yourself from recognising what has been happening to fat people and just because you affect this pose, doesn't make it true.

Fact is that the momentum against smokers has been building up for a number of decades now, but that doesn't mean that it precedes the fat hating bandwagon in a such an orderly way.

The obesity crisis has been dated from the late 1970's at it started to get nasty before even that.

Along the way, I haven't noticed smokers standing up for fatties, in fact, I've found a lot of them happily joining in fat bashing. There does seem to be some kind of underlying issue that some have with fat people, almost as if they feel that if fat people were more serious about their weight, they would be prepared to smoke as an aid to weight loss (just like some of them). There's also a sense of deflection- if everyone's hating fatties, they're not hating smokers.

Only a couple of years ago, when England sprang a smoking ban on it's cigaphiles, the first words out of many who went about in the media was, "whaah, this is what we do to/how we treat fatties". This is such an old sentiment, that it hardly annoyed me to be honest. They must of been made aware of themselves because they soon stopped.

This for me is the telling part, carelessly stigmatizing others prepares you and your mind to receive the stigma you think you are directing at others. It creates an atmosphere of the same responsive acquiescence and cowardice, no less because it shows the powers that be what you are willing to put up with. It gives them a mental and strategic route to go down, and I'm afraid the spontaneous recognition that this is what we do to fatties, not real humans, shows one of the reasons why smokers have so meekly accepted, not so much their fate, as the treatment meted out to them.

The lesson is, we should stop ignoring how people who may be unacceptable, to us and consider the general ramifications of what's being done to them, follow through and think, what does this mean for others who may be seen in this light? In short, think. Don't just laugh and take part and wallow, you are fouling your own nest.

We all be better off if we stuck up for each other and did not use so called health to vent personal rage or use it as a chance to lord it over each other, always a sign of insecurity.

It's not too late.

Inhabiting the norm

I want to pick up on a point sweet machine made in a post about gay and bisexual teens yesterday.

When we depathologize states of being that are considered abnormal, we can reveal the normative structures that propped up our pathologizing in the first place.

Or when we stop using our own states of being as the starting point from which all must be measured against. There is also a difference between abnormal and unusual. That which is rare or unusual is by no means bad, and this is a category that should be able to be accepted both by those that are in that category and those who aren't.

I have a problem with this fighting to be included into the category 'normal' as opposed to fighting for equal acceptance and understanding; or dismantling the neurosis of normalcy, which is often a source and creator of injustice. Fighting for normal seems to underline the norm as an ideal, and that can be counterproductive.

There is that which is normal to each of us; however rare or unusual a flower we are, and that which is possibly a/the norm in general; either the main body of people, or the largest minority which people fit in to.

When we accept that the categories we’re accustomed to are not best described as X and not-X (straight and not straight, thin and not-thin, etc.) but as X and Y and probably Z too, we see that X was only considered “normal” because it was important to people who are X to view it that way.

X could be anyone, it could be those who are fighting for their rights, they are just as capable of seeing their state as the one by which all others should not only be measured, against, but all others shaped around. Or all other states should be shaped wholly to be pressganged into giving shape to their state, because it cannot be defined as they would like without turning others into an extension of that state.Some people might say that is the hallmark of the fractiousnes of normal itself.

When we look from a standpoint of celebrating human diversity, it seems bizarre to think of Z as abnormal or the “opposite” of X: Z is its own way of being.

Agreed, but again, this is not always a divide between those who suffer social injustice v. those advantaged in general or by injustice, it is an attitude of mind, and those fighting against the norm use that 'bizarre' stance themselves at times, yet still critique that same stance because they eitehr feel it does or it actually does, go against them. This undermines their own outrage at this stance -if not at the injustice itself.

Thin people and straight people aren’t required to explain away their bodies and desires; they’re not asked “How do you know you’re straight?” or “Have you ever thought about trying not to be thin?”

In general terms, no they aren't required to justify themselves as much, but the neurosis that overspills into prejudice also puts it's own impositions on the X's, but it's not backed up by the mechanical weight of those who operate the levers of the societal machine. But plenty of those who aren't straight, feel exactly that straight = bullshit- and I'm sure it's not entirely wrong for straights to ask themselves these kinds of questions or be asked them. For instance, just how 'straight' can female sexuality be? Does it even really exist in it's own right in mainstream terms? It seems that the 'straight' is male heterosex and female het, is just an adjunct of that.

Witness how many women 'suffer' from female sexual dysfunction, or sorrily misused/ misunderstood/ semi existent female sexuality imploding under the weight of it's own hollowed outness. The term seems to be about men- gay talking about other men 'straight'. It's like in joke mockery than a category for women. Or thin shaming, hardly backed up by the sort of official power that gets behind the obesity crisis.

Social justice movements aren’t simply trying to flip things around and make it so that those questions do get asked of “normal” people, too; they’re trying to get rid of these demeaning, eliminationist questions in the first place.

Um, not necessarily, it depends on their requirements, but I think you'll find that plenty within social justice movements are just trying to flip things around, with them in the driving seat instead. They may feel that what they have is a better way and that others ought to have to answer to that way.

It's like Kera's mother, some people truly want to understand diversity, some do not, or are constutionally unable to, the lines don't divide. Those who fight for extention of rights versus those who enjoy them.