Fat People as Personification of Bingeing, part 1

Whether it's those thin/slim anorexics who use "the fat person in the mirror" as a metaphor for why they're starving.  Or the bitterness of people who see fat people as representing the thing inside them which made them fail to become anorexic.A certain type of slim person is still using fatness and fat people to express their personal psychodramas. If this unpleasant interlude is to be brought to a close, this kind of appropriation needs to end.

Teevee presenter Mika Brzezinski is a warrior against 'obesity'. She neglected to tell folks that she's had bulimia for years. In her mind fat people represent her urge to binge. I'm serious, the construct says so. Yet, the truth she represents runs counter to this.

That some slimz can out eat most fatz any day of the week. Mika roped her friend Diane Smith into a joint effort, her to stop bingeing and gain 10 pounds and be "okay with that." (All about weight). Diane who'd gained 100 pounds in the 15 years of their friendship, was to lose 75.

"Weight problem" i.e fatness = Eating problem kind of sums it up. Apparently Smith was appalled when she was call F-A-A-T by Brzezinski. She even used the word zomgobese. Brzezinski made big play of the beloved denialist trope when Smith's idea of herself was more than likely formed when she was slim. 

We'll forget that if the usual assumptions are true, the remedy would have been the same for both-stabilize eating-desired results follow. Rather than one swapping an ED for normality, the other a perhaps ED-I can't tell-for the impersonation of another one.

That's not nitpicking. People keep theorizing the 'cause' of fatness, yet can never demonstrate this through reversal of said 'cause' rolling back fatness. Dieting's indicates another fail.

By casting fat people as disease, "obesity" casts us with the uniformity our brains associate with disease. In the minds of those who accept this definition, fat people become one (fat) person. What goes for one, goes for all. Hence this absurdly unscientific, if one fat person can become slim you all can. If one fat person can sustain a lifestyle ED, you all can!!

This is as ridiculous as presuming all slim people have binge eating disorder because Mika does.

From Brzezinski's book;

How does a person who is not overweight write about her lifelong obsession with overeating without sounding like a narcissistic, woe-is-me skinny girl.

How about just telling your story? I eat like a fat person is supposed to, yet I'm not even chubby. And it's nothing to do with self control. Unless that's what you call bulimia, which let's face it, many do secretly.

Well, what do we expect? You've got the requirement to become or remain slim, with the emphasis in recent times on "because it's healthy." That puts pressure on people to do it in a healthy manner, which is even less efficient than unhealthy ways, making it harder to admit what might be going on.

Appetite and hunger can easily become levers for the body to maintain mental/mood balance in the face of stresses that threaten to sink your mood regulation. She seemed very nervous in that interview, still full of disgust from her rather amusing "Nutella" story (plz, it's not crack). All she was describing there was the product of the suppression of this lever, without resolving any underlying issues. Yet she was talking about how it felt like "addiction."

The capacity and power of appetite and hunger is not just as we see it. It's capable of far more than that if the trigger is there, or our system is sensitive enough. Proper scientists, need to deal with that and we need to learn to learn techniques to manage our internal stress and anxiety as a part of our mindset, like bathing every day. We definitely need to teach them to children.

Trigger Warning: Dieting

It takes a gainer to tell us something of what (weight loss) dieting would look more like if our view wasn't distorted by it's valourization. To the point of replacing ideas of what normal eating is like.

Tammy Jung is force feeding herself to gain weight. Her goal weight is 30 stones(420 pounds), at the moment she's at a paltry 250 (what a slacker). Well, she as a teen she was 8 stone (112 pounds), played sport-football and volleyball.

She always "felt fat", not good enough that is. Now, she is fat-if she can maintain it and whilst she doesn't feel good enough-yet, she does feel a sense of contentment. "Womanly" in fact.

Sport probably helped sharpen her competitive instincts. Teaching her about how pushing yourself through discomfort and pain barriers can feel like a noble end in itself. Encouraging discipline and sticking to your task, till the bitter end.

As well as building up quite an appetite to follow through on later. 

She weighs herself twice daily, using the readings to inform the balance of what and how much she'll eat subsequent to that. For instance, what she'll have for breakfast. Portion control is a must, as opposed to just mindlessly being in line with her needs and responding to them. Just like any other successful weight watcher.

She has to keep a keen eye on the scales, keeping track, making sure to catch any potential reversal of her sense of achievement.

There's always lots of pride available from exercising power over nature, in the form of changing your body through the management of your intake. You did that! All rather uber frauen. You didn't just leave it to chance.

Suspending mere need for a greater goal is a question of delaying gratification.

And don't forget the potential for drama too.  The suffering of having melted ice cream poured down a funnel to your throat.

Not because it meets your needs, but because it goes down when you can't eat any more solids. I think that's a tip!

Her boyfriend adores her at any size, so long as that's big. And is fully supportive and involved in helping her police her diet, to the point of seeming to be the principle food buyer and preparer.

Well, she has other things on her mind, like performing the intricate mathematics of her calorie intake and maintaining her man pleasing figure. Her diet is very expensive, costing as much as £70.00 in specially prepared food (take out).

Her doctor doesn't approve, they tend to object to dieting as we know.

She has been entrepreneurial enough to produce on-line video's featuring herself, doing various things, like ingesting calorie dense foods for the edification of paying BBW fanciers.

Jung did not indicate her regime with regard to activity. So the article was far from comprehensive. Though she was shown lounging around, she failed to show sufficient effort in moving around, so she could be missing a trick there. 

Professional Niceties

Asking the question;

Are doctors nicer to patients who aren't fat? 

Is all very well, but it's really about maximizing their ability to practice medicine.The problem with their professional sulk about fatness, is that it can get in the way of their professionalism.

It also reduces their own satisfaction, it must be galling to have contrived to feel someone's taking up your time unnecessarily. That only adds to fat patients original sin;

......doctors are trained to deal with immediate medical problems that have specific solutions, like a pill to lower blood pressure or emergency treatment for a heart attack. But obesity is a far more complex problem that isn’t easy to solve, and that can be frustrating to doctors. “When we can’t fix what is broken we tend to behave badly,” he [Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Yale-Griffin University Prevention Research Center] said.

It's been noted. Along with seeing the bulk of patients as more difficult to examine, handle and perform surgery on apart from the highly profitable weight loss surgery where there's understandably a more "we shall overcome" attitude.

We've so taken for granted the emollient of professional sympathy, that it seemed just to be about being nice.

I was brought up with the idea that doctors would treat murderous dictators, serial killers, anyone, about all, it was a case of ethics. They'd sworn an oath to uphold this. That meant something. Compare that with their resentful fat phobia.  

It should also be remembered that this is not about "general attitudes". The people in white coats helped sell this to the public on the back of their unquestioned gravitas. Whilst I have little patience with fat phobia, 'blaming' fatness on the fat public and fat phobia on slim hoi polloi is a pretence I'm prepared to enter into.

This is a subtler aspect of the attempt to set up the mythical fat v slim battle, many in authority are desperate for, to obscure their own cynical misbehaviour.

Divide and conquer, always.  Slim folk from around your way, did not invent 'obesity/obese'. And we all know  that.

Amour Propre, Amour de Soi

Amour propre is the self esteem that comes through the esteem of others. It's also more popularly refers to the image or reputation for esteem associated with those with higher status in society. In essence though, it refers to regard one gets from others and then feels oneself.

Armour de soi is literally, love of self. It is innate self regard. We are born that way. Our regard for ourselves is fused intimately with our existence and is indivisible from our awareness of that. Just like other living creatures. It doesn't occur to us to not like ourselves.

It doesn't actually feel like romantic love, which is often a false and hyped up idea of what love can be when mixed with sexual desire and some other stuff we won't go into here. 

Human beings especially seem to be made up of both inside out and outside in self love. Though it seems to be observable in (other) animal kingdoms.

What we learn is not so much to hate ourselves, or even to love ourselves. We learn to put things in between our inner self love and develop an armour propre. And they either support or cause our ability to heart ourselves to implode.

Too many clauses in the way of what just was, before.

We do need to learn to defend that self love from attacks not all of which by any means come in hate. And moreover, when the inevitable fall from the grace of self love is pressing enough, we must learn to repair and restore it.

It is a strange feature of our modern era that amour propre seems to have outstripped the latter to such a degree that the latter is dismissed by some as almost mythical, 'fake' or even oppressive imposition. This is a product of many influences mainly commercial inclined. Here provides a steady stream of routes in which to love oneself from the outside in.

Fat people who have other social value are learning what those of us accorded less all round have had to realise sooner. That a revival of the amour de soi is indeed possible and inevitable once ones amour propre is trashed by all and sundry.

You can see some of the above reactions are what can occur when the fat, nor other imperative isn't present. The cultivation of amour de soi feels somewhat artificial, irritating, if not down right vulgar.

Some of it is class. Middle class self regard is rigidly regulated from the outside, in the groupings they form together. Amour de soi, associated as it is with our original 'wild' animalistic lower status can feel almost grotesque in comparison to the subtle internalized cues of bourgeois esteem.

Self love, does not have to be perfect, nor can it be. We humans have not evolved to that point. If you participate in society's built more on AP, you can't expect to transcend that wholly. But changing the balance in favour of A de S is perfectly legitimate and does not need to be justified or even explained to anyone who doesn't feel the need for it.

That's sometimes how it is when you're not seeing things from the same angle.

Put Down Your Booze Doughnuts

Here's a telling little spat concerning the findings of a study. It apparently showed the surprising fact that fat boozehounds have a greater risk of liver disease than slim lushes. Though;

More research is required to determine the exact thresholds for each risk factor that independently and in combination increase the risk of chronic liver disease but this is an important first step in the right direction."

I find it hard to believe there's no raised risk if you're a heavy drinker in the underweight category. But as is usual in anything connected to 'obesity' this aspect is obscure(d). Not to pick on them, but to make the point-again- that weight and risk is a U-shaped curve, like many a spectrum of human function.

Jezebel's Anna Breslaw seems to have been on a misguided mission to appeal to fatz. Which I find kind of sweet, appreciate the thought. It's bit like when the very mainstream abusing thin women on their tawdry assumption that everyone hates everyone else, but without such self reverential nastiness.

In this case she got it a bit wrong. Mind's drift when banality ensues. That tends to be central to the body of knowledge that appears under the aegis of the construct of 'obesity'.  If this is so, I sympathize. 

These kinds of mistakes happen when those who have a history of being excluded are being included. The process is not without hitch, I've seen it times without number. That's okay.

What I don't like is this provides yet another unneeded opportunity for certain so called feminists to dump misogynist stereotypes on those women they consider of lesser status, in this case, fat women. As well as taking a dreary dig at fat acceptance being the sinister enemy of science.

Please.

After all we have been put through because we refused to pretend the failure of calorie restriction induced slimness hasn't happened.

No feminist who has a remotely logical or scientific brain could take 'obesity' seriously, merely because men are still able to assert it grandly, on grounds unrelated to pure science endeavour. Someone pointed out the flaw in the construct, in that it fails to correctly sketch out the ways CVD and/or organ damage degeneration happens, using fatness as a proxy instead.

Why some of these whiners don't think that might be a problem for those who have these factors, but are not fat, I don't know. I'm sure they will when some sufficiently scienterific guy tells them.

And don't get me started on some of the rank matter that turns up in that increasing turd bath of 'eating disorders'. I'd like to hear some outrage from these types then. That jazz is increasingly not just harm inducing it is straight up ignorance promotion filled with more hot air than Formula 1. Oh and can I give a special mention to things under the banner of 'nutrition'?

Oh and what about all these toxic placebos we call 'mental health meds'. Don't take us on because um..........displacement.

All that needed to be said in this case was in this excellent comment from "ruby.s.chard"

I haven't read the actual study, but it sounds like they're looking for an interaction effect. If drinking causes your risk of liver disease to be 6, and obesity causes your risk of liver disease to be 2, does being an obese drinker make your risk of liver disease 6, 8, 12, or something else entirely?

Anyway, I agree that Jez needs a dedicated science writer. And then Jez could do what no other news outlet that covers science seems to manage: include the citation for the original damn article(s) at the bottom of their coverage!!! It's hard to get mad at Jez for this when the philly.com coverage doesn't tell us either. I don't have time to spend an hour scouring Google Scholar for this exact study, but if it were linked from here, I might go peek at the abstract* so I can engage in discussion about it a bit better informed.
*Unless they're using any cool statistical techniques that I can learn about. Which is rare, because medical research seems to stick with OLS regression

Sorry to crib the whole, but she says it so well. I also agree with Vidiya's sentiment, who if I'm not mistaken is a fat acceptance advocate.

I'm not a reader of Jezebel, but I might be if it did upped its science coverage-got a scientist on board and made that a selling point. Fat people are not afraid of science. We are afraid of what masquerades as science and 'evidence' based, which is being used increasingly to transfer resources from fat to slim, if you don't mind.

Remember we asserted an instinctive understanding of ourselves as whole functioning indivisible units-when it was still total currency amongst scientists that 'excess' weight/ fatness sits there like a separate detachable preventable load.

Scientists eventually caught up not only with the fact that fat cells are actually active cells, but also that fat tissue operates as part of the system as a whole. Just like we said, not like the 'obesity' construct still assumes, slim people with detachable fat units.

This isn't clear because when others find out something we already know, it is presented to us as an accusation, in a form acceptable to their view. So active fat tissue becomes an inner guerrilla launchpad attacking our organs and glands oestrogenically. 

Good definitions help to explain things. When you grasp that our bodies are as whole as everyone else's, you begin to get why the body perceives an attack on fat stores is seen as an attack on itself. They say science is often elegant.  

If all these sharpies are so scienterrific, why didn't they tell us this? Why don't they ever get how much we know, or want to? Why didn't their outside perspective help us to get there? Why don't they respect our experience? Why haven't they formed a sounding board for building on more of our insights?

You know like women who take for granted that science doesn't reside in men or something.

Imagine women just taking the ball and running with it, forcing others to catch us? Think of all the effort women put into calorie restricted weight loss. Imagine if we'd used that to try and manipulate human metabolic function?

But no instead, let's dump on those under attack from our masters and compete for the imagined light of most obedient girl. Not so much Jezebel as Pollyanna.

Whatever feminist misogynists keep on hollowing out what used to be an intellectual awakening for women, it's your era and you're welcome to it. 

So, not so much fat shaming as the usual inconclusive and predictable filler that we get from a bogus construct.

Outmanoeuvring Depression

I was amused to re-read a report of a study which found no difference in outcome between those depressed people who exercised and those who did not. Why (wryly) amusing?

That exercise is effective treatment for relieving depression has become a recent shibboleth. And it's proponents will not take this lying down.

When it comes to neuroses in particular and mental illness in general, many things recommended have not been conclusively established as particularly efficacious.

Something to do with the psychosomatic or placebo effect of intervention. Subjectivity is usually king and has been allowed to bleed senselessly (or been used) to establish an efficacy not borne out in the cold light of day.

So, if people say repeatedly banging their heads against a brick wall, makes them feel better then that is often taken as evidence of positive potency. Well, you can't argue with people insisting it is valuable, because it helped them, can you? Too often, personal advocacy borne of desperation, helps shield methods from rigourous scrutiny.

The amusing thing is how this got started. Exercise is not a particularly promising way of treating depression. One of the latter's most notorious symptoms is a compromise or even loss of one's instinct and desire to move.

This is not, as is easy to assume, because one has become lazy due a nervous system set on standby. It's more down the exhaustion of a permanently overwrought, therefore overworked system. Heavy emotions such as panic, anxiety, fear, trauma, loss, grief and so on tax your central nervous system especially, meaning less available energy.

It is a shock to learn the very thing you think you think is the problem, doing too little is actually the product of nervous overload. And that what you need to do is make your mere existence less like hard work and more like neutral.


Whether it's specific; bringing resolution to as many unresolved traumas and dramas of the past as you can manage. And/or general i.e. re-training our normal state to one which is less nerve wracked. Learning to get less het up about things.

Releasing more energy from your stores isn't without meaning. This is probably along the lines of craving calorie dense foods (appetite) or increased energy demand (hunger) when one's mood is lowered.

Energy is clearly a central fact of your body's attempts to keep your head above water. 

There is a possibility that for some, mindless repetitive motion revives not just your instincts to move, but some aspect of your nervous function. It can help to dispel nervous energy that may otherwise be part of tiring out your system. Moving can mean a break from endless negative cycles of thought.

It should be tested more. Not just exercise. For all we know, simple physical movements may involve parts of the brain in ways that break up negative cycles of thought. 

Trouble is, for many, by the time you are depressed, your body, i.e. your muscles, bones even have already collected so much stress which only at that point translates into depression. If you have this response, it can make exercising deeply unpleasant, if not shattering experience.

It's possible that if it were viewed more objectively, exercise or physical movements could assist in diagnosis as well treatment even. If exercise/movement feels alright or good, it could be a different, less entrenched depression.  This could be down to more recent or current thinking/circumstances.

If exercise is more like an invasive assault, it could that your depression is more long term and more to do with having to be out of touch with your feelings over a longer period.

I'm speculating. My point is we'd do well to examine this in terms of movement, rather than the fitness mindset which clouds the issue.

It would be interesting to test aerobic type against healing based movement regimes such as yoga, tai chi, walking meditation and so forth. I daresay the latter might have a better effect on those who have to use their bodies a lot, i.e. low socio economic groups. The favouring of aerobic type motion speaks to the more office based.

That may even be what's making some of them down in the mouth.

I also have my suspicions about the instigator of this enthusiasm for exercise;

Melanie Chalder, of the University of Bristol's School of Social and Community Medicine, said: "Numerous studies have reported the positive effects of physical activity for people suffering with depression but our intervention was not an effective strategy for reducing symptoms. "However, it is important to note that increased physical activity is beneficial for people with other medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease and, of course, these conditions can affect people with depression."

Well, there you are. It's one thing to be depressed. It's quite another to lose status. Which would be depressing in itself, right?

Obesity Related Phantom Addition/Deletion

.............speaking of that last link. Check out this part of the comment thread.

A commenter called "mikedee" [03 April 2013 2:56pm] quoted from Ally Fogg's piece;

Basic physics confirms that the weight of passengers does affect the fuel costs of flights,

But his mind read "does" as "does not".

This was spotted and a few people responded, eventually including Fogg. It was let go. But I'm sure FA aficionado's will clock this as an example of the phenomena where, under the influence of 'obesity' mal logic, people read anyone not fat hating as being in league with satanism 'obesity'.

It points to the nature of fat hating which is essentially extremist in nature, fundamentalist actually. Fundamentalists believe either you are within their narrow cult or you are with the forces of evil or whatever the name of their baddie is, in this case 'obesity'.

In this schema, 'liberals' or relaxed adherents to their view, are also seen as suspect backsliders. Fundamentalism is all or nothing.

'Obesity' is a hostile creation of what fatness is needed to be by others.  We've been lumbered with forcing what little experience we haven't repressed to oblivion into crude phrases, whether they are true for us or not. Or we're accused of lying or denial.

This ventriloquist dummy routine easily extends to whatever fat people who are no longer complying with this, must think. This happens time and again-any nuance confuses these basic and limited assumptions.

People read over what you've written, writing their opinion of what you must be saying, according to them. Rather like the surprise accusation of "promoting obesity", it's often just their own hateful bigotry flipped over. At other times it's how they'd respond to it, flipped over and assigned to you.

i.e. they hate fat people-I still find that funny-so fat people must hate slim people. They disparage fat bodies, fat people must be disparaging slim ones. They're jealous of thinner bodies than their own, so you must definitely be too. You can imagine how tiresome this can get.

They don't get that you have undergone the same processes that led them to their mental position, the complete disassociation from all things fat, internally. we've all been on the same fat hating side. There has been no mirroring, which would mean the complete disconnection from all things slim, whilst maintaining a connection with your body. 

In this case "physics" was the trigger word. As you know, fat haters have a real mastery of physics. Enough to tell you weight loss diets do work, despite scare evidence of real (long term) viability. But not enough to tell you how they could possibly fail. Or falsifiability. For the record, I'd be astounded if physics couldn't explain how diet's don't work, no one seems to have bothered.

For them, anyone who doesn't pretend dieting works is in denial of their curiously religious like version of physics. Hence "does" added a "not" after it.

{{{Happy Daze}}}