A crisis of obesiness

There is apparently, a crisis of obese persons. During this time dieting has been around. Weight loss surgery has been around, pills have been around. And yet still. The influence of the nutritionists has grown, people repeat their advice up hill and down dale.

This lack of impact might embarrass lesser souls, but the food police remain undaunted by any shame or even a sense humility reticence No matter their irrelevancy, they are fresh as daisies with their assumption of knowing the answer. Thank goodness for that, they are my inspiration in recovering from their career making shaming of fat people. Glad to be of assistance. Charity is an excellent virtue.

Warnings have been issued, you will get sick, you will die. Diktats have been asserted. Motivation has been coined, what about your children, your spouse/partner, your country even.

Psychology, psychotherapy, therapy has been tried, all to no avail. It's seems the madness of fat people is incurable and yet strangely isn't showing up displaying itself in increased numbers in mental institutions and prisons. Miraculous.

Morality has been under the microscope, fat people have been constantly on trial. Urged to confess sins that are not supposed to be in any doubt. They need to hear it, but hearing it upsets them, not hearing it upsets them, everything upsets, them.

Somehow through it all, an obesity crisis has managed to cheekily rear it's naughty head. It's impertinence is staggering really.

Unlike me.

Bunged up

I appear to suffering from writers congestion, my am I glad I thought of that word, it's not that I can't think of what to write, it's that I can't seem to quite get it out in a way that makes sense, pah! It's getting on my nerves, I keep starting and leaving stuff unfinished. someone once said that when you get your ideas out of yourself, you're forced to new frontiers of knowledge, or was it that the vacuum sucked in more. Yeah right like the latter is likely. I'm willing to give it a try though, I feel like my thoughts go round and around getting a bit stale.

When I first joined fray a couple of years ago, I so wanted to speak, discuss things, I find to my horror, that I'm mocked ridiculed and apparently when I'm not being effortlessly offensive, I am impenetrable. Soouper.

I've always yearned to come across as a raving oddball hurtling into orbit, ranting away. OOhh, so exciting.

What does FA mean to me?

An interesting discussion at attrice's blog 123 has made me try yet again to put my finger on the the nub of what I find most alienating about FA. For me, it's the inability to question society's programming about being fat and losing weight and leave it behind.

I sympathise with feelings of no longer feeling part of FA, I too for very different reasons have similar feelings. This suggests to me that FA may be foundering by insisting on signing up to a whole set of arbitrary rules rather than concentrating on what we can, if anything, all agree on. This sometimes makes people feel that everything that anyone in fat acceptance says at any point in time-that they disagree with-is an intrinsic part of FA.

Being attentive and vigilant to assert and protect your rights-whoever said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance wasn't wrong-requires some real basis of self esteem. In a sense, fat hatred shows how political low self-esteem can really get, you are less likely to assert, protect and defend your rights, if you hate yourself and feel you are a lesser being. It tends to make you more obedient and lack the confidence to put yourself on the line, as well as the energy.

The path that has lead to FA, amongst other things, was a process of recovering a fuller sense of who I was. I could no longer defined by 'obese', it came to overshadow everything, and represented nothing.

FA is far from fully formed as to the full implications of what it means to start from a point of self acceptance for fat people, how can it compromise before it has been formed? This is yet again the prioritization of the needs of others, they can't understand FA, so that is FA's problem which it has to bend and mould itself around those who ever demanded that all along. These are the same old tactics that got our civil rights under threat in the first place. People who sell compromise are forgetting that fat people have already done everything that was asked of us and more. That has lead us here.

I don't wish to attack attrice, but she seems to be going back where she's been after having had a nice rest from what caused her to need an exit in the first place.

Semi-detatched?

I'm feeling rather semi detached from the 'sphere right now. I'm not sure whether I have a place in it, or whether I'm just raving to myself.

I suppose that's really it, within in the fatosphere. It is created by the people that join in, it has no tribes or demarcations as such. I've taken the view that it doesn't matter about the approval of others, although that's always nice, it's more about just joining in.

But I'm used to being part of something, I'm finding this a far more difficult adjustment than I would ever have thought. It feels unsafe somehow and I think that's because it's about being fat.

I've spent all of my formative years and beyond thinking about it along certain lines. More especially, ignoring and suppressing my thoughts out of existence. Whenever I've tried tentatively to speak about it, I've never been able to get near the things I've wanted to speak of, the things that link within.

Shallow chats (they always seem to break off quickly) about 'there must be more to it than this', have given me a voracious appetite to vent. This has tripped me up and made my thinking scattershot, it's harder to connect than I thought, or at least, I expected that I would be able to connect and it seems that my expectations were too great.

Being or feeling like a lone voice has rarely scared me in the past, now I realise how much work was done by others. How much I've followed in the footsteps of others, or been surrounded by like minds.

It feels like this shouldn't be the hardest part, that should be changing perceptions, but it seems like everything's hard. And yet, somehow I feel like it shouldn't be because it's not earth shattering stuff is it? Expressing your point of view, from your own experience.

It's trying to find a path, I know what I want to say, but I'm not sure I have the courage to say it. I feel like I do, but then I feel like I need to balance it, which ends with pulling my punches.

For such a long time now, I've yearned to find others that can understand what I've been trying to speak of, to give voice to what has been so hard to say, surrounded by the din of others.

It's a surprise to find how hard that is, and yet not quite in the ways I expected.

We're just going to have to do it ourselves

As they say, if you want something done well do it yourself. Over at Lindsay's blog [babble], reading yet another time wasting attempt to engage anti FA in some kind of meaningful dialogue ends in failure.

I must say I've become more sanguine about this than ever. When I first joined FA, I yearned for debate. Real head to head butting if necessary, in a spirit of mutual respect. I've just actually laughed out loud as I'm writing this to show how utterly disillusioned I've become.

First off we've got FA itself, and people who seem to think they have to tell what FA means and exactly how you must feel about it and yourself. This is inevitable, as the are always rules, but although I'll admit, I've overdone how much debate is possible about FA; people can't even be bothered to find out what it is, even if their minds are capable of making the distinctions that need to be made to grasp it. They don't seem to get that you've spent years of your precious life, suckered into exactly that, and when you finally overcome the initial stages of pure rage, to think that you could have been so credulous for so long, that the last thing you need is more of the same from the same type of people with the same attitudes and sense that they have an innate right to tell you what and who the hell you are.

I need a break from the overly entitled of the world, who think that it is their birthright to run things, from taking up residence in my head, thanks very much. This brings me to my point, those of us in FA who are of a more critical mindset, need to either in a loose alliance or separately, examine critically every bit of FA. We have to re-learn, in my case, what I've always taken for granted in any issue of contention, that is my ability to step outside myself, and leave my ego out of it.

Right now, mostly those in FA, are the ones that can truly understand and grasp some of the ideas of FA, properly. So it is going to be up to us to step outside ourselves and be the thoughtful critics that we need, regardless of the flak it may bring.

I threw away a piece of chocolate

Just the other day, for the first time I can remember, I had cause to throw away a piece of chocolate.

Now as a woman, I don't want to overstate the situation. The notion, for instance, that chocolate is somehow better than sex or other such nonsense, still continues to shock, I've always felt that mediocre sex is better than any chocolate in the world, come to it, any food in the world. I would also never mix the two, as I think that's really asinine.

The point is that I don't recall throwing away chocolate, merely because I didn't want it, like any other unwanted bit of partially eaten food. Somehow it never comes up, because either, I eat it all, or at best, I save the rest for later-later in the sense of about 5 minutes later.

To be honest, in recent times, I've kept chocolate for weeks, months even, usual put away and forgotten about- this is in itself is odd when I think about it, as I never used to be able to forget about chocolate, let alone, keep it, that I just didn't understand. But this time was different, first of all I realised that I didn't want it all, I stopped immediately - this was automatic; then I thought of folding it and putting it in my bag, but due mainly to the shape of the packet, this would have been likely to create a mess, in the past I would have bitten some off to reshape it, but I couldn't be doing with that this time, I said to myself, I'm going to chuck this, and I did!

I have to admit I felt I nanosecond's worth of pride, ouff! Vanity indeed! I asked myself why, I couldn't answer; because I don't really care that much about how much I eat, I have a trust of and in myself that I never used to have. I can only put it down to a bit of a throwback to the time when this just wouldn't have happened-except under duress.