Consent

Consent is mainly seen as an either/or thing. Lack of it breaks the chain of wanting something to happen and it happening introducing the invasiveness of something happening to you, against you.

What is harder to consider and sometimes reconcile is that grey area where consent is compromised. That is when you consent on a certain basis you believe to be true which turns out not to be. And if you had known the full facts or truth, you'd not have consented.

It's an occupational hazard of life to a certain extent. We cannot always know the full facts or know everything in each others hearts. What we truly want can become obscured by the internalization of supposed to's and should's, whatever our place in events.

That doesn't make it any less painful if it has crossed a boundary of belief dear to our hearts.

Part of the sadness of obesity is that many of us, did not consent on the terms sold to us. We bought into self improvement, not self hate or annihilation, that's important,  because its assumed we hated ourselves then acted on that, when it is far more the other way around.

Even those who do not/did not hate themselves have often developed a view of fatness where the normal rules don't apply. They've imbibed the 'segregation' of fat people necessary to create our fatness and created by our inner 'sinfulness'.r

We believed we would eat better, not develop disordered eating and eating disorders. We thought we'd heal our relationships with our bodies by losing weight. As that didn't happen for many, permanently any way, that price of that was decline and continued alienation from self. Whilst we were looking the other way, intent on proving to ourselves and others that we were good people and would not give up.

My basis of assumption enabled by my desire to be thinner and my belief that I could raise the odds of successful weight loss in my favour if I tried harder or hard enough and ate a perfect healthy diet.

I am in part to blame for that, no doubt. It is also true that if not under the influence of an atmosphere created by insisting certain things were true when it was clear to many they were not, I would have acted differently.

Certainly I would not have done myself so much damage by repeating failure over and over. That wasn't for free. I feel the attitude of falsehood to manipulate fat people around dieting and weight loss, but even more the effects of pursuing it via calorie manipulation compromised our consent. In fact I know it did.

It altered our attitude to our bodies, changed the meaning of us to ourselves and the actions of cals in/out altered our consciousness. Anorexia is a distinct genetic condition, that however doesn't mean the tools of an early form of it are harmless. It is a continuum and when people speak of the 'mental illness' of AN, they are speaking of a more acute form of what has happened to most people who diet, regardless of weight, especially repeatedly.

No body cared to monitor that, as our assigned original sin status blocked that. We could be blamed for everything that didn't go to plan rather than the effects of what we were doing assessed objectively by others not involved, coolly and rationally.

The careless disregard of us has wasted opportunities to learn and move on to better and greater knowledge. We were one ginormous multi nationed experiment. One of the greatest spontaneous ones. Anyone with any intellectual spark amongst the authorities could have used that to learn which could have at least salvaged more from what we went through.

The aim,  was just to keep us repeating it indefinitely putting any costs to us down to the pathology of our obesity.

We also wouldn't have been so hard on ourselves if we'd had a more realistic idea of what was possible, probable, likely and that would have saved a lot damage.

I now know I could have reconciled myself to the way things were better than I would have assumed and that makes me sad for all of us in a similar position. We deserved better from the people we listened to.