Unquestioned authority makes a stand

In an age of self advocacy individual groups put forward their agenda for recognition and progress.

This has meant that virtually everyone thinks this has "gone too far" because there is always some group that each and every one of us thinks is undeserving or who's demands for freedom either impinges too much on the freedoms of society in general.

Another way of looking at that is that we don't like them, or what we feel they stand for, so we don't want them to be equal, we want them to know their place. Because of this we feel the need to invest in unquestioned authority, purely as a means of keeping those we don't like and to spare us all from anarchy.

We don't wish to have to rely on confronting our chosen "undesirables" as marshaling counter arguments can be hard work and confrontation often upsets us, especially if we feel we are being reasonable.

A lot of this frustration has been diverted into the obesity crisis, telling fat people what to do has become the favourite role play of control, made into an on going theatrical event, to bring excitement and relieve the tedium of existence. A bit like those role play computer games, where good takes on evil, except with added spice of the involvement of real people.

It's funny, we claim to believe in the triumph of rationality, but express this through irrationality.

The problem with picking on fat people it's a big flunk out, we actually serve as a cautionary example of where belief in authority, regardless of merit, can leave you.

We show exactly why the advocacy of self has become a necessary requirement of any sane plan for self defense; don't do it and you give others the scent of blood, rather than show willing as you imagine. We show why-yet again- authority has become so mistrusted.

All of that would be tolerable if the path was not sullied by the fact that we are expected to make real that which is unreal, that which is wrong because the status quo insists it's right.

Even though we've done virtually everything we've been told, we have been erased and written in by those who wish us to serve as an example of how society brings wrong 'uns to heel. Making the world safe for the good folk.

We have shown that we are not rebellious, when it's come to the matter of weight, yet we are labelled "non-complaint" because we cannot make true something that is false.

The truth of this is given away by people saying they worry when we veer off the obesity script to discuss our experiences-in our own voices- that will lead us to self destruct. Clearly, the weight loss surgery, dieting with reckless self disregard and occasional pill popping-sometimes ending in serious damage has been noted.

Yes, if you're unnerved by the the thought of how easily led a group is, that is the opposite profile of non-compliant. The fear tells us we do as we are told, by whomever we are told, regardless of the effects on us.

If people are independent and never do as they're told, that we will not listen would be the fear.

I get a strong sense that the results of all this could have a profound effect on how we see authority in our modern societies. As rank has so often been the defining word in keeping us in our place, getting past that changes our investment in authority, even if the shake down isn't fully revealed.

Writing with the body

This made me smile today.

Acceptance with a silent F-A-T

Just caught a response to this post.

I'm still mystified as to why people cannot see that this kind of don't "mention the F word" attitude to fat acceptance sums up exactly why fat acceptance exists in the first place.

Although the writer couches her emotional blackmail gently and skillfully, it's just the same old, "I have problems with the word, so should you."

Well actually no.

The point is, when no one has a problem with it, the need for it will fade away all on it's own.

It's OK to talk 'acceptance' look up the word, as long as you are not accepting that made needlessly unacceptable by constructing it as such.

It all boils down to the strange bargaining element that fat people are subjected to, it goes, "if you do x, I'll stop hating you, heck, I might even condescend to give you the time of day, like you even".

Thanks very much.

But did it ever occur to you that the overweening ambition is not to gain your scintillating attentions? Or do you even appreciate how hard fat people have tried up to now to gain the approval of others by succumbing to diet attempts?

No, well if you don't appreciate or acknowledge that, you're not going to do the same with a watered down mealy mouthed version of FA, no matter how much you think you might.

That aversion will remain and it should confronted, not fought shy of to live another day. I can't understand which bit of FA says, I'm here to serve your needs, except ironically the bit that's most troublesome. Yeah, fat people really exist to serve others don't they?

Everyone, including some fat people themselves, needs to get over the idea that we can manipulate people to do our bidding by acquiescing to their every whim no matter how dubious. It's humility turned vainglory, we don't have the power to control others, we might just be able to control ourselves and have a little faith that others will eventually respond to that honesty.

There is something creepy about people who attempt to curry favour because they don't trust you to come round to reason, no matter how powerful the initial reaction may be. There's a difference between trying new approaches and hiding or obfuscating your truth, because you believe neither in yourself or others. If you're not convinced, why should they be?

All of this is how we got here and part of the reason why we are sometimes uniquely disrespected. I'm not trying to blame ourselves, we had the best of intentions, but if we cannot learn this kind of genuflect obeisance hasn't worked by now, then we should throw in the towel right about now.

When I first got involved in FA, I saw it as a movement that was from fat people, to everyone, because I think we all need a rethink on the whole weight debate. I've never seen weight as a barrier to what anyone is saying, I go by whether it speaks to me. I don't get and am not sympathetic to anyone who has problems with someone else because of their weight.

If the message given speaks to you, why allow a three letter word to stand in the way of that?

Why disrespect the motives of those who are bringing the message, if you like what they are saying and it expresses how you feel?

Isn't that connection enough to show you are in sympathy with them, why ask them to make self defeating and pointless gestures that go back on a central part of the message itself?

It's important that having been pushed back into mindless obedience, fat people recover from and reverse that and re-gain a sense autonomy over their experiences, presenting themselves in their own voice. If that chaps your hide, where do you expect the message you are liking to come from?

It doesn't come from a place of feeling apologetic about where it's coming from, it has to be grounded in a strong authentic base. That cannot be furtively looking over one's shoulder for the approval of those who've denied it thus far. I get that "fat" is a problem but that's the point, to take the problem and the shame out of it, by saying it, by embracing it as part of the spectrum of human experience.

So come one come all, participate, or hang back and be inspire. Either way, you must allow yourself, no-one can do that for you.

"Hard" is not the problem

I'm hearing "losing weight is hard" a lot around now as a way diverting a failure of efficacy into an issue of difficulty. Saying a thing doesn't work is not the same as saying its hard to achieve, the two are not the same and should not be conflated. Dieting fails whether it feels hard or not, it is dieting's dominant principle that fails to work- that of restricting intake and increasing use of energy that fails.

It doesn't fail so much because it cannot induce weight loss, it fails because it provokes defense mechanisms that come into operation the moment you create a sustained calorie deficit. Some are so sensitive that the intention of doing that is enough to provoke a titan of a reaction which they cannot stand.

The hardness of dieting varies, but on the whole it tends to be quite a challenge that feeling is those defences acting to thwart the effort. Even that feeling is absent, they still operate, that's why many who find dieting easy still end up re-gain, if they can even sustain the effort in the first place.

It's the same for other examples, drugs, jaw wiring, surgery, exercise etc., they all fail to make people thin for the same reasons slimming doesn't slim.

Those claiming that diets don't fail they are just wreally hard are ignoring that even if that was true (it isn't) that would mean it would succeed with very few people. The whole the harder something is, the fewer are likely to succeed at it, that's plain common sense.

If you want something to be viable over a large scale it should be doable for most people, or don't expect it to be effective.

Theoretical in this case as the issue is structural, the hardness of dieting is not why it fails, it is its failure in action. Typical dieting mentality, will say anything to preserve it.

Anything.

Impasse

I've come to an interesting impasse. For the first time in whenever since I joined the FA fray, I'm actually feeling quite indifferent to the whole issue. The reason why it's interesting is that I feel like I'm about to take a leap.

I'll either have to jack it in or take another step. I was reading a response to some condescending drivel in on yet another one, on how normals should treat fattie's 'cos they're not from this earth. The person was saying they've been reading about this for years and they are so over it because they're having such a great life.

I wanted to second some part of that emotion more than I would have a while back. But I'm not sure it's enough. I feel forces are gathering and there seems no defined end to the momentum building. How great will any fat person's life be if that continues?

I feel a sense of responsibility. 

Psych flail

The Royal Society of Psychiatrists are involving themselves in the body image ish-you. Are they telling some of their sillier members to stop implying fat person who respect have a form of narcissistic personality disorder?

Or how about telling people to knock off framing a vital function as 'addiction'? Nope. They're having ago at the great satan (I know, which one?) the media. Because apparently, the reason why we are in the mess we are in re eating disorders is the portrayal of bodies, not fat stigmatization and the whole obesity canard. 

Fat stigmatization via the obesity crisis is creating mental and physical ill health, disordered eating and eating disorders of all kinds. That's why they are running rampant and increasing with every generation. Not the media, which so often follows as a lickspittle lackey to the noble professions of science, medicine and other health professions, which obviously includes psychiatry.

Marshall McCluhan said the medium is the message, but I'm sure he'd agree that it works the other way around, the message is also the medium and that message is, be slim. Until someone apart from fat/size acceptance, deviates from that script, we all need to stop implying that's not the way it is.

Or that nothing bad could possibly come from the great and the good, so if something bad's happening, its gotta be the bad guys, how comforting.  Sadly official sources refuse mostly to come out and unequivocally state the truth, there is no safe way to achieve weight loss via the recommended route, that of energy manipulation.

Until they say this, unemotionally and unequivocally, without blaming it on fat people or anyone else, they are mainly creating a diversion.

Boo hoo dieters

Fat acceptance repeatedly gets caught up in the insistence that it excludes dieters and that this is creating problems. This is something unexpected. Everywhere diets are the law and yet for some reason, that's just not enough. How so? Though somewhat perplexed, I've come to the conclusion that the answer is the reverse of question.

Because dieting's so dominant any exception feels like a reversal. It's that high maintenance and so are dieters. Their dominance over the public space has clearly developed into a sense of entitlement. I understand that people wish to be able to lose weight. I don't and have never personally objected to this.

We all lose weight-and gain it- all the time in a never ending cycle of our bodies self maintainence. In the morning, most people weigh less than the night before. The reason is perhaps best indicated by what we call the morning meal. BREAK-FAST.

It's not uncomfortable or painful. It doesn't require calories to be counted, exercise to be done nor any of the usual paraphernalia of weight loss dieting. That is weight loss. It doesn't hurt any more than weight gain. Our association of discomfort and stress are caused by the form of weight loss, dieting.

It is semi starvation as a lifestyle that hurts and that's why the weight loss diet industry wish to pretend that weight loss dieting is weight loss and the latter must be painful. In order so that people are not discouraged when they compare the body's effortless ability to lose weight, with the brutality of weight loss dieting.

So that we are prepared to perpetuate abuse on ourselves in a way that appears to make sense. We've all been taught this conflation and we all still go along with it, including fat acceptance. The endless pandering to fat hate, dieters of both kinds- starvers and the feeders, pseudo science and fat phobia, is one of the reasons why fat acceptance has not advanced intellectually in 40 years.

The Fat Underground employed slashing rhetoric: Doctors are the enemy. Weight loss is genocide. Friends in the mainstream-sympathetic academics and others in the early fat rights movement-urged them to tone it down, but ultimately came to adopt much of the Fat Underground's underlying logic as their own.

That's from the 1970's. This kind of directness is seen as too "radical" for many and still the 'sphere seeks to tone itself down. If fat hate like weight is our fault, then we can do something about it. It's within our power, not so scary and random.

My confusion could be summed of something I think was said by Genet “If you wish to reach for new horizons, you have to leave the shore.” The “shore” in this case is fat hate, dieting and the whole way we look at things. If you are moving in a fat acceptance direction and are not ready to leave behind what prevents you moving forward, why would you to cling to all that?

How can you go in two opposite directions at once? The answer is you can't, unless you want stasis, not moving, in which case, exactly what is your interest in fat acceptance?  You may want to fight for and in defense of the rights of fat people, but it is at heart incompatible with weight loss dieting.

Whether it's incompatible with the idea of weight loss, I'm not so sure. It's like good/bad food, we can see how bad that and other dichotomies tend to be. I don't really see the point in making weight loss a moral issue, I suppose you have to if you conflate that with dieting. Dieters seem to have been well served by FA.

We unwittingly give them a new target to aim the hate generated by their self abuse and denial, by offering them a definite path of self acceptance. We take enough of the pressure off them that they can reinvest it in their efforts to fight biology with delusion. And we throw in eating what you want without thought so you can put on enough weight to spook you so that you can reinvigorate "motivation".

If that's not good enough, it's like the haters, I don't pretend there's anymore, short of abandoning FA altogether and letting it dissipate. All this feels somewhat disingenuous, dieters themselves taunt us, "Why won’t you tell us what to do, what to think? Why don’t you know how to tell us?" In the next breath calling us a bunch of mind numbed groupthink crypto fascists.

How can we not give enough guidance and be groupthinky?

Usually, that sort of both ways at once criticism really means it's personal rather than about ideas. I'm guessing they want an FA 101, which, why would you want that if you have a functioning brain in your head to think for yourself?

How can these things be given with ease? Labouring within the parameters of a frame that doesn't even recognise the possibility of our existence is not conducive to clear rationale. That's why we barely have 101's, we're still trying to work it out ourselves-but we are not allowed to be imperfect, though we're told we think we are and that we aren't.

The appearance of a fluency of thought could be achieved by going back where you've been, I suppose. But it's hard to see how that will lead to progress. I have nothing against dieters, I'm indifferent. I used to be one another thing often forgotten, fat people diet a lot. This is a grassroots effort, not a shop where the obsequiousness is a lever to extract as much currency from your pocket as possible.

We are just like anyone else, trying to reach a new understanding of things, given our real experience, as opposed what we were told was supposed to happen. I wouldn't have it any other way. I think it's exciting and interesting potentially. It's all in the potential, isn't it?

FA has the potential to be radical, it isn't though. There is nothing 'edgy' about saying fat people are as human as anyone else. It's insulting to claim so. What's extreme is saying we can control biology in the most stupidly inhumane and wasteful ways.

Pretending all sin can be located among the fat. That you can weight industry, intelligence, sanity, honesty. Trying to pretend FA's gone way, way further than it has, is an effort to stem its progress.

What investment do committed dieters have in FA? What difference does it make to dieters whether fat acceptance tanks into meaningless mediocrity? There's also the taking others for granted. Why is everyone so sure that if dieting took centre stage, we'd all still be here?

The theoretical loss of dieters fails to take account of the loss of those who really wanted to progress and realise the potential of FA. Not just for fat people, but for all who are sick and tired of the way ideas on eating have succumbed to borderline disorder, at best.

There are people out there who want to eat normally and feel alright about that. They're sick and tired of self important misanthropes with a depressing screed of humans are intrinsically worthless and morally bankrupt-unless a firm hand and copious amounts of pain are inflicted on them. To keep them in line.

I didn't buy original sin in a religious context and I don't buy it in a secular one, either. I do not and will never see it as my role to pander in any way to dieters. They can rest assured I don't give a rat's arse about how many calories they're ingesting or extruding at any given moment. I'm ok with that because I feel they are more than well catered for elsewhere. Nor do they seem to consider the needs of others as important. When people come to fat acceptance, they get a chance to let their guard down from the defensiveness that is in place elsewhere. They come to exchange and progress to a cogent understanding, based on realism not tedious stupid delusions of what is supposed to be.

Fat people's humanness is the only taboo

No one's ever been afraid to call people fat, only declining to call them obese instead and deliver yet another one of their tedious death threats. This piece of tripe has caused much offence, due to the idiot who wrote it, (oh, there I said it)'s racist insensitivity. I couldn't feel a jot of offence at such racial buffoonery. Racism is accorded way too much dignity still, it is stupid. 

The writer also thinks citing the Bataan Death March.....;

The Japanese immediately began to march some 76,000 prisoners (12,000 Americans, the remainder Filipinos) northward into captivity along a route of death. When three American officers escaped a year later, the world learned of the unspeakable atrocities suffered along the 60-mile journey that became known as the Bataan Death March.

.........is an apt way to bring the trusty saber of truth to those she projects fear of the 'F' word onto.

Vicki Iovine, was prompted by the nightline discussion 'Is it ok to be fat?', proposes the idea that fat is like nigger. Then spends the rest of her pisspoor article undermining that and failing to notice. Because she's as silly as she accuses Marianne of being, along with MeMe Roth, 50-50's about right for her. 

They're taking a vox populi, to see if fat people are still taking it lying down. The real enquiry is testing if it's still okay to be a fat hater.

"People used to be afraid to be fat, now they're afraid to say fat," iow having been used the the acquiescence of fatties, folks are now somewhat unnerved by the beginnings of a fightback. Not to the extent of bothering to find out what fat people are saying though. Instead relying on their opinion of what fat people think. Which is that we're terrified of being told we're fat. Because we don't know, or we'd cease...........to be.........................fat.

The dozy bint thinks Kevin Smith calls himself fat because he's 'comedic' not because he knows what he is.  His obvious and well publicised rage fury and anger, becomes embarrassment, because Ms. I thinks that's what it should be and she's writing the script of what fat people think, as haters think is their birthright.

She is well out of step and with a mind buried deep in that curiously deadened mindset fat hating mugs you with. She even does that thing only the most worthless haters do, endless punning and use of fat related word, 'girth' and seeking his pound of flesh blah, blah (was that ever funny?) Fat people were never allowed to say no before without being accused of having had a grease spot on their shoulder.

It would be a chip but we've eaten it, boom! boom!

I remember when this used to be everywhere it just got so boring. Except to the sadder ones.

Hurting yourself with food?

What beating yourself up with a french stick?

This is one of the things people think about having a compulsive type eating disorder or when they wish to eat less than normal to go from fat to slim.The assumption is that you can command yourself to ignore your hunger and that will make it stop.

This is the inheritance of defining fat people as only greedy. 

People trapped in this kind of cycle then find they inevitably frame their eating as self destructive-given the hype about being fat. The latter especially is used to question mental balance, sanity even. And I'm talking about some who have the disorders themselves.

This is part of the pattern set in eating disorders lore, that drama=taking the condition seriously. Actually taking seriously=taking seriously.

Nobody hurts themselves with food.