So I got here, how?!!

Weight loss dieting's compatibility-or not- with fat acceptance is a lot more interesting than it may at first appear.

One of the things that has most surprised me during my FA stint is that people identify so intimately with their dieting, that they feel affronted when people merely cease the standard operational propagandising bullshit about it. I dieted briefly-for about six months- when I was 11. I realised from there that the typical calorie counting diet wasn't it. I switched instead to the Rosetta stone of weight loss through healthist eating instead.

I can't say I didn't identify with it at all, but in essence no, probably because I considered myself a failure-as I did not become slim- even though I stuck with it for 17 years solid and basically everyday woke up thinking about ways I could try and eat less and use up some calories.

And believe me, that is more than long enough to know exactly what a diet is, even if it hasn't passed through the only apparently true human authority on reality in existence.

A human with a penis and a science degree.

Day, after day, year after year. I was only stopped by burning out, something that came as a tremendous shock. I was going to do the same old same old and bam! Like hitting an invisible wall of resistance.

Although I never got back on the daily treadmill again, I tried, but my desire screamed no! Because that would have meant letting go of my dream of thin. There was certain amount of belligerence too. I would not be beaten etc.,

Anyhow, about 5 years later, I got to a turning point, where I pace the floor saying I will never do this to myself again, I promise, on pain of death, I will never diet, full stop.

Instinctively I got into some kind of a chanting frenzy over and over again, I got quite into it. Then, after a while I experienced a sense of release and I knew then, that was more or less that.

Over.

The reason I ended up doing that by the way, is that although I'd stopped dieting, for me, I'd figured out that especially after having spent years threatening my body with diets, it can become like an abused puppy. It's not enough to stop kicking it, you have to win it's trust back and until you do, it will continue to wait for the next ambush to be sprung on it.

That means it can still be mounting defenses against it.

I can't remember how I figured this out. I'm glad I did though.

Even after all this, it still took me a while to get on board with FA. I went to BfB, I realise it must have been not long after it started, I only have a hazy recollection of it. But I distinctly remember just feeling like this was mostly going over my head. I considered that I had the issue, not BfB.

So, a few years later I was ready to check it out again, and see if I was ready, and I blundered in like a bull in a china shop. And so on and so forth.

I don't claim my route to be a template for anyone, but it does helped to explain why I am perplexed by those who are clearly not ready, but insist that is a problem for FA. Now if we were employers or even a service business who's job it is to professionally butt kiss to remove as much of your cash as possible.

I've never understood who is making dieters unwelcome and why dieters would feel able to participate, they certainly do. As long as they don't make an issue of diet blurb that would do weight watchers proud or dealing in the fat hate that maybe supporting their efforts. That latter point is the crucial and interesting point.

Just how far can a dieter go with fat acceptance?

FA is my HAES

That's right, self acceptance is my HAES. Health is uncovered not pursued. Not outside, layers within. When I located health outside myself, through others I became alienated from my centre. To accept oneself is to accept health. To reject oneself is to reject health.

What is pleasure? Is it partly a desire for well being and that's the basis for health. Health is a consideration in some way in everything we do. Without being fully aware of this. It overlaps with the desire for enjoyment and that which is pleasing to us.

It is an inner need, not an outer one. We do not need to be told to be healthy. We need to reject that which makes us unhealthy. Including those who seek to manipulate our deep unyielding desire for wellness, for their own ends.

That's for the sake of their health in some way. The need to see their own ideas reflected everywhere they look, to reassure them, to make them feel safe and validated. Isn't that about their health, even when it's at the expense of others? Isn't that their personal philosophy, that others must be sacrificed, if they're to be okay?

To reject pleasure/enjoyment is to reject health and healing. Self defeating hedonism is the chasing of that refused pleasure-it is displacement, not motivated by some unseen monster that is "pure greed" there is none. There's only needs we are attempting to fulfil, sometimes the wrong way. The need is not satisfied and grows ever more frustrated and unrequited. Until we are exhausted.

It's the need to make good that loss that they often call, addiction, that leads to the real form of it. To embrace oneself is to embrace health. To reject self is to reject health, to hate oneself is to hate health.

Hate creates displeasure, loss, a loss will be felt, that loss will be mourned, that loss will be chased. To hate is to wound, to love is to heal. Hate is not health. Spite is not health giving. To create either is to create displeasure, is to ultimately create ill health. Hate for its own sake cannot come out of health. Only righteous hate can be the beginning of healing.

Movement is to the body what thought is to the brain. I want to think with the whole of me, together and in turn, mind and body, body and mind. I choose to move my mind and my body. I don't accept those who tell me, my body is wrong or bad, it is incomparable.

Allow me to serve my health, in the way that makes sense to me. I move me-I move myself, myself moves me. I don't exercise, starting at exercise is meaningless to me. Your way of health may not be my way of health and vice versa................

Fat translator

I'm going to let you into one of my secret games. It's not really a game so much as a little notion that feels like a game when you 'play' it.

I'm feeling a little bit vulnerable about revealing this so I hope you'll be gentle with it.

It's called;

Ahem;

Translation into fat.

No, don't say that sounds weird, I haven't worked on it.

Probably because it sometimes feels bad, dirty even (the bad kind of dirty of course). I've tried to keep it a bit of a secret from the rest of my brain. That doesn't really make sense, but what I mean is, when I've played this game, I've gone to a little place inside. Then emerged fronting that I haven't really played it.

I just feel like the world isn't ready for it.

OK, what is it.

In case you haven't guessed-if you have or have played, you might be a bit bad too.

Basically.

Deep breath.

You think of anything that's occurring, a situation, especially anything that might concern, erm, personal responsibility in some way and notice how it's treated; how people react to it. Then you turn the subject into fat/fatness etc, and see how it sounds.

You can swap the other way too.

The next time someone says something about fat people or fatness, translate it into something else, of the kind mentioned. And mull it over.

So, you want an example right?

I'm afraid I can't. It's not safe.

That's it.

If that seems like a bit of an anti-climax.

Play it.

Go wild, and fat translate. Only remember, it's just for you.

At the top end part 1

I have always got the distinct impression that we in FA, like everyone else, ignore the existence of people like Sharon Mevsimler. It's like we don't wish to deal with those at the higher and highest end(s) of the weight spectrum, we don't wish to fully acknowledge them. And yet when they "burn out" and resort to surgery, we fancy ourselves to have some kind of deep soul searching night of the soul about how we feel about it vis-à-vis our conscience 'n' sch-tuff.

Rather than ask ourselves whether viable weight loss is necessary to spare them their agonies.

Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely opposed to weight loss dieting and the products of it's underlying hypothesis of calorie restriction- weight loss surgery, the pills designed on that basis etc., however, I never have and never will be against finding out how to make the metabolism adjust (itself) to take weight down, yes and up. I simply cannot put myself against progress and learning more about how our bodies, our selves as human beings function.

I get that people feel deeply that weight loss is against fat acceptance, but as I know they are really talking about calorie restriction-and I don't believe that is the only possibility, I can't really count myself out of fat acceptance on that basis. This conflation is the product of and disseminated by the slimming business and/or those who wish to convince people that dieting's placebo effects make it a viable option. Those who perpetuate that conflation, I'm afraid are just following their orders.

We do this a lot in FA because a)we are the mainstream, b) we are not and fat acceptance is not in any way, radical, get a tattoo of that if you like because it probably won't change any time soon, c) there is no need for 'radical' FA, it's a long established principle that people require their self esteem for their well being-whether you feel they deserve it or not d) we want approval and inclusion, we want back into the club (we imagined we had a lifetime membership to, like the fat hating tools who think that they are respected by those working them; we are not ploughing a new furrow. We are not revolutionaries, OK?

We have a lot of unquestioned 'junk in the attic' that hasn't been through rigorous processing-that kind of thing is not easy at the best of times, but if the urge to fit in with the mainstream takes precedence and therefore energy it makes it even more slow and painful. Anyone who thinks FA is in anyway radical is hopelessly mis-using that term.

Whether we learn how the body regulates its metabolism and/or how to bring it under the aegis of our will, makes no odds to me, because it's a study of human physiology. Even if it wasn't needed, which it is whether anyone likes it or not, it is wanted. It has been wanted, especially by women and unless you think women are pretty much brain dead, that's good enough reason for it to be provided.

It's also worth pointing out that weight does not occur/is not created/changed in a vacuum, it is intimately connected with other things. As I believe that fatness is probably a product of something else, rather than for it's own sake. Thrifty genes interesting, but ultimately, unconvincing.

The real problem for me is not weight loss intrinsically, but the only means mooted to achieve it. Calorie restriction is what is causing the problems we associate with weight loss. The defining of them as indivisible has derailed FA into merely aiding obesity crisis wallahs to get away with negligence of the marginalized who are left to suffer and die(t) because of the lack of interest in relieving their suffering. With the theme of we are scientific, I wonder if we've taken our cue from that in some way? If so/anyway, that's a bit of a shame on us.

By the time I got involved in FA properly a few years ago, I had little to no belief that there was any real intentions of getting fat people to lose weight-nobody who invests in diets wants an end to fat people, take a good look around has dieting made people thin? Look at those who venerate it most, they may be thinner than others who don't, but they are still fat and getting fatter. If you want more fat people, vote weight loss diet. Since then, I've seen absolutely nothing, nada, nil to change that view. The crusade is about social control, it has nothing to do with the regulation of weight, that is a means to another end, the regulation of people.

Look at it overall and ask yourself, what is happening overall, slimming down of society or change in behaviour and attitudes?

NO CONTEST.

Weight loss is a natural part of the process of the body using and converting food into energy. The conflation of weigh loss dieting with weight loss is in order that you compare the abomination that is weight loss dieting with itself, rather than with what it is supposed to replicate but cannot, the weight loss your body is probably undergoing right now as part of it's dealing with your energy demands.

Are you feel it right now? At all? Is it hurting you? Do you have to consciously plan it? Are you a slave to it? Do you have to run around after it?

No, no, no, no, no and no.

Comparing naturally occurring weight loss, with weight loss dieting is wholly revealing and demoralising. Not that it would stop people dieting, it didn't stop me, but it shows up even more not only how bad and inefficient WLD is, but how ridiculously punitive and stupid it is. And if you want to try and take that personally, remember, you are not your diet. Saying dieting is bad is not the same as saying weight loss dieters are bad.

It is a real nadir in the way we treat ourselves and is humbling to us as humans that it could have got so far and carried on so long. That's one of the (many) reasons it tends easily to generate low self esteem, a) all things find their meter.

And b)to justify and overcome it's rankness, people have to tend towards degrading others to try and make it make sense. That's part of the real connection between fat hatred and "weight loss" comes from weight loss dieting itself, alone.

Maybe if we accepted more the existence of the very fattest among us, rather than writing them off as people who have something wrong with them, yep, that thing is the thing that creates your weight. If you study that, you study all metabolism and there is at least a risk that if you reverse their fatness you have the ability to reverse everyone's. If we faced that head on, we would have to accept the necessity to find a proper and gentle weight loss solution, that it is clear the body can do of it's own volition, it just won't do it at ours. Not the way we ask it! It's truly strange that it's ended up with their bodies going where they may, when no-one thinks that of mood disorders such as depression etc.,

It's always nagged at me, we've abandoned them to their fate to serve basically the weight loss diet industry and the obesity boondoggle. Bizarre.

And I'm guessing those at that end don't feel much of a connection with those who are not affected by the issues they have. I'm glad Mrs Mevsimler had a devoted husband and large family, she herself gave birth to five lives. I'm glad that she didn't seem as isolated as being that size can help you to become although no-one can know how it feels. She also came to some acceptance of the situation she was in and although she wanted to live and tried to get assistance and help she knew the score. She knew that it wasn't about fault, there was something wrong.

Even though the invasion of the brain snatchers style devotion to calorie restriction has meant they had no help to offer her, they could have learned from her ..... sorry, that's actually so far from what's likely I just can't be bothered to finish the thought. Suffice to say they had nothing, and were not interested in progressing out of their state of hate fulled ignorance.

I can't feel at ease with the line of they're a tiny minority of us used to dismiss or explain why we can't really seem to try and engage with solutions for them, wherever that leaves others. It's true they are, but also their lives are as important to them as mine is to me. I'd hate to be written off like that.

Suffering should have some priority especially if it will not cause any to others.

Lifestyle panacea

One of the things I like to do is to see how attitudes to other states of being differ in comparison with those hung like a dead weight on fatness.

People might be wary of comparing fatness with states seen as "unhealthy" for obvious reasons. What I'm really noting reminding myself of is what it's like to be a real live human. For me it's a blessed relief to remind myself that having pretty minimal standards isn't extremist. That's something that can be surprisingly draining about being fat, you assigned artificial subhumanity.

It's like being in some kind of isolated bubble, where you have to watch the real people, who are of course your equals, acting like people in a way that is problematic for you. They let you know this with their endless taunting of "responsabilidad o muerte" fats!

If you are fat and are lucky to have precious little wrong with you, it can get easy to forget that it is normal to appraise things on their actual merits, and not behave as if they are worthy merely because they have been brought into existence by our supposed betters.

For a start, check out the figures the author of the study Dr Steve Ilardi uses to state his case that anti depressant drugs aren't working, feel free to bear in mind the absolute maximum efficacy of weight loss dieting is 12%.

"Because according to Ilardi, the drugs simply don't work. Meds have only around a 50% success rate," he says.

Yep, that's right the real people have standards, remember that the next time someone tries to obfuscate the utterly evident failure of calorie restriction by saying that barely a fifth of the above is worth beating up your body and mind over. Ilardi goes on;

"Moreover, of the people who do improve.....

Notice him making distinctions, how very humane. I've no idea what 12% means, is that probabilistic, each attempt has a 12% chance? Or is it 12% of fat people become thin for ever after dieting-how many times? No distinctions, practical nuance doesn't matter when it's all or nothing.

We certainly don't know how to slow, arrest or stop weight gain, we don't know the most efficient means to stabilize weight, why?

Because it doesn't matter worth a damn to those running the crusade, they'd rather you got fatter and died trying than make the best of yourself where you are. Once it was realised centuries ago probably that diets don't adjust underlying metabolism, the priority, if fatness is perceived to be a genuine issue, would be to do the best you can to minimize or stop any further gain.

......half experience a relapse. This lowers the recovery rate to only 25%.

No! What? You're telling me that one in four depressives get better and that's a FAIL? For a condition that can be fatal at it's higher end? You state boldly it doesn't work, as if you have the right? Shit, come around the fat way and see that virtually nothing is written off as just not good enough.

Low standards abound and none moreso than when certain fatties take it upon themselves to explain how grateful we should be for the toxic motherload at our disposal, how good it is, for us. It's truly pathetic and I'm sure emboldens fat hustlers and haters alike, seeing us as quisling and pathetic people who don't have enough self respect to draw boundaries. The former especially think they've died and gone to heaven, I'll bet.

To make matters worse, the side effects often include emotional numbing, sexual dysfunction and weight gain."

You even quantify side effects as if that matters!!!? Why aren't you just grateful for what you get, how come your behaving as if you matter as if the effects on you matter? How did it occur to blithely question medical science, don't you realise that because it exists, you cannot appraise them, you must worship them and assume they are worthwhile?

Wow, that is sooooo real!!!!!

It sounds so interesting, it's like progress can be made because information can be assessed. Rather than going round in endless circles to avoid challenging a weak basis. I'm almost drooling.

I digress.

Up to 20% of the UK population will have clinical depression at some point, he says – twice as many as 30 years ago. Where has this depression epidemic come from?

We know, it can't possibly be genetic. Being fat is nothing if not an education.

The answer, he suggests, lies in our lifestyle.

How did I know that was coming?

This consists of taking a daily multivitamin, not dwelling on negative thoughts, exercise for 90 minutes a week, expose yourself to 15-30 minutes of sunlight/ light box per day, be sociable, and get 8 hours sleep.

Yep that's it. Apart from any issues of time-piss easy, unless you are virtually catatonic. Try and visualize fat people complaining about that, heck, if that was our prescription for thinness and if it would be judged on it's real rather than imagined merits!!!???

OK, PANT. PANT deeeeep breath..........

I know that this kind of advice has been around for a while, I daresay things like CBT can be recommended for depressives, but it will be interesting to see whether this kind of lifestyle adjustment advice advances and replaces, talking therapies, pills and gradual de-stigmatization.

Human beings were not designed for this poorly nourished, sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially isolated, frenzied pace of life. So depression continues its relentless march."

Sound familiar? Yep, obesity, without the blameshame. It's fair to make a further connection. We have not properly/efficiently adapted to the on-going experiment that is our modern life, it's true.

But it's the direction of the analysis and the proposed answer, regression, into mythic past, rather than progression into a more successful, humane and intelligent adaptation to our circumstance where possible and a letting go of what which damages us. These kind of analysies lay the basis for interventionism and a rerouting of authority into saving us from ourselves. What they have been practising on us fatties they are itching to apply more widely. Those bullies who've stupidly bought into being tools because they thought it was playtime, may yet get a taste of it sometime soon.

Any aware fatty can spot the catch-22 they like to mess you up with. They say that humans who live a lifestyle that has been perfected over time (primitive), average 10 hours sleep, we 6.7. Questions like why, I doubt it's deliberate conscious choice rather than force of circumstance.

There seems little desire to find ways we can adapt more efficiently, because they seem most to lead in the direction of increasing the autonomy of the lay person. Take this whole preventative medicine rationale. That should have been changing the way we relate to the medical profession, instead, it's been worked so that we become even more dependant on consulting them for our "numbers" which we seem to live and die by almost as much as numbers on the scale at times. Even though there seems little evidence that those who do get the more prevalent ailments fit the model of risk.

No, we must somehow withdraw from modernity because we aren't "designed" for it and where do we think that will lead?

Oh and by the way, the good psychologist has never been depressed, but I'm sure that doesn't matter a jot does it? He's sure that if you just do as he says, exactly, you'll never walk alone.

I mean, be depressed.

On a mission

Another mind numbing piece displaying how costly it can be to get in the way of those who run things. When they're on a mission, no matter how fatuous. Because they get as mad as snakes and they're just not going to take it. Especially when they have KA-POWER!!** With everyone going along with them as if they're the law. They tend to get very excited when they imagine they are in possession of the current certainty de nos jours a so called  'evidence base'.

Apparently, social workers wish to expand their remit to dietary regulation of children. As if they can look after those who are actually killed by adults charged with caring for them. By that I mean, actually killed, not fed. 

It's not that they are saying the parents of fat children are being neglectful, it's that they could be. Well d'u-uh, is that anything like the parents of thin children could be abusing them? I can't confirm either way, because they didn't mention it. Not to worry though;

a high index of suspicion is needed for children who are extremely obese

Suspicion that they'll be the subject of authority inspired innuendo. That is not about parental skills.  That's about the mind of the observer.

I hope this all makes every one feel safe. If there are any parents out there desperate to "actively subvert" the, ahem, 'success' of weight loss dieting schemes. Don't be so hasty, you'll probably find they subvert themselves.

However, that does means you will have to forgo the chance of protecting you child against future eating disorders, disordered eating rebound weight gain (that sometimes never seems to completely stop) and mood disorders that can accompany calorie restrictions assault on the body. Which presumably, will be your fault too.

So it is a risk either way. They talk about parents who fail, without of course mentioning the failure of said smeckperts to come up with anything that doesn't mostly fail. 

Framing fatness in children as child abuse will have wider implications on the way people see the parents of fat children. They could be bracketed abusers on sight. Assumed guilty.

"Removing children from their parents may not help obesity."

Come again?!

"There are few data on the weight of children in public care," they say. A recent study found that 37% of children in care were overweight or obese – but almost all of them had put on weight after they were put into care."

When you reach this point, you should be thinking, you've gone wrong somewhere.

I don't believe in stupid

This post started off as an aside that just went on and on, which is why I often struggle to finish any post I start. So I decided to finish it here. I don't believe in the idea that people are intrinsically stupid. That they have a normally functioning brain, but it just doesn't function because of an intrinsic dysfunction that would make it a cause and not simply some kind of decision.

I think that kind of sums it up! I believe we can definitely become stupid, operate below our natural intelligence in certain areas and remain that way, if the conditions that produce that stupidity remain. But that our brain is functional and somehow dysfunctional, no. So 'stupidity' is adjustable, or its not that, its some kind of dysfunction or just the level you're at. And how can you be blamed for that?

At times what has been called stupidity, has seemed to be about an effect of trauma or emotional blocks. Bad programming, such as accusations or assertions that undermine your intelligence, from those you respect-which then carries the validating effects of your faith in them.  

Even those born with parts of their brain missing,  can function as well as anyone or better. I don't really see why you should be stupid in the way we construct it without a reason and that can be as much emotional as much as anything else.

Some prefer the belief that certain races and genders are less intelligent than those who create  IQ tests they fancy have no cultural or self favouring biases.

If they really had such extra intelligence they'd realise how credulous that was. 

Being a tool lowers mental capacity

Over at BfB MReap brought up this old chestnut. I have to be honest, I do feel personally that being fat or should I say, being locked into playing the obese personae at one point beggared whatever intelligence I possess.

There have been years of my life where I felt there was a hole my mind kept falling into. Frankly, I doubt this is intrinsic to fatness per se. As far as I know-there could conceivably that for some of us the breech opened by some metabolic blip or other. But I'd say it's more likely to be the role play. The ignoring yourself that does it. It's so stupid. To be obese is to be situationally speaking, a raving idiot. Wiki's definition;

An idiot, dolt, or dullard is a mentally deficient person, or someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way.

Could anyone better summarize a fat person's enforced default
You have to disconnect from your real body and pretend it is temporary.

You must ignore your feelings, actions and reactions.

You must repeatedly overlook what happens when you perform certain actions, i.e. calorie restriction and in the face of it, behave as if that somehow hasn't happened. And something else is supposed to instead. So you're stuck performing the act of not learning, just like an idiot, often during our formative years

Then there's the emotional component.

You are forced to perceive your body's protest as the sin within.

To discount any distress, disgust or hurt, in conjunction with being bullied, told off or mis-used due to the obese persona.

You are told you are stupid, because you are fat.

You feel stupid, because eat less do more is so simple. 

This is exactly what being obese is all about, that's why it's best taught to children as we know with the popularity of 'won't somebody think of the children' line much beloved of anti-obesity adherents everywhere.

As an aside, I don't believe in "stupid/ity" as such. Either your brain is formed in such a way as to not perform above a certain level, in which case, that's your best. Or something is getting in the way, or derailing your intelligence. Usually layers of negative programming from many direction. In that case, that is the problem not your brain.

Many people who are socially disadvantaged are effectively told to be stupid, or stupider or not to think. Or it's made dispiritingly pointless or painful for them to do so. Awareness of all that is going on. 

I'm constantly mentioning I knew this or that years ago, as a child, yaddy yah, mainly because there is this great raft of mental stagnancy as being "obese" really took it's toll on my mental and also physical function.

If thinness is to be privileged, which is really what a lot of this is all about, in order to make fat people seem stupid enough to make slimmer people look more intelligent. We have to be taught to play dumb, in the method acting sense. Sorry slim people, as I said before, the contempt shown for fat people in all this, is the contempt shown for all of us.

This also serves as another beloved notion, "incentive" because the reason you're fat is lack of sufficient incentive as we all 'know'. Fat people are in the position of an idiot, because we have to constantly defer to those who know less about our state that we do. We also have to play, cannot think for yourself and this is the crux, have to constantly refer to others instructions.  As if they knew something about not being fat by virtue of not being fat. Results suggest, they do not.

Smoking fat stand-off

Thanks to living400 for a link to a gratifyingly amusing article. It sheds some light on exactly why the toxic pile that is the obesity crisis is increasingly going to bite other people on the arse. Basically in it the quietly admirable Gina Kolata looks at the entirely predictable way in which obesity hype cannot cash the cheque its been allowed to write.

Many in FA, have predicted already that there is no way that hyping fatness over smoking as a health risk is not going to impact on anti smoking. If the crisis didn't make people so brain dead, or if they actually tried engaging honestly with us, they would have noticed the threat themselves. But no, they've just blundered right into that one!

So much for the endless lectures we receive about our inability to face reality, or consider consequence ha, ha! I'm sorry, but when people were talking about how fatness is worse than smoking, takes more years off your life etc., Did anyone really think they were going to just grow money to throw at their obesity boondoggles?

You think the obesity crisis creates money out of nothing? My, are people out of it! What's even stranger about all this is the fact that smoking is correlated with weighing less. So there's an even greater irony of symbiosis. Fatness is going to continue to bump up against little empires and citadels and whilst I wish no-one any harm, the prospect of this could get interesting.

Cargo cult fatties

Cargo cult fatties are those fat people who believe weight loss through calorie restriction can be widely replicated-or even that it is desirable that it should be. And this can be increased by studying those who are "successful" at weight loss dieting. To zero in on the "secret" of it all.

You cannot zero in on failure, except to identify the why of it.

The conviction that consciously tracking and making a record of calories is the decisive factor in reducing weight, is like saying the decisive factor in being less sexually active is recording every sexual partner and all the things you get up to with them. Whether you could be judged promiscuous or not.

Either you shag/eat less or you don't. If writing it down makes any real difference then that would pose the act of writing as having a unforeseen effect on agency.

In my case, the times I tried it in the past, my efforts where to no little end.  In earlier times, it just added an even greater sense of shame and failure.

Latterly, I was surprised at how my eating had declined to such a large degree, without what  I assumed would be commensurate weight loss.

Conscious knowledge of the specific number of calories does not regulate weight. The body does that itself without our conscious input. Your body isn't made to trust your conscious mind to regulate its calorie intake. It seems to know the inadequacies of that, better than the (shhhhh) mind your reading this with.

Rather like those who think they can control others by keeping an inventory of everything that person does, in or out of their aegis. The possessive type. Often they drive the object of their attentions away. So to is often the case with close calorie monitoring. Control of one's appetite and hunger become ever more fractured and elusive.

The why not just eat less when directed at fat people is brutish, but it is a question that should be posed to weight loss diet advocates, why all the fuss?

They can never seem to answer that one. If the deliberate choice to eat makes them put on weight, why didn't they just choose to stop eating once they discovered weight accruing? That's your rationale for your own size, so explain.

Probably can't because nobody just wholly decides, nor has total control or directly stop weight gain in the first place, or they would. They wouldn't just wait and then suddenly decide, time to go into reverse.

Like myself, I'm not 300lbs due to not putting on enough weight to weigh 300lbs. It's not conscious teeth gritting control. As we speak, I'm doing absolutely nothing, not to be 300. I'm guessing that my metabolism's doing that as efficiently as its designed to.

People like to believe a whole lot of dung about what they think they are controlling, when in fact they have diddly squat to do with it except to create a narrative they can crowbar the actions of their body into afterwards.

It makes us all happy to contrive to see our absurd flapping about in the general directions of things as control over our lives.  But we need to learn when our assumptions are beyond the true extent of our will. Do not underestmiate what the illusion of control in lieu of actual control means-anorexics and others cannot let go of this can end up dying as a result. It can become deep and pathological grip.

It makes them furious if you suggest they are not the dominant factor in all this. Don't anybody mention they don't create their own heart or its beating or any of their other organs.

Another issue with weight loss diet adherents, apart from their obvious refusal to accept reality of failure. Is their moving goal posts. They start a sentence by saying fat people can become and remain thin, using WLD's, by the end that same sentence that has become fat people can lose any amount of weight for any amount of time, however small and that 'proves'  their proposition.

If a person loses 5lbs for say, 15days etc., that is conclusive proof that someone who's 350lbs can become 150, or even that someone who's 150lbs won't have to keep trying to lose the same 10 pounds for the rest of their days-or until their metabolism no longer can repeat that manoeuvre.

Mind you, it doesn't help that fat acceptance can't tell the difference between weight loss and WLD, that is pathetic, however, it is still clear diets haven't worked.

These are people who like to act as if fat people have never dieted before or rarely. Somehow we are incapable of perceiving precisely what a weight loss diet is without reading about it, endlessly from "scientists".

Their belief that one can study weight loss diets for a deeper depth of understanding of more than say how our body does and doesn't function, shows it is they who don't understand what a WLD is or how it affects the body. If they did, they'd understand that WLD has no active ingredient beyond lack of calories, therefore all that is being studied is the belief that permanent fight with the body's defence of itself. 

The recognition of  this is not "giving up" or "defeatist". It is hope for a better understanding of how we function. Which could bring the answers they desire in ways that aren't aggressive, costly and futile.

It's a shame that so many have come to think they're just not worth that. 

What is it about WLD and feminists?

Anything to do with? Just a shot. They love them some dieting, don't they? No matter what they tell you, dieting feels very feminist. There's all sorts of stuff about how they wish it was compatible with their feminism. Or they could ignore weight or some such.

But that's really not the point. Why are they embarrassed to wish to lose weight in the first place? Why not just say, we want to lose it, but dieting is shit, women deserve better? Then they could stop trying to blame fat acceptance/fat feminism for trying to judge them for wishing to be slim.

Now being slim. That's another thing that's really feminist isn't it?

"Fat hairy lesbian" was more upsetting than I realized.

Crisis Hooks

Lara at Fatchicksrule reminded me of this cartoon by Ampersand. Inspired by this, I've decided to compile my top ten themes of the obeszoid crisis, AKA the first ten fourteen things that come to mind today.

My top ten fourteen hooks that sell the obeszoid crisis, in no particular order:

1-Fears about the freedom of people we don't like;

* So many of our problems stem from (other) people who are too liberated from the burden of (pointless) guilt, the authorities must find a route to usher in a new age of shame for them.

2-Compassion fatigue;

* We've tried enough things to assist the less fortunate/ marginalized we're exhausted and/or threatened, it's time for a brave new era of blame.

3-Fears that it will all run out;

* Somebody has got to represent our collective guilt and shame for our wastefulness. We've got to sacrifice somebody to assuage the gods, so they don't punish us the rest of us for it.

4- Unwitting diet adherence facilitators;

* Yes, if you can make yourself/ your life as shit as possible, that'll help me with my diet, thanks. And for fat self hating losers too.

5-Displaced sense of injustice;

* Somebody accessible has to stand as proxy for all the more inaccessible sinners who get away with it. We are owed catharsis.

6- Assisting progress for the unready;

* It's easier to let go of racism, classism, sexism et al, if we have another -ism to replace it with.

7- Seeing off the threat of social anarchy;

* If nobody feels debilitating self loathing how are people of merit going to stay at the top.

8 - A fauxgressive indulgence;

* Fat phobia is a better fairer class of prejudice because an obeszoid can be any age, race or gender -it's prejudice for a diverse age.
9- Assisting the medical monopoly to maintain it's hold whilst reducing it's workload profs;

* Blaming fatties is an excellent way to re-introduce the public to the old primitive superstition that illness is their fault that way they get most of the responsibility for their health and we get the power.

10-Patsy for ever rising medical costs;

* Is there a better way to divert attention from those who are really milking the medical model dry and delay threat of change.

11- Accessing a feminist beauty myth called "health".

* Slimness suggests androgyny fatness is physical ostentation either too femme /butch fatties are making a point with their bodies. Feminist BM is about women looking like they're ready to fight the patriarchy in the streets, at any moment. It's our duty to be fit enough (looking). Who heard of a fat Amazon?

12- Science bluffing for dummies;

* Mentioning calories in calories out is mansplaining and therefore deeply scientific.

13- A vehicle for improving for social conditions;

* Fat people are just a means to an end, they should relax and not take it all so personally.

14- Fears of encroachment;

* Fat people are taking up more than their designated space, that means I'm missing out on my allotted entitlement.

15-Religiousity for the irrelgious

* We had God and sin and heaven and all that. Now we have food and weight and the perfect diet of everlasting life. Amen.

Try, try again; then stop making an arse of yourself

It's sometimes hard not to pause in nothing short of fury on seeing the low standards those we are supposed to hold in high esteem set themselves. I find myself wondering why it doesn't make me feel any better about my own failings.

Take for instance this.

Upshot, gastric banding surgery doesn't work.

Someone get a witness.

Sweet mercy, this is supposed to be worth saying? Because there was some possible doubt that cutting people into an eating disorder would work out better than have them just ape one? That towering scientific principle that the locus of weight control is the belly?

"So" ask the innocents "How is it possible to have predicted what seems to be a new and surprising development in obesity scholarship?"

I'll enlighten you dear ones, because it is based on the same bankrupt premise that has already failed in the guise of weight loss dieting.

Inspired by the increasingly psychotic and obsessively one track thinking that eating just has to be the key to fatness-because fat phobes just can't let go of fetishing, what fat people eat because and until they let go, no body can move on and the organs that manage eating must be attacked as the more sophisticated progression after "peer pressure" has failed to filter fatness out of existence.

They continue to find ways to attack fat bodies with the frenzy of someone who just wants the fat body to listen and do what they want it to do most importantly of all, the way they want it to be done.

If they confuse it, shock it, violate it, discomfort it, encroach upon it, squeeze it might get the message to stop advancing, it's plan for world domination and to squash thinnies under it's fat cloven hooves, will be thwarted and they no longer have to live in fear of their numbers thinning out. (Oh yes).

If you can break the will of fat people, maybe that will break their fatness, if not, break up their organs. Either way, break something.

If you just keep cutting, shocking, brutalising and hurting, you might just tear through it's ability to remake itself fat. You will make it hear you, obey you. It's demoralising the way it just won't do what it's supposed to, as if to mock, making the powerful appear impotent their tools and ideas crude and hapless. The desire to appear omnipotent turned into a sham.

It can't be because they are wrong, it must be deliberate obstruction on the part of fat people and bodies.

It torments and will be tormented in return.

The message must be got through because when it does, we will get what we want.

Attacking the digestive organs of fatties based on the deeply medical and healing principle that;

Fat people have got it coming.

Yeah, if it was too painful to be fat, you'd just be forced to become thin. Suffice to say, wrong again, and so dimwittedly wrong, you can't even manage to be wrong with a new idea. You just want to keep being wrong with the same underlying bad principle.

How can any of this be a surprise to anyone who knows anything about weight loss? What exactly is going on in their brains? Some of those who study fat people like to check out fat people's brain's and compare them to cocaine users etc., it's about time someone took a scan of the brains that think that calorie restriction is a viable option and compared them to the most fundamentalist religionists and possibly those who are no longer in full contact with reality.

There is nothing surprising, whatsoever about the failure of banding the stomach, nothing whatsoever.

It is entirely predictable:

That if you starve people, they will be malnourished.

The stomach doesn't set your weight.

The stomach can stretch.

Starvation deprives the brain of enough fuel to facilitate depression/ mental issues.

And so on.

The only possible variable I can think of is the element of shock and distress to the body and how much weight loss this may permit through the high energy requirements of healing and trauma etc., But oh no, medical ethics-the desire to improve procedures and make them less traumatic-and the increased skill experience can bring works against even that!

That's how knucklehead this is, medical ethics and increased skill actually contributes even more to it's failure even though it's already a dud.

It is the startlingly abject refusal to believe that manipulating calories, really isn't the ticket to making fat people thin-and that is not the universe playing peak a boo, it really is like that. Hoping it's not happening and it's going to somehow change if you just keep testing it out is making creation science look better.

Not to speak of the arrogance of cutting up organs central to people's survival, because you just don't feel able to let go of a favoured guess.

They just act like a group of people who've sustained head trauma in a motorway pile up and manage to emerge wandering around in deep shock repeating, "this isn't happening, this isn't happening".

Well people, it is.

And you really, really need to get over it and move on.

Healthist neuroses

Interesting........... the way you notice the same things in different contexts and come to differing conclusions.

Bri ascribes the good/ bad fattie split to an overdeveloped (self) sabotage impulse. It's true that internalized fat hatred does often create an aftermath of oversensitivity which has and continues to derail fat acceptance in ways too numerous to mention. From my vantage point good/bad fatty is hardly one of those.

If you're aware of sensitivities, why would you write that off as straw? Is it me or doesn't this downgrading of ourselves haunt FA time and time again? Why do we find it so easy to palm off our own concerns, but pay extravagant attention to all sorts of nonsense from those seeking endless reassurance that fat acceptance doesn't hate thin people etc., and other nonsense?

I try to remember when judging an effect to see if the same thing shows up elsewhere and compare and contrast.

How many people do you know, slim and plump alike, that say things like "I know I eat x and don't exercise and that's bad/ makes me bad". "I want to be good but I just like the bad stuff" etc.,

When you accept not just that it is morally better to eat certain foods and immoral to eat others and so forth then you are likely to assign yourself goodness or badness according to what you eat or don't eat. That's become as much a part of the development of healthism as it is for weight loss dieting, for the similar reasons, to promote adherence.

It's that this is felt to be needed or indeed a good way to promote that adherence that is telling.

Funny that yet again those who label themselves bad fats-that is people who accept healthism, but either can't won't or don't practice it-are labelled 'neurotic'. In a sense they are healthists and therefore their neurosis is likely to be that of the healthist construct and also how it's been sold.

I don't judge myself by those standards for many reasons and I don't like the way it has become virtually the only model for expressing an interest in your own and others well being. I resent the way it's taken over and pushed out other notions and ideals.

That's pertinent to this whole situation because it's had the same effect on the development of HAES. There's something about the energy of healthist proselytizing, both to oneself and others that lends itself to this disrespect of boundaries and a blunted ability to see they're being crossed. Or take that seriously, it's the righteousness. When people push back instinctively against this, they are the ones that have to explain themselves to what cannot be wrong, ever.

As I see it fat acceptance-nay the world-needs something that starts with you and where and who you are. It is you. Because we all need to take care of ourselves, despite what we are lead to believe.

The trouble with healthism, is it stands there a bit like a great wall and you're supposed to make your way to it, regardless of the pain and trauma you must plow through in the endeavour, if you can even get going at all. You're supposed to feel really bad about of course. I'm as done with that kind of situation as I am with another example-dietary restriction that stupid ugly and futile.

If it's not working it's not working, I'm not going to sacrifice myself to make it look better anymore.

HAES was conceived to be similar, to retrieve mobility in those abandoned to their fate by the health system. It was ideal to be slowly developed into an open inclusive non-ableist therapeutic discipline that could enable anyone to revive any lost physical and mental rapport with their bodies and selves.

Understandably enough, that has been somewhat toppled by being invested with fitness culture. I suppose it's anxiety relief for those of us worried about our health and those fatties trying to prove we aren't lazy. That I can understand. But the needs of those who are ready to be "fit" should have had more importance and HAES kept separate with the focus being more on getting people to a state of equilibrium. They could then decide what route to go down re developing fitness, or not-if they want. Rather than signing up to it and being stuck in the same stasis they were before FA.

We could have a fat fitness culture and HAES to start from wherever you are, so no-one feels out of it or failing, because there is nothing to fail, there's only your individual route at your own speed, depending on your unique and individual challenges. Sometimes those are more mental than physical.

Those labelling themselves as bad fats need to stop but they are just pointing up the inaccessibility of healthism and it's blatant disregard for people who actually accept it as a good thing. HAES feels like it has become an extension of it that indolence disinterest has been imported lock stock with healthist ideals as a whole.

People have tried repeatedly to make these points but the triggering just goes back and forth one side to the other and it's written off with everyone is HAES!

Bri's certainly right to notice that part of our self (fat) hating legacy is a habit of low self esteem and self sabotage of a people who are so used to being wrong, that for many it feels uncomfortable to be anything else but wrong.

So we can all try to learn to take ourselves a little bit more seriously and not write off our reactions, even if they are shock, horror, gasp, neurotic; so what?

We're allowed to be both human and humane to 'good', 'bad' (and neither) fats alike.