Stagnancy is corruption

And corruption, stagnancy. That is possibly the underlying point regarding messages to "keep active". Most if not all of us, start off active, the thwarting of that impulse for varying reasons can reduce our freedom of movement which becomes stagnation.

Something occurred to me whilst replying to (part of) a comment from Vesta. When it came to mind I thought how come I didn't quite see it this distinctly before?!!

Researchers aren't ever going to find anything out about obesity because they aren't really looking.

I honestly hand on heart cannot quite get why this isn't more evident to others especially in FA anyway. Although it is more in the hiding in plain sight mode, it's pretty obvious. The big clue is to compare with other fields of science/medical research.

The history of research into fatness and weight hasn't been as uniformly pointless as it is right about now. (That's of course taking for granted that studying fatness in isolation-as a separate subject is actually a useful way of studying weight/metabolism-I'm not sure that it is). It has gone in waves, or more aptly, cycles. People have genuinely had a spirit of inquiry when it came to fatness of the without fear or favour sort.

However.

The doozy is, it repeatedly gets stuck with the calorie angle and calorie restriction as the remedy and that cannot be budged from. No matter what the facts say, it has therefore become, sacred. Wherever you start you must end there regardless of what has been found. If something doesn't fit, file as 'paradox'.

OK, you might say. We know all that so what?

That this stagnancy is its corruptness. The inability to move on from there doesn't just stop, it creates atrophy and regression. This is the antithesis of the lack of the more usual, let the chips fall where they may, that signifies good science.

The adherence to this article of faith is corrupt and attracts further corrupt mentalities, rather than the other way around as I thought.

This is what has caused it to become a bit of a non science. Some people got hold of obesity science about 10-15 years ago, after a period of more rigorous investigation and objective interpretation. Then decided to reimpose this as the dominant code. Even though with all we hear about the threat of obesity, this should be a golden age for obesity research.

Instead it has been pretty much a useless irrelevancy that cannot provide care for those who could benefit from it, nor for the millions of people who wish to lose weight, for whatever reason. They have not been served by this either, even though they tend to be its most vociferous defenders. They are defending hope of getting what they want and the profoundly held assumption that obesity science works like any other, or how it has done in the past.

It concentrates on finding out how dangerous obesity is supposed to be using questionable decisions to exclude whatever favours a better outcome for slimness, thereby not only putting a question mark on the figures on paper, but the application of those figures in real life.

That takes precedence over what is supposed to be the best way fat people should proceed as fat people-an obvious sticking point is the unethical refusal to accept incontrovertible evidence of weight loss diet fail. It claims to be able to find the active ingredient, in what can best be categorized with placebo-or even nocebo- and claims this is the route to increasing diet success for those who wish it to succeed.

They don't even give a damn about those who still believe in them. Gary Taubes referred to this saying that objectively speaking, obesity science just doesn't function the way science should. It's a bit of an oxymoron really.

“The institutionalized vigilance, “this unending exchange of critical judgment”, is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity, and it hasn’t been for decades.”

My emphasis.

You don't have to know diddly about scientific medicine to have picked up on what the focus of other medical disciplines tends to be, and how other medical scientists tend to behave, to know that the whole field operates more like a parody of science, rather than an actual one.

We are soooo biased

Just caught this thoughtful and reasoned assessment of fat acceptance. It's written by a person brave enough to see both sides and is balanced and judicious, study it carefully because it shows us in FA what we should be aiming for.

OK, not really, but this is the kind of thing that is categorised as this among 'right thinking people'. Well good luck to them, I'm happy to not bother with role playing judicious reason if that means equating falsehood of the crisis with skeptical enquiry from a point of view of experience and observation. I don't say we in FA get it right, we don't, but the overwhelming majority of our false conclusions are based on the obesity crisis premises and we are not immune to the wrongness that comes out of this.

When you come from the view that the 'extreme' of fat acceptance is presented as having the same right or expectation of self esteem as a person who hasn't had theirs systematically pounded out of them. It is unlikely that you will overcome that tin ear when it comes to making false equivalencies between the 'sides'.

We require this kind of ASSistance because as ever, we are in grave and mortal danger of alienating support, yes that's right. If it wasn't for the projection of fat haters belief in their own mythical invincibility on to us-because we could only possibly be a straight reversal of whatever it is they 'think'-people would flock to support us.

We are of course we are in total control of other people's conscious and wilful decision to indulge in fat hating. Something they know to be wrong and being mostly good people are therefore in denial about. And thus they must keep trying to pretend we forced them into it, in ways that if are convincing to them make them deserving only of our pity.

Let's state something for the record, those who find it politique pretend that the fat people they know oh, so well are suddenly not of this earth and represent pure eval are the ones that have alienated themselves from us, their choice. We fatties have been chasing them for donkey's years saying "yes we are being superbad, but we are trying oh, so hard to be good, please like us please et al."

Only when we burned out or came to our senses, thinking that we'd at least earned a hearing-if we did not deserve the same we gave so freely without counting the cost-that the 'relationship' we thought we were engaged in with those we sought to appease; was almost wholly one-sided and unrequited on our part.

Like the friend you always have to call and when you don't, frendship over, we have been rudely awakened to the fact that the care was all on our side. We are regularly told we are dying and we can only save ourselves by means that don't work and often make things worse to boot, we have been told that this is our fault, we suicidal addicts and why do we want clothes to wear etc.,

It is we who have been abandonned and left high and dry to sort ourselves out as best we can. And we only found out because of the need to rescue ourselves.

And no, we do not claim fat people do not get sick or perish.

I've never heard of a fat person, on being told they are ill saying referring to their weight as a reason why they simply cannot be unwell. Whereas according to quite a few med professionals, "What!? I'm slim", is one of the more recent top responses from slim people in the same position. In fact, how many times do we hear the travails of someone who has some ailment and claims to 'live right' and be at a 'healthy weight' so it's been all the more harder for them to accept they are perhaps mortal after all?

And after that there's this, vileness;

The thin die early in every case. Looks like there is some justice after all.

Sorry, what?!! Justice is people dying before their time? What a shitty thing to say, or even feel. Presumably this is supposed to be a sentiment we should respond to.

I'm not one for endlessly sounding apologetic about FA, but not in our name. We tend to leave death wishing to fat haters.

He ends even better than he began.

Just because there is no quick fix to being overweight gay (we’d all be mid-range straight if there was) and crash dieting ex-gay is dangerous and ultimately self-defeating, giving up isn’t the answer.

Liberties taken, my own.

Better still.

The answer isn’t easy – but what answer worth discovering is?

Ha, ha, you see he's admitted (deliberate choice of term) that the truth is to be discovered. As usual, we somehow have to carry the can for those scientists and researchers health promotionists etc., who cannot get over the fact that their big guess is a bust, when put into action and have decided it's not worth the effort and they're going to continue to have a massive sulk and insist that, "IT WORKS"

)))stamps feet(((

IT WORKS!!

Covers ears singing "la, la, la, I can't hear you!" Tell them, not us. Having studied human metabolism, personally and observed it in others, I'm perfectly sure learning more increases knowledge, if you wish to find it, which the obesity industry clearly doesn't.

They are the one's who've truly "given up", because everything they could possibly want is how it is now progress through knowledge would only undo that.

Therapy

In answer to the question, what do we do about fat stigma? This suggestion caught my eye;

programs which might help fat adults be more resilient in the face of fat hatred;

I've been saying for yonks that we should have some kind of deprogramming, maybe that would remove the need for the endless 101ing that is way too often pointless because the set up of mainstream mentality has to deny fat people any voice to stand up at all. So people come to FA defending themselves against it-which they call having a questioning, objective or open mind-rather than coming to it, to suspend all that long enough to grasp it, and then critique it.

It's a bit like those getting out of cults, or the army-I'm not sure even the army has these programs, but they clearly should. It might help deal with the amount of ex-Army who get into trouble after being subject the mental rigours of 'army discipline' techniques.

What I discovered from that, is I'm not the one to propose it, maybe no fatty is, if we could hear it from a *real person, someone with the required kudos, I'm sure it would be considered more deeply. Hearing it from a fellow fatty is possibly like hearing a breeze.

We need an internalized fat haters survivors group and the reasons we don't is we take our selves for granted. And possibility some of the FA narratives that are to the fore. I say that as someone who cannot ever remember recommending therapy to anyone. Maybe, we could re-write the rules on that too, along with a lot of other citadels fatness could turn over.

When you are knuckled down in full obese persona mode, you can become so outer directed that your core is imbalanced by it. Add to that a childhood start before your brain is properly formed and you are talking about a brain that can be fat hating outer directed shaped.

Part of the problem with FA for me is because that is not dealt with intensely and in depth that becomes the style of outwardness, rather than being outward looking from the centre of oneself. I am not advocating insularity, but a shift from the former supine looking outside in to an expansive inner centred vision.

Trouble is there doesn't seem to be any real appetite for it, sorry about the pun. Underneath it all I get a sense that we seem strangely bored with ourselves, because of that void, because of creation from outside. There seems a sense that we think we are boring and everyone else is interesting. Which of course could be, everyone else seems inward out, we seem outward in. Therefore we pursue the interest and engagement of others-who have actually willfully disengaged from us-and ignore or treat each other rather contemptuously.

I'm not talking about personality clashes etc., I'm talking about fat hating contempt, we are contemptuous of each other because we are each noting but a fatty, the void in you becomes the void in me.

Basically, there's a sense of 'who does (fat) so and so think s/he is?' They're just a fatty like me, they aren't all that.

This might seem an outrageous statement, there is praise of each other too, some of it genuine, however, nothing ever comes close to or as excited as someone who isn't fat, paying us some attention.

It's still the same fatty trying to convince the good folks we are genuine and really, not bad at heart and it's one of the few things that genuinely embarrasses me about fat acceptance on occasion.

I've similar elsewhere to a certain extent all groups in the firing line have this. So it is not unique to FA, but it does seem to have an extra edge, because it's so personal. It seems to me this sense of unreality of constantly and consistently having your feelings and experiences denied, that has left many of us with a deep sense of unreality about ourselves.

It's kind of double track in that we know we are totally real and yet inside the emotional and mental memories collect together and stand as a collection of sense patterns that contain and represent that experience of repeated denial, that sense of learned doubt and feelings of unrealness.

I don't know that it can be escaped, unless it is dismantled and I get the feeling, don't go there, not yet anyway, maybe 'society' i.e. the others, the real people, come around, we won't have to. Because their much desired acknowledgement will heal us.

I'm not so convinced.

And in fact I'll go so far as to say, I've never wanted to be saved by 'society' particularly. I definitely want them to can all fat hate NOW. But I'd be just as happy, if not happier to be saved by myself and others who have a clue, and for real peeps to recognize that. I would have thought they would have to, moreover I suspect they want it that way too. There's a part of them that wants us to stand up to them. I don't think they can free themselves from the yoke of fat hating on their own.

I think there's an issue of loss of face. It is really out there to claim that grown, sentient, sane people don't know what's going on in their own body. Apart from it undermining everyone's capacities for self knowledge, if you are wrong, you are very very wrong indeed.

So you'd better be right and if you are not. That's not something you are going to get out of easily. Far better to just keep it going as long as you can, postpone the day of reckoning, until you have little choice.

If we stop taking it and start telling them what to think of us, as it should be, a lot of them will feel greatly relieved. But we don't give them the chance if we ask them to do it instead.

They didn't do such a good job on telling us how to lose weight did they? What makes anyone think they'll do any better with saving our furrowed minds? Please, if I trusted them with it, I wouldn't bother with fat acceptance in the first place.

It's an easy enough to do. We bring this desire with us into FA and are often disappointed when encountering people who've been affected in the same way we have. And they don't have any better answers than we.

But I just feel if we were more proactive in this area of recovery and training to be more robust under attack, we'd break through that underlying sense of boredom with ourselves and our acquiescing habit and discover an inner core that has survived in all and is far more interesting than we could have imagined. A bit like some of those 'others'.

We fat people always take ourselves way too much for granted, if we learned to stop, we wouldn't feel as put upon as we some times do.

We might even become real enough to ourselves to stop claiming we have no credibility.

* A thin person, golly gosh.

Liberated hair

Surprising and instructive article by Julie Bindel writing on women's hair, facial especially but also including, underarm and leg hair.

My first reaction was to feel quite queasy about it, especially thinking about facial hair. I have to say though, I forget at times that I do not shave my legs nor bother much beyond ripping out some tufts from my underarm.

I also was forced to consider my visceral reaction in view of the whole fat debacle. I realise that this is how some people might feel about contemplating the acceptance of fat. Like puking up. And it makes you wonder, where does this come from?

I've seen a lot of black women with facial other hair and there doesn't seem to be the same feeling as there is amongst certainly white women. Shaving legs is not as much of a habit, in fact it seems to be a recent thing to know of black women who shave at all, although I know that's probably my recollection.

I remember once seeing a woman absolutely gorgeous fully made up etc., who had her blouse open to reveal hair as dense as the densest you would find on any head. Even I have never seen such on any man.

She seemed fully at ease with herself and no one else remarked on it, except later on me-shame-so I know others noticed too including a black guy who was working the same shift as I. He shrugged his shoulders and said so what, she's OK with it?

Double shame!

So yeah, I'm all for hairy women's lib. I remember the documentary when a woman with a full beard appeared throughout, after a while, I just got used to it and I'm sure that affected the way I see facial hair on women.

So the fact that I keep reverting to erghh is interesting. It means there is some underlying idea that I have, possibly as mentioned in the comments that women shouldn't have hair, or maybe it's non-black women?

Maybe it's because they seem to depilitate more overall that the eye somehow gets used to that and it that affects how you view other women, not erasing, but reminding of hairlessness? It maybe goes back to a theme that I wonder about from time to time, is the energy put into appearing separate and distinct between white men and women, somehow greater than that of some other races? Or not at all? If so, does it have some kind of underlying ideology. I'm talking more about cultural ideology?

I actually tend to forget because my hair is relatively fine on my legs, I have never shaved them though and my pits, well, their out of sight, though I've never felt self conscious about them either, I had fat for that.

And speaking of fat, the parallels are obvious, letting your hair grow is mentioned in a feminist context, by a self declared 'proud lesbian feminist' who also says that she plucks her facial hair and carries tweezers about for the purpose.

In spite of all this, there is still the defensiveness when matters of beauty are discussed preceded by feminist. It seems merely suggesting thinking about something translates in some people's heads as orders.

There's a lot of that in FA, if you speak about dieting and why you or others have done it that is often counted as telling people what to do.

It's funny how all the usual things that get brought up in the context of fatness get brought up here, what wo/men find attractive, what does and doesn't turn me on-why anyone thinks others care, I wish I knew, femininity and what counts as femininity, whether feminists can be (allowed to be) feminine by the sister's, what about the menz and competition about who 'suffers' more.

It's well worth reading on it's own merits and to compare the arguments in a fresher less fraught atmosphere, without the usual hate and yet reflecting different feelings.

Reading about it here it is clear that feminism has a lot of baggage for some even when merely considering how we live.

Mz Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!

When I read through some of my comments and my postings, I often sound at least a bit angry. I've struggled with this for a while now, back and forth for most of the years I've been hanging around the 'sphere. Although it may not come across so, this is out of character. At least I say that, but character is a multifarious thing. If the right kind of pressure is applied a sunny personality can easily become a permanent grump, or a whiner or a bitch-take a unisex interpretation of the latter.

This is the first time in my life that I have felt and come across (and seemed even when I'm not at times) this consistently and unimpeachable irked, irritated, ticked off, pissy and sometimes volubly angry to an exten that I actually am fed up with.

It's not that I haven't tried to calm down, and as that hasn't worked usually that means it is tied to something I'm trying to do or want to do, rather than badness. It means I have to choose to keep doing this thing or keep getting pissy. My dithering has been ended by the fact that a) I cannot stand this and b) what I want to do, I no longer can pay the price for.

Fat stigma is hardly the worst kind that's been laid on me. I think this is part of what has caught me by surprise, that and the fact that for so long, I was obedient and doing as I was told. So anger was turned inwards.

There's lots to be irritated about. There's also equally, far less than a whole lot of other things, to the point where not feeling particularly angry regarding FA and stuff, is perfectly plausible too.

It never used to matter to me whether there was something to be angry about as such. I was wary of anger and more what seemed to follow from it bitterness. I wanted to avoid that since witnessing it as a child. I realise now that what I was seeing was the stress of the overburdened. I became adept-I now realise- at re-framing myself away from and out of heavy duty rage, my anger worked for me and was appropriate. My anger made sense to me. This kind doesn't. It feels as if I'm constantly off balance, off centre, off kilter. I'm sure all this has disturbed me a lot more than I could have ever imagined.

Before getting involved in fat acceptance, I'd felt more distanced from things. There was always some points of disagreement that made me uncomfortable signing up for the whole.

It was the not hearing a reflection and my alarm about the way no one was defending fat people against attack and where that could lead that probably made me overcome my natural resistence to getting involved. In my enthusiasm, I decided to overlook or set aside things that I knew or suspected already.

I decided this time I would compromise, be disciplined stick to the group even when I disagreed something I usually wouldn't do. I felt like "I'm just not a joiner". I left it up to others, this time I felt, why should I expect others to do something, to say somethng?

It was in stretching to meet the mindset that tended to dominate that was my undoing. Each of us has an internal centre of gravity which we can stretch from, but as we know with every bit of stretch tensile strength decreases and things start to quiver and vibrate.

That's me, overstretched. I kept on because this is more important than personality and culture clash but now I feel I'm just getting in my own way and the way of useful communique, defeating the object of reaching. I need to recover that centre enabling me to express myself with some kind of fluency and clarity. All flows from there for me, to be able to think and translate my feelings into words because I still have a lot I want to say.

I get that my views are minority, believe it or not, I didn't think they were before! This makes it a priority to make clear expression. So I'm letting go of trying to reach out beyond that which can sustain my ability to say what I have and want to say.

To explore what others think too which is as important and to do that a change of tack is required. Another lesson learned.

I'm hoping Mz G is on her way out, thank goodness.

The justified...

Whilst reading this on BStu's blog today I was struck by this;

I caught the Sara Rue commercial for Weight Watchers recently and one of her reasons for needing to lose weight was not having pants she could feel comfortable.

I don't know if I'm just feeling a bit squiffy in the head but this little aside has really made me think; even though losing weight is supposed to be an overwhelming and intrinsic good. It is actually framed as needing an excuse to justify it.

Why would Ms. Rue-or anyone else- need to justify something that is supposed to speak for itself as a good thing to do? Anymore than she'd need to justify falling in love or an act of kindness?

She wouldn't say, 'I had to fall in love with my current squeeze because my heart/life/body felt uncomfortable without, or I had to be kind because my shoes hurt.

Looking at that quote again, it's as if she's saying she would continue to just be, if it wasn't for x (her clothing issues).

What it feels like is I'm finally hearing this aspect of weight loss spiel differently. I'm hearing excusing and the justifying, that was always there, but my ear wasn't quite attuned to, filtered out by old assumptions.

In general this is how it is framed, 'I'd continue to let myself be, if it wasn't for something catastrophic, painful, humiliating, uncomfortable'. It's not just, I've lost weight. And everyone just understands, that's just good, and that good, begets good and that justifies itself, positively.

Talk about hiding in plain sight.

Ironically, I've been more aware of this kind of necessity of negativity when it is less obvious such as the previous furore about dieters v (or not) FA.

I see this is usually hidden by if you don't have a reason to be thin you won't put forth the effort et al.

Fine.

But we are told that obesiteh is a veil of tears, physical, emotional, mental. On one response to a blog, someone stated that if fat people say they feel 'half dead' as opposed to be in actual mortal threat; they are half dead, and that should be respected as they are actually half dead.

We are told that some people are either so sensitive, or that's just the way their body is, that an extra 5lbs is weighing them down and making it difficult for them to get out of bed and perform their duties to the standard they would want.

So it should require no explanation for someone to wish to lose 5 or 500lbs. So why do it?

It is the constant need to disseminate the obesity persona-actually persona seems wrong, it's more than a persona. It reminds me more of the bad voodoo thing of persuading people to adopt an identity a mentality that then gives the persuader a powerful hook into the persuaded; that they can build on and invoke at their leisure.

It is turning your own mind against you and there is this awareness of it amongst those who deal in this. Perhaps it's more the desire to lose weight, via the means available, leads one down this course as an inevitability.

It is such a shame both that it has come to this and that we continue to feel this is acceptable.

It's trusting yourself again

Ellen Satter's excellent blog which has lots of good thought provoking advice provides some insight into how the use of our mind's can derail our attempts to match our needs.

The report is on a study two things about sugar, that our bodies can regulate it's use, i.e. the sugar we take ingest in drinks means we cut down on it or food in other areas. Rather than the usual assumption that sugary drinks automatically add extra calories. And that the widely disseminated beliefs about the harmfulness of sugar affect the way we actually respond to it. IOW, expectations can create a nocebo effect.

This is the aspect of healthist eating that most broke the trust I had in it. That and the subsequent realisation that it, if not provoked, certainly sent my eating disorder to greater heights.

Unlike quite a lot of people in FA, my journey away from eating disorder has been negotiating myself away from what we deem healthy eating, or more pertinently, it's mindset as in part uncovered by the study.

The nocebo part isn't just about programming you to expect bad things from certain foods. I feel that shows that there is probably a lot of exaggerated wishful thinking-in a bad way-about the effects they would like to come from this food, which is rather unedifying and hardly healthy. It's also about the fact that a lot of advice has come from or through the prism of those who have disordered eating and sometimes even long term eating disorders themselves.

That in itself is one of the reasons why eating disorders especially continue to increase, over and above those that come as a side effect of weight loss dieting. There is something about someone who's not only got an ED or a disordered view of food and eating giving advice that causes us all to view eating more through their eyes. In no small measure is it that they believe in the way they eat, a bit like pro ana or feeders.

The quasi religious proselytising plus the fact that they want the world to be more conducive to perpetuating their way of eating and are never held accountable for their activities, no matter the costs.

In terms of malign influence they have been too much like those food companies who will do anything to sell us and to get us to eat more of their product, whether that would be a good idea or not. That is the major disappointment about what's happened with healthy eating.

At one point some people, me included thought they could act as a counter to the industrialised food machine that would feed us excrement, if they could make it cost effective, with their synthetic flavours and various coatings they like to cover the waste matter they call food in.

Alas, we were not aware of how unbalanced some of these people were. There is evinced by their unholy alliance with the hateful obesity crusade, where they have cynically used fat people to hide behind and say, we know about food, we can prevent you from becoming like these fatties. They drifted far away indeed from the more gentle hippy tradition of holistic eating.

They took that and added a new ingredient; rage. At it's directed at fatties who somehow represent everything that gets in the way of a closer and more intimate relationship with their eating disorder.

The fact that they cannot make you thin clearly cannot doesn't matter in this credulously superstitious atmosphere of trying to ward off the fat devil/genie/ hoodoo, any snake oil saleswo/man can get ahead by merely suggesting they have the antidote.

But it's the way we've allowed ourselves to be suckered in to their invasive bossy style that is shows the depth of the desire to be slim at all costs. I'm old enough to remember a time when if a 'nutritionist' told you to eat x and not to eat y, they would have been looked at with utter contempt, as if they were deranged.

Now we behave as if they are entitled to criticise us in invasive ways we would not otherwise put up with, it is they that have been prime movers in training others to violate the privacy of fat people in general and with regard to their eating in particular.

They often cannot do what they advise, it's just assumed, they are the experts, we are not permitted to pry into their dustbins (hint, hint) to see if they eat what they say we should.

Who's pride?

There's an enjoyable article in Australia's Sunday magazine about fat acceptance in Australia. Apart from a few minor gripes, it's well worth taking a look at. I find terms like 'fatism' and 'weightism' silly.

Even more importantly defining the absence of shame that is pointless and irrational as pride is something that I usually resist.

I don't object to people insisting they have fat pride, pride in their race/culture/sexuality or whatever. I'm just not particularly enamoured of feeling proud about something for the sake of asserting a lack of shame. I feel neither proud nor ashamed to be fat.

Describing a divergence with your expectations as arrogance, haughtiness or pride is itself vainglorious and solipsistic assuming that you are the authority on how people should feel about themselves and can set the standard by which they should measure themselves, regardless of the merits of your case.

There are many reasons to feel ashamed or proud of yourself at the same time as being a fat person. The mere fact of being fat isn't necessarily one of them.

Conflating weight loss with WLD

This particular thread has got rather long, unsurprisingly as it contains stuff about dieters and therefore, dieting. Looking at this comment, I had some thoughts which I decided to post here rather than there.

I just wanted to write it down, rather than get into, or end a discussion. it's gotten rather long so I've split it into two.

Or the simple observation that we differ significantly in our beliefs about weight and weight loss.

I think this is a tricky bit, even those of us firmly on board with fat acceptance and in favour of no surrender to self/body hate in any way shape or form differ on our beliefs about weight loss.

To me, the conflation of weight loss, with weight loss dieting is a product of the weight loss industry and serves them hugely, IMHO.

Weight loss, is not owned by the slimming industry, it is not intrinsic to them nor invented by them. It does not belong to them. Rather it is an automatic human biological process, a side effect of providing our bodies with the constant supply of energy they need to run. Right now virtually all our bodies are engaged in a cycle of losing and yes (re)gaining weight as part of providing that steady stream of energy and not leaving us light headed or blacking out every time we exert ourselves, minimally.

It belongs to biology, that actually achieves it viably and effectively, not commerce which does not.

The issue is our desire to lose/gain weight doesn't match our knowledge of how to achieve this deliberately and consciously, of our own volition. Into that void steps the bankrupt calorie restriction hypothesis, or WLD if you prefer.

If anyone is on board with that conflation they are serving the purpose of it which is to shore up weight loss dieting by helping to protect it from that premise of scrutiny-comparing it to the bodies automatic version of it, with the results of the calorie restriction model.

This primes our minds to accept as fact that weight loss is inherently painful and hard, when that is actually weight loss dieting. The cycle of weight loss and gain doesn't hurt-unless there is something going badly wrong.

By saying that weight loss is WLD, the weight loss diet contingent are actually protecting WLD from greater scrutiny by conditioning people to compare WLD only to itself, rather than to that natural effect that occurs without pain or conscious effort and therefore keeping a continuous question mark over why it's so painful when we apply our 'intelligence' to it and not at all, when we do not. Why the huge disparity between the two? Why the abject failure pain and upheaval of one versus the absolute ease of the other. What explains that?

That enables them to get away with shaping our whole consciousness on weight loss. It means that rotten pills that are far more efficacious in being toxic and suicide inducing are accepted-because everyone knows the unshakable 'fact' that weight loss is a world of hurt.

No sorry, weight loss dieting is the world of hurt, calorie restriction/ manipulation is the corrupting and degenerate mindset. It's efficiency lies more in producing every form of eating disorder/ variety of disordered eating known to man. It is an able facilitator and enabler of fat hatred. And that creates and perpetuates the devaluation of the fat body and the attacks visited on it.

Fat hating supports WLD and comes out of it.

All the above is assisted by this conflation and yes, fat acceptance by passively and unquestioningly going along with this is not deviating from this at all. And putting fat acceptance in the line of fire between those who want weight loss and those selling it. We should at least get out of the way and let them get on with it.

I'm not accusing people who do this of being bad I can totally understand this position, if I bought this conflation, I'd probably come to the same conclusion too. However I don't. I just need to say that the reasons why everyone is not on board with a certain view of weight loss are not the same and that should at least be fully understood, whether you agree with it or not.

I sometimes get fed up of the way folks in FA only pay respectful attention to any quackery or pseudo science, above any thoughts some of us may have. What's the point in complaining about lack of credibility when the people who have least credibility in FA, is many people in fat acceptance.

A lot of us come out of the mainstream views on weight and we need to be a little bit more aware of that, I include myself in that. We carry to much unexamined baggage from weight loss diet culture that surrounds us and by not examining it more closely, point by point, we can just end up unwittingly perpetuating that which we are against.

The culture of calorie restriction has had a huge and massive distorting effect on the whole of society's ideas about weight and eating we should not take any of the ideas we have for granted-no matter how truthful they may seem. Without close examination and objectivity, that should be filed under pending further investigation. They have held total sway over us, they have gone unquestioned for decades and the idea that form their basis, centuries, probably.

It is a bit naive of us to assume that a little bit of celebration of self and slow inching toward self acceptance, swimming against the tide, is going to bring all that and all that supports it, crashing to it's knees.

As for the idea of being able to lose weight, in the way the body does, with the ease of the metabolism doing what it is designed to do, rather than attempting to mis-use the smaller conscious input into eating, which it was not. And how much that has to do with the current state of fat annihilating evisceration, breaking the conflation helps to see why again, I'm not so convinced that the notion of weight loss in itself, fully explains fat phobia.

I've said before this is a question of science and knowledge, it is simply not a moral issue. Those at the top (and bottom) of the weight scale need assistance in this area, they need proper function to be re-established to keep them from suffering. Like it or not, this means that weight loss for them is probably weight loss for everyone. Full stop. If you deny weight change to anyone, you deny it to those who's metabolisms are actually malfunctioning. Not just merely as perfect as they would wish.

There's also another matter which seems to be ignored. Weight is not a totally separate entity in and of itself. In some ways, that is an artificial notion borne of the obsession with dieting/obesity, itself. It is deliberate and in a sense political, similar to the way pills are doled out to people for their 'disease' of being run over by the societal machine-sorry depression. To avoid looking deeper which then leads to questioning of the source of stresses and strains on us. We collude in this because we love our modern societies with the promise of retail therapy and such. We've all been seduced by it.

The sense at some level that it just can't go on, comes out partly in the ferocious aggression aimed at fat people. There is a fear that our bodies are making some kind of comment on that, and that we have been neglectful and careless to expose this in a way that it cannot be avoided. Now this may be bull, however the point is the panic that fosters this fear and the resultant aggressive response. Weight is not interconnected with the overall function of our bodies and has definite interactions with aspects of ourselves and our health. I don't regret that, I think, clever body.

An obvious example of this is mental health, we know there is a connection between weight and depression, probably more than one and at all weights in some way. It seems that metabolic response varies, some lose weight, some gain when they are depressed. The point is, if we can manipulate weight, that will affect the ability to treat depression and other mental illnesses, even if that means making some people fatter until their mental issues can be dealt with.

Metabolism is (a) possible switch or leverage re-set/restore mental health, either gain or loss, remember the two are mirrors of each other. If you understand something about one, you may end up understanding the other, sometimes. This is just one example, there are others and there is the potential that any methodology could be more widely applied to other areas.

So weight loss as verboten doesn't add up, nor seem like an option, it's like those people setting themselves against embryo research because it's triggering. You cannot hold up legitimate progress merely because of bad history, the failure of the cynical and corrupt should not affect that of those who are genuine and seek to enhance our knowledge and empower our agency over our own bodies and health. We can learn from history, it's a mistake to use it to give us a reason to stagnate or regress.

More and less

I ask myself, could I eat less?

The answer is yes. That's followed, at some point, by eating more to make up for that. Eating less than you need creates a need for more than you need at a future point. Your body is waiting to make that up. Some bodies are better at this than others. Those that are less good will be seen as 'successes'.

It's not moral, it's just imbalance. Staving off the re balancing effort your body will likely make is not moral either.

As I'm supposed to represent greed, how about thinking about more rather than less? Think more. Listen more. Challenge shibboleths, more. Question (all) authority more.

Believe in people more.

Know yourself more. Like and appreciate yourself more. What's great about you, sitting there inside you right now, allow it, more.

As for eating, it is sometimes said we eat with our senses and our minds too.

There are those who wish to deprive you of agency, will and love of life. To control your every thought. Try to swerve internalizing that more.

Take a lot less of what they're dealing.

Swallow less mindless obedience, leave room for your mind to work as freely as you can, its yours and it is there for you, not them.

Don't starve on the self love either. Allow it to fill you up with goodness, all that you need no more and no less.

Cigarettes? Bodies? Unalike

A word to the soon to be wised up. I've said this before, but it bears repeating, the human body is not a habit, a substance or a tic.

It is a living and sentient organism, an animal creature. Incomparable with booze, smokes and drugs. Got that?

A cigarette doesn't have a central nervous system.

Alcohol doesn't acquire blood vessels and muscles that grow, attach and bind to it, yes?

That makes all these things, not your body, not of your body, merely things you ingest into your body.

And no, fatness is not a sign of mental illness/compromise, if you feel it is, be sure to show the overabundance of fat people in mental institutions, prisons, in the emergency wards with bloody injuries etc, because that is where the mentally compromised tend to end up disproportionately.

Sanity cannot become a mental illness, to hide your contempt behind.

Mental illness is a dysfunction of the mind, not stuff you don't like. You are not Sigmund Freud because you don't like a fat arse. Stimmt?

The fact that smoking is seen in a bad light, has no bearing on the value of fat bodies, full stop. Cigarettes are not comparable to my body. They do not have the status of a human body, of any kind.

Got it?

I'm sorry if smokers feel personally attacked, but the fact that you are for doing something as opposed to being, to existing, has no bearing on the fact that I am my body. Focus your complaints on those who have wronged you if you wish, plead/insist on more tolerance, say you are as mad as hell and are not going to take disrespect of you as people, by all means. If you choose not to, you do not set my standard, it is not your special duty to tell me the value of my body, or the worth of my existence, or that of any other fat person. End of.

I hope that's clarified.

Cease to turn my body into an inanimate object thanks; and I won't have to (keep) say(ing) this again.

Pretence

Perusing Bri's blog, I noted this telling phrase;

But little is known about the impact of obesity on quality and quantity of life

It's funny how many times-in the set up to a payoff of OMGZOBESITYKILLS, they just flat out tell the truth isn't it?

We should just collect all the examples of this and build up a true picture of what is known as opposed to what it is claimed is known.

Little to nothing is known yet pretence abounds.

Pretending that calorie/ dietary restriction makes you thin. Pretending that fatness is a disease. Pretending that 'risk factor' = destiny. Pretending that absence of said factors=long life with a pristine corpse.

And so forth.

Pretend, pretend, pretence.

How did what looked to be a post religious age end up with so much need for pretence?

* Amended to include link

Radicals waiting for an invite?

So here's a discussion of some density that bears mulling over. In the meantime, I just had to react to BStu's comment

Not only am I not radical, there are a LOT of people between me and there, too. I've spoken with these people and by in large, they just don't see anything in the Fatosphere worth staying around for.

Surely joshing?

Trust FA to have 'radicals' who are afraid of gatecrashing the gathering. Yes marginalized sidelined and ignored. So? Isn't that filed under sad, but tough?

I'm still of the view that there is no radical fat acceptance, if you believe, no recognise that you need to respect yourself as much as a human reasonably can, any less than that is pathology, because it's lack of self esteem. How can proper esteem of self be seen as radical by anyone who hasn't done anything wrong?

Making it falsely wrong doesn't count, haters!

It is a nonsense to me. All you can get further than that, is over esteem of self, say for instance, arrogance. Self esteem, like weight and it's purported health risks is a bell curve too much self esteem itself just like indulging in too little. They both end up at the same place, low self regard, just in a different way, in ways that look like opposites, but aren't really.

If you think about it, the desire for too much esteem, is itself a sign of insecurity, because it feels like a good amount of esteem is too little. It's a bit like those feederists, who speak of how they want to love fat oh so much, because loving it where you are, is somehow no love at all. Unless they create the weight themselves, they cannot be sure that it's love, so more weight will prove it.

But it won't assuage that underlying drive for more over a better sense of what you already have.

There are other things involved regards the 'sphere, there isn't the critical mass of people involved, so things can be a bit patchy. It isn't easy to be out of sync with the rest, or to not speak the same language or share the same culture, but it seems to be easier or at least better than self hate or silence.

But since when do radicals require an invite, surely they just have to speak up? And seriously, all talk and no action a bit rich if that talk is an action to far of you. If you don't like what's here, create something to your taste, what are you afraid of?

Yes the fatsphere is unnecessarily and yes, self defeatingly apologetic, a) it can only be the sum of it's parts and b) it's also that those who aren't or try to be less so, may not have the type of voice that is amenable to putting a different point of view to those more apologetic.

People often wish to discover things from people that are most like them, at times that matters far more than the merit in what you say. That's just the way we are as human beings. All of us are like that to some degree.

It's not for anyone to welcome you or not surely. With the greatest of respect to Kell Brigan and the big who hah about what she wrote in response to a post featuring Heidi's WLS story. Although I'm at a severe disadvantage as I didn't get a chance to read it myself but if KB was prepared to criticise someone harshly, and directly, she should have been a bit more prepared to deal with the backlash.

Mind you, we all struggle taking what we dish out at times. But she could have brazened it out or let the dust settle and carry on. I can't say I felt a lot of what was said by Heidi herself was particularly edifying in many parts myself-I did read that. No one can really stop you from starting a blog-apologies if I've missed your output, it's not necessarily for want of trying.

Yeah, sitting on you arse writing about schtuff is hardly the nobility of the work ethic in action, but hey, that's a lot of the world around us. It does feel a little bit showy and unreal at times, which probably feeds into the crisis's insistence that people must exercise as a moral good. Exposing other voices and helping to change the ground on which people are playing on is not a total absence of action.

You never know who's waiting to hear your unique voice, you particular take, you cannot be waiting for an invite, because you probably won't get one.