The honesty of fatness

There's more than one reason why trying to use the addiction model to describe fatness is a bad idea. I was reminded of one the most important ones by this quote;

My relationship with food has been on the rocks for years, but I can’t file for divorce. I’ve got to fight a good fight and get it back on track.

Well said Nick.

It illustrates an evasion that has helped to cheat so many addicts of a return to health, their lives even. the refusal to take on reversing addiction, as opposed to abstaining from the addictive substance. Like many of us fat people have discovered, guilt lies heavy on people and can pressure them into accepting lesser treatment than they deserve because they need to hurt to show how sorry they are. To be able to bear intolerable guilt, pain acts as a ‘paid my debt to society’ impulse.

This has helped a bogus moral element to enter drug rehabilitation that IMHO simply doesn’t belong there. It would if it worked fine; it doesn’t, so I judge it on that. If ideally a pain free as possible way of removing the addiction could be found, that is best. If guilt persisted I’m sure that could be better directed than the hurt of withdrawal.

Those involved in the ‘abstinence’ industry would be wise to keep out of involving themselves in fatness, even including eating disorders more readily associated with it. They may think buoyed up by the respectability and acceptance of the whole rehab boondoggle, that they can expand into fatness bringing a cachet to PBF (poor benighted fatties). But I warn them, even they may struggle to come out intact from this due to the fact that fatness is way too honest not to expose this nonsense.

Not only is any cause or trigger for fatness not directly that of the conscious will, mostly. Any attempt to deal with it has to tackle the one loophole allowed by the nature of those substances, they are not necessary to human existence.

The necessity of food makes a nonsense of abstinence. A fact that has not stopped those bereft of ideas and common sense from trying regardless. Thinking as they do that the perceived ‘cachet’ of the addict persona will uplift fatties who are not taken seriously. They fail to take account that abstinence hardly has any better result than trying to make fat people thin, especially considering the great advantage that non-necessity would theoretically give. In reality, no-one expects to be cured of conditions or diseases merely by pretending to be what they are not, in this case an addict.

If you can abstain, you are hardly an addict. If you have trouble with that, then that’s your problem. Not that you can’t imagine how to method act your way out of the situation.

If weight is seen as imbalanced, it must be rebalanced somehow at source (even if the process is not started from there), ditto eating and appetite. You can wing this effect better with drugs and alcohol but not so well with food. You have to re balance. You have to deal with things as they are, no matter how dysfunctional they are, or seem. There is no get out clause of “giving up eating forever”.

Abstinence wallahs although confronted about this in the past have seen this challenge off. Fat could revive that question by its very nature, even in spite of the current lowly status of fat subjectivity.

Which is one of the reasons why some fat people think the addict definition will recover their subjectivity. They must realise that the greater ‘recognition’ given to drug addicts self representation (at least what seems the appearance of it) is down to the greater promise of effectiveness, not because addicts are respected more than fat people.

It would be far better if the honesty of fatness acted as a spur to revive interest in re-balancing addicts and alcoholic’s bodies as a way of ending their dependence.