Thinspired

I was fascinated to see this response to Jay Smooth's video criticising some laughable effort on the part of some 'anti abortion' activists to give something up until abortion ends. The post did not take the turn I thought it would, no bad thing, because of course fatties have been thrown under the bus by just about everyone and it is a pain in the rectal region that deserves ruthless and clinical exposure.

I'm not feeling up to that right now, so I'll take an easier path.

Before I start, this so called abortion 'debate' is yet another on the working my last frackin' nerve list, let's get this straight (hur hur), anyone who's "against abortion" should cease participating in sexual intercourse whilst fertile with anyone else who's fertile, unless it is agreed by both parties that they wish to reproduce, alright?

Insisting "sex" is the same as intercourse and then claiming to be against dealing with the consequences of that construct is not a credible moral position. The overwhelming use of sex in the whole of human history is to get/express happiness, to get to know someone, get off, get some stress relief, raise morale, m'kay?

Not to reproduce, that is the central purpose of intercourse. The conflation uses the prospect of pregnancy as a punishment to control sexuality. Linking the pursuit of pleasure to the "pain" of creating humans is the product of the sociopathic element surprisingly evident in moral rule.

A bit like using the prospect of "food addiction" linking what gives us life to death and self abuse to order to control people's eating, which is of course supposed to control their weight.

Since the feminist second wave, the idea of "sex" we've been inculcated into should be open to challenge/redundant, because human sexual consciousness is no longer in the grip of bitter old geezers or patriarchy as some might call that.

It reminds me of that slogan to encourage condom use, "no glove no love". I'll amend it to, permit me the indulgence, "No contraception (which includes abortion) no fuckee fuckee". If fulfilling an urge is enough to risk the creation of a sainted foetus, the time to get a moral dudgeon on is before not after the (f)act.

Folks will just have to rub along more and frankly that's no great loss. Everyone's feeling the strain of insisting that we all pay tribute to fertility every time we want to get jiggy. There needs to be more "intuitive sex" going on where intercourse happens because people feel the urge for it, or wish to create a sainted foetus, not because we've been condition to feel the urge for pleasureful intimacy can only be realized via that route.

Anyway, getting back to Mr Smooth I have to say from the little that I've seen of him I've found him to live up to his name. If you want to grasp issues surrounding racism from a non threatening source-I'm not being snide-he's a good one to go to.

I must admit I enjoyed his video and thought the central point was bang on, the exposure of the laughably shallow pomposity at the heart of too much of the dieting mentality, which FA keeps hiding from itself by tidying it up, attempting to give it a cogency and dignity it doesn't and will never possess.

Mr Smooth having no need for this can see the impacted self obsession at the heart of this cult of anorexia more clearly. It's that unwavering driving force that has seen it successfully hijack  mainstream consciousness before most people knew it was happening. Everyone is running around after it, including Mr S here.

He's also highlighted the moral erosion of  needing to build social status around what you do and don't eat and by implication what you may or may not weigh. As this has always been a moral crusade, despite its pretense to be about slimming fatz or saving our health by destroying us. Its only real code is to perpetuate itself and make its surround as much in accord with itself, rather like a parasite.

It is absolutely laughable that someone thinks that the acme of your moral feeling is just be another chance to "thinspire" oneself the idea of something not being about you flies out the window in the face of a far greater imperative.

As usual, youth expose the reality of adult conceits in ways that shock us if we are not paying attention.

Although I've no time for the "anti abortion" movement, I do recognise the underlying immorality of the strong, attacking the weak and that the foetus is a potential life.

I refuse to go down the route of "collection of cells" a tendentious form of words that clearly recognizes what it is trying to distance itself from and I really don't care if certain "feminists" want to get the hump about that.

The abject misogyny of not thinking about where the problem really lies because its obviously those C-nuts again-the cause of all the problems and they're going to get it, is abhorrent. Hate always distorts and often vanquishes morality.

Using your purported distress about abortion for weight management/social advancement purposes shows a shallowness of mind though forgivable in youth it's still leaves one a bit mournful that this is being passed on to them as something to do with morality, that is of course the real hook into the crusade, far more than bullying. Jay Smooth rightly shows the upshot of this 'logic', if you believe dieting is a moral good, then "pro-choice" are doing you a favour.

As for should or shouldn't eat this or that HAES is in line with that too. Though I agree with ttuos, there's something a little off about making it fat acceptance versus food shamers.

Compliments of the season to one and all.

Hostage of a crusade

It seems the child  removed from his parents for being; too fat/short/ unable to dodge inevitable rebound weight gain-take your pick, is probably black/ PoC, yet again. I thought as much from hearing that he'd attended "the Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital" the impression confirmed from interviews with his neighbours.

The the facts are he's an 8 year old from Cleveland Heights in Ohio, weighing 218lbs or about 15 and a half stones in UK parlance. Apparently his BMI is about 60.

A lot of people have gone with the mother not trying hard enough, inadequate food environment and so on. The real issue centres on the refusal of professionals to reconcile themselves to the facts of their failed investment in calorie restriction.

That it is ineffective, impermanent and unfit for purpose, full stop, will have to be addressed. At some point human metabolism will have to be mapped according to the way it actually functions. Something food is being used to dodge.  You can understand that, going from knowing it all to knowing nothing, must be like a rich wo/man becoming poor, it's harder because you used to be rich.

Even the most unhinged fat hater will at some point notice the picture of irrelevancy, despite the admittedly compelling distraction of harassing fat people.


I've said before scientists/ medical professionals do need to deal with children who are gaining tremendous amounts in short periods, whatever the trigger. They should not just be left for their bodies to go where they may when there is clearly something off kilter.

The few things that are known, for instance that the loss of a parent through bereavement or even relationship breakdown can create a trigger in those susceptible to weight gain. Has that led to all children in at least the former category being routinely provided with some kind of therapy (i.e. group)?

That would at least be a positive legacy to come out of this wretched witch-hunt. If you deal with the things you know, you increase your knowledge through exposure. I'm definitely not advocating drugs here, at all.

The focus on eating has been spectacularly overplayed, it is not an appendage of character it's created by your individual metabolic function. It is part of that, not the whole of it and though across any population there is nuance and variation, on the whole that approach does not lend itself much to re-routing of what is creating and supporting weight.

This leaves little room for manoeuvre regardless of age or circumstance.

Relying on the childhood tendency towards obedience and openness to the wishes of those they look to for care can only go so far and still requires you to accept the likelihood of minimal success or outright failure.

The mother tried to go along with the requirements dictated for her son that is the option given to her. It's the choice of those who've mandated it as the only possible means of weight reversal, even though that is clearly false. If it was the only one, it would be effective. I daresay there could have been an element of culture clash, not everyone accepts the authority of nutritionists.

I would resent having to be judged by those who've achieved nothing and their breath altering denial about that.

Approaches need to be found that are effective, I was going to say and suit the needs of people's real lives, but non punitive effectiveness would go a long way and that has to come. Those who wish to employ people to tell them what to eat can go for that.

The child lost some weight for a while then regained, par for the course deficit creates largesse, famine creates feast. It turns out (other) family and friends gave him food. It's impossible to know whether this was the usual teasing/ sabotage people can insist on when someone is trying to shortchange their hunger, or whether it was his distress that moved them to relieve it.

As someone who struggled with a rampaging appetite from a young age, fuelled mainly by my dedication to restricting calories. I found it very hard going, sometimes torture. As someone who hated being smacked, it's the one instance where I'd have favoured it over restriction, that's how bad it made me feel. I never stopped trying though, filled with a constant sense of dread.

I don't mean the rumbling of hunger or of loss of habit. It's more a monstrous feeling that takes over your whole body and mind, as if you are under attack from outside though you know its something going on inside you.

There is often a sinister feeling of being haunted like being in a dark alley with menacing footsteps behind you. It undermines your emotional stability, you feel stripped of layers between you and the world whether you lose weight or not, your nervous system is seriously jangled.

At the time I had no idea this was my body's defence against famine in action, literally rattling away fighting off my efforts. Nor that the strange way hunger had became such an invasive mind bending assault was the effect of it being ratcheted up as part of breaking my will to hunger.

Or that a lot of my overly "anxious nature" was my nervous system sensitized from the constant threat of attack. And no, it's not 'addiction' it was mostly the product of a wrong approach.

There is no reason for weight loss/reversal to hurt. It is the nervous system fighting off the assault of lack that hurts and calorie restriction is not weight loss, though it's an often pain inducing punitive method of bringing it about. It often fails similarly even when those defences don't cause pain, because success doesn't depend on that, it depends on design to see off CR or the mere threat of it and unlike the 'professionals' it knows what works.

I can't imagine what it must feel like to feel being mashed between impulses like these and having to lose some weight and keep it off; or else. Children should not have to go through this because of the whims of those who have the luxury of not facing facts.

Not one jot of this is "officially" entertained anymore than the just as intolerable though less dramatic feelings of gnawing insatiable hunger most go through. It's not even a fat thing, many slim people are just as diet proof too. They can walk away.

Honestly, all those involved in removing this child should be forced to endure the reality of their own prescription.

Such is the peculiarity of this situation, that it's just as likely that parents will get into trouble for their inability to sufficiently abuse their children in the required manner. To watch them suffer in ways they wouldn't otherwise entertain. I know that some feed their children in a disjointed and imbalanced way, or give in to demands for the kind of industrial food waste cynically created and packaged to appeal to children.

Even if the mother is at fault for not being able to get her child to stick to his diet, why frame that as 'abuse'? Why not just say she couldn't cope with the regime? No matter how together someone is, there are always things they don't take to, that can never be 'abuse'.

But that isn't really the problem here, they wouldn't have taken this child if he was thin like his older sibling regardless of the make up of his diet. The issue is weight, so pretending that its about "quality" of food or exercise, is nonsense. Calorie restriction is often just an added kink for the body's weight regulation, on a surface level, it appears to be succeeding whilst often sowing the seeds of its own disintegration and problems of its own.

Using the state to prop up weight loss diet is futile. Energy, should be directed at reversing what triggers and supports weight creation. Removing its underlying support so that the body can settle itself in the same manner it came on, in waves or stages, whilst the person eats, moves according to their needs and in ways that make sense to them.

Soul is the key not the enemy

Glad Byron Hunt maker of the documentary film "Soul Food Junkies" recognizes the real issue about soul food is the narrowing of what that consists rather than another intellect free round of let's pathologize people through their diets. Snooze.

Our needs shape and affect our diet. Migration from rural to urban, from where food is grown to where its less so means changes are made that may not always been the best interests of balance over convenience or what's available. The forces acting on different groups also affect our dietary leanings and requirements. We could do with being more conscious of that, but this is rarely said directly.

Apart from personal or cultural reasons we tend to eat mostly from what is around us and what we take from that tends to favour our individual requirements, so we can stop writing off eating what's around as mere indolence. That is in our nature.

Sometimes those who are used to being more adaptable get caught out by that if the environment shifts to be less forgiving of that flexibility.

We can all get stuck in some rut or other, not just convenience that comes but the balance of compromise we make over food. Who prepares it for us and what pressures of time access and frankly, interest and enthusiasm are involved. Yes interest in food, it varies amongst all, that's allowed.

Some humility is required when suggesting changes to people's overall diets, offering reassessment, recognising the struggle some have to put food on the table and what an incredible and sometimes unsung job many people do in that regard, is a much better approach. Always remembering that whilst food is necessary and quite weird and wonderful, it isn't necessarily a cure all.

There is no need to leap in with nonsense like "food addiction" merely because people are set in their ways. Our palates are trained by what we eat, that doesn't have to mean for life, but ignoring this creates an impression of pathology that isn't there.

It needs to be stated that changing a palate can be somewhat of an unknown quantity.

It's struck me that we don't actually know how used to a certain diet a body can get and how much of a wrench it is to change because its built its whole metabolic functioning around it. We go purely on expectation that we should drop it on the abstract whims of food faddists, but that is very much assumption.

We know that when what we eat goes from home made to shop bought, we can get used to it, but we pine for the former. Sometimes forever. That's not about pathology, it's the nature of our body's precision calculation. 

No modern anti sin  health campaigners can afford to lecture about that any as they've amply proven time and time again that they are prepared to sacrifice the health of people in order to advance their anti this and that causes. Their whole act is as unbalanced as they assume everyone's diet is.

That said, when I saw some of the examples in the trailer I must admit, I found some of them unedifying.

If anyone looks at what they eat and is confronted by a sea of browns, beiges and greys, it does no harm to consider the missing colours of the rainbow. That however does not necessitate lurid constructs of calling food after fecal matter, embarrassing people with ideas that they are too stupid to care about themselves, that they are willfully self destructive, their bodies ugly and distorted and so on. What do these people have inside them that they have this to unload is an interesting question. If they're so pure, wouldn't their thoughts be a bit better than that?

I dislike the Dick Gregory style "That food'll kill ya". His personal history of food is a little more interesting than the usual crude before and after scenario suggested (that's often the case). I  wonder if he and his kind even really like food at all? There's a sense that they perhaps resent the necessity of eating, that they are compelled to do it, when they should be master of all, etc.,

If you insist people should take your care of what they eat you to can take care to engage positively with their eating experience and milieu. If your attitude is itself a form of mental and therefore physical pollution, then one has to wonder whether your purification through food endeavour is required as much to clean up your own mess.

The self proclaimed righteous (non) eaters need to wake up from their compensatory uplift (for denial of their own eating pleasure) from controlling others enough to recognise they are also using that to keep themselves in line.

It's very tempting for black people to hurtle down this seemingly apolitical bypass of 'fix food fix everything'. Hurrah! That means you not affected by the way you are treated, just force the health food down and run around and all will be well. You are in full control. It's very comforting and preferable to the alternative of confronting hostile forces outside and inside yourself, it's all in your power and is thus empowering.

Soul food goes back to slavery days, when black people where given the scraps and parts of the animal those who owned them had no use for. Instead of slipping into a defeated funk, they decided to rise to the challenge of making appealing and tasty food out of unpromising material. They bought their culinary skills, know how and imagination becoming inspired to create dishes worthy of eating.

It doesn't surprise me that parts of black America are so wielded to that legacy of black people snatching triumph from the jaws of defeat. People in general are as much connected to history by food as anything else, something the philistine element of food faddists seem oblivious to.

What is required is not a lot of prissy disordered healthist indulgence, but a spirit of reviving that same triumph, that people are worthy of good food no matter what station assigned to them by a pernicious society. A desire to make the best and most balanced out of what is available and that includes using land to grow food if necessary. I mean collard greens? Why would people eat them if vegetables where not important?

Its imperative to avoid yet another yawn inducing episode of "black shame" and the unedifying sight of black people wallowing in each others purported degeneracy which is responsible for undesired outcome.

Not anti for

I'm not an "anti" person, I don't even like being called "anti racist". Since racism is BS of course I'm against it, why wouldn't I be? Naming or thinking of yourself by what you aren't or don't like, is not something I tend toward.

I'm an atheist not because of the god question, but because I believe in something else. That may or may not put me at odds with those who are religious, but it is not my defining mode. Incidentally, I find 'arguments' about whether there is or isn't a god pointless and sterile and I have no time for the so called "unbelievers" seeking to indulge. 

I suppose my feeling could be summed up as the destiny of humans is in our own hands; through the understanding and mastery of ourselves.

Phew, I think I'll go and lie down.

I could be wrong, perhaps it isn't. Maybe that's the road to hell it could all depend on how we understand and where we go with that. I'm saying this because I do not and never have defined myself by being against the 'obesity' crusade right? I'm against it like I'm against kicking puppies, it's so obviously a bad idea, it's often difficult to understand how any one could genuinely see it as good thing.


To define myself as against it, it would have to announce its intentions clearly. I'd have to know exactly what it was for most of all though, it'd have to make sense and apart from at some point way in the past, it doesn't.

And I must say, the more I unravel the self immolating behaviour encouraged by being under its cosh, it makes even less sense than that, on its face. It's clear that it is about somethings, many things. Certainly smoking doesn't compare, we all know what that's about, but 'obesity'? What even is 'obesity'? A 'disease' with no symptomatology or cause, apart from EXISTENCE.

That's the real cause of 'obesity' existing in modern society with some degree of susceptibility. So presumably the 'cure' is to transcend society and create a virtual bubble of slim which you can walk around in like a computerized space suit.

It's hard to be against something that cannot even stand up on its own terms let alone any other.

Those familiar know what I'm talking about; fat people eat unhealthily. They must eat healthily to become slim, they must  not eat healthily and exercise because that is giving up if its not a diet. Fat people's problem is comfort eating, artificially inducing extreme discomfort is required to reduce this. Fat people have never tried to lose weight. Fat acceptance will kill you because it will keep you from doing what you've never done anyway and so on, so stupid.

Calories in/ calories out used to make sense, the number of calories you take in must be exceeded by the amount of calories you expend. But hey, what about the rest of "in", stored energy?

There are times when I almost admire some fat acceptance folk's ability to-it seems to me-create a cogent narrative out of this premo grade hokum and critique that, but then some or most seem to define themselves as against the crusade, rather than for something else.

There's also definitely a shared culture, it's very middle class and the sort of attitudes you find in the crusade are shared by many critiquing it, which makes for some weird exposure to class solidarity.

There are exchanges that go on that only those who are part of that are party to, just like the rest of the internet. Accommodating other voices is really hard, I can see that better now.

I don't like it, I think it's pathetic that its this hard to be able to communicate with people you supposedly agree with, but to be honest, I'm getting past caring or trying. I thought fat acceptance was a chance to move beyond this sort of thing, to some extent, but it isn't and that's that. If it is, I won't be a part of that, enthusiasm has gone the way of indifference.

All I can do is try and say what I have to say to the best of my ability and leave it at that. And stop behaving as if a cause could be more important than what divides, right now, it isn't.

Fat cats are okay?

Given the -ism shifting fat phobia of the left. Sorry about that, SOSDD.

Some in FA are disappointed that the term "fat cats" has gained currency in capitalist challenging rhetoric/ imagery.  There's some to and fro, it has accrued traction as something to avoid being identified with.

Question is, should fat people feel implicated by this term? 

It's use as a political term is attributed to a man called Frank Kent who used it to write an essay about big money donors in the world of politics wielding undue influence over the whole system.

Prescient indeed; isn't OWS's reviving that exactly?

What's fascinating about this term is it uses the word "fat" in a way that doesn't refer explicitly to the crusade, though operating in a fat baiting context some do try it on. Its meaning does not refer directly to everyday fat people it explicitly refers to the kind of middle aged upper class men of no specific weight category, you can be a slim "fat cat", who occupy power wielding echelons. Though always illustrated by fat men or animals.

It's fat as sitting at the top of the tree living easy off the efforts of others in that it voices a lot of underlying fears caricatured in fat hating tropes "lazy" springs to mind.  The ill defined chant of "unhealthy" is an attempt to weaken fat people's access to the strength of minds and body. The conflation of fitness and thinness definitely smacks of a sort of Napoleon complex of weight.

It has been marked out as not "fat positive", in that it's not celebratory of fatness, but how negative is it? Is it close to being fat neutral in that it can be anyone who fits the definition, rather than a number on the scale?

I mean we use all sorts of terms using words also given to weight bands. Thin skinned/lipped,wearing thin, none of which are positive at all, should they go too? Doesn't this predate 'obese' pathology and shouldn't we keep a hold of that rather than forget it, leaving only the current derangement a clear field?

Its also powerful to be a fat cat, isn't there value in having a symbol of power linked obliquely with fatness? Do slim people on lower incomes feel implicated by rich slim people? Of course not, so why should fat people on modest incomes feel particularly got at by this term.

As has become the rule with "social justice" economically challenged representatives of whatever are brandished around when needed to give kudos to an oppression narrative and put away as soon as there's something for the 'chosen few' to discuss. Thus it is used as a reason why the varied narrative of fatness, must be crow barred into a crude and I feel, unrepresentative "poor benighted fatty" one which more high falutin' fatz are convinced will push the fat agenda up the SJ hierarchy.

When fat people populate the homeless, the prison population and those with mental disorders, disproportionately, you might have a case, right now, the more interesting thing is why they don't seem to be.

It's a laughable failure of self awareness as much as anything, not grasping the rabid depths of class hatred amongst those they come from/identify with.The only people more openly derided by the impacted bourgies are the working classes in whom as many coded -isms are hidden as obezoids. And anyway, "feeling" sorry for people happens when people pass through authority to a pronounced degree, the desired pity is visceral not abstract.

I have never been convinced for one minute that insisting poorer people are fatter, if its even true which I've always had varying degrees of doubt about, will produce the required simpatico feelings expected. I remember when I first hit the FA nets I said more than once, "Fat people are just not sympathetic", I wasn't regretful on the contrary, I felt FA might encourage us to set a certain boundary on trying to prize a necessarily withheld empathy.

Despite in fact probably because we look too robust, too rude in health a bit too energetic somewhat immovable, sometimes indomitable, unreachable even, we are just too far from the most universal evocation of vulnerability, slenderness. Breaking boundaries is fine but instinct says what we'd have to do to overcome that would simply not be worth it and we should allow that to settle the matter.

Part of the challenge for many of us is to believe that slimmer people despite any acquired capacity to work themselves into mouth frothing ire are still threatened by fat people  the idea of us in some ways, rather like many of us are jealous of others and our idea of them. 

It's a pain in the arse, one of the reasons why I so resented fatness is that it didn't reveal my poetic (though I don't get on with it strangely enough) soul. What about my wistful ethereality? How would anyone properly get me, if I looked like I could play women's rugby? (Yes, slim women, excellent players and no you don't have to be fat to etc.,)

I've gotten over that, because funnily enough it fits most snugly into an aspect of FoBT, weight as an indicator of character. I mean its a question of having the confidence to be. After a while, you get caught up in that and funnily enough, people who get to know you know you. We all have mistaken first impressions and it seems like a lot of people don't "match" their image.

Who cares if people mistake you for, in my case once a hearth mother type who must be able to pass on a desired recipe, as I remember it, she indicated I was of no use as any thing else, cheek!

She was disappointed and I habitually apologetic, yet I didn't feel any way about it, I just like to help if I can.

(It turned out later that I could have advised her, but though she rightly identified the dish, I didn't know it by that name).

In some ways the real fight for fat people is whether we are going to go with the fact that we are still standing and stop fighting due to things like self consciousness about size, the grass is greener. Or if this will mean being boxed into a "strong fatty" trope, which can be self negating.

Or whether we are going to keep faith with how the damaging self betrayal of being an 'obese' has inflicted on us as and get others to be nice/r, or something.

It's often occurred that if only I'd shown the same kind of resolute no nonsense attitude to things as the sterling defenses of my "diet proof" body, who knows how I'd be feeling now? They say free your mind and your body will follow, but it feels more like allowing your body to inspire, even instruct your mind.

Thinker

I was perusing this article on the Monash University paper on stigma. A comment from someone called Tim Dean a philosopher at the University of New South Wales stood out. Illustrating how out utterly of touch fatphobes with a library ticket can be when they are under the influence;

What surprises me is that obese individuals don't sometimes react to the negative attitudes in such a way that does encourage them to excercise or do something about their weight.

Fat people have of course "reacted" mightily, tough if anyone 'missed' it, we're not doing it again just for them. I doubt this academic airhead absorbed the study or article which amongst other things quoted someone being told they were "lucky" to have miscarried because they wouldn't want to be pregnant at their size.

Instead it merits comparison with wearing clothes;

Social stigma is a potent tool for guiding behaviour to conform with social norms; after all, most of us wear clothes to work not because it'd be illegal not to, but because of the very thought of the embarrasment we'd feel turning up naked.......

So is rationalism, wanna try that first? "Guiding behaviour" neither creates nor delivers desired outcome.

Know what else? People don't tend to 'fail' to wear clothes because clothes fulfil their remit. Clothes can be demonstrated to 'work'-that is fulfil their function.

Seeing a trained mind reducing itself to this must be like watching a clever alcoholic suffer blackouts. The omens for rational discourse are not good. I'm not surprised, intellectual engagement and fat phobia don't mesh. Its this dim because it has to be. The surprise is that training in critical thinking remains untroubled by any of this.

Forget compassion, what about robustness of intellectual integrity?

I mean, what can we expect from those who posit the idea that hurt is a good way to control behaviour, as if that;

a) would have no cost or pathologies of its own

and;

b) it is a worthwhile or moral way of achieving anything?

Those thinking we are on the end of their leash fail to understand we've already complied. We believed the same things we weren't just overpowered. In the past we took it upon ourselves-for various reasons- to do what we were told was right at the time by those who we felt had the authority to do so. It didn't occur that people had anything less than our best interests at heart.

Various psychological techniques are currently being touted as a means to support the bankruptcy of calorie wasting.

In this we are being cast as dead fat suits only brought to life by the attentions of fat /concern haters.

Behaving as if because they pretend not to know we are alive assuming we'll play along, as ever. It is imagined that treating us as things is acceptable behaviour for any ends.

It calls to mind what feminists refer to as sexual "objectification", but I think it goes beyond that. We meet the literal definition given by Martha Nussbaum, I'm linking, but I'm going to copy it here;

* Instrumentality- if the thing is treated as a tool for one's own purposes

* Denial of autonomy-treated as if lacking in agency or self-determination

* Inertness-treated as if lacking in agency (and animus)

* Ownership-treated as if owned by another

* Fungibility- treated as if interchangeable

* Violability- treated as if permissible to damage or destroy

* Denial of subjectivity-treated as if there is not need to show concern for the 'object's' feelings and experiences.

If anyone has the right to discount experience its the person themselves, but even that is different from behaving as if things that happen, didn't. Our thinker continues;

My concern is by taking a defensive stance we risk normalising obesity in the minds of individuals who are obese, lending them a sense of entitlement and undermining the effect of social stigma to change behaviour. We raise a siege mentality that ends up being counter-productive. Guilt, after all, can be a good thing if it changes behaviour towards positive ends.

Concern? Basically healthy self defence spoils the effect of going unguarded in the face of a punitive onslaught. Trying to claim being in the ring with your gloves down, in the face of a beating is the way to change your behaviour as if because that is desired by others, the impact of the blows don't matter nor doest the humiliation of putting up no defence.

How can you be "concerned" that people are trying desperately to fend off blows that might be damaging their psyche?

What, this intellectual non-entity thinks "we" whoever that is has more of a say over your brain than you do?

The right to be acknowledged as you are, no matter where that is or where you want to go is going too far, that's only for the likes of him, isn't it? That's something you can be sure he takes for granted but then its pretty obvious why that shouldn't be in question for one second.

And who's "we"? If fat people are so defensive how do concern haters take for granted that his "we" is so in control of us? If we were defensive this popular illusion would not be present.

Being fat has been "normalized" by the absence of anything to stop it and that was entirely predictable decades ago. When something doesn't work repeatedly and you ignore it, that's another way of accepting your future. Too late to play coquette on that score.

Nor does it seem to occur much to these people that their behaviour towards us might change our attitude to them. Like you know when you act a certain way to someone or thing; another human, a dog, a cat, a worm or even a virus or a bacterium, you can expect a reaction.

If we aren't respected, we may not respect.

No drama

A while back a typically passionate * [T/W for those offended by soulful takes on the sacred R-O-C-K]   Mary J Blige recorded a seriously heartfelt track called "No more drama" in which she excelled even her usual resolute delivery.

In it she described breaking free from an disturbingly abusive relationship after the drama of it exhausted her habit of clinging on for whatever she was getting or thought she was getting out of it.

"Drama" does that. The constant everyday ups and downs are a vortex drawing you deep and holding you as you adapt to that and forget before.

Until burnout loosens your grip.

Its a strange thing to come to your rescue. The imperative to GET AWAY crowds out and upturns the status quo, whether you have any idea how you are going to manage or feel up to escaping, or not.

Physical, emotional and psychological withdrawal, as far as you can manage is the only order and that's all there is too it.

We can probably all agree people do things because they are not fully aware of the consequences or the risks they are taking.

From there assumptions differ.

For instance reversing that to presume if others appear to be doing something considered risky, it is due to their lacking awareness of assumed risk.

Some of us will have to disagree.

If you extrapolate from there insisting the more associated risk is exaggerated and dramatized, the more you can affect your target's reactions, you'd probably be correct in that.

You can even direct all behaviour that way, but what you and your drama cannot do with it is dictate outcome.

That is decided by the efficacy of the actions you are eliciting.

If you are going to ignore that fact and continue to manipulate people into actions you desire, prepared for when people become too weary and tired of your antics to care.

And when that happens, as the lady sings, people will have to cut you and the ugliness you're dealing in loose.

It's called, survival.

Critical blahhhh

The point is fat people's cruel disregard of ourselves becomes 'cruelty' to others, if they rely on that cruelty to prop up their self esteem or social position. Both end up counting themselves as less than they are.

People's enthusiasm for expressing how bad the fat acceptance movement is and the people involved with it should be audited for credulity. How is it possible to be that wrong?

Whilst fat people's credibility is endlessly mentioned  by both ourselves and by those who insist mindless obedience is all we are fit for, do critical voices pause to consider the credibility of their numerous critiques?

Seriously, what is so great about what they represent?

This is a crusade who's instructions have failed to bring about their stated aim, to make fat people slimmer. It's dominant thesis doesn't understand how human biology actually works, yet it's been extended to drugs, surgery, all of which are destructive and pitifully inadequate.

Where's the humility or credibility there?

Not to mention an indiscriminate campaign of stigma that is so bad that it is actually wearing out its targets before it's disease construct of fatness 'obesity'. Yet it refuses to take responsibility for any failure-unlike fat people, whom it finds consistent fault. It deals with this by erasing our efforts claiming we have not done what there is ample proof that as a whole that we have done.

Where's the honour? The sense of self worth to be able to say "mea culpa" we thought it would work, it hasn't? Where's the dignity of that? I suppose you don't need it when you're falsely accorded it.

The criticism of our attempts to get out of the way of something that has become putrid and pointless has itself become the problem is the cause for relentless and unyielding sniping. How is this even possible?

Do I even care anymore? 

Those who are critical, who are so concerned about the feelings of those who have behaved far worse than us, are being irrational and unpleasant. Does it occur that an endless blizzard of unvarying critical noise isn't actually relaying a credible or even distinct message?

Regardless of any merits their criticisms may have, people have to be able to be able to tolerate what they have to say in order to hear it, if they cannot trust that they are being fairly appraised that is not likely to be possible.

Try judging those you are protecting by those same standards. They're too good for that, so tip toe and pussy foot is the order of the day.

Nobody in FA that I know of wishes to degrade the physical or mental health of slim people, wishes to get a campaign going to make them feel disgusted by their own selves, assassinate their characters. Or slimz ought to be left to die because they cost too much.

So exactly how can FA be posited as the opposite of this? It's just trying to drag us down to a level we've not chosen, because others' our betters have, that is their problem. That is not a true definition of uppity.
being critical can be fine and noble, but a) it has to connect with what it is critiquing, or it becomes an exercise in pre decided antipathy, with whatever their idea of a person's views are, projected onto that person.


Being critical can be fine and noble, but a) it has to connect with what it is critiquing, or it becomes an exercise in pre decided antipathy, with whatever their idea of a person's views are, projected onto that person.

It's all so much blaah.

Mr Twerp

I've already written about Stephen Fry, someone I just about had some respect for until he ended that by exposing himself for the arse he is underneath his genial countenance. He was probably one of the first people I went off because his rabid fat phobia was so stupid that it appalled me so.

This is a man who lost virtually a whole side of his family in the Holocaust, yet used the usual "no fat people in the concentration camps" to bray away even a pip of rational discussion about fatness.

I've little but contempt for people who try that "Jewish people have been morally cleansed by the final solution" BS, but I just felt at the time that is him, this is what he is really like underneath and that is what I didn't like.

And that was way before 2009, so you'd think he'd have worked his previous "insight"into that mail article using his massive brainpower to explain why it failed to be the scything shield cutting any prospect of adiposity to ribbons.

He has taken in many with his posturing of the genius professor, fair's fair, he's not unaware of himself;

'I am cursed with big feet and blessed with a big memory,' he shrugs. 'I wouldn't call myself an intellectual, but I do like to collect learning.'

"Collecting", not necessarily possessing.

I subsequently learned that he was "bipolar/manic depressive", does that make any difference? Funnily enough it doesn't because being bipolar isn't spelt A-R-S-E hole. His hateful fat phobia is yes a vehicle for his self loathing but he is mistaken if he is passing that off as created by his condition when it is mainly coming from him as a person and how he views his condition.

I'll say little more on that except to say its a bit like people who hate themselves because they are fat-that is not seen as perfection and they feel they are/should be, rather than those who hate themselves because they are fat; for other reasons.

He can turn on the oleaginous charm at will (sounds kind of bipolar, cause or effect?). This is effective a lot of people adore him you could do worse as long as you avoid hearing him vent on easy targets.

Such is the extent of conformity when it comes to fat hating, we all have our own rules as to mitigation, one thing I cannot stand is fat fools in the media who go about trash talking fatness or fat people and/or making us a target for pity.

Leaving ordinary folk to reap fuller consequences of fat people's lowering social status, these people think of nothing, not the rights they didn't fight for may be under threat because they cannot get a grip of their selves.

Despite wiping their tears with banknotes.

I take no pleasure whatsoever in the fact that he like many others is regaining visibly, its more that when you empty a sewer into where you live because you think you're gone for good, without regard to the consequences of those still there.

You will meet that mess when/if you get back.

SF, wouldn't do this with his mental health disorder, nor drug use, nor anything else but fatness. He can speak about it as honestly as he can without having to demean the status itself. So take a tip FF's in the M (fat fools in the media).

Other people should not have to be increasingly menaced by the state busybodies whilst those with a little influence cannot get over themselves enought to and think before they speak.

How mean is fat acceptance?

The appeal for FA denizens to tread lightly on those who've kicked the crap out of fatz has forced me to consider this question, is it cruel to people who are used to having a soft landing place for their feet swinging limbs to withdraw that and let them fall on their own momentum?

That may seem like an idiotic question when you say it like that, but there is no doubt that in general we fatz seem to be awful reticent about calling our tormentors to account, for their own freely chosen behaviour.

This wasn't altogether unpredictable, after all, I myself have as much reluctance as anyone else but I try to overlook it somewhat because I feel it is old habits dying hard, namely being outer directed, focusing on other people's feelings with disregard for my own.

Then being asked to account for what I was supposed to be the product of what I was not paying attention to and also repressing. You can say its forcing myself to get back in touch with my own feelings, rather than distracting myself with others, I trust them to take care of themselves in the meantime.

I've also noticed a lot of the hurt people feel at fat people's emergence from non sentient outer directed. There's an element of we thought that was settled and we were happy with that. As you know when you put anything down that can become a makeshift storage or table, it exerts a gravitational pull bringing all flotsam and jetsam of the universe.

Okay, people put stuff on it.

People put a lot more stuff on our erased, obedient, genuflecting selves than I ever thought possible. Or maybe its that the things they put on them, got things put on them and enabled all sorts of things out of reach things to be tantalizingly touched with the finger tips.

By trying to regain the humanness of that part of ourselves, there's a sense that we are cruelly disregarding all this and we are in our way just as reluctant as others I sense. We don't want to be where we are, but its the change our minds that will have to come about that we ambivalent about.

If you want to look at it this way and it is fair to a fault fat acceptance is cruel or certainly feels it, both ways. From looking outward to restoring inside, from thinking about how you look to hostile others, to how you actually feel as an original autonomous being.

You know as in existing with the flow of your experience inside and out, rather than watching yourself, looking to catch yourself out before you do any fat creation whilst you're not looking.

Relative to before it can feel incredibly self absorbed, I certainly do feel I have become that way myself and sometimes overly analytical and precious.

Isn't it grand? In the past I would have worried, I'm a fat person being precious, oh the shame. Now I just think lighten up or get over it, I treat myself according to the way I'm being, not how much I'm making up for or not being fat.

Sometimes, it's almost fun.

The 'cruelty' of fat acceptance, is really the cruelty to ourselves of going along not with cals in/out ideology, anyone can make a mistake, no it was by accepting the hostility that increasingly went with it, for that reason.

For not policing boundaries by saying "okay you can say I'm in the wrong but that doesn't give you the right to act up like this, back off" etc., Its the lenience of "anything goes" as we are fat and wrong that was really cruel to ourselves.

And if you view this belated push back as a cruelty to those who've for instance gotten used to us making them feel better because we seemed a bit more beaten down, then let that be a lesson to us all.

If we carelessly allow cruelty to ourselves that builds future "meanness" towards anyone nice enough to take advantage.

Scant emotion

There's a really good post over at Feministe, not least due to the excellent commenter's who have written about their experiences with eloquence. It refers to the chef Karl Wilder's account of trying to live on a low food budget (food stamps allocation). It feels more real than these accounts often do. By relaying the kind of emotional toll it can take,I found myself relating to it in ways I usually don't with these experiments.

Managing on the lowest income requires a high level of skill in many areas, the opposite of what's insinuated by the some of the more self flattering classes. This tension of incompatible opposites is the genesis of (a) double consciousness.

When a particular groups real life or functioning existence is at odds with what society insists are its universal values.

More often low income is equated with; low skill, none too bright/ ill educated, sullied if not somewhat degenerate, the cries of  "all you/they have to do is x" are defensive.

I've no objection to teaching children some home economics alas vulnerable to being thrown aside for that which is deemed "more important".

Its a general rule that the greater the level of skill required for anything the more people will fall short of that standard.

The emotional component of managing low finance tends to get sidelined. My cooking can be erratic from out of sight to unspeakable, more so when I was very low on self belief in general. If I'd had more confidence and faith in myself, I would have done a lot better.

What brought me down even more than the lack of money was the feeling of being trapped with a tightening noose around my neck;

I am opening all my cupboards and checking every item in the freezer. I am hungry and want everything I don’t have.

I felt hounded by this feeling way too much, it could become acute in the blink of an eye. Don't get me wrong, I'm profoundly grateful to live in a society where people fought for that most basic of provision.

I can't explain some of it, often these feelings got on my nerves. I get people who've always been in low paid employment who think, for goodness sakes, that's how they express the pressures. Sometimes I made a game of it; being crafty, planning things out, noticing every little way I could make things go as far as possible, getting into some kind of rhythm. 

Other times I found myself out of synch and falling short, not always sure why.

I'm neither justifying or not, just saying that's how I felt about it. Give children as much training as possible in as many areas of food and its preparation, growing it to if possible. Variety and flexibility really can make all the difference and is some defence against the blandishments of the marketing budgets selling overly processed fare.

But also, tell them the truth about being poor, they often have to be better whilst being painted as worse.

Stroking your id

We all like speak the good word about ourselves; the internal pep talks, reruns of favourite praise and compliments thrown our way, shimmering memories of our perceived triumphs great and small.

We can be very high maintenance when it comes to keeping our spirits up.

As long as a person can get over the feeling that it makes them a bit of a shit (plus pathetically needy), an endless cycle of self praise can be set in motion by making sure that when you insult others, you are really praising yourself.

It can give an extra (((((frisson)))))) lacking from even the most gratuitous self praise.

Um, achieving more potent effects through indirect rather than direct means, where is that lesson being missed?

It’s worth bearing in mind when fat people are being insulted, its usually just a means of pressing the real hot button marked "ego boost". A bit like those study mice who'll press the reward button until they're exhausted, sometimes even dead.

That's how fat haters are sometimes genuinely surprised (and irked) at the extent of fat people's upset at these taunts. "It's not about that silly", but hey, they're not going to tell fatz that, directly, that would spoil it.

Whatever's been set up as the opposite of fat is ergo the opposite of the insult; "fat people don't like to work." “fat people are careless with themselves" "fat people are not good looking".

Who's industrious, responsibly self caring, well groomed and stunningly gorgeously attractive?

Coothcie cootchie cooo, whoever's not fat, that's who!

I suppose you could call it a "comfort insult". If you work it right you are always supporting yourself (why there's a need for it is a whole other question) but some think its a necessity, which is perhaps why they claim fat people have "no self respect". If we've succumbed to an idea of ourselves that is intrinsically insulting, we've not only wasted an opportunity to tickle our egos, but actively putting them down.

What are we like!

Ever wondered why the frenzied circularity of fat hating insults, the way they are so boring and never increase in subtlety or wit? Wonder no more. Someone is having an experience. Without that cushion of pleasure haters would bore themselves into some creativity at least.

So next time you're flamed/shamed, try and have some fun working out the compliment haters are giving themselves.

Proportion control

The alternative universe that is calorie fixation spews up a lot of babble to support its suspended reality. Terms that hold little or no meaning over and above expressing its misdirected rationale.

One premier fallacy is the idea that the body has little internal self-regulation of appetite, hunger (or body weight). Hunger by the way is about the amount you need to fuel you and appetite is what you need that to contain. According to them, people "mindlessly" eat whatever's in front of them without any regard to any internal dictates or requirements indicated by rising sense of satisfaction peaking in fullness and satiety.

Nor does any amount people eat ever have any affect on what they may eat later on. So for instance if someone eats a lot at lunch, they'll eat that has no effect on the amount they'll eat at dinner. If you eat a lot at one meal, you eat more overall and forever. They then reverse that, if you can just eat inadequately, you'll not get hungry any quicker that if you'd eaten what you needed and you can of course, keep that up for ever more.

Sometimes its hard to believe we've been in thrall to this for so long, oh the desperate mindset of magical thinking.

The purpose of this favoured absurdity is to hide the futility of re-drawing those bounds according to inadequate or an artificially low calorie limit who's sole imperative is to induce weight loss, rather than meeting your body's needs accurately and efficiently.

This has the exact effect its supposed to be "overcoming" it disrupts your body's hunger signals and mechanisms and often weight regulation itself. If when you cry out for your needs to be met and you're short changed. You tend to make that known, don't you?

When your body does this, it is then blamed on your greed or lack of will (to resist your body's attempt to meet its requirements) or your "emotional eating" / "eating disorder"/ "addiction". Either way, this disruption is caused by you, not the imposition of their cultism.

This shaky grasp of the purpose, point and nature of the necessity of eating and food, forms the basis of terminology.

One of their faves is "portion control".

It refers to controlling your appetite and intake by eye because the real control cannot be trusted to starve you sufficiently. The inflexible and inadequate calorie "allowance" strictures don't relate to the varied nature of  what you are served in the real world.

Now they have calorie counted menus, that is probably next. Restaurants and other eating establishments will have to weigh each serving every time and check the total is acceptable to the haphazard, though gravely delivered faddists. Exact righteous blocks of calorie allowance must me  served at all times by everyone.

Yet, with all this control which is of course supposed to be innate in slimz, why so little sense of proportion about the extent to which you will demonize fatness and fat people, in order to support and manipulate your own behaviour?

Portion control is supposed to be an understanding of how all the pieces of a picture fit together. How one part affects the other that is knock on effects. In other words, a sense of proportion. So if we are expected to believe that the portion controllers have so much of this, why do is their demonization of actual people and their bodies so unpleasant and ugly and so without any sense of limitation?

Just on the off chance that it might serve their ends?

Their control is no control and has the effect of robbing both dieter and fat people as their foils of real control over ourselves.

Force is always needed for so much cost to so little end.

Accountability

The urge to hold the 'diet industry' accountable for its undoubted shenanaigans is the easy part. The knottier issue seems to be the accountability of the scientific and medical establishment/s (and professionals) for the climate of hatred towards fat people.

No one could possibly pretend they are not the ones who's gravitas has raised fat hate to this pitch and extent of credibility, could they?  Yet for some reason or other, that seems to be the deal with many amongst fat acceptance seeking to pretend that businesses, who relatively few are under any real duress to keep giving their cash to, who's stated and unhidden intent is financial gain, has no dictate of "do no harm" that has been thoroughly supported by those who do, nay saved from bankruptcy by them at one point are somehow more to blame for the 'obesity' mess than anyone.

I have to hold the professionals more accountable for what we have had to endure and I don't really see, morally speaking, why they should be allowed to get away with it. I can understand why emotionally people might want them to carry on regardless. I can trust them to weasel out of their misdeameanours as skillfully as ever, but I simply feel that whether we or they like it, if they are not held to account for their own actions, they will be empowered to repeat this and probably will.

How do we feel about that, okay so long as its not us?

The other day I saw a comment trivialising weight matters as being "taken in" by the diet industry. If I was taken in by any one it was the science and medical establishment. What upsets me is not so much that they did, I've gotten too used to their breathtakingly low standard of behaviour with regards the fat issue-yeah and I remember the "good ones" like they remembered good fat people.

What really grabs me by the throat is that I never suspected they could behave in such a way, if I had, I can assure you I would have saved myself earlier, guessing that's the same for a lot of fat people out there, currently disabling themselves on doctors orders.

Part of the reason some won't contemplate the possibility of the disregard shown to them and their sometimes excrutiating efforts is that they cannot begin to imagine how they will deal with such a sense of betrayal.

Maybe I've just answered my own question.

So I can delete the rest of this post.

Note to 'undercover' fat hating foodists

Classist fat hate, shaming and talking about 'obesity' is not the same talking about food access.

Cart after horse

It's worth saying that immediately going from a high degree of conscious restriction to a normal/intuitive eating pattern is not necessary if that doesn't suit your situation or is too scary.

I did go through a period of letting go completely after a long dieting career I found I could no longer restrict calories.

The defence our bodies mount to overthrow a calorie shortage of calories is taxing. If you repeatedly subject yourself to it long term, fatigue will become ingrained to the point where nervous system shuts down it ability to carry out your orders. Like the wild horse throwing you off by rather than you having to get off.

It meant I had to allow myself to eat things I tried to avoid, in other words, what I "felt" like eating. I couldn't wait for that period to pass to be honest, it felt like I was being directed by a backlash from a habit of imbalance rather than current needs. And at the time, my whole eating impulse was stuck in its down phase, so eating anything was always rather blah and unsatisfying..

I didn't feel any more in tune with it than I did with calorie restriction, it was after all an extension of that process, rather than my own desire. Although I accepted the need for it and was fine with it, that was undoubtedly the end for me and dieting. I actually planned to start again afterwards! But just that little bit of ease made the idea of re-starting (afterward) intolerably repellent.

That's when I realised just what it had taken to keep restricting over and over again, day after day.

I kept checking for when I could engage conscious decision making again without my body/nervous system screaming in protest.

I found that feeling started to pass after about 3 and a half weeks.

I guided myself toward some of the things I'd been missing out on in that preceding month, checking for even the slightest feelings of resistance. If I had no feeling then great, if there was so much of a squeak I left it alone.

That period of release and checking for the end of it gave me the confidence to be gentle and extremely patient with myself. Not saying IE type eating can't work straight off, just that it can be far less suited to people who've had long experience with disordered eating and eating disorders, especially from a very young age. I had both they ran into each other.

Often there are different rules for what could be seen as ingrained disorder and the more situational kind-related to your actions as opposed to self generating.

A negative mentality about food eating and being fat had built up to such an extent that when I tried to eat mindfully-with a complete focus on what I was eating- it felt unbearable and soon descended into an even wilder chaos than usual.

I didn't realise the extent of it until then.

I had to dismantle at least some of this before I could think of normality and would not have fancied eating to the rhythm of it, in fact that would have been more or less the same as before, except without the pressure of calorie restriction.

That can mean a lot, it may even be the most decisive factor, but then again, maybe not. The most important thing is anxiety releases, the release of pressure and stress. The system overall is overexcited and frankly, most would be better off taking up something like meditation and waiting for that to calm things down.

The release of the threat of starvation is a bit too specific.

The thing about eating after all this (or just having had the threat hanging over you for a long time) is to remember that imbalance is not caused by any engagement of your conscious mind in eating, its the over engagement of it. Making (or attempting to make) it the basis of all eating.

That undermines the rhythm of your function, even without limit, such as those who go gluten free and so on. Interestingly, more people can manage that and it tends to get easier, which is what happens when changes though demanding make some sense. Its what people want a restricted diet to be like, but it isn't, because of the body's homeostatic regulation asserting itself.

Your mind is more of a channel into which information from the whole of your body flows, allowing you to respond to that, it does not create your hunger or appetite. It can and does influence it, through other parts of your nervous system function, your emotions and your thinking and things like your habits, history, environment, assumed or otherwise likes and dislikes.

The latter affect what is already there, they are not why and what causes you to eat, solely. It can have a huge influence in the sense of creating a chain reaction-which is why I believe there is some way to change the course of weight- it is not its underlying basis of creation though. It is always acting on something, that's why dieting is so misguided mistaking what effects something, for that it is affecting.

A bit like mistaking writing for the paper you are writing on.

The idea that eating is consciously generated, which exists to serve the calorie restriction model only, ignoring the automatic process already occurring, trying to duplicate it badly getting in the way of what is actually designed for that purpose causing disruption. That's how dieting, with its overly rigid attempts at conscious control creates disorder, it gets in the way and forces the body to mount a counter attack.

All this leads us to think engaging the conscious mind is wholly bad when it's really the over and wrong use of it.



If our conscious mind is unsettled, it needs to be emptied of all the myths and nonsense we collect from our environment, including food marketing yes, but also from healthists and others pushing modish forms of eating.

I went as far, at one point as emptying my mind of ideas of what I liked to eat. I just tried to let go of any feeling of liking x, y, z as much as I could. That was a bit odd, but I wanted to off load as much baggage as I could and experience things freshly. After a while, it made me more responsive to amounts of things, it was this that helped me find out that I tend towards eating lots of different things, rather than full meals of a few food items.

Both it and the increasing release of tension allowed my enjoyment of food to return, after it had been killed off by years of attempted restriction and the upshot of that.

So rather than withdraw completely unless its provoked by diet burn out, in which case you'll have to pause for at least some time, you can do it the other way around and indeed this is the way it should always be to me.

For instance, moving more because you feel like it, mentally and/or physically, rather than making yourself move until you feel okay about it.

Removing all negative, mistrustful ideas about food, eating and being fat. Let go of  your ideas and assumptions about the things and ways you like to eat and let your eating change in response to that. Keeping a conscious overview and using your instincts to guide you, listening always with kindness and care.

The key is to permanently de-stress yourself and your body, before during and after eating, train yourself to be calmer in your life in general and that will flow into everything, eating included. So you can look at it directly and/ or indirectly.

Do what you can do, what either works or feels manageable to you.

In general its usually okay to take an overview of your eating every now and again and think "um, I seem to have forgotten about this kind of food/food group", everyone gets into a rut overlooking good things at times.

Less respect for who?

A study is reported to have found those surveyed say they have lost more respect for smokers than they have of those who are fat.

Oh really? Why would that be?

What no-one cares to survey, evah, is how fat phobia and anti smoking fervour affects the respect fat people (and/ or smokers) have for haters. Especially watching the contorted minds and faces those choosing to be most afflicted.

When still hunkered in the collective hegemony of fat phobia, I used to think I had some idea what people believed, whether I agreed with them or not.

I've lost count of the times I've thought to myself-in the midst of this- "who are you people and what the hell do you really believe?"

Is this what we really are like underneath all the endless prompting and direction as to what to think? We are told this is the side to be on and this is what this side thinks?

Whilst no one's perfect, it's difficult to know what to think when people who claim being in favour of the death penalty makes you unspeakable tell fat people flat out that we should be allowed to die whenever possible.

Or how about those who claim to believe the world would be right if everyone just obeyed authority, those people should be treated right, they are responsible! Yet not only don't recognise an example of it before their eyes, they characterize it as lack of responsibility.

So what do these people actually believe in?

When people send endless death threats our way, robotic litanies of every disease possible written by fatness, do people really think the respect fat people have for them remains as before?

Because frankly, hearing how for two pins our lives are costing them a few mythical shekels doesn't exaclty make me think, there's a fine upstanding gentlewo/man, I really admire the balance of their ethical sensibilities.

I don't know how we're expected to take seriously being told that we don't care about our health when the idea that fat people can positively embrace health advice (that's supposed to make us slim) is a case that has to be made at all, ever.

Because it has been decided we must do or die(t) instead.

Do people really think about how they sound and look whilst going off like all ugly like that?

If fatz have the same respect folks they did whilst seeing themselves in a more punitive light, I'd have to question why.

We know what love is

I was going to leave the Weiner piece alone due to the amount of things wrong with it, but I can't help but be struck, predictably enough, by the title.

"Loving my body almost killed me" 

It was according to the author supposed to be "provocative", that's as maybe, but what it brought to the surface is the way abuse is constantly presented to especially fat women as love. It made me think of something like "My partner hurts me because/so *(trigger warning; even worse) they love me" or Orwellian doublethink.

I'd be lying if I said I feel particularly upset in the way I might have before, this explains an important part of why. Encouraging people to be open to abuse and to abuse themselves, is as immoral as it is stupid. The extent to which this mentality repels me is putting increasing distance between me and people like this who are just so out of touch from so much of fat people's experience.

The assumption that fat women are so unloved and not of this world that they do not know what that is or feels like and can therefore need to be told by a magazine is getting increasingly laughable. Let me try to explain something about basic ethics, if you ever reach this point, where hate=love etc., rethink as a matter of principle, okay?

If that doesn't occur, why would you think any fat person in their right mind needs to take you seriously? I am not asking for rigid agreement amongst those who are into fat/body acceptance, on the contrary,  I cannot understand why fat people ever feel we have to give up the basic norms of character and personality in order to fit into the box assigned by those who think they must define us.

Sticking rigidly to their caricature of what a fat person is they talk at that, not grasping how many of us have already gone unwittingly down the hate route from way aback and have had to claw our way back, because we were utterly mashed up, sick and tired of being sick and tired.

People like this do not speak to that, I don't care whether she is fat or thin, "body acceptance" or not. I do not claim mine is universal either, but it does reflect what so many of us have been through and how this has silently affected us and how we seek to redeem our situation, positively, without the permission of anyone but ourselves.

People like that are on our way back because our tolerance for this kind of thing has been, intellectually, emotionally, physically exhausted, many times over. Not just once around the mulberry bush, hemming and hawing whimsy.

I don't worry about "fat positive", are you kidding me? Just no longer attacking myself feels like enough of a holiday, that I could be miserable as heck and still feel like I was skipping around in comparison with before.

Having had an eating disorder, I'm sure this could have read more like a genuinely personal story and less like a public information stereotopia, telling clueless fatz how to find our arses.

Agree to disagree

A lot of the trouble I get into is due to the fact that I do not share the same operant premises as the general discourse. Even when I agree with starting points, I don't necessarily agree with conclusions and conclusions I accept for differing reasons to the main.

I didn't realise this was going to cause me problems as I figured

a) everyone's always going on about diversity

and;

b) some of the things I think are things that people used to think but stopped thinking because that was the way the land lay rather because they found fault with the underlying logic.

I'm a bit lazy/efficient that way. If I think something is right, I tend to keep right on thinking it unless I'm persuaded otherwise. I also like to know what I think, therefore I tend to have to translate what I hear into my own words because to me, understanding is not being able to repeat what you've been told, that's often the first step if you don't get something immediately.

But really that's recall, the precursor is memory, understanding is when you can shake it up a little and it still makes sense, when its become part of your brain.

When it comes to fat acceptance, I find that people seem to share assumptions with the mainstream of mass opinion and yes, fat phobes, that I just don't.

Even if you are in disagreement, you can share the same underlying premise. So for example, if someone said "Fat is unhealthful" and you responded with, "Fat is/can be healthy", we would seem to be in disagreement, however, the basis of assumption is exactly the same that health is actually pertinent.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't give a rats gonads whether fat is healthy or not when it comes to how you treat fat people.

Full stop; THE END.

I don't care if being fat makes your face fall off and your arms twist around the wrong way and slap you upside the back of the head, that has nothing to do with anyone's hating, which they had no excuse for and never will.

EVER.

This means that I often feel like I'm on the wrong end of side split in two. Taking a look at some of the themes that come up;

The shared underpinnings of the "health" issue is because awareness of risk can affect or stop bad behaviour or risky behaviour it is caused by lack of awareness of how risky it is.

I don't agree with the reversal, lack of awareness of risk is not the only cause of risky behaviour and even if it was, once you've told people the risks for decades as long as many were born and they try and try your remedy proving they've listen.

Get on the pony marked "eazy sanctimony" and ride out of town before you descend into denial of those efforts so you can continue to justify your on hating ways.

In your dreams.

I've always believed the most important reason people stop doing what ever is they have an effective way that works. Now you'd think that would be obvious wouldn't you?

It doesn't even matter how much you don' want to stop if you can find a way that's easy peasy for you. In that instance, it may matter how long you stop, but it will stop you better than all the will in the world with a route that is a useless cul de sac, as many of us have found out the hard way.

So whether fat is healthy or not has importance in terms of truthful representation of the variety of fat experience, but nothing whatsoever to do with whether stigma is acceptable it isn't ever and the dependents need to wean themselves off it, before we are ready to really give them a rude awakening.

We can do anything

Its giving "the oxygen of publicity" time again, I avoided Ms Weiner as at the time I wasn't feeling up to negotiating any trip wires between a lack of shared basis of argument, nor wishing to be part of any boo hoo inducing "backlash".

'Luckily' for moi, an actress called Mila Kunis decided to get silly well, she is manifesting the effects of calorie restriction.

losing the weight has entirely changed her views on body image.

Yeah, it'll do that. The widespread extension of fat hating rides off the back of this effect which is some kind of chemical change that alters or is itself an alteration in the way you think.

It would be unusual for someone not to be able to "lose weight" as that happens as part of our body using the calories we ingest to supply us with ready energy.

"Losing weight" has quietly replaced what was supposed to be the real purpose of dieting, to become and remain slim. It's an admission of defeat by fat fighters which they are trying to deny to themselves because they're ahem, better at accepting others imagined wrong doing than their own actual error.

It started off that if you expended energy you lost weight that would make slim and stay that way and that was that. Then we discovered rebound, we all thought that could be conquered with persistence, wrong again, but no matter we'll parlay that into something healthy lifestyles.

Dieting soft enough to keep up permanently plus exercise, alas that's too soft on fatness. Society's weight overall, has not reversed one iota since the advent of healthful lifestyling. So now its "lose weight.

Uhuh, okay, I'll see you after a visit to the loo. Well, it can mean anything.

Our erstwhile heroine decided to lose weight for a role in "Black Swan" this was somewhat of a revelation;

'I don’t think I ever fully realised what a human body is capable of doing

In case you're wondering, she wasn't talking about the the way billions of brain cells are packed into 3lbs of set porridge or the way thirty foot of digestive system is snugly bundled into your body cavity, she's referring to losing 20lbs.

'I believed I could do anything. I never for one moment thought that I couldn’t do it. I believe in hard work. In self-drive and self-worth.

Yeah, whatev's, that what we thought when we started, hey, do you think maybe we're slim and don't know it? I've been reading how you can "identify" as fat, whether you are or not and that if you do people shouldn't rain on your parade.

She basically does that really cute thing clueless fat fighters do, positing reporting fact as "negative" because we have to be super positive and pretend we don't know any better (oh how we tried) but wait, then she thinks that's why people 'fail' to "lose weight" become slim.

Thanks for having so much faith in us MK, now we know for sure we can take fat acceptance to a new level of consciousness, because WE CAN DO ANYTHING.

I knew that, no-one who spends years of their life trying to outwit biology the wrong way being hostilely directed from the outside, co-operating and being smacked down for it, whilst being taunted and insulted by all around empowered by authority and is still standing afterwards could ever be chopped liver.

Moral illumination

I think quite a lot about the overapping moral dimensions of how fat people are seen, noting its effects on my own views on morality and how I see morality assigned to people in other areas.

Everything from ends and means, to how mis treatment of oneself can become a moral question in itself rather than just a mere extension of autonomy and at what point. I never for instance thought of the implications of body hating's containing and therefore conveying a lot of misogyny in the past. That's a glaring oversight on my part, I tended to switch off when hearing about how society controls women's bodies through the ways they look, so I think my quest to be slim took me to where I wouldn't necessarily have gone otherwise in that sense.

The thing that's come to mind right now is more about the extent of our duty to support moral precepts when we are the baddies. How far is our sense of duty-if any- to that process of judgement? Has the experience of being labelled bad and offered a false route to redemption affected how you look at others who have broken (more directly) some other moral construct?

Does it depend on the extent of 'wrongdoing' ?

I'd be interested to hear how people like Katie, Shoshie and others of a religious or spiritual bent who may be more used to directly balancing and weighing up moral strictures feel about being cast as sinners. Has it informed, challenged or changed their views about that status and sin itself?

Do they feel a difference in their idea of themselves now they have the experience of being cast in that mould? Has it affected their sense of being (I'm assuming) "good people"?

I feel this has always impinged to some degree on my sense of goodness-although I assumed I was good underneath- and to some extent my sense of 'innocence', I mean that it actually took me a while to realise that when some event came on the news and folks were described as "innocent" that I in the same circumstances could be included in that.

I felt disconnected from the idea that I could ever be described thus in such an unqualified manner, is that odd?

It did to me when I finally realised the extent of this feeling, I don't think that all fat people feel this way at all.

There's also the question of being assigned the role of transgressor without directly deciding to break the rules. That is truly odd, like sinfulness has gathered around you, rather than you going to it. Some like to assign motives of rebellion to fatness, but the way fat people behave as a whole shows clearly that fat people are not rebellious by dint of being fat.

People who decide to break the rules deliberately tend to have a different mindset and behaviours. They've made a better study of authority and how it actually works  as opposed to how it claims to work, we are probably going through that in retrospect through changing our minds about how we want to be treated.

It's not that I rule out choice as part of the equation, more than it is not usually direct. I'm in favour of changing our understanding of choice from the narrow basis of elective direct choice we tend to couch it in.

All this also makes me wonder about keeping to the rules selflessly or expecting to be rewarded for doing so.

The medium is their message

I’ve always really liked the aphorism, "the medium is the message".

I think about it both ways turning it around and around in my mind-the message is the medium. I had it somewhere in my mind when thinking about how fat acceptance should write itself by via its own experience and not be sunk under a lot of irrelevant ideologies and positional conceits that are often don't add any tangible meaning to it.

Or seek to be no threat and fit into what other people have laid down.

McLuhan described it once as meaning;

The content of the medium is never the message, any medium, at all creates a new pattern, a new atmosphere a new environment of human perception, which works upon the whole man, it works upon the whole society. That is the message.

He was referring to mass media, I think it works for any message- the shape formed through a message expressing itself is the message it conveys.

Its not too hard to see this when you think of how people repeatedly recognising the futility of “proving” stuff to fat haters.

We all start from the rigid hegemony of what fat or thin people are like, fat and thin alike with differing consequences. All the terms of reference, of meaning are set to serve ideas of eating as an extension and measure of character and the conscious mind the creator of eating and through that the decider of weight. That's in the service of fat phobes.

It empowers them.

We don't get kicked around because we are repressed, or because we lack the capacity to speak about ourselves, we argue solely on terms based on us being defined by what erases our experience. Our assigned place is to be described by what we are supposed to be.

Drawing us in to play the same old game same rules trading on that common ground and reviving it in our minds with us in in the same old position of answering to the kangaroo court.

Its not what they’re asking “prove your healthy/fit/sane” etc., its the medium of us as supplicants, running around after hostile diktats.

Our views are formed in response to the same old medium of fat hating, rather than an assertion of our own.

Radical fat acceptance

Not my definition.

I rarely manage to lead with ideology about the way I see the world. Even when I find myself in agreement with people I tend to part company at some point along their arrival at a conclusion.

Which I may also disagree with.

I daresay I'm not alone in that we come together on what we can agree on as much as anything, although what we can't be allowed to get in the way.


I've been puzzled from the start by the cry of how “radical” fat acceptance is supposed to be as is. An "Uncle Tom" mentality is pretty ‘out there’ compared with a KKK one when it was the norm but really, who cares?

N.B. I'm using that to illustrate the point not to call anyone an UT or anything else, just in case that's a potential point of confusion.

An extreme view can be acknowledged without it defining yours, whether or not it is the norm. Its always annoyed me that something which should never have been in doubt is presented as ‘out there’ because its fat people reclaiming it, belatedly. Am I the only one uncomfortable with the idea that its "out there" for us to acknowledge we have a conscious awareness of ourselves, from the inside?

I see others under a lot more duress, oppression keep a hold of that, we do too in other areas the question is why such a difference with fatness can that really just be about other people's insistence? That this can be derailed but never replaced or switch off until we are?

Doesn't that haunt anyone else?

Reasons why don't get rid of that feeling completely.

I'm not wholly surprised people are putting up a fight against us regaining this aspect of ourselves, the primary strategy is to keep us tied to the same old thing, "answering" the same questions responding to the same points knowing as long as we are doing that we are still operating by their rules.

Our behaviour was/is such that they think they are in control of our thoughts with their "We can't tell fat people its okay to be fat". We agree insisting we were wholly forced by them, by their words.

A lot those fighting us are up to their necks in knowingly bad behaviour choosing to indulge themselves, opportunistically. We can see they feel badly, hence the repeated insistence that "its for our own good". Yet I hear plenty about how "well meaning" that is.

A lot of fat hating is on the defensive, if we recover ourselves we maybe asking them some questions they may find tough to answer. There's an element of denial, keeping us tied is easier than than that.

That won't change until people feel that is the losing side, we are all like that to some extent.

Many of us seek to reassure that fear (often) we don't want to go there we say, others are a bit more reticent because really who knows? No-one has any idea how people will feel when they've forgotten how to pander hate. Are we really sure every one's going to be so forgiving? It's not been for free there have been costs.

I'm beginning to think perhaps the cries of radical is the same restlessness I often feel, a sign others too recognise the mindnumbing circularity of an FA that will not stop congratulating itself by comparison to the low standards of wilfully ignorant hostility.

The whirligig does move overall a bit, not much mostly its just round and round, defined by its supposed "opposition" clearly that’s not what we came for, if so I’m glad because I was beginning to wonder.

What we need and want is a fat centric point of view that starts from us (which is the norm for all humanness) and is not merely opposing the same old worthless erasure of us and endless piles of straw.

Defined by our restored consciousness and understanding of things. We are as capable of being objective as anyone (or is that the worry?) and I'd have thought possibly more so as many are tired of being juked by falsehood.

I wouldn't say we are asking for dignity etc., I don't think you ask for those things do you?  Others get used to you not standing for anything less.

This is one area of deviation from the norm, we are not survivalists about to decamp for the woods on this particular question we differ from the mainstream. We have different/ no religion, I'm sure we can break away on this thing alone, without having a mental breakdown, we cannot be compared on this level as we know better.

We should be as wildly different from that ‘standard’ as is necessitated by our experience.

Often the tooing and froing between the mainstream mentality and an FA which chooses to be formed by it many feel it feels like being dragged endlessly to the same level. And that's way more of an insult to FA than it is haters.

So why does FA have to keep being turned into a gigantic response to straw? Rather than being about fat people's needs? For some, that's all about throwing off the burden of stigma, that isn't the same as people needing to be relieved of actual ailments and distress that is sometimes reflected in their overall functioning including in their size. Can we get over that because we are no longer care about performing for others?

Why are they more important than those submitting to weight loss surgeries NOW? Sorry, but something has to be done about that. The "keep trying" brigade have done untold harm to fat (and other) people's health. They've done it in the name of the current crusade they are milking. Let them deliver up solutions and clear up the mess they've helped to make of some people's lives and health.

They have been avoiding this from the start, its really hard for them to get outside the prison of calorie restriction they've built but they need to, just for once, can FA stop body shielding them? They should be made to deliver on the false promises they've made.

A need for intellectual purity is better served by shaping your own worldview rather than not and then tripping over fat people to fashion the appearance of it.

There are other reasons, knowledge and understanding of how we as humans actually function, if we'd known that would have known better, this crusade has advanced mis-using science egregiously, eschewing knowledge is no more an answer for anything than, "Let's not tell children about sex in case they start doing it" style arguments. Ignorance is never an answer.

I'd also like to say something else.

If you think I've made an error or a mistake or you want me to/ think I should clarify something I've written here (or elsewhere) there's the comments or an e-mail button on my profile, use them, I'll do my best. If the latter doesn't work, let me know in the comments if necessary (stating if you don't want me to publish).

You can tweet me, if you prefer the button's on the side there.

I think I've been around long enough for people to have some understanding of me, don't assume you're so easy for me to read or that any tolerance is one way. I recognise I require that, I extend it too. I sure there are limits on both sides. If you feel I've reached that, let me know.