Doing my usual hiatus thing amongst other stuff for now.
Anyhoo, (via Bri) this is what I mean when I say thin(ner) women must reclaim their bodies from the (mis) use they've been put too. What's really being sold here is not 'skinniness' but lifestyle/proto anorexia more than anything.
We know this, for instance the lack of people becoming skinny not only makes no difference in curtailing or ending its influence, it actually seems to increase it.
On one side aspire to thin bods on the other aspire not to be fat creating a lovely pincer movement.
Charming.
People are thin, by their physical nature and inclination. Some may live by HAES, that is they maintain what's termed a healthy lifestyle for their sense of well being and health. Perhaps some do manage their intake somewhat as do many of other weights on a varying scale.
Unless they are restricting to wastage and ill health, they should not have to put up with being symbols of semi-starvation and pain merely because their bodies are repeatedly associated with this by commercial and other interests.
We should be careful to refute it using their bodies to symbolize what we are refuting, accepting the bait and ignoring the switch occuring. It is not necessary, their bodies are not the problem anymore than fat bodies. It is the underlying philospohy that is the problem.
Teaching young peole especially that they should abuse themselves to become acceptable, or even that they need to earn acceptibility.
If slimmer women also refute this, it will help us all to remember bodies are selves, not aspirations or cautionary tales. They need to assert the truth of their bodies the same as fat people are in the process of doing, talking about themselves holistically and not allowing this view of their bodies to be the only ones.
As we know fatness cannot be conflated with 'overeating' calories in/out is a misdirection, which is why following it creates such collateral and other damage. That also means that skinnies or (death thinz, ha, ha) aren't necessarily starving either, capicse?
To say either one is to use ci/co as your default position and defines purely weight as the outcome of an eating disorder and calorie manipulation-too much or too little. Apart from the ideal BMI of 18.5-25 and they should be afraid of becoming fat and join in to 'prevent' it.
We need to critique what is really being sold, ideology of weight loss. Remember saying thin bodies are starved is the same as saying fat bodies are overfed, you cannot have one without the other and the absence of stereotype in one, absents it in the other.
Don't we not know any thin people? Are they all swoony from lack of energy, exercising for hours a day nibbling on salads? Are there enough hours in the day for them to do a commensurate amount of exercise more than what many fatz have done only to remain fat?
I have stated time and again, weight loss is not the same as calorie manipulation, the latter is supposed to be the former but clearly cannot be as perverse as that is to the literal minded.
That means weight loss is not inherently dysfunctional that's calorie manipulation, even on the occasions that it doesn't particularly hurt.It is the nature of it, versus the response and design of the human body.
Thin bodies are created by the unique interplay between genes and circumstance the same as any other size.
Don't make the mistake of being a willing recipient to the lie of bodies as conflated with stereotypes of behaviour and eating as you are automatically doing the same to your own.
Whatever thinner women think of FA, we all need to unite in an unofficial alliance to tell certain interests that our bodies are not for sale. They cannot just stereotype them and use them to symbolize anything they please, leaving us with the fall out of mutual and self alienation. That "speech" is not free to those paying for it.
See you after this one.
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Monday, 21 March 2011
Bullying
I was surprised by my reaction to the Casey Heynes incident. The violent ending sickened me. As much as that was the sight of two youths stuck acting out a scene set up mainly by the wills of those not present.
One ended up being slammed very hard into the concrete reality of consequence unlike those who've helped set this up. Literally and metaphorically, his world was turned upside down as bully became victim and victim became avenger.
The only people who 'deserve' that more are those who think mob rule is just a part of the toolkit to pursue their own ends however deranged. Convincing themselves it is for the good of others to disconnecting the obstacle of conscience.
The one who found out that his quarry was as human as himself and could like himself be pushed to a point where the normal rules don't apply was of course Ritchard Gale, the smaller boy in the video. The other boy whose fear and fury he was unfortunate enough to detonate was Casey Heynes.
The games society plays often comes out in less conditioned minds, in this case children, but not only. We are oh so shocked of course and we utter some mindless defence about how "children are so cruel" etc.,
Children don't tend to know enough yet unseasoned (/deadened) by the acceptance of a critical mass of hurdles which obscure motives or finesse re/actions. The gaps they slip through and the ways they do, break through our sense of order.
They are still learning.
These two are the ones who got hurt both of them, Casey over a longer term and Ritchard over the shorter term, for now. Even if this was a private matter this will stay with him into the future would you swap with either?
The latter was lucky to escape with the damage he sustained, he looked very shaken, possibly concussed/winded if the wrong part of him bore the impact that would have written a more serious ending and who would have payed for that?
I don't think its too much to say this is a pretty accurate microcosm of what's going on with fat people generally. We can see who represents us but also who represents the common or garden folks on the 'other side. Both manipulated by the same distant hands and left to fight it out amongst and police each rather than either or together confronting those who would wish to set people against each other.
It illustrates some of the complexity part of it the way victim/victor are flipsides of one another and how the former can erase and reduce you. The shock that anyone could be 'angry' enough to taunt, hit or hurt you is something that is so inexplicable, that part of you can remain frozen in that initial shock for there on out.
What the bullied position can hide is your thinking as well as who you are, Casey clearly a bright and articulate boy didn't hit back before just out of fear, but out of awareness of his own growing strength and wariness/unsureness about that, in other words, ethics. Those who can't stand to be hurt often cannot stand to hurt others, equally.
That can place them in a position of withdrawing, which can draw out the bully in ourselves into advance, merely by the absence of a perceptible counter force. Often its a question of how soon that effect happens to us all. This cycle can continue its dynamic and only when the reasoning brain can be overcome by something more primeval and direct is it arrested.
Those who speak fatuously of the "time bomb of obesity" need to understand this is a real ticking time bomb they might want to consider when they insist laughably that its time to get tough with fat people. They might want to consider what reaction that leaves to having one too many boundaries overridden.
Because when you push beyond another then another this little vignette sums up your course. I don't necessarily mean violence, hopefully its more reassertion of selfhood after being inveigled into partial surrender of it.
Then too is the shakedown of all the feelings repressed in acquiescence to the crusade possibly along with any force that has liberated them. Something we all know phobes have a low tolerance for as it forces them into contact with their less noble qualities.
They resent both this and being encouraged to go this far by their 'betters', something fatz who assume any potential backlash against the crusade managers will come purely from fatz.
I think people are right consider whether the response was disproportionate, it's true, he could have assumed a more assertive stance and warned him to back off. But Casey himself has spoken perceptively about this, he knew things got ahead of him and mixed in with this explosive rebound reaction was the fear garnered along the way to it. Those seeking to test people's limits should factor that in under risk.
When you play with people beyond their capacity to tolerate it what you find may be as much of a shock to them as you and not wishing to find out may be what's keeping you 'safe' more than simple fear. Feelings remain unexplored for a reason. Beyond past abuses there was being hit squarely in the face, more threatening than being hit lower down somehow, even if if it is less painful.
The final straw was the little dance by the smaller boy, that complacency left an opportunity for a surprise counter attack. A person can tolerate in sadness what they cannot in being toyed with.
The balance of power shifts from one to the other, in an instant.
The reaction of hero of a revenge fantasy is fascinating. It confirms the suspicion that a lot of haters underneath their bluff and bluster are desperate for fat people to reassert boundaries that have been breached in different ways by all.
And problematic as the hero worshipping is aside, there is something repellent about a lonely person gaining 'friends' via that narrative.
Those who believe in constantly appealing to the pity of those who've willfully taken the bully route should remember that the fat boy became someone a lot of people could identify with. Because violence aside, he became present again when he re took his ground.
One ended up being slammed very hard into the concrete reality of consequence unlike those who've helped set this up. Literally and metaphorically, his world was turned upside down as bully became victim and victim became avenger.
The only people who 'deserve' that more are those who think mob rule is just a part of the toolkit to pursue their own ends however deranged. Convincing themselves it is for the good of others to disconnecting the obstacle of conscience.
The one who found out that his quarry was as human as himself and could like himself be pushed to a point where the normal rules don't apply was of course Ritchard Gale, the smaller boy in the video. The other boy whose fear and fury he was unfortunate enough to detonate was Casey Heynes.
The games society plays often comes out in less conditioned minds, in this case children, but not only. We are oh so shocked of course and we utter some mindless defence about how "children are so cruel" etc.,
Children don't tend to know enough yet unseasoned (/deadened) by the acceptance of a critical mass of hurdles which obscure motives or finesse re/actions. The gaps they slip through and the ways they do, break through our sense of order.
They are still learning.
These two are the ones who got hurt both of them, Casey over a longer term and Ritchard over the shorter term, for now. Even if this was a private matter this will stay with him into the future would you swap with either?
The latter was lucky to escape with the damage he sustained, he looked very shaken, possibly concussed/winded if the wrong part of him bore the impact that would have written a more serious ending and who would have payed for that?
I don't think its too much to say this is a pretty accurate microcosm of what's going on with fat people generally. We can see who represents us but also who represents the common or garden folks on the 'other side. Both manipulated by the same distant hands and left to fight it out amongst and police each rather than either or together confronting those who would wish to set people against each other.
It illustrates some of the complexity part of it the way victim/victor are flipsides of one another and how the former can erase and reduce you. The shock that anyone could be 'angry' enough to taunt, hit or hurt you is something that is so inexplicable, that part of you can remain frozen in that initial shock for there on out.
What the bullied position can hide is your thinking as well as who you are, Casey clearly a bright and articulate boy didn't hit back before just out of fear, but out of awareness of his own growing strength and wariness/unsureness about that, in other words, ethics. Those who can't stand to be hurt often cannot stand to hurt others, equally.
That can place them in a position of withdrawing, which can draw out the bully in ourselves into advance, merely by the absence of a perceptible counter force. Often its a question of how soon that effect happens to us all. This cycle can continue its dynamic and only when the reasoning brain can be overcome by something more primeval and direct is it arrested.
Those who speak fatuously of the "time bomb of obesity" need to understand this is a real ticking time bomb they might want to consider when they insist laughably that its time to get tough with fat people. They might want to consider what reaction that leaves to having one too many boundaries overridden.
Because when you push beyond another then another this little vignette sums up your course. I don't necessarily mean violence, hopefully its more reassertion of selfhood after being inveigled into partial surrender of it.
Then too is the shakedown of all the feelings repressed in acquiescence to the crusade possibly along with any force that has liberated them. Something we all know phobes have a low tolerance for as it forces them into contact with their less noble qualities.
They resent both this and being encouraged to go this far by their 'betters', something fatz who assume any potential backlash against the crusade managers will come purely from fatz.
I think people are right consider whether the response was disproportionate, it's true, he could have assumed a more assertive stance and warned him to back off. But Casey himself has spoken perceptively about this, he knew things got ahead of him and mixed in with this explosive rebound reaction was the fear garnered along the way to it. Those seeking to test people's limits should factor that in under risk.
When you play with people beyond their capacity to tolerate it what you find may be as much of a shock to them as you and not wishing to find out may be what's keeping you 'safe' more than simple fear. Feelings remain unexplored for a reason. Beyond past abuses there was being hit squarely in the face, more threatening than being hit lower down somehow, even if if it is less painful.
The final straw was the little dance by the smaller boy, that complacency left an opportunity for a surprise counter attack. A person can tolerate in sadness what they cannot in being toyed with.
The balance of power shifts from one to the other, in an instant.
The reaction of hero of a revenge fantasy is fascinating. It confirms the suspicion that a lot of haters underneath their bluff and bluster are desperate for fat people to reassert boundaries that have been breached in different ways by all.
And problematic as the hero worshipping is aside, there is something repellent about a lonely person gaining 'friends' via that narrative.
Those who believe in constantly appealing to the pity of those who've willfully taken the bully route should remember that the fat boy became someone a lot of people could identify with. Because violence aside, he became present again when he re took his ground.
Saturday, 19 March 2011
Fat acceptance all the way along
I started this as a response as I wasn't sure how long it would be, I decided to bring it here;
Its about the energy and potency of fat phobia and hating. This has by that potency of investment spilled out onto virtually everybody. Therefore excluding anyone from participating in an honest embrace of whatever sense of plumpness/chubbiness/fatness they relate to is essentially self defeating.
It just shuts off a channel where that potency can remain intact to be re-invested in the whole.
I really find this sense of erasure by the mere presence of someone else's body to be a hangover of being shamed by said body type. Slimmer people need to wake up to the fact that going along with the aggrandizing of their own bodies has turned them into a living reproach of other bodies, it has depersonalized their own bodies, differently.
So called thin privilege does not come for free. They too need to reclaim their own bodies for themselves like fat people. Part of that is to no longer be afraid of or hate fat/ness, in others or perceived/ feared in themselves.
Needing to reclaim their bodies from what may have seemed to be a position of strength but was only relatively so. A less weak position rather than a strong one.
Each body must be capable of being taken in its own right and draw its own rules not just exist in comparison, positive or negative with others.
That goes against what fat hating teaches us to do-to compare bodies, to our own detriment or praise rather than from a self accepting curiosity or celebration of a varieties of quality or type. Nobody's body should be seen as a cipher of 'purity' to insult or browbeat another's, in the same way fat bodies should not be a cipher for 'impurity' or badness to create fear or hostility of becoming so in fat or thin alike.
We can delight in our differences in ways that don't have to annihilate anybody. If we feel that the mere presence of someone thinner does then we have to push on and find ways to work through that. It is showing up that habit of comparison and how automatic it has become.
That's why I love this post because it suggests what is possible when you no longer see your body through hostile gaze. Other bodies no longer assault or belittle your own and you can appreciate them as they are.
Fat acceptance spaces are great in that they enable us to create experiences where we start that process of exploring and working through how we feel. We are letting our guard down by doing this and this can cause things to sting or trigger us in ways that may not when we have our defences up in the world.Where our learned numbness of survival and hurt is in play.
I don't blame people for feeling upset and angry about what feels like a dominant and privileged body pushing out their own belittled one. But that is the shame or self consciousness of what we seek to throw off inside ourselves and out.
FA can extend to learn not to allow those rules to reign in the fatsphere by seeing those bodies in their own right, rather than as they are usually presented to us. To develop a new relationship with them as well as our own. Just as thinner people need to develop a new relationship with theirs and ours that is not based on superiority but on acceptance of the validity of all.
Only approving your body because it is assigned as 'better' also means that it is not good enough as it is, it has to be made into 'better' before it can be worthy. Think about what that means. That is hidden at least in part because of the constant comparison with negatively rendered fatter bodies. It is a loss made to look like a win. Ironically it seems increasingly so as fat bodies are hated more which then encourages increased hatred of fatness. It is a vicious cycle of its own.
I'm afraid this is the deal a lot of thinner people have bought into. A little bit of fellow feeling for fatz could have saved them from it, that is why some of them keep trying to make equivalent what is not. They think they can avoid it that way.
We have all done things to be ashamed of to varying degrees, we all have to try get over that. We all are facing this, fat people too. We are not 'winning by victimhood' so trying to make out that thinz hurt in the same way is not the response needed.
What is required is for thinz to want to reclaim their bodies from an illusory 'pedestal'. The question for me is are you up for that? Do you feel like you are giving up something?
That has to be worked through because you are not. Respect and positive rapport with your body cannot be surpassed nor equaled, certainly not by any relative 'privilege' that brings with it anxiety and fear that you may become what you most fear.
It's similar in a way to smaller fatz and larger fatz dealing with your position in things without feeling your experience is belittled or erased merely by being contextualized.
I agree that we live in a society that teaches even thin women to think of themselves as fat.....I think this is the key theme here, I've gone on record as having no truck with any false equivalency or attempts to assuage guilt about participating in fat hating by trying to shut out fat people's full voice but for me, this is something else.
Its about the energy and potency of fat phobia and hating. This has by that potency of investment spilled out onto virtually everybody. Therefore excluding anyone from participating in an honest embrace of whatever sense of plumpness/chubbiness/fatness they relate to is essentially self defeating.
It just shuts off a channel where that potency can remain intact to be re-invested in the whole.
I really find this sense of erasure by the mere presence of someone else's body to be a hangover of being shamed by said body type. Slimmer people need to wake up to the fact that going along with the aggrandizing of their own bodies has turned them into a living reproach of other bodies, it has depersonalized their own bodies, differently.
So called thin privilege does not come for free. They too need to reclaim their own bodies for themselves like fat people. Part of that is to no longer be afraid of or hate fat/ness, in others or perceived/ feared in themselves.
Needing to reclaim their bodies from what may have seemed to be a position of strength but was only relatively so. A less weak position rather than a strong one.
Each body must be capable of being taken in its own right and draw its own rules not just exist in comparison, positive or negative with others.
That goes against what fat hating teaches us to do-to compare bodies, to our own detriment or praise rather than from a self accepting curiosity or celebration of a varieties of quality or type. Nobody's body should be seen as a cipher of 'purity' to insult or browbeat another's, in the same way fat bodies should not be a cipher for 'impurity' or badness to create fear or hostility of becoming so in fat or thin alike.
We can delight in our differences in ways that don't have to annihilate anybody. If we feel that the mere presence of someone thinner does then we have to push on and find ways to work through that. It is showing up that habit of comparison and how automatic it has become.
That's why I love this post because it suggests what is possible when you no longer see your body through hostile gaze. Other bodies no longer assault or belittle your own and you can appreciate them as they are.
Fat acceptance spaces are great in that they enable us to create experiences where we start that process of exploring and working through how we feel. We are letting our guard down by doing this and this can cause things to sting or trigger us in ways that may not when we have our defences up in the world.Where our learned numbness of survival and hurt is in play.
I don't blame people for feeling upset and angry about what feels like a dominant and privileged body pushing out their own belittled one. But that is the shame or self consciousness of what we seek to throw off inside ourselves and out.
FA can extend to learn not to allow those rules to reign in the fatsphere by seeing those bodies in their own right, rather than as they are usually presented to us. To develop a new relationship with them as well as our own. Just as thinner people need to develop a new relationship with theirs and ours that is not based on superiority but on acceptance of the validity of all.
Only approving your body because it is assigned as 'better' also means that it is not good enough as it is, it has to be made into 'better' before it can be worthy. Think about what that means. That is hidden at least in part because of the constant comparison with negatively rendered fatter bodies. It is a loss made to look like a win. Ironically it seems increasingly so as fat bodies are hated more which then encourages increased hatred of fatness. It is a vicious cycle of its own.
I'm afraid this is the deal a lot of thinner people have bought into. A little bit of fellow feeling for fatz could have saved them from it, that is why some of them keep trying to make equivalent what is not. They think they can avoid it that way.
We have all done things to be ashamed of to varying degrees, we all have to try get over that. We all are facing this, fat people too. We are not 'winning by victimhood' so trying to make out that thinz hurt in the same way is not the response needed.
What is required is for thinz to want to reclaim their bodies from an illusory 'pedestal'. The question for me is are you up for that? Do you feel like you are giving up something?
That has to be worked through because you are not. Respect and positive rapport with your body cannot be surpassed nor equaled, certainly not by any relative 'privilege' that brings with it anxiety and fear that you may become what you most fear.
It's similar in a way to smaller fatz and larger fatz dealing with your position in things without feeling your experience is belittled or erased merely by being contextualized.
Friday, 18 March 2011
Step away from the fat kids, Michelle
Seriously, back off. Under the pressure of her campaign against childhood obesity her mind appears to have been taken to a new low.
Fat children are helping to destroy the US economy?
And to think fatz are called (((((paranoid)))))
Those people who insist on going on like Martin Luther Fatz going about the nobility of the person underneath the virulent irrationality yakka yak, really need to get a grip on themselves.
Well meaning is as well meaning does. And I'm sure MO is well brought up enough by her charmant mother (and late father) to know that means its not what you do, but also how you do it that matters.
She speaks approvingly of their influence on her and her brother;
My emphasis.
Every child indeed, unlike this;
I don't give a flying fig if hating fat children senseless cured cancer if anything good can be achieved, it can be achieved in a good way just as easily as bad one, it depends on the way your mind is cast on it.
And what about the fact that POC/ working class children are fingered as disproportionately fat? Do they really need the first lady talking things up in this way, now attacking them as drags on productivity present and future?
There is a background to this of the black/POC middle classes feeling able to say certain things using obesity as a cover for what would be given greater scrutiny otherwise-as ever with this trojan horse crusade of pointless blame.
The is complete diversity of unity on that one, doesn't it make you feel all warm inside?
It doesn't matter what people's faults may or may not be the crusade cannot help because the hatred turns into a self perpetuating momentum with it as the primary object. Other righteous things which can be achieved without it, get pushed out.
I remember when Barack Obama was campaigning and he got a bit 'down home' with a crowd of (mainly) black people, telling them in effect that they need to lay off the fried chicken if they wish to succeed in shattering the paradigm of seeing themselves only through the lens hostile/uncomprehending eyes fused onto their own.
Sorry, did I write that out loud? I meant to say, if they wish to get healthy/bourgie/ acceptable. Even if he and other feel black people need to look at their diets, he has to recognise that they and other POC/ working class people know the obesity campaign;
a) ignores and/ or denigrates them their needs such as the physical energy they use in their work.
b) has a distinctly off putting theme of cultural dissemination of certain values (assumed to be socially improving rather than a product of being and a support to being MC), no1 anorexia as a lifestyle. How would that make sense when you're always pushing yourself hard?
Yet seeks to c) demoralise any seeking to try and inch up the income/ class ladder, by diverting their time and energy into the gym, as well as making them feel lowly for not being any bit more than thin.
The narrative of "I have so much more energy since I've gone to the gym" doesn't necessarily work if you use up a lot of energy in your daily life.
I'm not against physicality, on the contrary, I come from a culture where movement is virtually an extension of speech.
I feel like you talk with your body, feeling disinclined to move-if there is no physical impediment- is like losing your voice.
Being told to keep talking when you've been shouting at the top of your lungs all day and want only to whisper or be quiet by someone whose whispered all day in an sitting around in an office who needs to shout and bawl to release a build up of nervous tension. Well, it hardly smacks of tailored or unbiased 'advice', when some need restoration others invigoration.
This doesn't go with the burn calorie frame because it doesn't recognise movement as a healer only as an energy waster. Low income folks flogging their guts out making minimum wage a living wage also disprove 'active lifestyle' shibboleths about 'being active'=healthy and slim, to the extent that they are erased as 'inactive'.
People don't even bother to check out the validity of their ASSumptions when they manage the picture is not so conforming as phobes want.
What is bad about this speech, and I sincerely hope its a blip and either her innate good sense or some adviser/factotum will pull her from the precipice, is not so much what it says, although that is enough, its that her mind is showing the signs of this obesity fighting mental implosion of reason that is so unnerving.
I'll say that because I wish to bend over backward to avoid trading in any cod mental diagnosis, but I have seen this happen time and again where any one declaring war on the adipose cell as personnified by fat people child and adult alike reaches a point where their brain turns.
Like the momentum of 'fighting fat' causes the mind to cross a mental line a kind of reductio ad absurdum descends and they can no longer see any sense worth a damn and lose all perspective that they are talking about human beings like themselves. Or in this case, like their own children.
Jamie Oliver springs to mind.
What is upsetting is it never matters how nice and well balanced the person is or how well they start off.
I say this without mirth, it is always sad to see this happen and I've never seen anyone who doesn't if they go at 'anti obesity' hard enough. I feel I need to stage an intervention here because I would not like her mind to go the way of other fat fighters as it is an insult to intelligence of any kind.
Fat children are helping to destroy the US economy?
And to think fatz are called (((((paranoid)))))
Those people who insist on going on like Martin Luther Fatz going about the nobility of the person underneath the virulent irrationality yakka yak, really need to get a grip on themselves.
Well meaning is as well meaning does. And I'm sure MO is well brought up enough by her charmant mother (and late father) to know that means its not what you do, but also how you do it that matters.
She speaks approvingly of their influence on her and her brother;
"I always felt that my father and my mother were unconditionally rooting for me. And kids need that. Looking back that played such a huge role in building confidence in me and my brother very early. Whether we succeeded or failed, we had two people who lifted us up and supported us....."
My emphasis.
Every child indeed, unlike this;
Childhood obesity is affecting your workforces too – obese children are less healthy and miss more school on average,” leading to more parental tardiness and absenteeism at businesses in their communities, she said. “When we talk about childhood obesity we are talking about the workforce you are trying to build, businesses you are trying to attract, budgets you are trying to balance everyday,” Obama said warning that businesses may be reluctant to invest and build in communities with an unhealthy future workforce.
I don't give a flying fig if hating fat children senseless cured cancer if anything good can be achieved, it can be achieved in a good way just as easily as bad one, it depends on the way your mind is cast on it.
And what about the fact that POC/ working class children are fingered as disproportionately fat? Do they really need the first lady talking things up in this way, now attacking them as drags on productivity present and future?
There is a background to this of the black/POC middle classes feeling able to say certain things using obesity as a cover for what would be given greater scrutiny otherwise-as ever with this trojan horse crusade of pointless blame.
The is complete diversity of unity on that one, doesn't it make you feel all warm inside?
It doesn't matter what people's faults may or may not be the crusade cannot help because the hatred turns into a self perpetuating momentum with it as the primary object. Other righteous things which can be achieved without it, get pushed out.
I remember when Barack Obama was campaigning and he got a bit 'down home' with a crowd of (mainly) black people, telling them in effect that they need to lay off the fried chicken if they wish to succeed in shattering the paradigm of seeing themselves only through the lens hostile/uncomprehending eyes fused onto their own.
Sorry, did I write that out loud? I meant to say, if they wish to get healthy/bourgie/ acceptable. Even if he and other feel black people need to look at their diets, he has to recognise that they and other POC/ working class people know the obesity campaign;
a) ignores and/ or denigrates them their needs such as the physical energy they use in their work.
b) has a distinctly off putting theme of cultural dissemination of certain values (assumed to be socially improving rather than a product of being and a support to being MC), no1 anorexia as a lifestyle. How would that make sense when you're always pushing yourself hard?
Yet seeks to c) demoralise any seeking to try and inch up the income/ class ladder, by diverting their time and energy into the gym, as well as making them feel lowly for not being any bit more than thin.
The narrative of "I have so much more energy since I've gone to the gym" doesn't necessarily work if you use up a lot of energy in your daily life.
I'm not against physicality, on the contrary, I come from a culture where movement is virtually an extension of speech.
I feel like you talk with your body, feeling disinclined to move-if there is no physical impediment- is like losing your voice.
Being told to keep talking when you've been shouting at the top of your lungs all day and want only to whisper or be quiet by someone whose whispered all day in an sitting around in an office who needs to shout and bawl to release a build up of nervous tension. Well, it hardly smacks of tailored or unbiased 'advice', when some need restoration others invigoration.
This doesn't go with the burn calorie frame because it doesn't recognise movement as a healer only as an energy waster. Low income folks flogging their guts out making minimum wage a living wage also disprove 'active lifestyle' shibboleths about 'being active'=healthy and slim, to the extent that they are erased as 'inactive'.
People don't even bother to check out the validity of their ASSumptions when they manage the picture is not so conforming as phobes want.
What is bad about this speech, and I sincerely hope its a blip and either her innate good sense or some adviser/factotum will pull her from the precipice, is not so much what it says, although that is enough, its that her mind is showing the signs of this obesity fighting mental implosion of reason that is so unnerving.
I'll say that because I wish to bend over backward to avoid trading in any cod mental diagnosis, but I have seen this happen time and again where any one declaring war on the adipose cell as personnified by fat people child and adult alike reaches a point where their brain turns.
Like the momentum of 'fighting fat' causes the mind to cross a mental line a kind of reductio ad absurdum descends and they can no longer see any sense worth a damn and lose all perspective that they are talking about human beings like themselves. Or in this case, like their own children.
Jamie Oliver springs to mind.
What is upsetting is it never matters how nice and well balanced the person is or how well they start off.
I say this without mirth, it is always sad to see this happen and I've never seen anyone who doesn't if they go at 'anti obesity' hard enough. I feel I need to stage an intervention here because I would not like her mind to go the way of other fat fighters as it is an insult to intelligence of any kind.
Your weight is the whole of you
Fleeing the mainstream view of weight is not easy. We have all been formed by it to some degree, alternatives have slowly been erased or sidelined by its need to re-create things to serve it and in its own image. It is difficult to escape it whilst it still forms the basis of your own understanding too.
At the same time, trying to find out and express a new basis of seeing which reflects your own understanding and experience.
The basic premise we've been taught is control of energy=control of weight. Everything about diet lore has to serve it, because reality doesn't. It created this hegemony by using the former necessity to replace reality.
That's why we fear extremists and extremism, its impulse has to be to re-create reality in its own image, which suits few if any or it is meaningless. That is the truth of the crusade rhetoric and why restoration of truth, destroys it. And why it must be resistant to logic, it is too narrow and inflexible to absorb it.
The first thing is it detaches weight from self, setting up a false view that weight is detachable. We hear an example of this when people say "What about fat people's excess baggage? They should be charged for that, as I'm charged for any extra weight in my luggage."
This is a bit like calling yourself your body as if the latter is a possession owned by the essence of you floating around in it like a little pixie made of air.
Truth is, your weight is yourself it is the whole of you and indivisible from self, no matter your feelings about that overall size.
By that, I'm not talking essentialism, saying that your weight is destiny or has to be, I'm saying whatever you want for yourself/body, it will be with the whole of your self/ your weight that it will make it happen.
It cannot be you as a slim person with excess baggage that is just a metaphor of the idea that weight is an extension of your character which you can jettison at will.
Even if you could change or control your weight, that metaphor would still be wrong. Whether fatness is, sometimes or wholly a process/es of some kind, it is clear that it would have to be the whole working together.
The same way weight is gained.
It is of course also true of our feelings especially our most heightened emotions good or bad, something our cultures do not allow for. But the fact that they are using us to tentatively ignore this at arms length, indicates that is hypocritical BS.
So no fatz needs to be on board with it, unless they want to be.
So what does it mean to think of weight as the whole self, rather than a jerry built extension attached to the real you?
I'm not sure I know, I'm just taking the plunge.
At the same time, trying to find out and express a new basis of seeing which reflects your own understanding and experience.
The basic premise we've been taught is control of energy=control of weight. Everything about diet lore has to serve it, because reality doesn't. It created this hegemony by using the former necessity to replace reality.
That's why we fear extremists and extremism, its impulse has to be to re-create reality in its own image, which suits few if any or it is meaningless. That is the truth of the crusade rhetoric and why restoration of truth, destroys it. And why it must be resistant to logic, it is too narrow and inflexible to absorb it.
The first thing is it detaches weight from self, setting up a false view that weight is detachable. We hear an example of this when people say "What about fat people's excess baggage? They should be charged for that, as I'm charged for any extra weight in my luggage."
This is a bit like calling yourself your body as if the latter is a possession owned by the essence of you floating around in it like a little pixie made of air.
Truth is, your weight is yourself it is the whole of you and indivisible from self, no matter your feelings about that overall size.
By that, I'm not talking essentialism, saying that your weight is destiny or has to be, I'm saying whatever you want for yourself/body, it will be with the whole of your self/ your weight that it will make it happen.
It cannot be you as a slim person with excess baggage that is just a metaphor of the idea that weight is an extension of your character which you can jettison at will.
Even if you could change or control your weight, that metaphor would still be wrong. Whether fatness is, sometimes or wholly a process/es of some kind, it is clear that it would have to be the whole working together.
The same way weight is gained.
It is of course also true of our feelings especially our most heightened emotions good or bad, something our cultures do not allow for. But the fact that they are using us to tentatively ignore this at arms length, indicates that is hypocritical BS.
So no fatz needs to be on board with it, unless they want to be.
So what does it mean to think of weight as the whole self, rather than a jerry built extension attached to the real you?
I'm not sure I know, I'm just taking the plunge.
Fatshion
I have to say, I've little interest in clothes. This wasn't always so. Way back I was really big on self expression through clothes. Then as time continued, I found myself increasingly caught between my vision of a slim canvass that I could never make manifest and the reality of what was available to wannabe fat style icons.
The implosion came when I threw a strop and dropped out in a tizz, I just couldn't deal with this anymore.
I tell you this hardly interesting little tale is to explain how surprising it is that even though my style impulse continues to languish in oblivion (as far as gladrags goes) I still find the fatshion scene, specifically on tumblr to be a compelling and moving view.
It's not that I feel to go and check in with any regularity, as I do with the wordy fatsphere but when ever I do for some reason or other, its arresting.
It seems more accessible and more effortlessly diverse than the wordysphere although dealing with images will bring that out more clearly there does appear to be a greater representation of fatz of all varieties.
It sets up an alternative view, rather than reacting to a redundant one. It looks at the fat body and deals with stuff through that. It doesn't so much bypass the "oppression narrative", but by looking at it looks forward, rather than looking back at fat hate and trying to tunnel out with 'evidence' of what has no basis above the desire to hate, full stop.
It deals directly with peeling off the layers of fat phobia by coming to terms with the vision ahead.
The equivalent of what a lot of the wordysphere does imposed on to fatshion, would be to set it in a clothes store that only went up to a size 14 and then attempted to use its stock to explain why this is not good for sizes above.
It just creates for fatz using our experiences to write fat acceptance. In doing so it restores more of the vibrancy and character we've lost to the annihilation and erasure of the crusade.
In a way its an embodyment of the normal eating/intuitive eating process where you bypass a mind overloaded with unbalancing negativity and go straight into setting up a positive realitionship with food by doing so establish a new positive loop.
Rather than battling old negative ones within the terms set by that negativity. Giving the chance for it to be at least be tamed by that abandonment and withdrawal of energy.
My combative side, which dislikes a situation where there is only one point of view pretending to be the only one possible when it is not. Even more when it splits itself in two and assigns a bit to those who oppose it because it beliefs that is its privilege.
Then claims this is a "debate" because it is rightly ashamed of its own hating view, like spraying perfume on a turd.
Engaging with it as if it is anything but what it is enobles it and allows it to continue to set our agenda, in its own absence, power indeed.
Power it does not deserve on any level.
The proof of that is fat people referencing themselves and the normalcy of that for all people, in doing so, they reclaim it for themselves as a matter of course.
The implosion came when I threw a strop and dropped out in a tizz, I just couldn't deal with this anymore.
I tell you this hardly interesting little tale is to explain how surprising it is that even though my style impulse continues to languish in oblivion (as far as gladrags goes) I still find the fatshion scene, specifically on tumblr to be a compelling and moving view.
It's not that I feel to go and check in with any regularity, as I do with the wordy fatsphere but when ever I do for some reason or other, its arresting.
It seems more accessible and more effortlessly diverse than the wordysphere although dealing with images will bring that out more clearly there does appear to be a greater representation of fatz of all varieties.
It sets up an alternative view, rather than reacting to a redundant one. It looks at the fat body and deals with stuff through that. It doesn't so much bypass the "oppression narrative", but by looking at it looks forward, rather than looking back at fat hate and trying to tunnel out with 'evidence' of what has no basis above the desire to hate, full stop.
It deals directly with peeling off the layers of fat phobia by coming to terms with the vision ahead.
The equivalent of what a lot of the wordysphere does imposed on to fatshion, would be to set it in a clothes store that only went up to a size 14 and then attempted to use its stock to explain why this is not good for sizes above.
It just creates for fatz using our experiences to write fat acceptance. In doing so it restores more of the vibrancy and character we've lost to the annihilation and erasure of the crusade.
In a way its an embodyment of the normal eating/intuitive eating process where you bypass a mind overloaded with unbalancing negativity and go straight into setting up a positive realitionship with food by doing so establish a new positive loop.
Rather than battling old negative ones within the terms set by that negativity. Giving the chance for it to be at least be tamed by that abandonment and withdrawal of energy.
My combative side, which dislikes a situation where there is only one point of view pretending to be the only one possible when it is not. Even more when it splits itself in two and assigns a bit to those who oppose it because it beliefs that is its privilege.
Then claims this is a "debate" because it is rightly ashamed of its own hating view, like spraying perfume on a turd.
Engaging with it as if it is anything but what it is enobles it and allows it to continue to set our agenda, in its own absence, power indeed.
Power it does not deserve on any level.
The proof of that is fat people referencing themselves and the normalcy of that for all people, in doing so, they reclaim it for themselves as a matter of course.
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
1959
Trigger warning; sorry, but this is another of those weight loss dieting 'efficacy' so dieting's mentioned throughout, so skip it if you've had more than enough.
The much quoted 95% of diets fail was based on a 1959 survey/study of a hundred patients attending the nutrition clinic of a New York hospital for a weight loss diet, as they came. It included those who dropped out and did not as far as I can tell control for anything.
That leaves us with a probabilistic figure which can only amount to out of every 100 weight loss diet attempts, 95 will fail; that is return to starting weight or there abouts.
Pretty much sums it up for me even if diets were a viable option, if the patients cannot take the 'treatment' it cannot be expected to be the solution, regardless.
Now I should clarify, what does not working mean?
Well, the remit of diets is to expend what is deemed 'excess weight' i.e. you use up 50lbs in reduced intake and/or exercise and that is that.
As we found out, it isn't, that's the first major fail-rebound- that you have to keep monitoring your eating to stave it off is a major fail because it is not explain by the theory of extra weight=extra calories. It shows diets don't really understand how the body functions or it would have anticipated or have had an answer for it.
The study ended after a 2 year period and by that time only 2% of people had maintained a 20lb weight loss, not enough to make any person in the obese category 'acceptable'.
The study set out to examine two assumptions the claims that dieting was effective and harmless, these suppositions came from studies from the preceeding 30 year period, so the idea that belief in diets/calorie manipulation is a product of our current times is false.
This has been repeatedly been debunked, all to no avail not because people can't accept it, but because the implications of accepting it are unacceptable. So it keeps coming around again because it fits in with the medical monopoly's underlying premise of treatment.
The support given to weight loss dieting should have sparked attempts to disprove it with a new figure backed up by a large scale better controlled clinical study to replace it.
In spite of the fact this small study from 1959 which should have become obsolete years ago, the multi billion pound slimming industry, government scientists, big pharma obesity scientists haven quite managed to counter it yet. Such is the strength of the counter case.
So this ludicrously low key preliminary finding has assumed an importance way above its standing because it has not been challenged with anything better.
Take a look at the table featured (I'd avoid the text unless you're desperate for another banal lecture in weight shame) on US weight stats from 1950 onwards and see if you can find any reverse trajectory, of any kind.
Stunkard himself did not expected it to be debunked long ago, so have all who've encountered it over subsequent decades;
Instead both reality and fact based studies merely underline it. What is telling is its inclusion of everyone along the process. It is assumed that everyone can lose weight and people fall at the last fence, rebound/ regain. When in fact failure starts virtually immediately. I know people who are more or less diet proof, no matter whether the moment a diet starts they develop a kind of extreme panic response which builds to the point where they can stand it only for a matter of hours or less.
I fit close to that type of diet proof person, the difference is, I was tenacious and wouldn't give up, assuming this was just my greed talking, turns out that this pushing made me mentally ill, something which lasted until I not only stopped dieting, but promised myself fervently and repeatedly that I would never do to myself again.
Anyway, those who insist on believing in diets, finally got fed up with evidence failing to contradict Stunkard and McLaren-Hume, decided to try another approach;
Having given up on fat people becoming slim a new approach to directly focus on weight loss diet outliers is being taken. Something called the weight loss diet registry which solicits people who remain reduced.
Two researchers Dr. Wing and Dr. James O. Hill of the University of Colorado aim to make a long term study of them, basically a survey of people To study them long term to see what can be learned from them about how to remain in a state of semi anorexia.
Something which is not only an undesirable pointless waste of time, on those terms any way, it ignores those who are in too much pain, discomfort or have mobility issues to be able to have a life wasting energy. Not to mention someone like me who become chronically depressed by my body's compensatory adaptation to energy restriction. Something which defeats efforts at dieting as ones ability to move is curtailed tremendously not to mention developing chronic compensatory overeating.
None of this shows dieting works in itself or to the standard required from fat people on the contrary it has clearly ceded that ground by extensive lowering of standards of weight loss and maintenance to only a year.
It wasn't really motivated by the emotional upset of dieting not fulfilling the promise invested in it, which is that we can all choose to be thin, so pretty much 100% efficacy;
This is straw as 95/8% is not 100%, however it is clearly not what is required if the true aim is reducing levels of weight and fatness.
So Stunkard's figure remains and is best critiqued with a new figure garnered from a study featuring the real context of weight loss dieting- everyone over a BMI of 25 reducing to below that, permanently.
Or better still another approach which actually works.
The much quoted 95% of diets fail was based on a 1959 survey/study of a hundred patients attending the nutrition clinic of a New York hospital for a weight loss diet, as they came. It included those who dropped out and did not as far as I can tell control for anything.
"Stunkard and McLaren-Hume's 1959 study of 100 obese individuals, which indicated that, 2 y after treatment, only 2% maintained a weight loss of 9.1 kg (20 lb) or more"
That leaves us with a probabilistic figure which can only amount to out of every 100 weight loss diet attempts, 95 will fail; that is return to starting weight or there abouts.
Hundreds of papers on treatment for obesity have been published in the past 30 years. Most, however, do not give figures on the outcome of treatment, and of those that do, most report them in such a way as to obscure the outcome of treatment of individual patients. So me authors, for example, report the total number of patients and the pounds lost without making clear. . .It was conducted by Dr. Albert Stunkard and a dietitian called Mavis McLaren-Hume its conclusion;
"Most obese persons will not stay in treatment, most will not lose weight, and of those who do lose weight, most will regain it.''
Pretty much sums it up for me even if diets were a viable option, if the patients cannot take the 'treatment' it cannot be expected to be the solution, regardless.
Now I should clarify, what does not working mean?
Well, the remit of diets is to expend what is deemed 'excess weight' i.e. you use up 50lbs in reduced intake and/or exercise and that is that.
As we found out, it isn't, that's the first major fail-rebound- that you have to keep monitoring your eating to stave it off is a major fail because it is not explain by the theory of extra weight=extra calories. It shows diets don't really understand how the body functions or it would have anticipated or have had an answer for it.
The study ended after a 2 year period and by that time only 2% of people had maintained a 20lb weight loss, not enough to make any person in the obese category 'acceptable'.
The study set out to examine two assumptions the claims that dieting was effective and harmless, these suppositions came from studies from the preceeding 30 year period, so the idea that belief in diets/calorie manipulation is a product of our current times is false.
This has been repeatedly been debunked, all to no avail not because people can't accept it, but because the implications of accepting it are unacceptable. So it keeps coming around again because it fits in with the medical monopoly's underlying premise of treatment.
The support given to weight loss dieting should have sparked attempts to disprove it with a new figure backed up by a large scale better controlled clinical study to replace it.
In spite of the fact this small study from 1959 which should have become obsolete years ago, the multi billion pound slimming industry, government scientists, big pharma obesity scientists haven quite managed to counter it yet. Such is the strength of the counter case.
So this ludicrously low key preliminary finding has assumed an importance way above its standing because it has not been challenged with anything better.
Take a look at the table featured (I'd avoid the text unless you're desperate for another banal lecture in weight shame) on US weight stats from 1950 onwards and see if you can find any reverse trajectory, of any kind.
Stunkard himself did not expected it to be debunked long ago, so have all who've encountered it over subsequent decades;
''That was state of the art in 1959,'' he added. ''I've been sort of surprised that people keep citing it; I know we do better these days.'
Instead both reality and fact based studies merely underline it. What is telling is its inclusion of everyone along the process. It is assumed that everyone can lose weight and people fall at the last fence, rebound/ regain. When in fact failure starts virtually immediately. I know people who are more or less diet proof, no matter whether the moment a diet starts they develop a kind of extreme panic response which builds to the point where they can stand it only for a matter of hours or less.
I fit close to that type of diet proof person, the difference is, I was tenacious and wouldn't give up, assuming this was just my greed talking, turns out that this pushing made me mentally ill, something which lasted until I not only stopped dieting, but promised myself fervently and repeatedly that I would never do to myself again.
Anyway, those who insist on believing in diets, finally got fed up with evidence failing to contradict Stunkard and McLaren-Hume, decided to try another approach;
Since then, nearly all studies of weight-loss recidivism have followed patients in formal hospital or university programs, because they are the easiest to identify and keep track of. But people who turn to such programs may also be the most difficult cases, and may therefore have especially poor success ratesMy emphasis. Because of course those people are left out of the obesity figures aren't they?
Having given up on fat people becoming slim a new approach to directly focus on weight loss diet outliers is being taken. Something called the weight loss diet registry which solicits people who remain reduced.
Two researchers Dr. Wing and Dr. James O. Hill of the University of Colorado aim to make a long term study of them, basically a survey of people To study them long term to see what can be learned from them about how to remain in a state of semi anorexia.
Something which is not only an undesirable pointless waste of time, on those terms any way, it ignores those who are in too much pain, discomfort or have mobility issues to be able to have a life wasting energy. Not to mention someone like me who become chronically depressed by my body's compensatory adaptation to energy restriction. Something which defeats efforts at dieting as ones ability to move is curtailed tremendously not to mention developing chronic compensatory overeating.
None of this shows dieting works in itself or to the standard required from fat people on the contrary it has clearly ceded that ground by extensive lowering of standards of weight loss and maintenance to only a year.
It wasn't really motivated by the emotional upset of dieting not fulfilling the promise invested in it, which is that we can all choose to be thin, so pretty much 100% efficacy;
''It was really to convince ourselves and convince the world that there are people who are successful, and then to learn from them,'' Dr. Wing said.
This is straw as 95/8% is not 100%, however it is clearly not what is required if the true aim is reducing levels of weight and fatness.
So Stunkard's figure remains and is best critiqued with a new figure garnered from a study featuring the real context of weight loss dieting- everyone over a BMI of 25 reducing to below that, permanently.
Or better still another approach which actually works.
Tuesday, 15 March 2011
Cant, spiked
Sp!ked recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. They should be congratulated for personifying the truth that if you are truly a humanist-with or without religion-the crusade cannot really make sense.
For the uninitiated, spiked are not liked, the founders include self declared Marxists who continue to proclaim themselves such. The reason they are not liked is because in the post fall of Communist leftist shake down, their political settings appear to have shifted out of kilter with what passes for the general left right now, or the other way around, depending on your view.
Questions about their political position come from all sides. However for me their take on a lot of things, whether I've agreed or disagreed have made more sense than many of the more mainstream left.
They take on many unpopular stances ironically Patrick Basham himself a former tobacco lobbyist had the nerve recently to question anti smoking campaign tactics. Whether you agree or not its worth bearing in mind that the obesity circus is unseating smoking as outstandingly harmful by virtue of both its peculiar hype and its linking of fat prognosis with that of smoking.
There was a time when I thought that potential bang up would cool the heels of anti obesists, wrong again-almost always when expecting reason to prevail.
For the uninitiated, spiked are not liked, the founders include self declared Marxists who continue to proclaim themselves such. The reason they are not liked is because in the post fall of Communist leftist shake down, their political settings appear to have shifted out of kilter with what passes for the general left right now, or the other way around, depending on your view.
Questions about their political position come from all sides. However for me their take on a lot of things, whether I've agreed or disagreed have made more sense than many of the more mainstream left.
They take on many unpopular stances ironically Patrick Basham himself a former tobacco lobbyist had the nerve recently to question anti smoking campaign tactics. Whether you agree or not its worth bearing in mind that the obesity circus is unseating smoking as outstandingly harmful by virtue of both its peculiar hype and its linking of fat prognosis with that of smoking.
There was a time when I thought that potential bang up would cool the heels of anti obesists, wrong again-almost always when expecting reason to prevail.
Monday, 14 March 2011
Fat person admits: "Its self inflicted" over here....
Gotcha!
Having one of my periodic mental fluxes where many things are flying around my noggin, but I can't get a handle on them. People who say "Tell us more about your FA journeh the vulnerability the struggle, so that we can identify with you." etc., Don't seem to realise that the mechanics of mental change/adjustment can get old.
The romantics!
Whilst trying to sort out my ludicrous "drafts" folder, I've been trying to put into words my feelings about why we should absolve (no I'm not afraid to use that word) medical professionals and scientists for their part in the stigmatization of fatz . It seems this is unconscionable because it would hurt their feelings- they believe they are saints and pure in heart and deed no matter how they act- they don't deserve it apparently.
Why?
Because they have the insolence to demand a free pass to mis behave in exchange for moving towards a more ethical stance. We are not yet able to be so demanding which makes it our duty to shuffle along and absorb this and not go along with it as usual.
People will listen to us, if we stop being defensive for non fatz, defending yourself against attack, however early, for fatz= feeling hurt about being hurt.
Lets not get any airs and graces, after all it upsets everyone why not stick to our role of cringing arselickers, grateful for anyone who might pay us some mind for a mo? So they claim, whether they follow through or not doesn't matter, we'll just try harder.
To hell with any potential negative consequences of this to us or anyone else we don't have time or energy for that after considering every one else's trauma about confronting what they're capable of.
Indeed, why not also seek to pretend to the old 'absusers logic' "I hurt you, because I care".
If they didn't care, they'd just have left us alone and at least have done us no harm.
Now that I have partially managed to calm down, I'm still struggling to put it into words because after a calm start I just descend into the fury of Hades and this time I say, no, I will endeavour to calming explain why that is bull hockey.
Ho hum.
Anyway, I'm just going keep at it until I at least can say what I think needs to be said, as well as wrestling with this time I can say it, totally self inflicted ish-yoo.
Ahhhh, that last bit felt good because this time, it's true.
Having one of my periodic mental fluxes where many things are flying around my noggin, but I can't get a handle on them. People who say "Tell us more about your FA journeh the vulnerability the struggle, so that we can identify with you." etc., Don't seem to realise that the mechanics of mental change/adjustment can get old.
The romantics!
Whilst trying to sort out my ludicrous "drafts" folder, I've been trying to put into words my feelings about why we should absolve (no I'm not afraid to use that word) medical professionals and scientists for their part in the stigmatization of fatz . It seems this is unconscionable because it would hurt their feelings- they believe they are saints and pure in heart and deed no matter how they act- they don't deserve it apparently.
Why?
Because they have the insolence to demand a free pass to mis behave in exchange for moving towards a more ethical stance. We are not yet able to be so demanding which makes it our duty to shuffle along and absorb this and not go along with it as usual.
People will listen to us, if we stop being defensive for non fatz, defending yourself against attack, however early, for fatz= feeling hurt about being hurt.
Lets not get any airs and graces, after all it upsets everyone why not stick to our role of cringing arselickers, grateful for anyone who might pay us some mind for a mo? So they claim, whether they follow through or not doesn't matter, we'll just try harder.
To hell with any potential negative consequences of this to us or anyone else we don't have time or energy for that after considering every one else's trauma about confronting what they're capable of.
Indeed, why not also seek to pretend to the old 'absusers logic' "I hurt you, because I care".
If they didn't care, they'd just have left us alone and at least have done us no harm.
Now that I have partially managed to calm down, I'm still struggling to put it into words because after a calm start I just descend into the fury of Hades and this time I say, no, I will endeavour to calming explain why that is bull hockey.
Ho hum.
Anyway, I'm just going keep at it until I at least can say what I think needs to be said, as well as wrestling with this time I can say it, totally self inflicted ish-yoo.
Ahhhh, that last bit felt good because this time, it's true.
Thursday, 10 March 2011
Open Windows
A while back the fatsphere was up in arms because fat people were being blamed for global warming. The real irony was rather than fat people being a metaphor for human destruction of the earth fat people are more like the earth itself.
After insisting we must have certain goods and services, out of more than necessity to support our various cultural peculiarities with attendant status symbols. We use up the earth in pursuit of these skimming over consequence. Especially if it clashes with our reading of what the bottom line is.
The earth, although we know it has its own design, must obey us thus the dance between that and how it actually works begins...
When signs of the earth's accommodation of our will shows in ways we deem offensive, fury ensues and accusations are flung around. The earth is bad, non complaint and misbehaving for doing the only thing it can, operating to its own design.
I wonder though if my brain was pointing to something else, what if a better model for thinking about human metabolism, is weather and climate rather than "thermodynamics"?
I don't pretend to have any real grasp of either. I've no doubt physics can explain exactly why diets don't work. Some people have already spotted the cals in/cals out flaw, more calories in, more expended, less calories in, less expended.
As for climate, all I know is that weather is climate adjustment on a more day to day basis (hence climate change) and the earth's temperature control.
In the post ci/co hangover we still told to assume weight is a mere product of eating and/or activity, when maybe it has a different primary or secondary purpose to merely being the sum total of eating and activity, and that is to regulate and control our inner climate and temperature.
Eating is obviously about energy and nourishment for the body to use to rebuild/replenish and even destroy its cells, a basic definition of metabolism.
We are told from ci/co, that if you take in more calories than you use, you'll gain weight.
I've lived with one of those types who eats a lot and remains slim. The type who often sweats when they're eating a hearty meal. If you put your hand a few inches from their forehead, during and some time after a meal, depending, you can feel the heat coming off them.
It's not unique to them more a question of extent. There are other sites on the body that are supposed to do similar. There may be other things that also waste energy along with this, gut bacteria for instance.
So for them, rather than energy intake causing weight gain, it triggers their body to just waste any extra through burning. It's like opening the windows in a house that's too hot. What happens if the place stays hot? Is fat part of the body's transfer of energy to cool itself?
It reminds me about years ago discussing why people gain weight with someone trying to wriggle out of the straight jacket of ci/co, I ended up exclaiming "It's like it's [the body] stuck on store, stuck on store!!!" Storing fat that is.
Something triggers the body to keep storing, it stabilises or continues gradually or less so. Sometimes it seems as if once that pathway opens or is opened, it finds it easier to keep using that way for whatever purpose it is putting it to.
Fat people use up more energy in survival and movement, if size is adjusted for our metabolic rates don't vary much with slimmer people. This is the factor of stabilizing weight in some of us.
But now I'm thinking that maybe these counterbalances either don't kick in or peter out in some people.
I don't and have never believed weight is purely a question of genetic destiny. It is too responsive to and influenced by too many other factors. It's not so much saying everyone can be a weight outlier, but far more can probably than do. And that's probably a matter of circumstance; genes, environment, absence/presence of counteracting factors.
By the latter I mean things like pressure and stress, how strong and long term and unrelenting they are. That can play a crucial role and is for me the source of any weight/class differentials rather than food which I think most suspect is largely a dead end. Even if it wasn't, there is no reason why it should be the way even if it was true.
Weight change is noted after the fact, mostly it requires no effort and is a product of either time or underlying change. That is the only viable way it can be reversed. The idea that any pain or torment of any kind must be present is purely a sop to those who insist on their favoured * trigger warning fetish of restriction.
After insisting we must have certain goods and services, out of more than necessity to support our various cultural peculiarities with attendant status symbols. We use up the earth in pursuit of these skimming over consequence. Especially if it clashes with our reading of what the bottom line is.
The earth, although we know it has its own design, must obey us thus the dance between that and how it actually works begins...
When signs of the earth's accommodation of our will shows in ways we deem offensive, fury ensues and accusations are flung around. The earth is bad, non complaint and misbehaving for doing the only thing it can, operating to its own design.
I wonder though if my brain was pointing to something else, what if a better model for thinking about human metabolism, is weather and climate rather than "thermodynamics"?
I don't pretend to have any real grasp of either. I've no doubt physics can explain exactly why diets don't work. Some people have already spotted the cals in/cals out flaw, more calories in, more expended, less calories in, less expended.
As for climate, all I know is that weather is climate adjustment on a more day to day basis (hence climate change) and the earth's temperature control.
In the post ci/co hangover we still told to assume weight is a mere product of eating and/or activity, when maybe it has a different primary or secondary purpose to merely being the sum total of eating and activity, and that is to regulate and control our inner climate and temperature.
Eating is obviously about energy and nourishment for the body to use to rebuild/replenish and even destroy its cells, a basic definition of metabolism.
We are told from ci/co, that if you take in more calories than you use, you'll gain weight.
I've lived with one of those types who eats a lot and remains slim. The type who often sweats when they're eating a hearty meal. If you put your hand a few inches from their forehead, during and some time after a meal, depending, you can feel the heat coming off them.
It's not unique to them more a question of extent. There are other sites on the body that are supposed to do similar. There may be other things that also waste energy along with this, gut bacteria for instance.
So for them, rather than energy intake causing weight gain, it triggers their body to just waste any extra through burning. It's like opening the windows in a house that's too hot. What happens if the place stays hot? Is fat part of the body's transfer of energy to cool itself?
It reminds me about years ago discussing why people gain weight with someone trying to wriggle out of the straight jacket of ci/co, I ended up exclaiming "It's like it's [the body] stuck on store, stuck on store!!!" Storing fat that is.
Something triggers the body to keep storing, it stabilises or continues gradually or less so. Sometimes it seems as if once that pathway opens or is opened, it finds it easier to keep using that way for whatever purpose it is putting it to.
Fat people use up more energy in survival and movement, if size is adjusted for our metabolic rates don't vary much with slimmer people. This is the factor of stabilizing weight in some of us.
But now I'm thinking that maybe these counterbalances either don't kick in or peter out in some people.
I don't and have never believed weight is purely a question of genetic destiny. It is too responsive to and influenced by too many other factors. It's not so much saying everyone can be a weight outlier, but far more can probably than do. And that's probably a matter of circumstance; genes, environment, absence/presence of counteracting factors.
By the latter I mean things like pressure and stress, how strong and long term and unrelenting they are. That can play a crucial role and is for me the source of any weight/class differentials rather than food which I think most suspect is largely a dead end. Even if it wasn't, there is no reason why it should be the way even if it was true.
Weight change is noted after the fact, mostly it requires no effort and is a product of either time or underlying change. That is the only viable way it can be reversed. The idea that any pain or torment of any kind must be present is purely a sop to those who insist on their favoured * trigger warning fetish of restriction.
Friday, 4 March 2011
Muscle confusion
There are some extreme fitness workout regimes dealing in a notion calling itself muscle confusion. Your body adapts to a regular set of exercises so if you keep switching them you'll 'surprise' or 'shock' your muscles into a greater response. Taking your fitness to greater levels, as it adapts to this new stimulus, more than if you kept going with your same old routine.
It's the surprise that is said to 'confuse' your muscles. This came about due to a plateau effect occurring when dedicated gym goers stall in their progress towards their fitness goals.
The general idea should sound pretty familiar especially to fat people who've had a career of using dieting and fitness regimes to attempt to become slim dandy. You'll have noted that when it happens to you, to your body it is not happening it is dismissed as examples of your laziness. You plateau because you are not doing it right or you're shirking lying and kidding yourself about what you're doing.
Only when it happens to the slim gym devotees, does it actually attain validity becoming observable and worthy of response. That last bit should especially be emphasised worthy of response.
It's how progress happens, one thing leads to another this is a microcosm of how fat hating can induce a punishment of boredom and mental stagnancy on being being fat, overall. I'd be surprised if this effect was not being parlayed into 'fat people's smaller brains/stupid' trope.
Sometimes it is you that becomes 'confused', often you can get to the point where you don't actually feel sure yourself what you are and are not doing, not sure enough to stand your ground in any open discussion.
So you go on with your life and eventually somebody 'valid' enough can give voice to your experience. When this occurs, fat people are never referred to of course ever. Never "This is what so many (fat) people have been talking about/ referring to in the past" etc., Nor is there much doubt amongst the devotees that they're too lazy or incompetent to be able to describe the things that happen to them as if they are real and define human experience.
Such can be the strange spectating role of a fat person, removed from their own experience. Only having it confirmed for sure by others. When this effect builds to a certain point, you get that haunting lack of credibility effect that we mention so much, in varying guises.
Imagine if we'd been able to be as human as we were, how could we have innovated and added to the fitness genre? How could we have shaped a more generally inclusive fitness culture by merely responding directly to our needs and therefore others not fitting the gym bunny ideal?
How much better off would we have all been?
It's the surprise that is said to 'confuse' your muscles. This came about due to a plateau effect occurring when dedicated gym goers stall in their progress towards their fitness goals.
The general idea should sound pretty familiar especially to fat people who've had a career of using dieting and fitness regimes to attempt to become slim dandy. You'll have noted that when it happens to you, to your body it is not happening it is dismissed as examples of your laziness. You plateau because you are not doing it right or you're shirking lying and kidding yourself about what you're doing.
Only when it happens to the slim gym devotees, does it actually attain validity becoming observable and worthy of response. That last bit should especially be emphasised worthy of response.
It's how progress happens, one thing leads to another this is a microcosm of how fat hating can induce a punishment of boredom and mental stagnancy on being being fat, overall. I'd be surprised if this effect was not being parlayed into 'fat people's smaller brains/stupid' trope.
Sometimes it is you that becomes 'confused', often you can get to the point where you don't actually feel sure yourself what you are and are not doing, not sure enough to stand your ground in any open discussion.
So you go on with your life and eventually somebody 'valid' enough can give voice to your experience. When this occurs, fat people are never referred to of course ever. Never "This is what so many (fat) people have been talking about/ referring to in the past" etc., Nor is there much doubt amongst the devotees that they're too lazy or incompetent to be able to describe the things that happen to them as if they are real and define human experience.
Such can be the strange spectating role of a fat person, removed from their own experience. Only having it confirmed for sure by others. When this effect builds to a certain point, you get that haunting lack of credibility effect that we mention so much, in varying guises.
Imagine if we'd been able to be as human as we were, how could we have innovated and added to the fitness genre? How could we have shaped a more generally inclusive fitness culture by merely responding directly to our needs and therefore others not fitting the gym bunny ideal?
How much better off would we have all been?
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Self harm
Whatever we human beings do for themselves no matter how strange hard to fathom or self defeating it seems-to others- are always trying to do some good.
I loathe the snide take of people harming themselves as a motive for their actions, or "self harm" as it fatuously calls itself. It's like a factory owner polluting the environment, the motive maybe profit or achievement, the pollution a side effect, not its purpose.
It's not actually needed to call in question the cost of our actions to ourselves and/or others. Its fine to say someone is harming themselves and they shouldn't, it's defining that as their ends which is cynical as it smacks of putting someone in their place, whether that helps or not. It's about putting the needs of the caller before the called, as with concern trolling.
Which is of course the source of this rubbish, other people claiming to act for others may well intend to do them harm as a defining cause for those actions, that's plausible. And that illustrates the phrase, to convince you that you are as much your own worst enemy as someone else who may well be, usually to compromise or impinge upon your will in some way. Persuading you to give it up to others who are more trustworthy and legitimately motivated than you, after all, they told you what you are for you.
Wasn't that nice of them?
This label has taken root whenever people think something shocking is going on real or imagined and people are behaving in ways that are causing them or others around them especially problems or just discomfort but they cannot just stop right it right then and there on demand.
They get this label and they have to 'confess' to it as they tend to be told portentously, this is the first step to dealing with their inconvenience and in their desperation to move on/ please others and/or themselves, they submit.
Any objective questions such as, how often can the urge to do certain things be stopped dead through direct force of will alone? Even if they are not seen as negative. I mean, if you study history for years see the world in terms of it, love it, can you stop thinking about it like that?
What's the difference between that and not be able to stop a negative behaviour dead? When does it cross the line from how the mind works to pathology? That's the problem with flogging the disease model to describe every inconvenience or imperfect situation, the danger of pathologizng humanness. It gets to the stage where normal existence feels like a sin or wrong in some way.
Because if the answer is hardly as by this point most people who could stop would have already, then classifying that inability as "self harm" assumes a deliberate willfulness that may not exist.
There's also the self serving instinct on the part of those who do not have the 'problem' seeking to use that to create a more positive view of themselves, and not having this particular issue makes them very clever and knowledgeable about how to end or reverse it. Knowing nothing equals knowledge.
Their brilliant insight is along the lines of;
Stop doing what you're doing and the urge to do it will go and you'll no longer be doing what you're doing. That's if it's even the cause of whatever they deem the 'abuse'.
They can't see any reason for any one to do that, because....they're not, this means not doing it nor wanting to is the same as feeling an overwhelming urge to do it yet not acting on it.
Absence of imperative is the same as ignoring an imperative.
The saints may sneakingly admire those they perceive as sinners but in their head, the former assume they are not because they fear the harm it may do them. But having unexpectedly positive feelings toward someone does not mean you want to do as they do, not seriously. It's an assumption that you need to be stopped by anything but absence of inclination.
Like those who claim they'd love to be unemployed and laze around. No they wouldn't or why aren't they? It's an expression of their frustration not a life plan.
Putting it down to a judicious assessment of risk because that makes people feel better though. Every cloud has a silver lining. Someone's problem is another one's opportunity for self esteem building, even if the scope is limited by the fact that you are already much better off than they.
Hummm.
We can see the outcome of this, that the obesity=death angle and the pretence that dietary finagling is the answer means that we fat people can easily be characterized as 'self-harmers' as we won't stop being fat.
I loathe the snide take of people harming themselves as a motive for their actions, or "self harm" as it fatuously calls itself. It's like a factory owner polluting the environment, the motive maybe profit or achievement, the pollution a side effect, not its purpose.
It's not actually needed to call in question the cost of our actions to ourselves and/or others. Its fine to say someone is harming themselves and they shouldn't, it's defining that as their ends which is cynical as it smacks of putting someone in their place, whether that helps or not. It's about putting the needs of the caller before the called, as with concern trolling.
Which is of course the source of this rubbish, other people claiming to act for others may well intend to do them harm as a defining cause for those actions, that's plausible. And that illustrates the phrase, to convince you that you are as much your own worst enemy as someone else who may well be, usually to compromise or impinge upon your will in some way. Persuading you to give it up to others who are more trustworthy and legitimately motivated than you, after all, they told you what you are for you.
Wasn't that nice of them?
This label has taken root whenever people think something shocking is going on real or imagined and people are behaving in ways that are causing them or others around them especially problems or just discomfort but they cannot just stop right it right then and there on demand.
They get this label and they have to 'confess' to it as they tend to be told portentously, this is the first step to dealing with their inconvenience and in their desperation to move on/ please others and/or themselves, they submit.
Any objective questions such as, how often can the urge to do certain things be stopped dead through direct force of will alone? Even if they are not seen as negative. I mean, if you study history for years see the world in terms of it, love it, can you stop thinking about it like that?
What's the difference between that and not be able to stop a negative behaviour dead? When does it cross the line from how the mind works to pathology? That's the problem with flogging the disease model to describe every inconvenience or imperfect situation, the danger of pathologizng humanness. It gets to the stage where normal existence feels like a sin or wrong in some way.
Because if the answer is hardly as by this point most people who could stop would have already, then classifying that inability as "self harm" assumes a deliberate willfulness that may not exist.
There's also the self serving instinct on the part of those who do not have the 'problem' seeking to use that to create a more positive view of themselves, and not having this particular issue makes them very clever and knowledgeable about how to end or reverse it. Knowing nothing equals knowledge.
Their brilliant insight is along the lines of;
Stop doing what you're doing and the urge to do it will go and you'll no longer be doing what you're doing. That's if it's even the cause of whatever they deem the 'abuse'.
They can't see any reason for any one to do that, because....they're not, this means not doing it nor wanting to is the same as feeling an overwhelming urge to do it yet not acting on it.
Absence of imperative is the same as ignoring an imperative.
The saints may sneakingly admire those they perceive as sinners but in their head, the former assume they are not because they fear the harm it may do them. But having unexpectedly positive feelings toward someone does not mean you want to do as they do, not seriously. It's an assumption that you need to be stopped by anything but absence of inclination.
Like those who claim they'd love to be unemployed and laze around. No they wouldn't or why aren't they? It's an expression of their frustration not a life plan.
Putting it down to a judicious assessment of risk because that makes people feel better though. Every cloud has a silver lining. Someone's problem is another one's opportunity for self esteem building, even if the scope is limited by the fact that you are already much better off than they.
Hummm.
We can see the outcome of this, that the obesity=death angle and the pretence that dietary finagling is the answer means that we fat people can easily be characterized as 'self-harmers' as we won't stop being fat.
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