Wrong way around

I was intrigued by reading a post which brilliantly exposed the genesis of the "eating addiction" trope. You start with the assumption that dieting is absolutely viable, in total opposition to reality;

“Initially I tried to crash diet and even spent three days nibbling my way through just one can of tuna.

You then posit its almost inevitable therefore failure as defining you;

“But I quickly realised that I couldn’t diet as I love food far too much.”

That right there is the basis for the idea of addictive eating. Okay, this is an extreme version, but what people don't understand that even unextreme respectable dieting is likely to be surprisingly similar in terms of failure that people become convinced there is something very wrong with them.

There must be if they cannot 'stick' to this perfectly balanced, nutrient rich, tasty full of lovely fruit vegetable brown rice whole wheat goodness. There must be something awry. Even more than whilst eating this way, their appetite becomes really really big their intake, lots.

That's often how people diagnose themselves and how the professionals who still invest in calorie and dietary restriction, not because  they believe it works but because they feel they need something.

I get it, the latter is how my appetite rose unmanageably and in a way both it and hunger started to break down in terms of functioning in a meaningful way.


Strange the way the idea of the way our bodies are supposed to work, defines as pathological, the normal response to that, even stranger, the status of the subject is what makes it this way round.

Kindly STHU with your "overweight"

The promiscuous throwing around of this term is getting really tired.

Just how hard is it to get over the fact that some people are bigger size thin? Some people are greater than others. They are more than, just how dimwitted do you have to be to name someone else after you not to be able to get over that?

Imagine if you will; failweight, scanty, stopshort, underfat FGS?

Can I get a lightweight, storm tossed, insubstantial, flighty?

Miserweight?

Or what about small, minceur, sucked out, eaten up, already devoured-whats the Latin for the last one? It could be the antithesis to obese which has its root in the Latin "to devour".

We are the weight we are. We've told you what we are,  fat, we are something. We are not what we are not; got that?

We are not some thin person's self important prissy take on us-"What, some people are over me, they're past moi? Must your shock be our label?

Must it be an endless memorial to someone else's tedious fee fees?

I get the sensory impact of fatness on thinz who've not gotten over the baby thing of  I am the defining principle of what all humanity should be. Many of us, of all weights are living testament to the fact that this can be overcome

We do not expect you to be our size equally, you are not our defining principle of our substance.

Now its time to stop looking stupid and like your head is permanently stuck up your anal passage and recognise that not everyone looks to you, is in reference to you, okay? Become a sophisticat.

We define ourselves by the integrity of our own bodies, regardless of our plans. We are too precious to live in an ever dangling future possible, whilst ignoring the present. Where we here.

And that is fat.

So get that.

Celery Sticks

I suppose this ad was meant to be funny-the celery sticks cancelling out a slice of cheesecake- was a dead give away...yet doubt remains as this is the kind of weird trip the mind takes under the influence of calorie manipulation.

Like when you're asked why you don't use the energy you're using to protest fat phobia, in the gym. Because expending a set amount of calories in the church of gym is somehow more.

It certainly made me giggle and when the other women comes to join the first one and she says-oh you've lost weight-I admit, I burst out laughing. It thoroughly exposes the overweening emotionalism of calorie restriction, something to think about when having to listen to the yawn inducing tedium of how "emotional eating" is a big problem fat people need to 'fess up to and how it is the key factor in compulsive/binge eating etc.,

Its also partly because it now does seem oddly abstracted, reminds me of those comedy sketches when people put a macguffin phrase in to signify some banal trope insiders exchange portentously; unaware of how absurd it is to those not under the influence of the spirit of the group.

I wonder if they were told it must be in there so they just dropped it in like stone, up 'till that point, it had a real air of veracity.

This kind of talk is highly recognizable from what feels like forever, from people mostly but not exclusively, women. I have to confess one of the main things which put me off ever trying slimming clubs, was the fear that I too would develop this kind of mentality.

I still remember when slimming club "points" came in. I heard a woman really going to town with how she realized that if she saved some of her points during the week, she could have a fun sized chocolate bar at the weekend.

I cannot tell you how furious it made me, I mean she sounded like it was the most exciting thing that could ever happen to a person. In fact, now that I think about it, she was probably having a small episode of hysteria, hey, it happens.

Even though my resentment of my weight was still in full swing, something else kicked in, a kind of feeling that it was beneath our minds to think this way.

The ad has created a fuss from those who identify as having eating disorders and apparently this is no surprise to some. On the other side are those who find this precious that those complaining need to get over themselves a tad.

I consider myself reasonably capable of telling when a mark has been overstepped, or I used to, now I'm not so sure.

Because if you really have an eating disorder, why would you think this kind of internal monologue was in anyway specific to that as opposed to the norm for most people who count calories?

A split was established by those who advocate for those diagnosed with eating disorders who insisted that the world of dieting had nothing to do with their condition. Wilfully overlooking the fact that calorie manipulation, weight loss dieting is a flat out disordered.

FULL STOP.

The authorities as usual are determined to create artificial chasms between the disorder they promote and that other stuff over their that is deranged weird and neurotic, usually enabled by the same impacted misogyny that has facilitated the characterization of the 'obese individual' (hurl).

What amazes me still, although I should have gotten over it by now, is the way that some wish to collude in the fiction that there are "healthy" and "unhealthy" calorie restriction approaches and the difference between having an eating disorder is following one or the other. Even though at the same time we are told that ED's are 'genetic'. 

The real difference between someone who has a fully blown eating disorder and one who doesn't is not 'behaviour' as we keep being told, but how the body reacts to the same/similar behaviour.

Or to put it another way, if you've dieted hard like many of us in FA have, if you are not an anorexic, it is not because you were more 'sensible' it is that your body (I include your mind in that) responded differently to anorexic behaviour.

It didn't succumb to the pressure or the right detonator was not available perhaps.

Like the difference between a fat and thin person who are in all different ways similar in age, experiences, class, gender etc., is a different pattern of activity in their respective bodies.

What's interesting is the way this is subtlety being portrayed as a failure of awareness on the part of the advertisers, yet the real failure seems to be those complaining who seem unaware that there is nothing special about this kind of thinking, whatsoever.

Something reflected in the comments on various blogs to this story.

Those of us in FA who cannot stand "diet talk" when we are kicking back perusing the fatsphere, feel similarly. Some people enjoy mocking this but it shows people let their guard down when they are getting in touch with and examining their deeper feelings.

They are not in the same frame of mind as usual and that is why I cannot understand why any one would be triggered by this, when they have their guard is up, this must be all around them.

It's not that I'm unsympathetic as such, more puzzled by the desire to enforce distinction where there is none. It's again that weird conjunction where those who identify as having eating disorders enforce a boundary of bona fides between themselves and behaviour that is also disordered as if they are unrelated..

Well they need to realise that the reality of our anorexic worshipping nations has caught up and overtaken them.