Stroking your id

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are we like!

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

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

Proportion control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of their faves is "portion control".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I've just answered my own question.

So I can delete the rest of this post.

Note to 'undercover' fat hating foodists

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

Cart after horse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Less respect for who?

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

Oh really? Why would that be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what do these people actually believe in?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We know what love is

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

"Loving my body almost killed me" 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agree to disagree

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

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

a) everyone's always going on about diversity

and;

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full stop; THE END.

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

EVER.

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

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

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

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

In your dreams.

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

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

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

We can do anything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral illumination

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

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

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

Does it depend on the extent of 'wrongdoing' ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The medium is their message

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

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

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

McLuhan described it once as meaning;

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

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

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

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

It empowers them.

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

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

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

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

Radical fat acceptance

Not my definition.

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

Which I may also disagree with.

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


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

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

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

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

Doesn't that haunt anyone else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd also like to say something else.

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

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

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

In depth

Not saying this isn't a good post in some ways, but I found it too snaggy, mentally speaking to be able to support it wholeheartedly, it's as much about interpretation as much as simple outright disagreement.

I find this a lot when it comes to FA, when it comes to blogging, I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that its too crude a format for the job that needs to be done re fat acceptance. There isn't the trust or respect that we see endlessly for those thought to have more 'kudos'.

The extent to which we cannot maintain a disagreeing interaction is unprecedented amongst such a thoughtful group of people. In fact, it's down right odd, I can't think of a comparable example off hand.

To discuss our nuances of disagreement we need a forum specifically for that purpose. I know we have some already, but they don't to my knowledge have the same focus. We need one to go through and discuss all received ideas and those of FA with as open a mind as possible, to test them and see if they hold up.

FA is perhaps too unwieldy to be one thing. If people get together with the specific purpose to generally go through ideas then maybe we can shake the dust of some of the more banal/suspect ones.