Saturday 30 April 2011

Shifting moral sands....

The central posit of the obesity construct is weight as a product of your lack of moral will being the agent of your doom. You have therefore become your own enemy.

You must go to war with that enemy within. You must expunge it, in doing so you will attain the freedom of slim.

Whether that is true or not it’s fair to say people signed up for ‘anti obesity’ on that basis.

Vanity can make you try but cannot make you keep going. A deeper hook is required. People are right when they say pure vanity is shallow it is, surprisingly so.

That should be good news but in the topsy turvey world of fat hate, it's something to be shamed for.

On the basis that weight was in our power to control and that if we weren’t controlling it we were being neglectful in our duty to ourselves and our society. We could keep fighting what was effectively a non-existent "will to fa"t which actually turned out to be our own will to be.

We could see we were ‘wrong’ because we are good people. That's the source of vulnerability, not oppression, but the belief not only in ones own goodness, underneath it all, but even more in the goodness of others.

We assumed it would be simple as said. Eat less, do more, didn’t think they’d be any more to it. When it proved harder, that is what many of us tried harder. Even if we didn’t or couldn’t, we had the sense of decency to feel bad about that.

Everything changed the moment it was decided fat people were actually bad people as opposed to good people falling short, behaving badly, being fallibly human, if irritatingly so.

B.A.D-F.A.T.T.Y was the end of all that.

The first thing that flew out of me when people started asserting, a fat person is a bad person was “No I’m not.”

It came from deep within, if it hadn't doubt might have stopped me saying it.

It came from the part that’s still comparing your acquired ‘beliefs’ to actual rational common sense.

That was probably one of the first times I’d asserted myself naturally and unequivocally since starting my food restriction career. It was like the voice of me that had been stifled by complete obedience.

It was the first time in forever that I’d spoken from the heart, kept the faith, stood my ground with what I knew to be true about myself as if I was just a human being, rather than an empty puppet to be guided by wiser heads.

It was the start of me speaking against the flow of what I was told, it was the first resistance, the first limit to be set on the extent of deference.

That is when the crusade began to seriously overplay its hand.

I didn’t sign up to be my own enemy, abuser, avenger and destroyer. I got caught up in that as a side effect of keeping my eyes on the goal and doing whatever it took.

In a way, I was slowly drawn in and mesmerized by my unending gaze. I didn't connect the effects with the cause because it was "the right thing"

As we all know, if something bad is happening, it flows from the actions of badness; right?

I did not sign up to bear false witness to myself, but to uncover and face the truth, no matter how uncomfortable and act on it.

After B-A-D.

No matter what I or anyone else did, that sense of acting according to moral duty was over. Never again would it be anything more than mindless obedience and that just makes a mockery of all we have put ourselves through, taking for granted that we have no sense of self preservation or desire to protect ourselves from harm.

IOW owned for life.

That's always the way with bullies, once they've hooked you, they never think you will ever resist.

It turned people from moral agents of their will, into fall guys suckers or as it is said over here, complete MUGS.

Thursday 28 April 2011

Oh gluttony!

How terrible thou art, fatz have to learn....

Wait a mo.

No one cares about gluttony.

I walk past excuse me, vomit past and present in the streets because people drink themselves to that point of intoxication, i.e. they poison themselves with booze until they have to hoick up the wretched surplus.

I can  say this because boozing is cute and the signs that you've indulged overly, amusing.

Not being an imbiber myself, although I had a few "adventures" finding that out, I was actually shocked when I found out one can become singly or doubly incontinent under the influence.

Not because of that, but because I kept comparing it in my mind to their reaction toward any hint of 'over'eating. I couldn't help wondering, what if eating lots had the same effect, people would like, explode wouldn't they?

Not to forget the numerous associations alcohol has with all kinds of violence and abuse, although I've never been sold on the "S/he's so nice until they get a drink in them and then they become a monster" speaks more of polarity than enemy within, but anyhow, gluttony in the form of drink is acceptable.

Even though it speaks very badly of those who like to drink and get drunk, if you examine the themes closely. I've never quite got what to make of the "I want to have fun/relax etc., so I'll become oblivious to myself".

Like fun and myself, or the self with all the defenses I've built up is something I need to take a break from.

Ok.

Somebody commented on another thread about "celebrating gluttony" and I responded that gluttony wasn't necessarily anything to celebrate. In fact I don't having been a former glutton myself, I found it genuinely tedious and stressful burden.

Well, I say former, I think I can honestly, although I actually feel greedier now than I did then, because although I ate more my life ended up being built around trying not to be. I'm guessing its supposed to be a substitute for freedom, but feeling free is about being able to satisfy your needs with ease and being able to feel satisfied and enjoy it.

It's also about being able to feel hungry. I don't mean necessarily ravenous, but in need of energy to replenish your body.

But in truth, it's already celebrated elsewhere all around us. Alcohol, which is of course a food too, as well as a drug, drugs, clothes, gadgets, you name it, we are unquestioningly gimme, gimme.

I don't know how much is me and how much is my history of trying to restrict my eating, but that contrast never ceases to jar.

Tuesday 26 April 2011

The 'need' for it, is already the failure of it

I seem to be going through one of those phases where I'm not sure I know what anyone is talking about including myself.

So whilst I get to the other side of that, I thought I might mention that I didn't start saying "diet's don't work" until I got into fat acceptance. I'd heard it before for obvious reasons but felt reticence about asserting it. I thought that was about 95% or whatever much disputed figure-is not 100% right?

I'm sure that's innumerate, it is about probability that is out of every attempt 95% et al, will fail, (pre goal weight) rather than out of all dieters 5% etc., will succeed.

Although dieting is clearly a massive failure, how could it not be when it preceded the "obesity spike", which wouldn't have occurred or would have been swiftly reversed by it, let alone the actual crisis which was a consequence of that spiking. Apart from statistical inflation.


Equally, that's true of the need for dieting itself, the existence of which defeats necessary basis of calorie restriction. As 'fat humanity sceptics' (haters) are fond of saying, how long does it take you to notice you've gained weight? Not long, correct, as soon as you do, eat less/do more is put into effect.

Except that doesn't work hence resorting to a more extreme version of it.

There has always been something of the ritualistic about the whole culture of weight loss dieting, a smokescreen for the inadequacy of calories in/out with the distracting creations of magick.

Maybe it was this nagging at me.

Saturday 23 April 2011

Someone

I found a picture of myself the other day and was taken aback. It was one of those head shot passport style photos, ones that are notorious for making even the stunning look wrong.

I remembered it as myself looking at my most disappointingly foul. I even remember the lower half of my face looking a bit shady.

I was mesmerized by it because I looked different. I could see myself and actually looked like someone rather than off putting. I was no longer an object, I hadn't even realised that's how I saw myself until now.

When you start to see yourself as you are making serious inroads in a habit of self loathing-and its true whether you are fat or thin-some people call that surprise beautiful. Sometimes it is, but more than any positive feelings, I just looked different, like someone, somebody, rather than just something to look away from.....

Monday 18 April 2011

Lost identity

I can't help thinking too great a love of quotation is the sign of a mind that thinks its cleverer than it is. However this one struck me immediately.

Without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity. Within love there is a constant confirmation of ourselves. ~Alain de Botton

When I was a girl, I made a profound error. Between my earnest little soul and whoever knows what, I'd got it into my head that people are so selfish, self centered and self absorbed, naturally, and that I'd better not bother with my ego or I'd become horrible.

I should concentrate my attentions elsewhere, on being good as it would be needed there. I was wrong! It seems the ego needs a surprising amount of maintenance, cultivation and above all protection.

Live and learn.

Alain de Botton's quote speaks to how absorbing fatness from the outside in, has robbed us of identity then love and vice versa. That curtailed and suppressed our own true responses, to the extent that they were not able to develop or even, appear.

FA is a reaction to that surpression, our induced passivity and where that and the hostile defining have led us. It has not restored a self defined fatness, beyond this, yet.

That is not a putdown of fat acceptance, but a recognition of the extent to which  the view has interrupted a distinct view of our own.

The demands of answering to others meant our own connection to our feelings has faded and a fat identity is in a state of arrested development.

That lost (self) love has created an emptiness at the heart of our thinking and means we have circled around a shallow opposing of what has come at us.

Which is also, inside us. It is not so much internalized fat hate as we are part of the collective consciousness of default fat phobia.

That was where we truly "let [part of] ourselves go".

Use self or lose self.

Even those who have a relatively positive view of themselves as fat people, are part of the same, there is no escape. It's not enough to not hate yourself or your fatness, you actually have to think without quarter and I've yet to come across anyone who really does.

Self hatred is on top of that and is more in the fighting of weight and the yearning not to be what you are, not an admiration of  thinness/ desire to be thin.

A lot of people will probably disagree with that, but I don't see why admiring other body types and and envying them means you have to count yourself any less.

It's the striving without respect of pain or cost that both creates and demonstrates the extent of your hate. In time, if we go about it the right way, we will rediscover and change that, restoring creating, getting in touch with our own sensibilities.

Before any expression or response to outside orders had to be 100% affirmative, anything less than that was labelled as the cause of our fatness. I'm not talking about mere objection on our part, I mean any thoughts that were not what they should be. Gung ho, proving we were committed to becoming something else.

We had to view ourselves as temporary, always ready to "move on" at any point.

We are the disease so we effectively had to fight an invention of our inner degeneracy, which turned out to be us.

There could be no middle ground, no righteous, balanced, fat view. No conversation or communication, only complete obedience any thinking which does not totally agree is non-compliance.

Full stop.

Either pepole believe in method, or in (the biology of ) people and no-one, including ourselves chose to really believe in us.

In modern society's framework of self definition and expression, this is unusual, I cannot think of anyone who matches it, although if they did, would I notice from the outside?

This unprecedented hegemony, between inner and outer worlds made one whole unbroken consciousness was conveyed using the influence of science.

Science finds truth and brings about answers with that. As we have all gotten used to it doing this, it has started a dynamic which can be reversed in our minds to our answers or wishes can create science, or truth.

Trust in its truth finding has made it powerful; "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Our challenge is demanding, what we have to be freed from is a view that is as much inside as outside us. We need to relearn how to feel about ourselves as fat people as we do about ourselves as individuals, as a continuous flow.

No split or switch.

We have not so much internalized as replaced what would be a naturally occurring view with something else, which wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't the view of those who are not fat and are hostile rather than objective or curious. It is not only their view, it is all their phobias and hang ups. Irrational fearful, illogical unreality, distorting any real observation or meaning to lies.

Removing one that is equally inside us as out. But it isn't fully realised yet and that is the real difficulty, even more than the resistance of others.

Of course they are resisting, that is the extremeness and narrowness of their chosen position, they have nowhere to go, there is no give in their stance. If they were going to do anything else but resist, they would not have erased our view in the first place.

The way things are now is more or less the only way that can serve the crusade. The decisions cannot be others because of that, crusaders will just have to reconcile themselves to our efforts, we cannot appeal to them.

What we have to decide is whether we really want that, or not.

Sunday 17 April 2011

Duty

One response to society turning on fatz I’m not feeling is "We don't owe society health" etc.,

Apart from rejecting the idea society or its authority always knows how to 'acquire' health. We have a sense of duty about our own well being anyway. I see no evidence to the contrary unless you count not necessarily wishing or being able to do exactly what certain self declared experts want us to do any time they want us to do it.

Society though can speak to my sense of duty anytime and I will certainly consider it. Not out of toadying acquiescence, but because of all the mostly unknown people who strove, fought, suffered and refused to give in to whatever low standard was the form of their time.

In spite of the price they had to pay.

Whether they were privileged or skating the edge of destitution, whether they made their aim a small point of eccentricity, specificity or an all encompassing vision of better lives, they contributed.

Because of them many of us are alive that wouldn't be or still in the game in a better condition than we would be, they've increased our well being as well as our health. If that sounds overly dramatic, take a look at the infant mortality rates of developing countries and their overall life expectancy rates.

Take a look at the lives lead and see the absence of people who care enough to fight.

I move, freer, easier, better not just because they existed, but because they refused to let things lie as they were.

That is why any society I live in can ask me to do everything from pay tax, to re-cycle my rubbish, because if I can't do something to make the world a better place in any small way, I endeavour not to leave it worse off so that those who come or will exist after me will not have to reap that.

Thing is, if family, friends, community, authority, society invoke our sense of duty to take extra care with our weight because it is deemed a potential or actual problem. We listen, because we believe in them. That belief has to be be mutual, or not at all.

If it is not, that is where any duty they can invoke, ends.

Once that fault has opened, the duty relied upon is suspended along with the trust and that's fair enough because those who needed to forgo trust in us to formulate their premise and didn't and that was reason to rethink, should expect no better from others.

Until a way is found to re-gain trust withdrawn, any target of this has the right to withdraw its trust from society in return and tell it what to do with its proposition.

If I have a duty to consider advice as far as it is honestly known, it has to be honest and there is a duty not to impinge or depress my health in the process. That should go without saying, but as it clearly hasn't.

Society has a duty not to stigmatize us, for any reason or to any end if it seeks to, it forfeits any right to lecture about the health it seeks to mishandle. If it claims we are doing the wrong things because they're expedient for us, it has no right to do the wrong things for its own expediency, either.

Simple.

We fat people have already acted in good faith according to society’s dictates. We expect that good faith to be returned by observation of the facts. If that is not desirable, it should not desire to interfere, harass in anyway, until it is.

If success depended on acting on the advice of authority, the weight of society would have gone into reverse without any shadow of a doubt. It did not, because that depended on what authority could not deliver, efficacy.

Society has the duty not to mea culpa and not pretend we are to blame for that.

It is truly a tribute to the good will of fatz that it has taken many of us this long to begin to catch on to this, hence the dawning anguished fury of to hell with duty and so on.

I can understand that.

But this low class crusade and the base motives of people acting in accord with it, no matter how decent, will never write my heart.

That's already been done by better and that is that.

The only thing it can do is change my view of society and the people in it, most especially authority.

Things can never been the same as they were before due to the way our sense of duty has been cynically mis-used.

We are entitled to be more circumspect, the suspicion that was absent from the start of the project now, isn't.

Saturday 16 April 2011

Safe space detonator

It's ironic, the other day I was defending "safe spaces" in the sense of what's the superior alternative? My point was, the so called "free speech" shouting down or erasing certain voices doesn't define or indeed respect free speech itself or there wouldn't be any need for these spaces for those who's points are logical and worthy of consideration, whether you agree or disagree with them.

I've never been at ease with the concept, apart from anything, they aren't as safe as all that. My feeling was not so much safe as space to explore what the mainstream has to squeeze out. Fat acceptance is because it has to be and I couldn't see how the ideology of the crusade could get beyond that without changing its objectionable nature, more or less wholly.

If it wanted to do that, it would exist in the first place.

I took myself off the fat feed because I didn't feel my feel for "safety" was in tune with what seemed to be the general view. Despite feeling I'd regularly been called out unfairly, I accepted if it was that regular, my feel had to be off, whatever I felt about it.

Although unsure about safety myself, I've not experienced all the horrors of the world so it's not my place to speak to the needs of others.

The way I saw FA spaces was a bit like one sees a college of law. If I crash a lecture on family law, insisting forcefully that I wish to discuss crochet, on the grounds of exercising my freedom of speech.

I'm still going to get told to leave because people are there to learn about law and wish to do so in an environment conducive to that. They put it on the tin "Law School". Fat Acceptance, see that? To attract the interested, but to dissuade the unwary.

I'm not being prevented from discussing the art of craft, and to insist that I am  merely because I wish to impose myself into any context I feel like is churlish in the extreme and goes against any freedom of speech beyond my own idea of what that must be.

Creating a tyranny surreptitiously via free speech, yes, that is possible if certain things cannot be said. Yes I know that may sound to many like Orwellian newspeak, but it is actually their rigid idea not of what free speech is, but how it is maintained or works in reality as opposed to the romantic abstraction most of us cherish to some degree.

Linearity is often an abstract construct ignoring the way things are really more circular. That if you just keep going on and on in what feels like a straight line, without care you often end up coming back around on yourself beginning to achieve the opposite of what you were previously.

The feel and form maybe different, bu the effect becomes the same. That is why results, feedback, have to inform at some point.

There is a lack of faith in humanity here, if it was really so easy as freedom versus tyranny, this side of the line or the other that would be simple. They'd be no wars, no conflicts. Are there really people out there who believe these things happen because people just feel like eschewing clearly demarcated lines for bloodshed and turmoil?

Its the difficulty of managing an optimum balance and all the myriad cross currents of experience and belief that trips us up over and over and causes and increase strife between those with differing, sometimes similar views.

The thing about safe spaces is that this particular knot is subtle and hard to foresee (specifically). When you do not confront bigotry directly, however good the rational for that is, that impulse does not go away if anything, the confidence and conformation of like minds, strengthens and clarifies it.

Which means even if anyone on the same side pokes their head above the parapet in a manner seen as vaguely awry for any reason, no matter how trivial or even irrelevant, that can become the detonator of those frustrated impulses.

People in safe spaces need to try and keep in mind all forms of conduct have their limitations which have to be assessed along with their value.

Wednesday 13 April 2011

Hate says the darndest things....

I don't know if you've seen or followed thingsfatpeoplearetold. It could be painful viewing, I found it surprisingly cathartic in the main.

Along with people feeling liberated to behave anyhow, is consideration of the malice lurking around in our heads which moves us to air it, given opportunity.

It's supposed to be more acceptable in this case because we "choose" it. Nonsense, people choose a lot of things it is deemed unacceptable to witchunt them for, it does suggest people really need to say something to explain their need to vent. To justify it to themselves more than anything.

The urge is to demoralise fatz, with the kind of things people fear or have possibly been told themselves. To make us give up on whatever it is they claim we lack already, ironic when we are so often accused of "giving up".

Actually, I don't suppose it is that is a dominant theme of viewing the crusade and its effects, always seeming to induce what it claims to fight.

That element of trying to induce demoralisation feels like a personal reaction on their part about what people have come to believe should happen to anyone deemed persona non grata. A resentment that these things have been aimed at them and were not deserved and not at the real wrong doers, represented here by fatz.

This re-confirmation of belief and attempt to discharge what may have been used to police them, makes me feel we just don't have enough accessible ways of dealing with a lot of the nasty things we are told and how we store them in the basement of our minds.

We don't even seem to recognise how much they hang around. If they are hidden, or memories fade, we may boast that we can take it, we're tough. But of course this effusion of spite says not.

Our sense of acceptance of this treatment as something we have to grow a thicker skin about becomes a sense of hopelessness. This impotence makes us ripe to turn on each other and those running things sense and exploit that.

I suppose it goes 'up the chain' for all; it's a matter of degree.

Over and above the effect on fat people, I can't help being dogged by the familiar feeling of seeing people in ways I wouldn't usually. That if they were not under this influence, they would not wish to be seen in this light, at all. As perspective has been lost on potential effects on us, so too on themselves.

We are so used to people trying to people trying to show themselves at their best, the opposite is disconcerting, like bearing witness under some kind of false pretense.

When people talk about getting tough with fatz, apart from being laughably clueless, they don't seem to understand the way they are showing themselves has to change the way they too are viewed.

Gravitas, doesn't spring to mind.

It's so taken for granted that we have been cowered by the power of righteous rhetoric, how much of that was about seeing things the same way is not perceived. I feel we have been beaten down by that as much as the firepower of the crusade.

We unwittingly assisted and any absence of that is going to be hard to replicate.

Often the way repression of any kind fails is when the energy required is more than the perceived reward. Change will be proffered before collapse. Perhaps that's what this 'food addiction' meme is the beginnings of.

It will be very interesting to see the effects of all this as it begins to strengthen and increase, whether it strengthens or demoralises those who don't quite realise how easy they've had it thus far.

Either way, they'll lose, its just a question of when both they and fat people realise it.

Exit poll fat acceptance

There's always a great hole at the heart of fat acceptance and that's the great people missing from it and as usual, its our fault. Says other people in FA. Those committed to fat acceptance aren't up to much, the unpopularity of FA is, according to theory, testament to that.

Not to worry. The answer's at hand. People are exit polling those on their out of their recent enthusiasm. The thing to remember here is these people always understand their own motivations, are not trying to cover up their own desire to continue with fat hating. Never wish to take digs at people because someone failed to fall at their feet. They never fail to take account of misunderstanding, cultural divides or expectations, such as fat people are so ultra friendly, they'll never say boo to anyone.

They never have any of these (and many more issues) nope, they always seek to answer in deeply thought out ways, earnestly trying to illuminate a better path to ending the campaign against fat people.

Bearing that in mind, the reasons why FA is not popular, have nothing to do with the fact that we've all been encouraged without restraint to dehumanize, degrade and hate fat people. Nor that people aren't as brave as maybe we like to think. Or that people love to fit in and bond with each other over a widely accepted enemy.

It's not even that fat acceptance is really, really hard. It's isolating, dispiriting and you have to exercise the most undervalued kind of small courage and that is of being a subject of unrelenting ridicule and some people just might not be up to it.

Nope. Non of that, not on your life.

The actual reasons why are......................

Sunday 10 April 2011

Suspension of goodness

A while back I worked out a pretty comprehensive overview answering the what is fat acceptance question. I worked it all out on cards, used a diagram to connect the main themes overall. I was truly inspired that day, unexpectedly so.

Alas, I left it some place and that was that. Usually things like that wouldn't worry me as themes swirl around my head and I feel able to replicate them.

This time not so.

One I do remember was the "suspension of disbelief". I meant why people find something as simple as don't stigmatize fat people too complicated to grasp. This is of course absurd in a little like going back in the day when it was too weird to say black and white people are equals.

As a girl, I used to joke that MLK could have been described, technically as insane for proposing this, given the cultural climate of his day. As we know, insanity is culturally mediated. Often that means majority madness=sanity and minority sanity=madness.

As many fatz are finding out to their cost.

People have to suspend disbelief to get on board with the crusade fury. They have to pretend fat people are their designated 'obese' role because they know us, we are them and they us we live amongst us. It's a bit like an actor in a torrid soap opera being fused with the character they play.

Often people who think they're above that 'confusion', only hoi polloi get carried away with sort of thing, but listen to any interview with an actor who's played some beloved role in some indie film and you'll hear the same you/your character, you s/he did, mash up in interviews.

When people latch on to a good character, villain or goody, it makes a noticeable inroad into our sense of the actor's persona, more so the actors themselves.

Fat acceptance is like those who insist firmly, they are not their character. Its hard to be relaxed when you used to be overtaken by the role yourself and are still squeezed between the aftermath of that and those who wish to keep you pressed into said role.

But really there's another form of suspension on my mind.

If you are on fire and I beat you with a heavy blanket or roll you roughly on the ground. I have to suspend good manners, propriety and most especially your autonomy to put you out. That's fine, I'm saving you. It would become problematic though if I only thought you were on fire and you knew you weren't.

Even if you were in some other kind of trouble, it wasn't that.

Yet, here's me insisting that you are and that trouble is fire and I'm going to beat heck out of you, to "put you out".

If I refuse to listen to you, which is effectively feedback on the situation-taken as I am by my conviction, I'm just beating you up, abusing you because of what I insist on believing. What could possibly be my motivation?

Further, where is the line on my actions and their duration to be drawn? If not by feedback, by what force?


Thus we have the so called "well meaning" fat phobes, suspending their own goodness in order to push us to do what we've done already, many of us still.

People some in FA think this is a comment on the character of the well meaning. Presumably because fat phobes insist on the doing the same, fusing their discontent with our weight with how they should judge us as people, when they accuse us of being sinfully culpable for our fatness.

No, saying they are not well meaning is a comment on this suspension, how it makes it very difficult for them to judge any feedback that will alter their behaviour to the better. That should be evident from I imagine that person's unhealthy, that means I can stigmatize them into better health.

But even if we overlook that, there is the construct they are operating in which requires them to write off any discomfort, distress or pain as just the devil within trying to have it's way.

And that is why no matter how nice people are when they start, they quickly descend as we have seen with certain folk recently.

My essential disagreement with the crusade is not the possible fat prognosis if that indeed that makes any real sense outside the calories in/out model, but of the crusaders ethical stance.

I have always maintained that I, we have nothing to fear from people who believe fat is bad news and are concerned only with our own well being. So are we. Even if there is disagreement on prognosis, they are not likely to bother us much, we will just disagree.
What I think most if not all in FA are saying is we get that you think we are heading for trouble, that is still no reason for stigma, full stop. We are rational, we have shown by the way we responded to all this that we are capable of being reasoned with.

There is no reason for any untoward emotive behaviour directed at us and we judge it for what it is, not for any purported intent however noble, we call BS on the premise.

Saturday 9 April 2011

The beautiful flow of discourse

Trigger warning: The first link is to a site that deals with maintaining a weight loss diet, although that particular thread is probably ok.

There have been a couple of really interesting threads recently around the area of food and weight. Both show what can be achieved when there is trust. One of the saddest things about the whole *obesity crusade is the way we fat people have been robbed of an equilibrium of trust in common discourse.

That is too often ignored by those who seek to characterise this as a two sided battle between equally wrong/right ideologies. We in FA aren't getting a chance to be properly wrong or right as our contribution is on the defensive against histrionic attacks.

Its not that we are seen as suspect, we are labelled completely untrustworthy disseminators of our own (ascribed) set of pathologies makeing it virtually impossible for us to contribute anything that is more than crudely defensive.

Indeed that is the point, to erase us as our contribution can only undermine the convenient fiction written in our absence.

People who speak of pure debate-on whatever side-overlook that a necessary basis for useful discussion is an assumption of good faith on both sides. By that I don't mean, gullibility in terms of accepting everything say, fat people may say as the absolute end, but merely in order to hear what is being said and respond to that. Like a chain of exchange.

Nor do I mean gullibility the other way either, to take on face value what (anti/pro obesity) crusaders say is what they actually mean.

That is disjointed because they are clearly conflicted. It's not that I don't believe crusaders have no point of view, its just that view does not hang together cogently because they seek to represent what they themselves admit is bad as the height of moral goodness.

For instance we are told that it s good for fatness to be made such an intolerably painful and uncomfortable existence, via peer pressure that we seek to do anything to reverse it. At the same time it is claimed this is morally good because it is better for us and our health to engage in attempts to reverse it.

Whether we can succeed or not.

At the same time performing the actions associated with reversal has become more important than what is supposed to be their end, mainly due to the refusal to acknowledge true efficacy or lack of said actions.

So we fat people are stuck trying to engage in discussion as we always have we have been excluded because the desired fiction au courant is agreed upon by others (and some of us to be true). Which is why FA has been revived, to give ourselves voice, not to segregate ourselves.

All this is a waste, we have a lot to offer in terms of understanding more about how we function and what we need to function well and in balance and those against us could benefit from that too.

When you see these two threads, you begin to understand just what is missing from the crude and largely irrelevant discourse who's imperative is to make being fat hurt rather than advance our understanding of each other.

*Not 'anti-obesity' just 'obesity', due to the way the results do not tally with the intent, I feel the need to keep an open mind on intent.

Thursday 7 April 2011

Our credibility

Talking (see comments) of credibility for some reason the focus is wholly on fat people's supposed lack of it, even we in FA tend to view it from this end. Why?

We have credibility, it just doesn't feel like we do.

Even those who haven't dieted cannot help but be immersed-to some degree- in that atmosphere of self disbelief. That is the source of our lack.

FA is in part about restoring things like this for ourselves and not just waiting for haters to bestow it on us (heck no).

First off what is credibility?

1. capable of being believed; believable: a credible statement.
2.worthy of belief or confidence; trustworthy: a credible witness.
 
Ask yourself do you and your experiences merit the above definitions? There's no point in referring to fat phobia on this, not because I disagree with it but because that position currently cannot accommodate our truth in any way that doesn't parrot their fantasy of what a fat person is. 

The truth is we all exist in credibility, until something impinges on it, like a stream that flows freely unless its path is blocked.

If nothing interrupts this process we are at one with what we are doing and what is actually happening to us being the truth.

So we are credible, we just don't feel it emotionally. That is where our memories of the denial of ourselves really sits.

The interruption is the constant disbelief of the obesity construct, necessary to its existence as is and our acceptance of that disbelief as the truth. This not only interrupts our own, it replaces it. That doesn't stop the truth at all, it just causes our to be internally suppressed with falsehood doing the suppressing.

In order to recover from this, we need to remove those blocks imprinted in our brain and nervous system, allow the truth squashed and flattened underneath the lies to rise to its fullness.

That is not easy, it's pretty unprecedented to have such a direct experience of clear truth flattened under such blatant lies, the obvious parallel is being mentally unbalanced, when people think their fantasy is truth.

That is what we have been put through other people's fantasies imposed upon us and we need to understand that. We need to get a sense of our amazing resilience in remaining (relatively!) stable under this kind of duress, many of us since early childhood onwards.

When it suits, take a break and just connect with a sense of all you have done to fit society's model, all you have accepted-in the past- all you have acted upon, all the results, the ups, the downs, from as early as you want to through even to battling with trolls on the internet etc., if you want and just let that flow swiftly through your mind, calmly as you can.

For now, don't go too deep or upset yourself, keep the distance you need and jump over anything or stop and recover if it gets a bit much. You can come back to it. 

Allow yourself to think and if it comes feel, this is what I've done, this happened I know it. Even if that seems odd, just stick with it to connect your mental understanding with that sweep of memory.

It doesn't matter if you don't feel anything at all emotionally, the point is just to go there in whatever capacity you can. As you repeat this, or of course, your way of connecting your emotional mind/brain with your memories and your conscious mind.

At some point your emotions will catch up (more) with what you know mentally, consciously.

Indeed, that is one of the great purposes of the conscious mind, to enable you to figure out what you can't always feel now, so that you can change or correct from the past and don't become a complete prisoner.

I'm sure the experience of FA is doing this, but it's just a suggestion of helping it along. Of respecting what you've been through and taking care of yourself.

It's important to stay relaxed and keep it light, be guided by how you feel. As you repeat this and/or develop your own rituals of connection, your experience will become more whole again.

Wednesday 6 April 2011

Addicts, addicts everywhere....

It's a staggering testament to the power of defining reality that an idea, no matter how absurd can just keep going regardless, because it is convienient to those in authority.

Because it is not accepted that calorie maniupulation is inherently defunct and that science has no answer to it's construct 'obesity', we are now to be labelled addicts.

This has of course been coming for a while, the only thing that has delayed it is not lack of 'evidence' (oh, since when has that stopped them) no it was that the idea of 'food addiction' is as ludicrous as it is reprehensible.

And guess who's well behind this swill? That's right our old friends  (whom we should be so grateful for) because they study the effects of "weight stigma" for us out of the kindness of their hearts. No one has managed to note the effects of stigma on human beings, thus far, have they?

Addiction to food is a degenerate idea, because it yet again seeks to pathologize the human condition by pathologising the thing it needs to exist, food. I doubt very much that they are observing more than the heightened function of hunger and appetite systems, which can come in the aftermath of diet rebound.

By the way, what is happening to science? This feels like some kind of counterraction to the previous more progressive ideation of the discipline, as if an anti human original sin mentality is seeking to use science to impose itself on human consciousness.

Truly unpleasant.

As someone who should be fully on board with this bilge, I know that my disordered eating was a severely heightened response of hunger and appetite, not searching for highs, not that I'm hear to criticise that, but it is a mistake to see it this way.

We are designed to use food as a support for mood, if it dips low enough to try and stop that progressing, it's supposed to be a temporary measure, if matters are not resolved it can continue, but the answer is to resolve the underlying problem not to attack the defence.

Imagine a sword fight where someone snatches the shield because they've decided that's why the swords are flying. It really is that stupid and its all because those who are observing these things, insist their boneheaded reactions and prissy responses take overwhelming precidence over accurate understandings.

There does also seem to be the possibility that when your nervous system is too tense as a matter of course, this tension spreads to hunger and appetite via the nerves controlling them-why wouldn't it? And that causes this oversensitivity.

The reason it difficult to get rid of is because it is attacked directly, rather than treated holistically, reducing the tension in the nervous system overall. That's probably why it can yield to varying degrees to psychological councelling as that can cause tension that hangs around in our bodies.

Fat people's stock has fallen so low on the back of people's rising obssessional hate has twisted minds to such an extent that they are prepared to hurt themselves to get at us, seriously, thin privilege was one of the first instances of that if I think about it.

Rebuttal of this meme is usually met with the comparison with smokers or drug addicts and alcoholics. And that is the problem for all those people who keep on with this individuality ad absurdum, whatever you choose, is ok, as long as it doesn't affect anyone else, but we know this at best comes under the term "useful fiction", because here's where it does.

Drug addicts are right to accept the term as it describes a physiological condition, however things started to slide when the arugment about psychological dependency was lost-that it too should be deemed addiction.

Then there were alcoholics, again alcoholism in the susceptible can cause a physiological dependency. The problem was with labelling it a drug when it is both a food and a drug, which helps to explain its unique place in the history of humankind, virtually every civilisation brews some kind of alcohol.

Even though I don't drink I objected to this unbalanced reading of alcohol through the lens of those who have problems with it seeking to dissuade by pathologizing.

Then smokers mainly psychologically dependent on their habit sought to use the term addict to resolve the success of anti smoking campagins on their psyche most of them say they want to give up, versus their lack of this enabling them to do so.

So many of them sought the term addict as they felt this was somewhat of a shield for the undoubted hosility shown towards them in recent years.

Now this is moving on to fat people some of whom I'm afraid are using the same defence as smokers to try and parrry the intolerable hostility of the crusade. The implications of this are worrying, one thinks especially of children, if fatness is labelled addiction-which presumably means thinness has to equal anorexia, you cannot have one without the other- then the prospect of taking children from their parents or guardians increases.

Imagine people seeing fat children in the light of being fed drugs by their parents? As stupid as that is, the meanness of the crusaders is pretty reliable.

All I can hope is that enough fat people refuse  this definition-I'm wary after the "real women" debacle that they may not-to dump it in the trash and bring some of the other crap down with it.

One thing is for sure, if it does become the law, it will be open season on the empire of rehab which thus far has not been subject to scrutiny as its victims are willing.

I really hope fat people are not suckered into this and kick the bejeezus out of it.

Tuesday 5 April 2011

People not "at risk" for being themselves

I clicked on this link from Lara's latest post, between both a couple of things brought me up short. First of all this from the OP;
Fat people due to stigma, victimization and villianized suffer low ecomonic standards of living which means we are more likely to rely on state services.
What stigma though? That of race, gender, class or fatness? The latter seems to be in effect, however its hard to see how that can be isolated from other factors. I think the truth lies in something highlighted;
Those of low income or lower socio-economic status [interesting phraseology] may be at greater risk for overweight and obesity, though the risk varies depending on age, gender, and race-ethnicity.
Presumably "lower socio-economic status" is some kind of euphemism for things over and above income. It is certainly arresting to see the suggestion that you can have a societal status that is the equivalent of having an actual low income whether you do or not so blatantly stated.

The claim is if you have a low income, or the status of someone with a low income, then you are more likely to be fatter, or not;

The study, published in the International Journal of Obesity, revealed that children from families with an income between £22,000 and £33,000 were 10 per cent more likely to be overweight or obese than those from families with an income of less than £11,000.
Seems poorer=fatter as a hard and fast rule is still open to doubt (though there may be a difference between the US and other countries) as my observations tell a slightly more complex story. Ethnic variance is also interesting as black women are significantly fatter than black men in both the US and UK.

Recognizing my doubts falls mainly under anecdotia as it is based on observation, I wouldn't say that's definitive without corroboration. Unfortunately the standard set by obesity hype is so low that one has to fall back on talents somewhat overshadowed by the age of 'evidence base', so it's not all bad then. I've always found it odd that so many people in FA seem so keen to go unquestioningly with that line.

This makes it seem a little too convenient for all concerned, possibly for divergent reasons.

Either way if the proposition is x people are more likely to be fatter then I'd advise "well meaning" (paid) wonks to state that plainly rather than convey any message of the lower orders as disease.

An "overweight" is a person,  an "obese" is a person yes seen from the perspective of their body, but until anyone can show me what part of the self is not contained within that very body, then we can leave that supernaturalist hogwash of one's body separate from one's self  aside.

A person cannot be "at risk" for being themselves, that is NONSENSE ok?
Because as we FA people keep saying, the human body cannot be characterized as a disease, if those who have the privilege of working stuff out have to come to that conclusion to get their point across, that is where they know they've got it wrong. If those on lower incomes seem human to them, of course.

The current urge to turn every aspect of human existence into the disease model as if it is some kind of quasi spiritual validation of us, is an unwise route to go down. Apart from it having an air of the occult, it gives an unbalanced and ultimately unbalancing view of human nature.

Whether you're a fat phobe or not, if they advance it with fat people, is anyone really dull brained enough to think that is where it will end?

It is too extreme a power play not to become a tightening noose around all our necks.

This isn't so much about whether people agree or disagree on the various weight prognosis  bandied around it's as much about what you are really seeking to convey with your definitions. The vainglorious idea, real or imagined, that the sort who write this kind of thing are the standard by which all humankind should measure themselves by is something they should not seek to validate by inveigling it into 'science'.

Luckily no-one would be silly enough to insist higher incomes/status are at greater risk of thin or underweight.

Saturday 2 April 2011

Whatever.......

It's funny, I'm rather flitting between trying to shift my focus away just responding to general fat hating idiocies and trying to untangle the knot of how I express myself. The two are related, even though they are getting on my nerves separately.

I'm still writing stuff and thinking, but it is surprisingly tricky to move towards a positive view from a more reactive one.

The problem is not disagreement it's the frame.

As I keep saying how can there be 'sides' and what is the one other than the only side, our own? The idea that being concerned about obesity is a side is nonsense, people who work to eradicate real diseases (and that may be the definitive clue here) are never on the 'other side' of those with said condition and if they find themselves with differences they seek to persuade because that is their only real point.

This is not about fatness, but 'obesity' a meaningless construct of turning a body into disease whilst pretending that confection means it is a separate disease. Like saying  being working class is a disease called plebesity but it's not against plebs, it's against the disease of plebesity. Oh what's that? Being a pleb.

Indeed.

So this is for the health of fatz right? So we are clearly in favour of that. Great, so who's the 'other side' of that? As we cannot be against ourselves and have proven beynod doubt we are not, whoever is against us is on the 'wrong side' in fact they are on the side of what they claim is the problem a threat to health. That can be the only other side to us.

Whatever the origins of 'obesity debate' it is haters who deal in it. How many times do you see that phrase come up in the 'sphere? It's surprisingly rare and usually in reference to crusaders 'logic'.

That may be why they are so fond of this 'debate' coinage.

They started with the erasure of us, again (ask yourself why if we are the aim of the crusade) so they can insert their own creation of us and themselves, for if it is not about us it's about them and what they need. If altruism was the motive, they would not need anything, the reward would be helping us, instead they end up creating the conditions in which to most bring about the prognosis of their construct, presumably so they can see it well enough to fight it.

Anything we say that is not on their script is something to be 'debated', presumably whilst Rome burns as the adipocalypse proceeds.

The crusade starts from an adversarial position, wholly inappropriate to health, it's more like an an anti petty crime drive (why they changed the name of that campaign and didn't stick with "jump for joy" which is lovely, I don't know).

Whilst disagreements about strategy, treatment and prognosis may occur, there can be none when it comes to the health of the subjects concerned or someone is in the wrong. And it isn't us, as we've shown by our willingness to follow orders that we care about our health and believe in acting for it, like anyone else.

When it all became too much, sometimes after a lifetime of it, we are seeking to detach ourselves against totally against the tide, undermined, blocked, ignored, when not erased and told we are not doing what we are doing.


When we were throughly disenfranchaised from mainstream health, we sought to include ourselves,  whether HAES, or do our own reserach find our own ways, because the drive to heal, survive and thrive so strong was thwarted.

We have nothing to prove to anyone, including ourselves, about our sense of responsibility and our need to take care of ourselves, it is those who claim there is another side to that, who need to explain themselves.

All of this knock about stuff is fine but I'm tired of caring what people don't think. I am bored with feeling stuck up in the head of those who are seeking to remain stupid because that is all they can do, because here is where they need to operate from. I mean that it the ancient terminology, as in refuses to acknowledge the truth. That has always been the strategy of the crisis.

It has gotten ahead for two reasons, for who supports it, number one and by its use of  the injury done to fat people by the exegeses of the calorie restriction and it's assorted emotive paraphernalia of self abuse, hatred and a sense of being a dupe and a scapegoat.

When they publicize said views, I want our thinking in its variety to be there for other fatz reading to know that isn't the way the truth and the light as presented, but I don't really feel it's my duty to disabuse anyone of wanting to hate fatz as long as they don't make it so by acting out in terms of discrimination. In the same way it's not my duty to dis-abuse anyone of religiousity merely because I am atheist/humanist.

In fact I'm ambivalent about denying them the beauty of discovery for themselves, or indeed a more human/e centred religiousity which is good enough for me if that's what speaks to them. I still trust haters enough to believe when they see our recovered presence they will respond to that as they responded to our continued abandonment of ourselves.

It can be a thin line between challenging an orthodoxy of falsehood and being drawn back into an unwinable battle. I don't mind lost causes it's lost causes, but tedious ones, I cannot stand. I usually feel argue your corner to all comers and win or lose at least raise your level of debate, but the extreme fundamentalist fiction of this precludes that growth. 

It has no flexibility. Either we are in control of our weight via counting calories or we aren't. What is the 'moderate' centrist view of that? Its falsehood has been exposed, by its practice, reality has defeated it. How can we better that?


Contact with it feels like it's regressing me mentally, even if I get better at making points.

You know how black and/or working class youth are caricatured as being reverse snobs, celebrating ignorance and stupidity as authentic?

Well this obesity crisis is the real deal, this is where stagnancy and stupidity are celebrated and the height of intelligence. It's the usual, we are asked to prove dieting doesn't make thin, by those advancing the idea of fatness reaching a crisis point-during the era of mega profit slimming and fitness industries. And a boom in money spent on obesity research which in the main has not broken with it.

In other words, the premise of the crisis proves our case.

That is why fat acceptance's scurrying off to 'prove' what is evident is not elevating intelligence how can bowing and scraping to stupidity do that? It makes you mind supplicant to the mentally flatlined and how ever silly, they lead.

If we held out more they would give us more and that might require more of a challenge. But we let them off the hook and wonder why we feel so unreal. We are never going to feel more real until we stop behaving like their factotums and more like their equals.

Friday 1 April 2011

Society is owed nothing

We are told endlessly about the costs of fatness to society, well I can tell you, being 'a unit of obesity' has cost us plenty.

I'm not in the mood to go into that, suffice to say, we owe society nothing. If fact I'd say, it owes us. Not only for ignoring that we've tried everything we've been asked to try, done everything we've been asked to do. But for holding us responsible for the dysfunction of what we've been asked to use.

We were and are not responsible for that failure.
We have been directed in our actions from the outside, we did not insist on dieting, it was insisted that we must diet to lose weight. It isn't the fault of the designers that they've failed by they are responsible for refusing to acknowledge the results and they've failed because they refuse to learn from all that we have given to their method.

If people are disappointed with our lack of weight loss, so were we, we are learning to get over that, so can society, if it wants to. If it cannot, that is not our problem, not should we be harassed, taxed, insulted or have to pay for it.  We've paid more than enough, in things more precious than money.

'Estimates' about health costs of fat people, from those quarters who refuse to acknowledge are impossible to trust. Even if they were there are other costs to society, social costs and we have no idea of who costs who.

Any extra costs, perceived or real are generated in the current system with fat people stricture to a great extent into required behaviours, that makes society accountable for any costs it feels fat people accrue as it interferes greatly in our behaviour from childhood onward.

Anyone who feels any of our costs are too much, should consider themselves no longer a believer in stigmatizing fat people and the consequences of that.