* Burned by Gaslight

* I previously titled this "Blinded" etc., but that just wasn't right.  I apologize for not getting on that sooner.

A lot of focus on the damage done to fat people is on the pressure to be thin or to lose weight. Yet much of it resides in the way delusion has been enforced in place of reality. The delusion here is not merely belief. It is the suspension of reality to impose a preferred imaginary version.

Meaning, this has been a conscious imposition of falsehood.

It’s been abundantly clear for decades if not more, that conscious calorie restriction was not a viable strategy for major reversal of weight. It has been tried by millions worldwide, not just by fat people but people of all weights.

It’s failure is obvious.

Though the practice of it preceded the so called “obesity crisis”, it neither prevented, nor has subsequently reversed it. There’s a lot of emphasis on ‘obesity’, yet whole societies are getting bigger or fatter, across the board.

The failure of calorie restriction has been deliberately and consistently denied. This delusion presented as ‘scientific/medical fact’. Fat people were vigourously shamed into participating in this sham too.

Leading us to reject the reality of what was actually happening to us and our bodies. Feeling we'd dishonoured ourselves through being fat and needed to redeem ourselves by adhering to this delusion as an implied means of redemption.

I once misnamed this process as “Rebecca syndrome”, after the film of the famous novel. The main character is the second wife of a widower tormented by the housekeeper, who manipulates things around her in order to undermine her sanity.

Turns out that's a name for something else. This process has another name; gaslighting. Ironically also after another film where the same kind of thing happens;

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory, perception and sanity. Instances may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim. 

In this case the purpose, or should I say, the drive has been a major repression of truth to keep us dieting. Like anorexics, those who invest in calorie restriction derive a profound sense of control from it.

being thin is in fact often only a minor matter compared to everything else that drives you...........control is probably at the centre of it all: thinness is simply an effect, a demonstration to yourself and to others. Control of food and eating might be the most obvious anorexic behaviour, but the control illusion stretches its tentacles into all the rest of life......

I like Emily Trosciank's phrase "the control illusion". That is exactly what's going on at the heart of this peculiar inability to absorb reality. And vice versa, a desire for control magnetizes people to adhering to calorie restriction.

We've seen evidence of it time and again. When a paper starts off with dieting is shit, then ends up saying don't stop dieting. People cannot seem to accept that this supreme illogicality is a product of the potency of that safety blanket.

Regardless of actual outcomes or damage done this control illusion remains intact.

This is why I keep saying that anorexia's labelling as 'mental illness' is instinctively political. An attempt to other anorexic behaviour so it is not associated with respectable authority.

Because any damage is not borne by those most rigourously imposing it-by proxy-on other people. So unlike a person with anorexia, there’s not even the prospect of their own pain acting as a lever of control, to sap the fervour.

It's solely on their capacity to be swayed by the damage done to their targets, in this case fat people. If that doesn't explain why fat people are and have to wake up, I don't know what does.  

The coldness to the effects on fat people induced by this mindset is becoming legendary. It has helped turn fat people into a subhuman category of disease without it even causing any pause for thought amongst decent thoughtful people.

So called caring professionals have been so fully on board with it, that this in itself has helped to discredit fat people. Virtually no criminal on earth is abandoned by the explanations and ministrations of various white coated professionals.

I guess the lesson here is criminals have learned to have more self respect than those who are law abiding. And they're more threatening to the cowardly instinct in us, that likes to bully.

The consequences have been a major source of enabling the undermining fat people’s integrity, honour.  The erasure and denial of our efforts. Not only to others, but worst of all, to ourselves.

If there is one person on earth who should believe in you when all others doubt you, that person is yourself. Fat people have been cynically denied this.

Unsurprisingly, this has affected fat people profoundly. Apart from being a major source of lowered self esteem and other problems among numerous fat people. The wonder is that we've stood up to it so well overall. I suspect that is in part due to the consistent sense of openness and honourableness we've brought to things.

Thought I do not claim we are by any means perfect, we have behaved better than anyone else plus we have been morally accountable in ways many of our tormentors haven't.

Leaving aside the physiological effects of the action of constantly attempting weight loss dieting/calorie restriction. [Weight loss dieting loss and re-gain is a punishing way to fail.] It's being pressured to keep repeating the same failure, over and again on pain of accusations of a lack of moral integrity.

Which if you think about it, is a hallmark pattern of different sorts of brain malfunction. The inability to take in and draw meaning from experience.

It’s one thing to keep trying when you know the score and are prepared for the true likelihood of success and choose to suspend that in order to have a go. It is quite another to be prevented from acknowledging what has really happened and being made to see yourself as the cause of the dysfunction.

This is what has done damage to people's psyches and has been a despicable and cruel misuse of people. More that that, trust has been violated not only by those who were expected to unreservedly deliver objective scientific truths. But also, those who were expected to have best interests of those they love at heart.

Internal

I suppose my version of self acceptance has always been more internal. It took me a long time to notice just how out of step this is with the mainstream view of things. I sincerely did not know that for others, fat acceptance is about advancing it on the outside.

This will then feed back to us internally.

So mine is more from the inside out, others from the outside in. I think both are important. Though a lot of people see my view as negative, actually there is a lot of negativity in the other version too. Fat acceptance seems to work best for me, when fat people just get on and change the things we need to change.

The funny thing about fat acceptance is like a lot of other people I recognize the relative triviality of * being fat. It simply isn't as demanding as being Black, or gay or being a woman, overall. I don't even have to think about it, you build up an empirical sense of things through time. The contrast is immediate.

Even though the openness with which people are prejudiced is hard, the worst thing is the ubiquity, there sheer unmitigated hegemony of the view against fat people. It is actually the only one that is really acknowledged.

There is a contrivance to being fat because of this that isn't there when it comes to race, sex or sexuality. Those operate on more powerful themes and have built up a subterranean history that has become all consuming and subconscious. It's difficult to conceive of post those ways of seeing.

Whereas most fat people have some memory of being seen as human beings. It's not that there wasn't bullying, but it wasn't given a spurious credence by the medical science establishment. Nor was it as hyped by those around us and the media into being the de facto way you must see fat people.

Before people could make up their minds if they wished to be an arsehole. After energetic promotion of hate, it liberated the capacity for hatefulness in us all. Including fat people towards ourselves.

* correction

Size for Sex

I was surprised when the statement is "Anti obesity: the new homophobia?" turned into is fat like being gay?

This is why I'm not a social justice person, nor an ideologue. I thought being gay was something in itself, that had nothing to do with homophobia. I actually didn't realise some people define their identity purely by oppression.

In terms of being gay, I think of homophobia as an outside imposition on gay people. They've had to deal with that intimately. And yes that has shaped the nature of same sex love, but homophobia surely cannot be seen as interchangeable with being gay. As misogyny is not the same as being a woman?

I'm not being persnickety, the whole point of the comparison between (anti) 'obesity' and homophobia is that the two are outer impositions on respective groups. It has always been my opinion that being fat is not like being gay.

What makes them seem similar is both are vehicles for abolition from outside, through methods that cannot do the job. Regardless of what you think of the desirability of those outcomes. It's the refusal to accept these truths and the creating of a delusion-that is a preferred fantasy pressed in place of a different reality that gives an air of connection. 

Except of course attempted gay deconstruction. That has become unacceptable to many. Increasingly, the idea that gay people should either be prevented from acting on their feelings, or penalized or punished, is being recognized as wrong, even if the consciousness formed by a legacy of fear and loathing of homosexuality hasn't fully caught up.

If you know me much of my views, you'll know that I'm not and have never been against weight change-anyone who wishes to make that an issue can bite me. What I am against is anything coercive, punitive or disordered. And that pretty much defines the current method we have now-calorie restriction that specifically insists on altering weight via that route and claims there is no other.

Which is nonsense as any fat person who knows any thin or slim people knows. Our bodies show that altering of the regulation of weight is done by the body all the time, but for some reason, those volunteering to investigate, show little enthusiasm for teasing that out.

Preferring instead to turn their failure into an article of faith. Rather like the fundamentally religious or conservative do with their insistence that gayness is about a lack of will power/falling out of god's grace.

Paul Campos' astute observation is in noticing the shift from problems with sex, to problems with size. And that this reflects a change in the mentality of the classes that decide these matters. They used the device of submerging what they disapprove of in  "pathology" and dressing up punishment as  "treatment.

The issue is not really what about being gay or fat, it's what the administrative classes think. What's making them tick and the levers they instinctively feel regulate morality and existence. It is now the politicized body, rather than sex(uality). 

Dr. Snow White

Poor old doctorzzzzz-again. Just because they solidly lent their gravitas to the idea that fat people are greedy lazy fools who hate our health, only needing to diet-which works-even when they knew full well it did not.

Liberating-along with scientists-the hatred that we have put up with for so long.

Just because they've recommended millions to the slimming industry "They're the experts" helped save it from being found out by linking it to the pretense that "it's all about health."

Just because they've covered up the fact that they hate the way fatter bodies are more challenging. Just because they willfully deluded themselves that what they could see wasn't working, would somehow work if they could shout and scream at their fat patients-many of them children-enough.

Just because they don't bother to direct any of their frustrations  toward "obesity research."

Just because they helped to make sure you turned into everyone's enemy, contributed hugely (yahz) to humiliating and silencing us in the process; whilst demanding they be given nothing but our unconditional love, undying (geddit) devotion and continued everlasting worship.

Just because you think they should be held accountable for their own actual, real life actions.

Doesn't mean anyone should forget for one nanosecond-they are all Snow White. 

Recognition doesn't automatically confer benefit

Reblog;

One of the things I've warned clueless slimz to wake up to is the assumption that the authority that is busy dehumanizing fat people, just happens to love them purely because they are slim. It's a comforting idea but hardly convincing.

In truth, the way they treat fat people is more likely to be the way they think about all of us. It just suits to set us against each other. A bit like those people who organize dog fighting. Pitting each dog against dog.

This is the number one rule of being in charge, learn how to delegate. Get folk to police each other, keep each other repressed and in line. Divert their attention with mutual animosity.Instead of just presuming that say, thin/slim anorexics only gain because they are recognized to the point of what is often indulgence. Test that posit by finding out whether they actually are benefiting from it, in reality.

Now I have to confess, my interest in anorexia nervosa is minimal. I've heard too much of the ideology of it for too long. Because of the insistence of PWA and their supporters to deal in their own disjointed and obscure rationale, it becomes only of interest to those who can be interested in that.
It's obvious that it doesn't appear to be doing PWA much good, nor is the rate in which anorexia occurs lessening.

Obvious and entirely predictable, if you seek to perceive human physiology through ideology rather than biology, barriers to understanding are put up.

Understanding is so often healing or the start of it.

Ideology is too often most about the demands of whatever wishful thinking you wish to invest in, and that is what takes the lead, look at politics, religion for examples.
It's not there is no truth in it, it's that this is often forced into second place by the desire to believe what one wants to believe.

So yes, fat people with ED's are suffering for lack of recognition that will give them as rational a perception of their condition as possible.
But given the rough treatment they're prepared to hand out to fat people, why presume they feel much better about slimmer people?

It would seem that the way many anorexics like to think of themselves and their condition is in line with-or has been manipulated in line with (who knows?) what the PTB is selling to the rest of us as a feasible lifestyle of calorie restriction. Which is really anorexia by another name.

How many times when the statistics concerning anorexia are pointed out as a concern is the response "But, there is an 'obesity' crisis?"

You won't be under the bus if you're still driving it

I agree with the underlying sentiment of this we can restore our self possession without using slim women's bodies. 

Though I no longer say this with any real enthusiasm. There was a time when I would have reacted against attacks on slim women's bodies with a sense of heartfelt fellow feeling.

The solution is to shake each other excitedly, all the time, and yell, as loud as you can, “You guys, aren’t bodies the coolest?!”

Sounds like a familiar feeling.

I thought..........we would go on the journey together, egging each other on.

I'm not sure exactly where the first break came from, perhaps the demand for a rename, "fat" is "alienating", which was kind of the point. Or the assumption on our part that slim women affected just as devastatingly by the hate invested in the word "fat" would revel in the chance to be free of it. 

Instead they want approval for their "fat talk" and "feeling fat."

Telling us how feminine it is to attack your body, that's what women do, anything else is FAKE! Meaning fat acceptance is of course. That knocked me off my perch. If it is fake then how do you get over the culture of tearing yourself down?

Then there was the attitude that we were most definitely not equals, no one likes you, which was a bit diverting given that slim privilege is a laughably pisspoor and hardly worth defending, the ceaseless demands for reassurance that we weren't trying to do to them what they'd already participated in doing to us.

Yeah, fat people have to reassure slimz that self restoration isn't a hostile act against them. No amount does or can or will. I could go on, but I'm already bored myself.

There are always fat people who are going to behave like this. Why are fat people expected to be any better than they?

By now, I can't tell whether my frustration is as much about trying to avoid yet another snooze-fest of whining about "real women" farrago.

Though there is amusement to be had at the over-earnest fighting for inclusion for this misappropriated term "Real Women."

I am not a real woman. Woman is realness inclusive enough for me thanks, as in: "Feminism the radical notion that women are human beings." You dig? I know other women are real too, without needing to be told this by Hanne Blank or anyone else.

It is undoubtedly wrong to abuse slimmer women's bodies. Just don't do it. I would appreciate some acknowledgement of the extent to which slim women often don't have a problem seeing themselves as the standard and defend it as if it's their birthright. 

Patronizingly lecturing fatter people that their act won't do any good in the long run is not just laughably hypocritical, it is something so many slimz obviously don't believe themselves. So why they expect some fatter people to behave any better than they I don't know.

This capacity to only see your own sin in the "sin eaters" is hardly endearing. As is usual, people seem to keep expecting FALSE superiority to pay out more than it ever does (because it is false natch).

At the base of narrow body standards is not so much fat phobia as those setting them, probably the thin/slim upper middle class/middle types who seem to populate 'obesity research' and the like, have no perspective other than their own.

They are surrounded by people just like them. They are in a state of uncritical assertion of their own spoiled behaviour and rarely encounter the kind of interruption to this, that allowed them to mug us with their BS standard in the first place.

Everyone starts out assuming they are the standard by which all should be measured.

Remember when you were a little kid and you went to nursery/primary school and first realized other kids were weird. Their families weren't just like yours. Yes! Your family's rules, laws, mores, habits, traditions were not the way things must be.

We have to learn not to do similar with bodies as well. Not to use them as the rule to measure others.

To understand the different associations applied to various body sizes means sensitivities vary. I still remember in the primary school playground, hearing a thin girl protest about how she kept being patronized as barely there. It made her feel insubstantial, lesser somehow and that really angered her.

She was strong, felt healthy and capable-as indeed was my impression of her.

I was taken aback. I'd assumed she wouldn't have any real issues with her body as she was the ideal. I've never forgotten that and made an effort to listen more carefully. To this day, I explain to those fat people who keep this habit. That they are really doing the same underlying thing we all do, using their body as a yardstick to measure others. 

To come across this in fat people doing the same as slim people, is hardly "hypocritical" it means, not every fat person is particularly thoughtful about consequences. Notably, the person who provoked the OP was formerly thin.

The many of us in fat acceptance who've never had any truck with this sort of thing feel that way, because we engage our minds critically and empathetically on the subject. We've thought it through a bit.

That is neither a product of being fat or being involved in fat acceptance, in itself. It would be nice if that wasn't taken for granted.

Of course you are going to fat people who think the same way as so many slimz still do. What would be impressive would be if it ever dawned that this is what fat people still find it difficult to escape.

Frankly, until they found the real woman thing, I was beginning to think slim people didn't get the point about an enforcement of a standard being self defeating. Well seriously, does it look like they do?

It was a little dispiriting knowing they knew it all along, but just allowed things to progress. Now we are being told that it doesn't do any good, as if we couldn't tell from the constant venting of insecurities.

That is actually a female trope now, We are women we are insecure.  I think we could see this collusion in fat hate didn't do much good. It's whether they see the end of that as more of a loss than a gain, for them.

The real lesson of eating whilst having an emotion is .....

You're alive!

Okay, I know what this is about. They mean that stimulus to your nervous system, i.e. emotions/feelings, shunts eating processes into gear.

Rather like smoking a spliff can too, because it stimulates part of the eating process located in your brain, in a more direct way. I'm pretty sure smoking a doobie is not an emotion.

When a certain level of tension has built up in your system, rather like a clenched fist makes your hand act as one and an open palm means you can animate parts more distinctly, with less engagement of what isn't needed.

Tension tends to drag more processes into play than the you intend. That's one of the reasons it is so exhausting. Flexibility tends to reduce activity to the necessary, encouraging the flow of energy.

There are three main approaches to healing that I know of. Directly attacking the pathology, epitomized by western medicine's magic bullets-though a pretty universal impulse.

To ease and relieve everything but the pathology, i.e. things that support and maintain our everyday well being like Tai Chi, meditation and other alternative exercise therapies. By resting, refreshing our bodies as a whole, we encourage self repair and self healing

Or combinations of both.

I've never liked the intensity of focus on eating disorders as if that is the person. Rather than the second supporting the person as a whole. In this case, calming down the nervous system as a whole.

In other words calming and reviving you as a whole person.  Focus on the 'disease' can end up making it seem to be you and you seeing yourself as it.

A combination, the third approach means yes, you might well have to look at the way you see yourself, the world and your interactions with it. How you (feel you) fit your overall view of everything. 

The current favoured approach is to me bizarre and frankly at times repellent.  It tends to be avoiding both seeing you as a whole person and questioning the way you see yourself. No doubt due to the implications.

Identifying a person as their-real or assumed- pathology (sound familiar?) and encouraging people to see themselves through it, as if it's an identity is the current theme du nos jours.

Conditions are taken very, very seriously indeed-as if unseriousness is  somehow crux of the problem. Inducing a fatalistic "I'll never get ovah this" line, a gap for another set of toxic pills with minimal efficacy to be produced.

Concentrating on an image of wounded, damsels in distress, yet brave and noble in their sufferings/fight against this terrible 'illness.' As if the interest is the eating disorders not the person.

Make a real worshipful cult out of it. A full on irrelevant Gothic melodrama.

Increasing the prospect of them feeling barren and lost without it.

Addicted to Addiction

Still trying to find a civil response to some of the points expressed in the comments to this. In the meantime I made the error or following one of the links to a post mentioned.

It begins;

A third of the population could be addicted to food and the problem should be treated as a medical condition, says an addiction expert.

It continues;

Professor Doug Sellman believes the symptoms of being hooked on food are similar to those seen in drug and alcohol addicts, but those grappling with the affliction receive no support or funding. 

Really, so what's this like? Similar to symptoms found in drug and alcohol addicts. That's right, fat people experience these things from being fat 'addicted to food'.

Haven't you noticed that you have been as high as a kite for years? Well don't worry, there's "research" to fill you in. Notice how fat people keep needing to be told the most obvious things about ourselves from 'research"?

As if we aren't aware of our own existence or something.

All will be revealed; the totally altered reality, filled with visual and auditory hallucinations, intense feelings of pleasure, lowered inhibition, messed up co-ordination etc.,

The real shock is that all this can happen without you even noticing, but hey, neither did your family or friends. Unlike the addiction of drugs and alcohol which can be viewed objectively by others.

But don't let me deprive you of more of the hard stuff;

Like people with methamphetamine, you don't get the shaking but it's the craving, feeling deprived and really needing it.

I see what he did there. It's not like methamphetamine at all, which necessitates mentioning it. Like don't think of an elephant. What else is it not like/ like?

"It's like they need those particular foods as if their lives depended on it.

I confess! I sometimes do feel like my life depends on particular foods, especially if I wish to eat that particular food and not any other. That comes out of our basic leaning toward seeking energy. Our primary nutrient need means we all have an in-built and powerful attraction towards energy dense foods. It's even part of the attraction (and effect) of alcohol.

I think this is about my fave;

The need for food "hijacks" the brain's limbic system, which is responsible for the body's survival instincts - in effect, the brain tricks the body into needing more and more food.

The necessity of food hijacks the very system helping to ensure we fulfil the necessities of survival-such as eating.

Okay. This is not really understanding how eating and food functions. That's true of most 'food addiction' experts/advocates. They trade on the 'obesity' cult hype, which places the direction of its definitions totally in the hands of professionals and is then applied to the people concerned. It's not direct observation. 

Like drug addictions, people addicted to food needed increasingly large "hits".

 Sounds like they'll need increasingly large "shits" too.

Even though they know it's bad for them, they still just feel this drive to eat.

Oh you know these people can't hear themselves at all. No critical faculties are being engaged internally, or externally.

What happened to our view?

Back when I was learning to break the habit of a lifetime and voice thoughts I kept unformed in the back of my mind, I remembered thinking-there is only one point of view and that is unfair.

It doesn't come across much, but there's only one view of fatness and it does not come from fat people, nor has any real honest input from us.

Zero, zilch, nada, nichts.

Barely.

Yet we adopted it the same as everyone else.

Everyone agreed the same view of fatness, decided by those who were not fat. And we fat people agreed with a view of ourselves that came not from us.

So, what happened to our view?

It was repressed from within and without.

By representing the disorder that is dietary restriction as perfectly right and feasible, the normal responses we are designed to have became the sign of sin. The conscious desire to be greedy rising up from deep within us.

We felt we had to suppress those responses, our feelings and emotions in order to get on with the process of righting ourselves. To live right and become right-or slim. To merely feel and acknowledge those feelings was seen, in itself as identifying with them, strengthening them, going along with them. It was guilt and would go against and defeat our righteous purpose.

So we had to just not acknowledge them, somehow we became detached from part of our inner selves. It wasn't a case of feeling and thinking about what that was and deciding not to tell anyone. It was, you cannot acknowledge, what's going on within. That's collusion with badness, not cultivating the rightness that had to be delivered from outside, from those who were not wrong-fat, but were right-slim. 

What we were repressing was connection with our innate defence mechanisms at work and thinking about and analyzing our emotional, intellectual and psychological responses to them. This has left an eerie silence within virtually all fat people. Something missing.

Like coming to a place where the road should be, but it runs out and there's just a hint of what should be there, but somehow obscure..........

Weak

Skin aka, Deborah Dyer undoubtedly one of the most talented singers I've ever heard (this isn't even the best performance I've heard from her) and check this out. The respect is evident. She's so good, even though I'm not a fan of the oeuvre of her band Skunk Anansie, I still like hearing her voice.

Yet, there's something about the lyric.

"Weak as I am. Am I too much for you?"

All is uh-gain leading to review the supposed weakness of the word "acceptance," as in, "fat acceptance." I can be quite nit picky about terms, yet I've never had any real problem with it. Liberationist at heart, I've never been keen on "equality" as the be all and end all of anything. I view it as at best a guide, not an aim.

So I feel like the kind of person who might find acceptance insipid somehow, but I just don't. I think that's because I don't really see the direction of fat acceptance as fronting to slim people. Or in performing, proving anything for them.

I don't believe fat hating is a genuine on face value urge. Hate comes from being threatened, its not supposed to be a contrivance of social engineering facilitation. The causes provoking it are heartfelt yes, but that's not what we are getting or being told. The action of it is the highest grade of BS there is.

It makes me cringe.  If we weren't so self conscious ourselves, we'd see just how utterly reprehensible and absurd it is. Which many of us of course, don't want. We protect our love affair with thin privilege, as we complain about it.

My FA is not for slim people sorry. Though they're welcome as always to take what they want-honestly. But it's not specifically shaped for their sensibilities and they need to stop pouting about that.

The priority is enlightening (ha!) fat people young and old alike.

All this means that even if I did feel weak, I'd want room to feel it and still count myself as human-and be counted as such. The right to feel weak, to be weak, because you have been weakened by forces that may or may not be within your influence. This ability to feel feeling honestly something so often undermined in fat people. I want it.

Certainly way more than I want the tight resentful approval of those trying to persuade me to submerge myself into where they've excluded me from and where I frankly don't particularly want to be as much as all that.

You might say, it's either more toward one or the other. Either, outside- changing the minds of others to change your own. Or inside out, changing your own mind which forces others to make a decision about their response.

I don't know if either is superior, just that I know which one makes most sense to me and feels right.

The need to project strength though understandable isn't my priority, not for it's own sake. Having been beat up and drained for so long, people want to be fierce, but we forget, we've survived, amazingly well. I'm not entirely sure how or why, but don't underestimate how unexpected that is, for everyone.

How strong it is.

Fat people staying honest and true to honouring ourselves would be a mighty force indeed. Not only that, our truths are for everyone and can be used by them. Not when our actions are guided by pandering though.

Our weakness is in thinking we need to impress others more than we need to impress ourselves.

Urban Revelation

I have my own feelings about both the use of the concept of privilege as central to understanding fat people's situation. Either way, Big Liberty has written a new version, it starts;

The state of receiving unearned social status, notoriety, workplace and academic merit, attention from prospective dating partners, media attention, and other perks from being perceived as 'thin.' Can also encompass greater access to healthcare, likelihood of attaining gainful employ, association with positive traits like being a good parent, person, or lover, accommodation in public and private transportation, and the ability to immigrate to New Zealand (check: there's a BMI limit) -- by virtue of being 'thin.'

 The first definition by someone called *thinniswill begins thus;

The concept where overweight and obese Tumblr users (usually white women, but not limited to race, gender, or sex) whine about how being fat is equal to the years of oppression similar to racism. More accurately, an ongoing game of sour grapes, wherein those too lazy to change themselves will instead blame society for the fact that they're missing out on all the best parts of life. 

Yeah, having as rarefied an intellect as this no doubt. And can I just say how much I enjoy the use of race as a way of trying to induce shame fat? Black People exist, for that kind of use.

Well, I suppose it makes a change from the Holocaust.

I couldn't fail to notice the definitions of thinspiration, first;

1.)Thin + Inspiration.

a.)A person's thinspiration is usually an Image or Photograph, but can be many other things like: Lyrics, Poems, Quotes, Sayings, etc..

b.)An inspiration to stay thin.

And second;

something that mostly anorexics and bulimics use. Is usually in the form of a picture in which ana and mia people look to to gain inspiration to continue starving themselves in order to reach an ideal that they will never be able to get to.
common thinspirations:

There are three more. They are all by different people. The closest thing to an insulting word or term I could find amongst them was, emaciated. And that could be debatable.

Here's anorexia and here's 'obesity', excuse the comparison, but it just goes to make the point that it doesn't make any difference whether you are "mentally ill" or not, if you are slim. [I couldn't resist adding fat, post edit, I think you know what to expect, enjoy!]

The latter is commented upon, a soulless wasteland of nothing but what the definer wishes to say, basically a cheap crack. The first one is the voice of those concerned, you can tell. They can challenge even dominant views and that still makes sense, it's still feels worthy of consideration.

They are never disqualified from being.  From first person testimony of their own. Not having to regurgitate the hostile and hateful as if that is how they feel.

I think that about sums up the privilege accorded slim people. Fat people are looked upon, lazily defined as caricature. And no, that isn't an irony at all.

Slim people just ARE.

* Oh, did I just make up my own version of something?

Intoxication is the cornerstone of addiction

The term addiction is being thrown at fat people (isn't everything). No problemo though, right? All one has to do is say, "I am not an addict." Laters, ta ta, bye.

As simple as that.

But no. The politics people put onto fatness complicates "no", unnecessarily- in ways that are as psychologically draining as they are boring as hell.

I'm one of those strange people who actually has some (basic) grasp of what addiction really is. I was lost in waffling as usual, 'til the other day when I had a sudden light bulb moment. I realised that the key to explaining addiction might not be pleasure (the cause of my waffling) but intoxication, d'oh!

Intoxication is the cornerstone of addiction.

For now, forget everything about that term (work with me) but the third definition;

Poisoning by a drug or toxic substance

The point about ingesting these chemicals is they can poison you. Your body has ways of trying to prevent that from happening. Opiates, like heroin especially can relax your muscles to the point of paralysis-including such as your heart for instance- so your functioning literally comes to a halt. Our bodies naturally produce opiate like substances, in order to aid our functioning. For example to stop the working of your body from hurting. i.e. heart beat, lungs inhaling and exhaling, even joints and muscles contracting and stretching.

Your body has inbuilt protection against a potentially lethal intake of opiates, chiefly, to reduce its own production of said chemicals (obviously not infallible, but its doing what it can.)
I'm pretty sure this is the basis of some forms of chronic pain syndrome, where people are in permanent pain, but doctors can find no specific injury or reason why.

So, an intake of opiates leads to a reduction in the amount of those pleasure chemicals generated. This is what addicts speak of when they talk about how great the first time is and how its never as great again. That first time is either before the body reads and starts to react efficiently to what's going on. Once all this is experienced, it's quicker off the mark next time. This is what users call the/a"downer."

After the drugs ingested are processed by the body and the effect wears off, production can adjust back up to normal, or thereabouts.

When drug use becomes a regular enough pattern, that ability to restore normality is what can become compromised. It can wear out and function at so low a level that the person can no longer function properly without that intake. The internal production is no longer adequate.

This atrophy of function is the physiological basis of addiction.

It varies in people according to susceptibility. Genuine physiological addiction, that is when the body finds it hard or even cannot seem to recover its function to a tolerable level, is quite rare amongst drug users.

What less rare is what is really a form of emotional dependence. When factors other than physiological dependence weld people to drug use. That can be more powerful than chemical dependence.

Puny Accusation

I still remember when I first started commenting on the internet. I was on a certain leftist blog.  Having one of my sadly numerous desolate sub-conversations with a smug middle class man. During which, he asserted laziness was a character flaw.

I responded that I did not view it this way.

End of conversation.

Apparently, if I was too out of it not to know the profound truth he uttered, when I heard it. We could hardly continue our futile 'exchange'.

This part of the internet has been strange for me. I expected to find connection with like minds. It has not been so-for varying reasons-in the main.

So I was glad to see someone else knows this.

Laziness, that great cloud stalking fat people under the puny caricature of 'obese', is itself a lazy accusation. In whomever this quality is found, it is usually some kind of mental protest. Sometimes its the early stages of a kind of melancholia, or even depression.

We can see a form of it manifesting in the rigid adherence to the calorie/expenditure model as the be all and end all of weight regulation. It's devotees want it to be it, hence they lack an overwhelming drive to go on and fill in the gaps.

Expectation is the key to this form of indolence. They feel it has already been done, when in fact, it hasn't.

Communication didn't have to be this hard. Some just want it to be.

Design

Humans are not designed to be fat, apparently, yet can be and are. We are apparently designed to weight loss diet successfully and in the main, cannot.

Go figure.

Social Enforcers

I'm sure you've seen or heard of this video of Jennifer Livingston a presenter of a morning show in Lacrosse Wisconsin.

She received this e-mail from a viewer headed "community responsibility;

Hi Jennifer,

It's unusual that I see your morning show, but I did so for a very short time today. I was surprised indeed to witness that your physical condition hasn't improved for many years. Surely you don't consider yourself a suitable example for this community's young people, girls in particular. Obesity is one of the worst choices a person can make and one of the most dangerous habits to maintain. I leave you this note hoping that you'll reconsider your responsibility as a local public personality to present and promote a healthy lifestyle.

What a prince eh?

Undoubtedly crashingly impertinent, invasive and just down right c-rude, but you know what? Once the initial impact disperses, it's hard to feel this is just an individual. If you've paid any attention over the years to the way people we trust with our lives have abused their influence over us.

It feels very much like what it is, the relatively well mannered utterings of a sockpuppet drone. A mere extension of the authority that has propelled this effort.

It's about time people woke up to just how chronically supine they sound droning on about people's dis-easiness, that they themselves are enforcing with their mechanical outpourings. In fact, when one can bypass hurt, they sound just like we did when we were falling hook line and sinker for this script-inside our own heads-there's is our old voice back at us.

Its all distraction.
 
I have yet to hear one person dealing in it who isn't diminished by that. It's like an advert for how little self respect we have in general. The real embarrassment is how much of a hold those who have access to white coats can have over us.

Everyone who's commented thus far, seems to have taken the lead from Ms Livingston, filing it under freelance "bullying". Being the current affairs professional she is, she cleverly linked it to some anti bullying month. But lets face it, this is a concerted and contrived campaign against fat people directed by those with authority.

The desire to avoid that seems puzzling to me, but perhaps it is me who's out of tune.

I need to repeat, its taken a lot to get people to this point. It was not an overnight thing and that was with a standing start of an extensive history of ridiculing fat people.

I can't stand the way the very thing that should be getting some very sharp scrutiny in all this, authority and our relationship with it. Our betters must remain benign or the sky will fall down. So, not too much chance of examining what we can learn from all this. 

Pater must remain intact. That means of course we have to point fingers at each other, which means well, we are just doing the same as each other aren't we?

Fat people are thieves because....we bad. Fat haters are bullies apropos of nothing because they are bad. Oh, sorry wait, is that fat people who are bad or the others carry out their orders? Is it fat people who are mentally suspect, or the "bullies"? Oh I know, the public's bad, we're all bad.

Authority's ((((((goooooood)))))).

It chose the means by which people were supposed to make change, whilst doing nothing to halt the changes in the environment going in the opposite direction; let alone acknowledge that the valiant efforts of those they dumped on, had demonstrated the intrinsic unfeasibility of their dictates, anyway.

Whilst I do not stint on pointing the finger at individuals and their decision to liberate behaviour they know to be wrong, under the protection of this permission given from our supposed betters. Because we should learn from this not to be such tools, any of us.

It makes me uncomfortable to hear this filed under "bullying". A little part of me feels like ignoring this. It connects, gaining a traction that relieves from the almost permanent state of headdesking that is the usual reward for speaking about fat affairs.

I certainly have felt the insistence on making this solely about fat people was a mistake. I remember once crossing swords, when I said being excluded from health care was not simply about being fat, it was about being on the medico's shit list.

That approach would have connected too.

Turning this into an individual matter, ignoring the hate campaign orchestrated against fat people is like insisting on seeing sexual assaults in terms of the evil or sick who lurk amongst us, removing these acts from their context in sex/ gender power relations.

I don't say everything has to be or can operate always at the deepest depths. Nor do I claim to be particularly deep myself. But this feels way too shallow and in the end, rather self defeating.

Often people attempt to silence fat people by insisting the imposed submerging of ones humanity to that of an object-its like smoking/booze/drugs-is an apt way to run a "health campaign" one that claims the "cure" is already in existence.

And concerns itself solely in stating how bad the disease of being human is.

Is this within the remit of healers?

Everyone knows the way fat people are being treated is wrong, they know.  They want not to know. As little time as I have for centring fat people's consciousness around the notion of "thin privilege", I can't help noting the concept is hugely unpopular.

Even though it has been stated that fatness is a default disadvantage, that can only be remedied by slimming down. Yet, when fat people assert it in this form, suddenly we are told being fat isn't a disadvantage.

In other words, they themselves feel it is more socially enforced, than an actual deficit.

You only have to look at the extraordinary capacity of human beings to adapt to their circumstances to sense what a contrivance it is to place mere fatness as in some way, outside that.

And er, what's with this making "fat" an insult? The man referred to her "obesity", and gave us an object lesson in the sheer absurdity of that term. It turns first person into third. From "I am Jennifer" to "Jennifer is obesity".

He did not call her fat. 

All that his message conveys, flows from the stupidity of naming a condition after the whole person. If you excised the ideal weight and named 'obesity' as starting from there, it might work.

But it doesn't, it makes the whole person disease.

It's bad enough when people turn sexuality, or gender, into disease. But most people can at least conceptualize a person is more than that, though the taint created by the bad feeling tends to overshadow it.

This is presumably why our heroine decided she was "more than a number on a scale", reminds me of "more than a woman."

We are not more than our weight, that's the point. What we all are is more than the meanings being assigned to weight, everyone is, including those fighting to continue to be favoured. 

And as for us being"better than this"? Please, we aren't! This is who we are, desperate peculiar individuals looking for any advantage we can get, even punking people we love, admire respect and depend on.

Even whilst we lose something that is really precious.

I'm all for the human spirit, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. We have all fallen for this crap like the proverbial sack of potatoes, whether fat people not defending ourselves worth a damn, allowing every boundary of decency to be crossed. And others stunning their conscience, indulging themselves every bit as much as they describe.

We'll be better than this, when we take a good hard look at why we need to behave this way. The forces that drive us in these directions and how we can learn from all this.

*Post Edit

Identity

To quote the witty clever Marianne Elliot-Said aka Poly Styrene (check out the full lyrics -scroll down to "identity"T/W for mention of extreme self harm/suicide);

"Identity is the crisis can't you see?"

I was taken aback when I started to hear people say, fat is an identity. I can't say I felt it. To me being fat doesn't really mean diddly in essence, that's the point. It has been defined and distorted by those who want their weight to define them.

Fatness has been defined as an extension of that, in service to them-by them and their needs, contrived and otherwise. Ironically, I'd discovered just how meaningless slimness was to me when I diverted from my duty to play the 'obese' role.

After a while, I couldn't actually remember what I was supposed to be slim for. It's like the emotional memory had gone.

This is one of the few occasions when perhaps sidelining thinness or slimness would not be apt. Always when it comes to repression of others, is the repression of oneself. The drive is subconscious.

When the receptacles for this stop playing their assigned role, the dominant ones can be the ones who may find themselves a bit lost.

The underlying mystery is why the desire for this extent of assertion in the first place?  What makes certain groups so aggressive in their need for this? Do you find that as unnerving to contemplate as I do?

The peculiar thing about slim, perhaps really thin people is they have spontaneously, without to my knowledge any meetings or conferences to have decided they must issue forth this collective identity.

That it is inherently superior to fatness. Why would it be so necessary to prove? Why so fraught if its that obvious?

A small chapter of the fattening of society as a whole is told through the story of vanity sizing.  

“So many women tie their self-esteem to the size on the tag.” 

For "so many" read, slim women. These women have been reported to have stopped buying clothes on occasion when they can no longer fit into the size they feel best befits their identity.That they feel they are.

This feeling once coagulated around size 10 for a few generations. It had a meaningful cultural resonance, possibly until women's shape started to change (thicker waist). It was not so much about slimness that was a given. It was the size women were supposed to be.

Anything greater, unless you were tall or "pleasingly plump" was, well a bit awkward. Going up to unspeakable in the 'plus' or fat sizes.

That is why it is such a cheek that some people even manage to try laying this at the door for vanity of fat people. They barely bothered to make clothes for fat people, why would they wish to obscure how fat we were?

Perhaps as the fattening has now reached a critical mass (sorry, couldn't resist) the vanity has moved to fatter people, who used to be slim.

And perhaps in many of their minds, still are.

What is fascinating about this erm, psycho-sociology, is fat people simply do not care nearly as much. In that sense, it's not so much that we don't identify a fat group and being grouped in it. In our desperation to be reassigned, we were blocked from bonding properly with our own bodies, en masse.

We were taught to see them as temporary. Only time and the failure of the experiment has forced reality to be acknowledged, finally.

We neither have the drive, nor don't own the idea of what fat/ness is or is supposed to be.

That has been given to us. We are literally a figment of slimmer people's imagination. Funnily enough, it is slim people who recognize themselves-and we too-as individuals above all else and fat people are seen and still too often see ourselves as many people, with one psyche.

I don't mean what Americans call a "hive mind" I mean, our default is as one archetype. The closest that comes to mind is the way White People are always individuals, yet recognizably a group or tribe it is Black People who seem to merge. Especially to non Black People.

I still remember witnessing a discussion where a White Person expressed the sentiment that, it was frustrating when Black People did not agree.

Annoying though it was, I knew what the person meant, scary isn't it? At the same time, I marvelled at how it simply could not be applied to White People. 

Detoxify Culpability

Fat people are blamed. Accused of directly being at fault. Its a particular form of suffocating culpability-as punishment and corrective, something people instinctively seek to avoid. Making it a way to put pressure on fat people to think and act in certain ways. To be in a permanent state of demoralisation.

The usual impulse for others has been to seek removal of the pressure of culpability by removing it altogether. Fatness has been deliberately excluded from this process of using "Not my fault" as a shield to relieve the pressure of burdens such as shame and self loathing.

Some people, seeing those accorded greater value by society-going down this route, presume fat people need to follow suit, to relieve the tremendous burden of blame pressing down on us. To equalize things. I say instead we should consider;

Detoxifying culpability

Just like we're doing with fat and fatness.  We are clearing out a lot of the horseshit people dumped in on that by refusing to be ashamed, insulted or bowed by being tagged "FAT!!!!"

Thus stopping it from brutalizing our psyches, which effectively recruits you unwittingly into a form of self abuse. This has helped many who aren't fat too. Though even if that was just in our own minds it would still be an achievement.

After being terrorized by it for so much of our lives, we are slowly returning some of its original more varied tone and meaning. Rich, dense, fertile, sumptuous, energetic, comforting, truculent, ballast etc.,......... Instead of a one track of stupid scare pathology. A toxic blow to oneself, at times to the point of not being able to think or function.

Rather than seeking to join everyone else in the pursuit of innocence, sometimes hiding behind terms like victim blaming (because wouldn't it be awful if victims were ever human and culpable, in any way). We need to consider the fact that to be human is to be culpable for some wrongness of some kind some of the time. Allowing that to reach the point of being such a threat to ones ego and mental health that people need to run away from it needs to be dealt with.

If fat people are the ones to do that, lets take that on, rather than expending that energy chasing a retreat into what our status has made impossible, innocence. Let's surprise as we have before and devalue the currency of faux innocence by saying "Screw it!"

The burden of blame, false and real is of course likely to be in addition to the problem/dilemma/conundrum itself creating a vicious chain reaction of crisis which begets shame, which assaults the ego, which drains mental, emotional and physical energy, making it harder to come cope or come up with solutions, hence one entrenches and sinks lower into the mire.

Often it is this, rather than the original issue or trigger itself, that really stops a person from coming to terms and resolution. It's so powerful that all one has to do is create a "crisis" to set it off.

Which I'm sure you'll recognize as the the obesity crisis's primary strategy and why that has become more problematic for many than any problems they may actually have. iow, fat people are no different to people, we are people.

It's felt to make things easier for others, if fat people can be made artificially if necessary to be a singular class to turn our being into disease.

Fat people's way of trying to protect themselves from being called out as fat, was to develop an archetypal kiss arse mentality centred around neutralizing potential anger in those around us, lest the dreaded weapon of being called "FAT!!!" was triumphantly unleashed by anyone who felt like it.

I still remember how much fat people lived in permanent state of anxiety that anyone would find a reason to say it. Many still do.

Culpability is not quite the same as blame though they overlap. To be to blame is to be accountable usually to be the cause of something, in moral terms. To be culpable, is to have influence or input which may or may include a varying extent of moral burden.

If I deliberately decide to step on your toes, I am to blame for your hurt. If I do the same accidentally, I am responsible, or culpable, but not to the same way morally.

With fat people, the two have been deliberately fused to obscure the implications of that blame. Which is if fat people are to blame for creating disease in ourselves so is everyone else. Either human beings ultimately create their own health/ill health or they don't. By turning fatness into disease and that a choice they get round the implications that all people create their health/ill health by being too.

Fat means, no one else has to deal with the burden of this knowledge/assumption.

Fatness is a way of marking fat people as unique. This means a) no one has to do anything but us, indeed people can actively get in the way of the instructions they've given us without any responsibility for that and b) no one has to bear the burden of seeing themselves as the creators of their own health woes-which would of course ease that burden. It is a shabby and cynically vindictive thing to do. To not only burden with a damaging level of blame with little to relieve it, but to quarantine people in that state.

All can pretend we are unique amongst humankind, being an island each to ourselves and we can resolve issues we all should confront.

Yes, we need to question being blamed, but also whether it is so bad to be to "blame"/culpable really,  for being fat. Whether, if we did choose to be fat, it wouldn't be for good reason and to see that as worthy of exploration as any other state of being that is seen in this light.

The answer would be to discuss those possibilities civilly and intelligently, rather than to stick us with the pervading uncivilized carry on of now.

Separate blame from culpability and toss it in the bin. Consider the latter head on. Culpability is oh so very human. Few adults are wholly above it for what is either bad decisions, situations, outcomes, real or perceived. Rather than allowing that to sink us, regardless of whether we're to blame or not- like we fatz used to allow "FAT!!!!!" to sink us.

Why can't we acknowledge this and learn instead to balance that with maintaining the kind of mindset we will need to make things better? To be honest fatz, like it or not, that is exactly what every has stuck us with, we are the one's who'll have to sort it out.

"Grocery tumour"?

Figures.

As the doctor started the exam, he patted her husband’s stomach and called it a “grocery tumor”.

 'Obesity' is a slim person wearing a fat suit that is disease.

I think the case can rest on that one.

P.S.

Stepping out of the role of medical professional that way, to enter into this kind of over familiarity, when someone is in a vulnerable position-laying down- is not appropriate: boundaries.

I can't think of an equivalent, I suppose it's like this doctor suddenly patting the concave tummy of a slim person saying something like "famine".

Uncalled for.

Rude awakening

I had to link to this amazing article. It so beautifully expresses not only its central point, which is the mis design and reporting of clinical trials of drugs by pharmaceutical companies, to distort findings in favour of efficacy and safety.

So applicable to the way quack techniques have been used maintain a state of delusion on the feasibility of weight loss dieting as weight regulation-temporary or permanent.

Drugs are tested by their manufacturers, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that exaggerate the benefits.

[Emphasis mine]

Wow, just wow. Absolute gold.

I need say little more.

Except..... we the public have participated in a natural experiment which was supposed to have stopped fattening of nations in its tracks by now. Not "lose weight" or get healthy, fit, whatever.

But to go from fat --------------------------------------------------> to SLIM.

So any nonsense where 100 fat women report to have their weight (loss) is monitored every month and at the end they've lost an average of 5lbs in a year does not equal 'proof' that a fat person holds slimness in their hands.

Yet, I feel a bit wary of using it to illustrate this point. Even though the article is well worth reading on its own terms, it's nothing new. But I know, the writer Ben Goldacre would be against a clear acknowledgement of  the facts.

Which is the strange thing about fatness, the way that the most harried and de-legitimized are the ones who end up representing something approaching rationality in all this. Those who see themselves as in the vanguard of it, cannot or do not want to see it.

I'm sure plenty of people don't like close scrutiny of drugs prescribed to regulate behaviour. 

I can't pretend the extent of this, doesn't in part explain the gullibility with regards to other matters such as the case of dubious drug trials. Why should we expect those who fund them and manufacture the drugs they test to use the process to their advantage, if no one's checking that they aren't?

Its a rude awakening for sure.

Mythological unhealth means decreasing function creates health

Even in these ludicrous times of fat hysteria, it is difficult to understand how it is possible to indicte having a BMI of 30 as so burdensome and degenerative to ones internal organs that it is disease-like yet claim evidence of better health in having the function of major digestive organs deliberately reduced, curtailed and potentially to destruction.

It would be almost funny on a certain level, but the causalities quiet one's mind to a state of incomprehension. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If it is the case that decreasing regular (not irregular or over) function increases health, then that re-writes the rules of medicine and science.

Usually decreasing function from a normal range would equal decreased health. Why researchers from all over the world aren't swarming all over this break through in biological rationale to hopefully take it somewhere else in time to make a name for them, I don't know.

It's their lost opportunity.

As ever I appreciate Sue's well written posts. However, I think she like a lot of people, seems to overlook all those people who's weight has come more or less to a standstill, when asserting things such as "you can lose/keep weight off" with diet and exercise.

I appreciate the point she's making and its an important one, that everything you'd do to reduce weight without gastric surgery, you have to do with it, plus and in addition to its numerous potential and actual side effects.

However, it simply underestimates the sheer despair a lot of people are in by the time they get to the gastric surgery point. Some of them do it because they just need something, anything that will help them to sustain the unpleasantness they need to put themselves through to achieve any loss.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people overlook or do not realise that for many people, dieting, is the last resort (before any consideration of GBS). They have cut down and cut down and cut down their intake, only to realise the next point is a LCD or VCLD to get any real weight off.

One of the more tiresome aspects of FA is the contempt it maintains for fat people and acquires through the continued chasing of slim people and their approval, which is often ugly and filled with cul de sacs, is often intellectually worthless as well as being extremely stressful. 

Its a way of avoiding oneself, of that there's no doubt. It is natural a lot of people looking for a positive change of status do the exact same thing, externalize everything as if they are not implicated in it at all,because they are the victims of the situation.

Hence the overemphasis on "thin privilege" which has never really sat right with me as a way to restore fat people's mental and physical equilibrium. It is fat people who need to change as anyone who manages to stick it out long enough realizes.

Many people simply cannot function properly whilst lowering calories. It's a myth than anyone can eat any deficit of calories. It's born of the incredibly skewered picture we've been left with when it comes to achieving weight loss through calorie restriction. 

Type 3 diabetes

Ick, the pity party's in town. The pressure of fat people lifting the lid on just some of the price paid for calorie cultism has left the morally ignoble casting around for a way to keep on hating. Here we have the grinding gears of trying unconvincingly to turn loathing into pity-hoping that enables the status quo to be preserved.

When you raise the subject of over-eating and obesity, you often see people at their worst. The comment threads discussing these issues reveal a legion of bullies who appear to delight in other people's problems. When alcoholism and drug addiction are discussed, the tone tends to be sympathetic. When obesity is discussed, the conversation is dominated by mockery and blame, though the evidence suggests that it may be driven by similar forms of addiction.

Ah, the old think of fat people as addicts rather than actually recognise calorie restriction cannot manage weight.

All those such as drug addicts, alcoholics etc., have a say in their state of being is like.  When you look up what is written, their input is usually what it is framed around-though I do not by any means claim its perfect.

They are in touch with what is happening to them, because they've never had an identity foisted on them, under the aegis of authority, nor been forced to suppress their own feelings and the ability to read and analyze them under the guise of this is how you stop being bad and become good.

They have had the benefit of the greater humanity accorded to men, because both addiction and alcoholism are framed by that agency and it does not define their bodies, but the substances they use/depend on. Their humanity is not submerged by their acquired pathology.

Fatness only need to be explained in terms of addiction because the extent of the failure of restriction is so unacceptable.

Well let me say, pity won't do george. I and I venture most fat people require not a jot of your pity, we require you to behave properly. That this has become such a challenge is a tribute to just how bad an error defining bodies as disease is.

The mockery as you call it of fat people is less a problem than the misinformation, which liberates everyone's inner bully. It's clear that an important factor in breaking down the body's reserves of health is stress, stigma and dealing with open loathing wherever you go at any moment. Ask a Black person about that.

What Monbiot doesn't mention is this level of harassment and stress is a deliberate strategy to undermine the very health he's concerned with.

As for the Alzheimer's link, I daresay it will be difficult to find out; a) if this makes any real sense, b) how much this understands the way bodies store fat, c) how much of a factor is the chronic stress, that shapes and affects hunger/ appetite, therefore diet.

This is another reason why studying the way metabolism function, rather than being stuck in the dead end of ci/co will likely be or be part of taking our understanding of disease to another level.

The current obsession with calorie restriction feels like surrender. Like a lack of will to go far enough as that will change the way medicine is practised.

Calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a long time. He says the evidence is "compelling", but it always is in this area of predestined conclusions-anything that can remotely related to fatness.

The taint of 'obesity' has already undermined diabetes and those who have it enough. If metabolism is the route to an answer, then the stress of stigma will merely add to the overall risk of dementia and Alzheimer's.

And I know that would be a great shock for those who don't begin to have a clue how that will play out on their vulnerable loved ones.

Kunst ist eine Hündin

I couldn't help but be amused as this useless hack piece explained how real women are going to be replaced by toy women again at a magazine called Kunstschisse or something.

Methinks its because the idea that anorexia is "caused by the media/fashion industry" is for the last time, premo grade bullshit-certain women tell because they are ashamed of the allure anorexia and its attendant behaviour holds, Even though the age of 'obesity' has thoroughly exposed it;

Except that the publishing industry consistently sees reader focus groups choose thin models over larger women in both editorial and advertising. Attempts at using larger women have been as unsuccessful here as in Germany.

As usual, I get the feeling fingers are pointed at fat women, because anyone who isn't thin is "fat" and that's something to do with actual fat people.

I have never understood how in a world where fat people are routinely ordered we are in full control of our biology, which we did not design, it is apparently beyond the reach of middle class etc., slim folk to explain to their daughters that models are paid to look like that, you aren't.

Thinness has currency, yawn, I'm not going to repeat it, as someone who was prescribed and felt some sense of duty to take the anorexia cure for my obeecity, I just don't give a rat's arse about those who are in two minds about a more elective yearning; 

But we as consumers need to decide where we really stand and vote with our wallets — not continue to say we want one thing while consistently preferring another.

Spare me the pressures of societee on (slim) womenz blah, blah, blah I really mean it when I say, I'm all tapped cried out on that one.

And how could I not give a mention to the understanding of professional slimz. See if you can spot the usual "courage";

 And yet criticising thin women has become an easy, crowd-pleasing option in recent years (politicians cynically wheel out the anti-model stance on quiet days, often using the term "real women", an expression so offensive it undermines its intended meaning).

I can only guess at how awful that must be.

It gets better on the term "real women" as usual;

It is patronising to fat women, insulting to thin women. It's loathsome.

Doesn't that make you feel all warm inside?

Except;

It makes me furious. It's now totally acceptable to imply a thin woman must never eat, while being entirely unacceptable to imply a fat woman eats constantly. Both are offensive. Thin women have become fair game in recent years. It's not helping.

Yezzzzz, that's enough of that.

Lightness switch

I pick up my bag and put it on my shoulder. It's so heavy that I have to concentrate to stand up straight, at times veering off to the side.

By the time I really get into my walking say, five or so minutes later, it feels different, lighter.

I've noticed my body has adjusted. Some kind of alteration changes it from too heavy, to just a tad unwieldy when I take corners or break into a run. When I'm ambling along it can feel barely there.  

In the wake of this and a bit distracted I recently climbed to the top deck of the bus. It halted suddenly and I fell forward before I'd reached the top of the stairs landing on my side. My bag got trapped in the stair rail stemming the impact a bit but still, I hit the ground with a bump.

There was no fear on being lurched asunder. None of that shaken up feeling you can get from a sudden upending, there was no scare.

If you think I'm alluding to weight gain, I suppose there is that. There was a conversation about the weight of large breasts the other day.

One has to be careful. I don't wish to undermine the fact that they can be cumbersome to the point of causing physical degeneration. But I have to admit, I stumbled over the fact a while back that this this capacity, invoked by changing the way I though about my breasts to a more neutral or positive attitude, profoundly altered the way they felt.

I hasten to add, I'm quite broad shouldered, which might make a substantial difference. I do though remember how I used to feel. Whereas I got to the point of feeling like I hardly noticed them, in comparison to that.

A good well fitting bra adds to the effect.  

The basis of this alteration is definitely tied into this physiological capacity to adjust, sometimes it is a bit like a light flashing on. It's literally an altered state of physical consciousness, of physicality.

What prompted this more was how much this might be the basis of how stress can affect our bodies and health by changing the way it functions. I think there's a mental/ emotional version of this adjustment, perhaps its all a part of the same intermingled process.

I'm sure there are difference depths to it, leading up to pronounced states of pleasure, but this seems to me an early or lesser stage, I wonder if towards its other end point is certain kinds of chronic pain conditions.

I think it is protective of us and when we are overburdened, our bodies cannot make the adjustment. 

We start from a deeper place of this and I sense that it can be breached as well as eroded overall. Whether from traumatic, stressful and threatening environments, or in part the way our moods work, individually.

Its not always so much what is happening to us, its what state of consciousness we are in or out of when it occurs. When we are processing the implications of it, emotionally, intellectually and so on. 

The more we are exposed to being outside the soft pliable flexible state, the more of a chance even everyday stresses and tension have to wreak havoc on us.

I definitely think what seems to be a growth in neuroses. The elevation of rationality-or what passes for it- as the only acceptable metaphysics means increasingly the conscious mind is taking the lead.
The idea of being in control of your biology, via being in control of your eating is part of  this. There are others too and that plus the spread of misguided interpretations of atheism and secularism are putting more and more unnecessary pressure on a part of our mind that wasn't designed to operate like a marooned island.

Do scientists own science?

It's a question for everyone to consider. If scientific fact is obvious but unacknowledged by those who claim the title of scientist, are lay people allowed to acknowledge it?

I would say yes.

If the medical profession choose to build a "consensus" of falsehood using that same rejection of fact, are lay people allowed to opt out of any attempt to impose that particular falsehood on them?

Unequivocally, yes.

Most especially if that opting out is based on repeatedly putting that falsehood into practice, forming not merely an individual result, but an overall pattern predictable amongst the overwhelming majority of people, the overwhelming majority of the time.

Real or indeed hard science is REALITY. It is recognizable, testable and the results predictable. We know the outcome of reducing calories and increasing energy output is predictable, it doesn't make or keep people slim.

We know this, we have experienced this and we can see it in the people who've dieted walking around, not being slim. We can see it in the so called 'obesity' crisis that has manifested in tandem with the growth of multi-million pound slimming and fitness industries, not to mention the growth of nutritionists who specialize in trying to manage people's weight.

And that isn't correlation, because fat people have dieted, they have used the services of all that claimed to have the power to do this, including surgery. Denial of that is the mere necessity of those who wish to trade reality for delusion. That is their choice and must be theirs alone. They must stop using any power or influence they wield to force that on others.

Whatever else dietary manipulations can manage, they cannot manage what is being asked of fat people.

This needs to be acknowledged unequivocally without any hiding behind "Lifestyle change", nor sour rancour bitterness, towards or blame of fat people. No more slander or shame, to avoid reality no matter how difficult that is for those who are dodging it. No matter how high their position and reputation may be.
 
Because until that occurs, no real progress will be made in how to understand and/or alter the course of human metabolic function.  

Some of us have to face the fact that we are asserting this, in the face of opposition from those who are usually the ones to tell us what reality is.
Usually it's the other way around. It is usually they telling the rest of us even when that runs counter to our "intuition", or against our deeply held assumptions. That includes going against what seems to us to be what is actually happening or other false consciousness.

Now it is their turn to feel what that's like and they need to get on with it.

In the end, not even scientists own science. They are in a special position to have made a profession out of discovering the nature of what is really happening despite what we may think of as "common sense".

It shouldn't need to be said that it is as unacceptable for scientists to manipulate others using incomplete or bankrupt hypothesis as it is for the public to try and silence scientists on the basis of our cherished assumptions. Neither should it be acceptable for scientists to derail genuine scientific inquiry with their own quackery or pseudo science.

Science is for everyone. 

Is fat phobia the new homophobia?

Isn't that really what the title's about? Though the subtitle is;

Telling fat people they ought to be thin is about as helpful as telling gay people they should be straight

The point is deeper than any facile comparison between being gay and being fat. It points at the way 'obesity' has become the homophobia for those who would at least pay lip service to disdaining it, those who wouldn't often can't resist adding it to their portfolio of bigotry.

Eating has come to take the place sex takes up for fundamentalist religions. A central facet of existence, eating even more so, is the means to imbue with the dominant themes of who we are and how we should live.

Free will has come to the fore of our collective consciousness, replacing the fatalism of more precarious religious times. We see ourselves as self created through our conscious will, hence we create our weight.

It's not about whether these things are true or not, it's the need for constant repetition of said theme in every possible place. Like pattern on a cloth, we must always be reminded of what is there (that mimics the way truth is always there).

One of things many object to about those who cannot pretend we control our weight in this way, is we seem to be fatalistic, defeatist.

When in fact, all we are saying is, not this way.

That's pretty easy to discern but such is the fevered clamour for repetition of free will, even this is too provocative. 

Religion is concerned with fertility given the natural pre modern medical intervention(s) high infant mortality rate of human beings. Gayness, seen as not contributing to the creation of life became a container of and symbol to represent fears of extinction.

In more developed society's where the creation of life is taken for granted. Our central concern has moved to sustaining one's existence. God has fallen to earth, from the old creator in the sky, to each and everyone of us being a creation of our will.

We are our own creators.

The extent to which calorie restriction/expenditure consumes one's existence-pun intended- means investment in it creates a momentum to centre our way of life around it. This necessarily extends to distorting the way we see ourselves.

It has to replace the norm which has effectively happened, it is normal eating for many, which now seems disordered or greedy, naughty or worst of all, fattening. Certainly the rigid, inflexible, watchful, unsustainable nature of calorie restriction doctrine exacerbates a sense of insecurity by comparison. Even whilst it is creating and promoting its own mayhem.

It comes down to the insistence on this as the route to weight alteration-which must be a product of an unhealthy fixation on free will as it yields not to evidence or reality of any kind. The refusal to accept that our design does not submit to our modish metaphysical fixations, is the driver of fat phobia, just like the refusal to accept that some people simply cannot make themselves heterosexual enabled the revving up and spread of homophobia. 

The two mirror each other to a weird degree, for fat phobes what has replaced religion as the way to validate reality for all of us, science is now being bent into something more akin to religion by fulfilling a similar role, rather than as a beacon of empirical truth.

Fraught

I was going to respond at the blog in question, then remembered, that's not going to work. 

It’s also a good reminder that Health at Every Size is truly a weight-neutral approach – sometimes people do lose weight as a side-effect when they are doing what is right by their body (a lot of the time not, but it does happen on occasion, usually when other physical conditions are in play.)

Ok, but this still implies weight-loss is not a rational/acceptable personal goal.

It of course doesn't, its "weight-loss" not weight loss dieting that HAES avoids. It's the difference between weight loss and weight loss dieting again. Though it seems obvious the conflation can't get past the programming. That's why the pathetically emotive pretending not to be "anti science" accusation is so risible.

If your mind is frozen solid on an issue-apart from what what others say, your pompous arse is going to be hanging out with that gambit. If these people were so "pro science", like pro life we all are, you'd think they'd have noticed how absent real fat people are from the 'obesity field'.

And note the fatuous condescension;

I get that this is super fraught territory with tons of toxic cultural messages surrounding it

Oh do you really, well spotted. Because when women kick off-and frankly the anger of fat women is nothing compared to the inchoate meltdown of anyone daring to query the use of bourgeois sweeties (anti depressants)-it couldn't be because their intellect is being blocked and shut down by sexist levers or the even to me surprising anger at the violation the basic principle that its not who knows but the quality of what is known?

No, its the eeemeaushun of it all. Everyone knows women are more prone to hurt fee fees aren't they? Principles are for the menz.

This is why I'm glad not to bracket myself with this demeaning attitude feminism has sunk to in its glorious "intersectional" phase; so easily led by the male lead fat phobia. Well, that's all inclusive isn't it? Why should patriarchal arseholery that can trade on its ad hominem reputation, not shine out and discredit a group dominated by women. 

Who because of that, need to constantly "prove" they are not crazzee and illogical for thinking; get this; that this existence of theirs, is actually happening to them.

zomg.

The seeming implication that WL(D) is not a rational blah, blah, is the "fraught" effect the commenter mentioned but of course, in their own mind, projected onto fat people. 

People have a pronounced tendency to only be able to see their own issues in fat acceptance because fat people are always wrong, it just "FEELS" so right. Like being drawn into a well worn mental groove.

By the way, I don't believe in set point theory either, not that it matters because on the internet people look for what confirms their hobby horse so they can have a whine arse rodeo, rather than seek those they might agree with and move the dialogue somewhere.

Well, we've all done it. 

It's homeostasis, or the body's self regulation that stops weight loss dieting from being feasible.  Though yes, that may differ for low amounts apparently up to about 10% and /or recent gain after long term slimness.

And no, it is not about gaining over a long term, it's whether the underlying setting of your weight has shifted or is just a temporary response to something.

Sorry, but I'm so far beyond bored around the world many times with this now that its hard not to sound annoyed.

N.B. Love this explanation of badness of quackery which is so apt for authority supported dieting. Though the writer was talking about comp med.