Monday 30 July 2012

More US children measurements are "off the official charts"

Ye gads, what could be responsible?

Official CDC charts using data from the 1960's and 70's. Why? Because; This government agency doesn't want 'obesity' to become the new norm.

Other notable facts, 17% of American children are in the 95th percentile. 

Wednesday 25 July 2012

RUDE

As the fat hating consciousness was gaining momentum, we were expected to return fire. We never really were able to, not from a fatcentric point of view, though we might have squirmed desperately trying to "answer" the rhetorical guilty verdict this is, "Why're ya fat?"

At some point instead of making sorties then tensing up waiting for the expected explosive reaction, there was a taking for granted that no more than an ineffectual squeak at best, would come forth.

That shift of energy, like when the fight goes out of something wild and it is tamed, was fat people permanently relocated to the backfoot.

Things proceeded from there. No matter how angry, forceful nay formidable a fat person was in general, barely were they or anyone else able to surmount that deadened sense of being overrun and cornered.

Now that we've realize our part in that and are ready to do what it takes to advance again to re-gain our own selves; we seem to some to be rather rude. By that I'm not referring to the quality of response according, to character mood or mode of expression and so forth.

I mean merely saying anything that isn't defenselessness so palpable that it leaves a scent. 

The rudest of all is to simply respond, converse, debate, argue whatever, as if you know you have some idea of what you are talking about. Without any apologia, or countless reference to how well meaning you know disingenuous irrational hatred is.

Tuesday 24 July 2012

The truth gets handled

Well well, well;

Again, the commonly held idea that moderate exercise is helpful for weight loss is somewhat destructive. Weight loss requires sustained, strenuous exercise to the point of extreme fatigue. Period. If you don't have the physical capacity for that, you cannot lose weight, probably not even with surgery. It also requires, not eating in moderation, but practically starvation. Starvation responses occur in different people at different calorie levels, but the effect is the same. That's too much to glibly expect from someone, especially someone who is extremely obese. And sustained maintenance of greatly reduced weight is very, very rare.
It just goes to show that you don't have to agree with someone to know they've got the point. It's not really about weight loss, its about lowered calorie intake and increased energy expenditure. "Physical capacity" is really susceptibility toward anorexia. That is in itself a large spectrum. From someone like Debra to someone like me who is pretty much dietproof.

And I'll have no nonsense about how its "insulting" to call strenuous weight maintenance that, it's the way we are made. This is obscured by the malevolent Gothic melodrama of what we usually think of as AN, the one where the system is taken over by or implodes into it. Rather than this where a conscious and sustained effort of will is the drive.

I've almost given up trying to explain the ability to do even this goes on top of (and probably overlaps) that susceptibility. You need both to get on to that register and according to Debra, that's about 3% of people who lose weight.

Anorexia has been of course classed as a mental illness, but that has always felt as much about politics as illumination. It is effectively the prescribed remedy for 'obesity' is this, too much identification with anorexics makes that more obvious. Neither anorexics or medical authority wishes to draw attention to the link.

And the idea that its too much to expect from someone who's fatter than most is bullshit. It would be cruel if it worked and it can't even manage that. The ability to diet does not follow the weight scale.

There are plenty of thin and slim people who could do it at gunpoint. They don't have to worry about that. If they become fat, that's that.

The former fattest man in the world was thin in his 20's which was going the second decade of fatness for me.

In the main its clear, most people simply cannot become anorexic seeing that is probably what those defences are there to prevent. Apart from succumbing to a real famine. If calorie restriction worked, it wouldn't be necessary.

We've decided not to accept this. The belief invested in the myth of WLD efficacy could move mountains. And fat people are so erased as meaningful in anyway in this area, that it actually prevents many from coming to the above terms with clear facts.

It's this refusal that's sidelined any other possibilities.

The anti humanism of fat phobia becomes intellectualism of a kind most ferocious.

Friday 13 July 2012

Bodies as cause and effect

A study recently garnered some results which found the prevalence of fatness increased with the degree of physical/sexual abuse experienced in childhood.

The information was from Black women, matching the information from a 2005 study, with measurements taken more recently.

'Obesity' was defined by the usual BMI of 30 plus a measurement of at least 35 inches around the waist-which was deemed "central obesity". Both measurements showed the increase which lessened slightly after modifications were included for variables such as; diet, physical activity, reproductive history etc.,

Its findings are in keeping with other research done in this area.

My view on fatness/weight and trauma in general is unchanged. Eating is designed to nourish and replenish your body, primarily. It also can have a secondary function based on its ability to replenish your physical energy, which lifts mood. It's one of the reasons alcohol can do the same, energy (from calories).

The body can open up channels to spontaneously recruit this effect, helping to support the regulation of your mood when you're under some sustained level of duress. It can be brought into play by the stress and trauma of abuse, emotional torment as that is often a case of luck as to whether any trauma resolves itself of its own accord. Humans mostly depend on that.

Dealing with that that won't heal is not one of our strong points.

So though people often describe themselves as "using food to cope" because they feel it in a conscious way. It seems to be more often to be about ones susceptibility towards this plus trigger. People aren't always very good at locating the cause of some of their actions. Look how many people were able to be convinced that they deliberately decided to become fat because they didn't give damn about how much they ate. Now some of them are saying that wasn't the case. 

We should be wary of the extent of suggestibility when it comes to deliberate intent and eating, because that is the dominant ideological perception of eating. It's also false, eating is not primarily a consciously directed process. 

The body can use to this mood regulation, when it feels the necessity (which can vary hugely) to help stave off neurosis. To stop it culminating to becoming an ingrained condition which itself threatens your existence.

The issue here is this is supposed to be temporary, giving you a bit of time to deal with and resolve the source of stress and/ its aftermath, without sinking into a debilitating state which would mitigate against this.

If that doesn't happen it can keep going and cause side effects of its own. That is part of what has been mangled as "food addiction" or a chronic eating disorder. When actually, we've never come to terms with dealing with old trauma. We just keep going until it fells us. If it doesn't we can pretend we got over it with our own inner resources. Riiiight.

It must be said though that what is usually left out is there seems to be some kind of chemical effect from the physicality of fatness itself, on mood regulation and support. Perhaps the body even works it out on a percentage basis, which may be part of why the overwhelming majority of bodies put on a certain amount. This can be an adaptation to environment, i.e. likely necessity. Just like food insecurity there's mood insecurity? Tending to retain reserves in case of additional trauma. Being fatter in itself may have some kind of palliative effect. Rather like what underlies this aspect of 'obesity' paradox-which is just a way of saying pathologizing fatness is the wrong way to define it.

The body doesn't always have to use the lever of increased intake at all or alone, it can just shift its rate of storage or energy conservation. Depending on the individual capacity and flexibility in this area.

It sometimes seems to go the other way i.e. the same can lead some people to shed weight, which may or may not also have another kind of palliative effect as well as any alteration of physical function triggered by the trauma in itself.

The tradition is here is to fixate on eating rather than the underlying state of the nervous system, so its almost always put down to that.Yet eating is merely a metabolic function, it is intimately affected by the demands made on you.

Wet and Shaky

Okay, Man Savage and this. I agree with Brian, no one should be inveigled into having sex with someone they find unstimulating. No one has to find slim people attractive. No one has to be a prevert and find fat people attractive yadda ya.

Though I must say, the writer's attitude to her tuned out (by fatness) libido invoked a similar response to recent spotlighting of asexuality. Sexuality as a conditioned response triggered only by certain preferred body types-hints at a basic malleability or even asexuality as an assumed default.

There is something asexual about such an extent of sensitivity to the way people look when sex is supposed to be about the feelings it gives. If bodies are that disturbing, why not buy a doll? 

Anyhow, the extent to which fat people have become projection fodder is really strong in the responses too. There's a slightly eerie feeling of being spoken about and past, in your presence the conversation being a closed circle with you on the outside waiting.

That's really how it is on a macro level. The obesity crusade, though fat people signed on too, is that of others. Assumptions about the efficacy of the calorie restriction feel like listening to children filling the gaps in their knowledge with whatever they can think of.

It speaks again of what many of us keep talking about, the way the 'obesity' construct has dehumanized and disconnected fat people from others. I don't believe we will ever communicate normally until it has been dropped from everyday discourse.

I'm not speaking of censorship but of a changed consciousness.

I keep looking at;
I don't think losing the beer belly will make me want to drop my pants all the time, but it couldn't hurt, right?
The attitude under those three words sums up the weight of consequence between those who demand and those who have to obey.  She doesn't even feel a flat stomach will make a difference to her "libido issues" but  hey, its all so trivial he might as well!

Who gives a shit about him or the effects on his state of mind? Often we speak of self esteem, but what of the grind of WLD? What if he's one like me who's diet proof and ends up eating more than he has ever eaten or wanted to eat because his body's defences respond that way?

All controls come down, it is ugly and feels so and it can bring with it-as it did with me- a flat-lining of satiety, which adds to depression. At the same time, any doubts about the normality of your eating are put to rest as if you were before, you are not now. 

It may all may turn out to be hunky dory, its just the lack of space to realise the former, no room for, boy, that didn't work! It sort of has to or you are marked.

I also realized reading this, that there's something about diet believers attitude that that brings an impersonal edge to what is presumably an intimate relationship. You are sharing your life, your body with them, yet, there's no sense of context informing their analysis of the situation. 

It could be from a stranger. There's a sense of, who's in charge of this person? Do they have a mind of their own, any independence? What other mental hooks can bring them to heel?

It's a bit like those who complain about one partner leaking details of the relationship to friends or relatives. They then feel they have some kind of say in it and interfere.

It's not so much about weight it's about how they are suddenly taken a step back from you, looking at you in a rigid way that might as well be to a stranger. That feeling of being in the presence of someone with their their own mind is punctured, it's like you are now under the influence of something impersonal and unaccountable.

You are forced to carry the blame for its failure, yet must follow its orders. Whilst you're left with someone you thought was your companion in arms and is now the extended arm of this entity.

I think there's only been a couple of instances when weight or shape became a bit of issue. It wasn't conducive to intimacy is what I can say. How can you abandon yourself fully when feel like you're being appraised?

How can you trust or even respect someone who isn't capable of questioning the source of their own opinions? Who is in charge of them?

I also have to mention Dan Steelglutes's attempt at cutesy ironic sexism misses its mark.

Having signed on to fight oneself, only for it to end in a much refuted and denied futility, will run you "out of room". And yes, women have been more affected by dieting on the whole. For fat women there have been times when many of us have felt our existence as viable women depended on becoming slim.

We followed the instructions of male led authority-I don't know about you, but I never once considered who was delivering the message-and were never allowed to acknowledge that because they weren't and still aren't ready to do so, unequivocally.

The aftermath of burnout, in whatever form often leaves people a bit wet and shaky, for a while.More entitled than the fatuous demands to try to make your body go where it won't. 

You know like when you repress yourself and replace it with an alternative required consciousness, only to find yourself burnt out and unable nay unwilling to continue?

Like that.

Thursday 12 July 2012

Low Self-Esteem

There are two routes to low self esteem. One via the disillusionment of high expectations- of self or life. The other is straight on attacking and undermining it, directly.

The former has shaped the discourse on LSE as it's not so much a low estimation of yourself. It therefore tends to defend itself; return fire, self advocate, object, protest. It makes a noise discussing its situation instructing everyone as to how sympathetic everyone should be too its desperate travails and such. 

This isn't the kind fat people have.

Fat people have latter kind proper of LSE, the which is full on attacking degrading and undermining your own self regard with an indifference and carelessness that skates the amoral, sociopathic even. It takes no account of costs to you, everything is focused on the goal.

It matches what's coming at you.

I keep  trying to say this is what fat acceptance is about for me, not fatness so much seeing through societal and authority's approval to finally smell its rotten stench and recoil from it.

Self esteem in fat people is maintained by the other aspects of our humanness, in the main, fatness is a drain on that.

Hence the decision to learn to accept oneself not only as fat but as fully sentient and able to comment on one's own experience is a step before the usual self advocacy. I don't think many people seem to get that. They presume because fat people are protesting we must have the self aware kind of battered esteem.

Based on the usual bottom feeding standard assigned to us, where anything more is magnified and reverberates overwhelming the senses. 

I have always found this intensely annoying. A reflection of the much beloved assertion that fat people are so grotesquely biased in our own favour, that we can be dismissed outright.

And for goodness sake, why can't people tell what self esteem is when fat people come into view? That's all it takes to reverse perception?

Pish and piffle.

My irritation is not helped by the fact that there is often this concerted impulse amongst many slimz instinctive no doubt, to rigidly set in stone this ultimately intolerable fat standard beside the normal human i.e. slim one as if they're the same. 

It feels suffocating, like we're being locked into this like beetles set in amber, it treats us as if we don't know what the human standard is. As if we aren't even here and that's the key to this type of LSE. It erases and takes you out of the game, even though you are still there, you fade.

This error turns up in assumptions about winning round allies. That they are draw to how hurt you are. So show them that and your away. I've always been shocked by that but found it difficult to say why.

They everyone, including social justice devotees are draw by what tends to be missing from fat people as a collective; self possession. A line drawn in the sand that this is as far as we are going with this.

The absence of embodiment people seek is what seems to prod a lot of hatred and loathing of fat people. Or any people frankly, it brings out the bully in virtually all of us.

If you abandon and flee from part of your own self in disgust, others are likely to take their cue from that. Even nice compassionate people will tend to turn away. I guess we all have limits on when LSE just becomes too off putting and we passed that point.  

That is why fat people's talk of body acceptance and self love is so important, especially those who come from a milieu where being fat is unspeakably coarse and low class. It has to happen in some form or fat people are not fit to even get to the point where we can demand anything.

In the why oh why talk, some say fat activists were too radical before, or not enough. My feeling is the former conclusion is not right. Due  to the extreme  nature of the 'obese' construct, a mix of iatrogenic quackery, a neurosis inducing personality disorder posing as diagnosis. Its leaves nothing for anyone aware of their own self possession to compromise on.

It forces you to be "radical" unless other things supporting your sense of self obscure the extent to which fatness as been occupied by everyone else.

How can you be moderately non-sentient? Halfway an outer controlled puppet? Half disease half person?

The thing that discombobulates is the hopeless normalization of this grotesque fiction. To some people, that makes it reasonable by definition, the mainstream is always moderate. And those correcting it, radical.

The setting of fat people always wrong, because we always are if you notice, equals fat people must be doing activism in a bad way. We must not be sufficiently amenable which is obviously nonsense; but we are talking ingrained emotion.

It's a mistake we need to stop making.

I used to think self esteem was the real issue, now I think its the ability to believe in ourselves, I don't mean credulity I mean the ability to believe that we can contribute to defining the human experience as fat people. 

Friday 6 July 2012

I Accept

T/W; For ideas on how to punish yourself.

As queasy as I feel about this blog I have to say when it comes to the meaning of acceptance I feel exactly the same way;
Acceptance means that you perceive reality accurately and consciously acknowledge what you perceive.
That's certainly how I feel about acceptance in general and the acceptance bit in "fat acceptance". I must admit I don't know if it sounds wishy washy, but I can't say I care if it does. All the more to lull certain folks into a false sense of security, ha, ha!

I've lived "tough", let's burn fat, let's take charge, let's get in shape. Not only was this IQ sapping, it lead only to the weakness of total obedience with total blame.

Incompatible opposites.

I can't find a way to care about how fat acceptance purportedly sounds. My focus is on what we have not been allowed to or permitted ourselves to perceive and consciously acknowledge.

It never occurred to me that the FA effort was all about changing the minds of others. I assumed for that have a chance of occurring, mine and other fat people's would have to change most of all. I didn't know people think that you have to change the mind of others to change your own.

Since having heard it years ago, I still don't get it.

That might make sense if we were talking about a situation where fat people represented our reality as a matter of course, versus others representing what? Something else to counter that. But even as I set up that premise it collapses, because if we'd done that, we wouldn't be in this position.

What has happened is we've been thoroughly on board with one mind set; other people's. The reasons for that don't actually matter as much as suppressing your own consciousness to replace it with another outside one.

We don't have a complete one of our own and we should have. The real point is nothing worth achieving should have required us to be without it.

The point of FA to me is to uncover, recover, discover that, in a way, for the first time.

I am truly astounded that people think this is what it's like to be on your own side. Slapping the recognition of what a gigantic load of shizz this has been, on top of a mind still in this shape, is supposed to the same as never having had a consciousness of self flattened to virtual invisibility, even to ourselves.

Calling the difference between the peculiarity of being fat and the lack of that peculiarity "thin privilege" is all very well but it simply obscures the fact that fat people have almost split ourselves in two to join others in the same attitude towards us.

Thin people aren't so much privileged, so much as more normal. It isn't normal to want to be something else so badly that you refuse to acknowledge your current form. Their privilege is not having been formed, directed and have lived this way-not because of the celebration of being slim.

Being defined as a thin body with a fat disease on it, listening to people talking about how they "feel fat" and how "mental illness" requires a pathological terror that the person might be fat.

Imagine if you thought you were thin, would you be terrified and respond to that terror by eating yourself senseless? Fat is awful, fat is bad. Shit, even when folks are not supposedly in their right minds still manage to uphold fat hating jazz. It reminds me of one of the eternal protests of Black People.

Why is it other people are never ignorant enough not to hate?

If you are on your own side and you can't get anywhere, yes I can see how you can say society has to change, but that takes for granted that you recognize your own existence. That is having/needing a double consciousness-which is where you recognise the fictionalized version of false universality of how to live would be the death of you; if you aren't in the right class or aren't the right race or gender etc.,

We've never really had a double consciousness. We have the faux universal consciousness, we have the if you just do what slim people do, you'll be slim. We don't have the what are you talking about? The are you telling me my life?

This is our normal that is how we are how we are, doing what slimz do in other words, being. We are just fat whilst doing it, therefore requiring us to be slim requires us to know way more about being human than we know.

About certain aspects of human physiology especially.

This for me epitomizes the state living the 'obese' construct shapes your mind into. That is why I'm here, to reject that, to accept what I know to be and refuse to be persuaded to disavow it as before.

I am as human and need to be as human as anyone. And that even if I could achieve thinness through said route, I wouldn't want it because I'm not prepared to be subhuman for anything. I cannot tolerate it. I'm not prepared to become someone who disgusts myself to do it. Not because I'm boo hooing about my fat thighs, but because I hate bullying and the politics of it-fascism. I detest having to mindlessly obey authority because it's authority, despite what happens.

Just because it won't show, because our 'betters' are saying, its all right to keep deluding yourselves because we're on board with it ourselves. 

I'm not here because I give a shit about what slim people might think about fat people, what brought me to this place was finally realizing the value of me, of us and our experience; even if it didn't accord with what was acceptable or permissible to others, no matter who they were. No matter their back up, their kudos, their validation, the colour of their coats, whatever.

None of them were going to dictate reality to me anymore, none of them were going to tell me my life any more because I am living it, not them.

We are living it, not anyone else.

WE

Not other people. They don't have the final say in what we did, what happened when we did it and how it felt, subjectively to us. And if that doesn't match any "objective" assessment, that is a matter for rational investigation, not stigma, denial and erasure.

I don't believe in them over me anymore. I believe in me. I believe in us.

Whatever that's called.

*Apologies for not enough reading before posting.