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.