The use of obesity

[Reblog]

I’m glad moves have been made to feed children properly. Ask yourself why that would ever be necessary. Tying these initiatives to ‘obesity’ means the underlying classism of writing off certain children and therefore people, is ignored.

The ethics of feeding children the industrial food effluent of the political classes cronies. i.e. Crony capitalism, is goes unqueried.

At least voice the deal society has done. The well-being and undermining of the health of children, for purportedly saving money. This should be done in order to insist so called advanced societies pledge never to do that again.

That they at least acknowledge this kind of proposition as a false economy. So that if say, the Right get in, they do not reverse these policies on the grounds that it interferes with their friends ability to offload dubious products on those under their charge.

Without at least being asked, how much money will cutting good practice for the poor “save”? What effect will that have on their health? Cost that and subtract it from your proposed “savings”, the result is your policy. Is that really a saving? That should be a common question for any attack on the poor under the guise of supposed cost cutting of budgets.

Obesity depoliticizes and obscures those who’ve already been subject to hard end of politricks.

Capitalism is theft

There's been a persistent strain in FA of apologizing to our bodies, or to ourselves. For all the hateful trash talk many of us have poured on. No, let's say all of us. Anyone who's accepted they're disease has indulged in hate speak against themselves.

I remember saying FA in part felt like an apologia to the child I was. Not an inner child, but in my memory. The one I unwittingly betrayed, whilst "doing right".

All this can be cathartic in some sense-though I'd say, do it whether it feels that way or not. To find again and keep the faith with yourself, in the face of such a hegemony of vitriolic disapproval, is worth doing.

In a way I pity those who will wait until the tide to fully turns. They'll not have the thought of knowing that they turned first. On their own, because they realized their own value. Through having devalued themselves for so long.

That though they could feel like they sold themselves out. They equally rescued themselves against the current.

And if you're assuming that it's unusual for "doing good" to be the problem you may be forgetting the old axiom "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Oftentimes, when you're trying to change course from some badness, of habit or ethics. You can waste a lifetime rooting out your sinfulness or moral failings. When often it's the good things you believe in that really nailed you in place.

It tends not to occur to look there.

Even now, I'm still bemused at the sheer extent of impropriety I was prepared to ascribe to my nascent self without question.

I can be very obedient, yes. But there's always been this ticking part of my mind that will question anything. Why did I never think, can  I really be this bad? What else backs it up?

I certainly saw flaws along the way with the mainstream diet weight hypothesis. But I promise you, never did it occur 'til well after my weight loss diet burnout crash, that there was anything untoward about the motives behind the diet weight hypothesis. Or that I might be worthy of some kind of case for the defence. Some mitigation or character statements.

If anything I was just bemused at how I could be sinning so badly, with so little effort, let alone intent. At one point in my teens, I actually became worried that I might be some kind of sociopath. How else could I have been trying this hard for this long (already) to so little end? Perhaps there was way more wrong than I assumed.

Nor did I question the lack of supporting evidence. I mean how bad(ass) would I or the average fat person have to be to ignore society's strong views on fatness, disregard what medical professionals, scientists and researchers were saying about being fat?

What everybody of all ages were so united in feeling. How would that not show up elsewhere? How could that possibly not be noted in a general insouciant disregard for rules and conventions?

Psssh, please.

All this is leading to the fact that a certain slimming outfit have picked up on this device and cheekily used this self apologia to flog the industrial food effluent they package as VCLD virtual starvation. Or like bariatric surgery without the gastric re-tailoring.

And incidentally shitheads, you really do need to stop claiming fat people are so full of blaming others. Do we call fatness a disease? Nope. An eating disorder? Nope. A mental illness? Nope, a "disability"? Nope, an addiction? Well, only some who believe solely in calories in/out.

Anything that's not nailed down.

Bourgie Weight Watchers

The Guardian, the paper of liberal leftist metropolitan fat phobic idiocy is currently engaged in a torrid frenzy about the crisis of obesity. Or society's getting fatter, zomg. Off the back of a report which lists a ten point plan which reads like a list of things society decided to allow free reign long after the wailing began.

It's pretty standard, slim centred point of view which treats fat people as objects whilst pretending we're the subject. Calorie restriction and weight loss diets feature prominently. Blame, mixes with the crunching gears of hastily rerouted disdain which is supposed to become sympathy, when it is really a crude form of pity. The usual repellent sub-eugenic ravings liberated by 'obesity' are seen as 'lack of empathy' rather than something profoundly untoward in the speaker.

Pride is not the issue here, it's unpleasant to be pitied full stop. More especially for other people's casting of you. This extreme self involvement, on the part of others, is another form of the disconnected lack of engagement that is at the heart of fatness as a construct.

This unconvincing effort of 'sympathy' is not due to fat people humanizing 'obesity' through beginning to find their voice. It's more to do with how much obesity is out of keeping with the liberal/left's usual narratives on its own prevalent neuroses.

This is a consistent threat to the progressive mindset and means fat consciousness is bitterly resented. There's no doubting the widespread desire for it to fail.So fat people can go back to previous mute obedience (who knew it was that important?)

Researchers are also working on that right now [if anyone can work out what this new method using "instrumental variables" is all about, feel free to get in touch.] How we miss you Sandy!

As I keep saying, how can not being able to calm down or cheer up-for no apparent reason-like grief, loss or trauma be an "illness" nay a "disability" for goodness sake, but having an imbalance in the vital process of eating be posited as purely willful?

A basis of necessity cannot rightly be more routinely adjustable than that which is unnecessary and more directly under conscious control for that matter.

One of the stranger experiences of being fat is revealed though. The way nothing else matters but, you're fat. Sexual or other abuse, rape only matters through being implicated in your fatness.Recovery is in terms of how much timber you can get off. Hence the use of the word "psychology" for what is actually weight loss surgery. These people are not hearing themselves at all.

As we know, weight conflated into behaviour is a great source of this mess, until folks let go of that, this will continue. This is also a faultline among fat people. Those who are fat and have things that require physical or psychological investigation and those who are simply fat. Some of the former feel that if any fatness is normalized, then they'll lose the possibility of further investigation, because so little of real value has been done. 

An obscenity given the extent of obsession.

Fatness uber alles can have a peculiarly numbing effect on fat people's experience of themselves and what has happened to them. A knock on effect is when this bumps into the sacredness of trauma, which I'd argue is possibly the privilege or halo invested in slimness. 

At times this has forced for instance feminists to reassert their dominant narrative of sexual abuse but only when the flattening effect of fatness has threatened to lessen the impact of sexual assault/abuse as it's applied to those who are accorded lower status, among them fat people.

The impact then is in the value invested in the person, not in the experience itself.

Hardly any deviation from this pattern allowed, as usual no real engagement of intelligence or wit. No one mentions that if discomfort is the underlying factor, the remedy is for fat people to care far less about things than we do now.

That the problem is we're too uptight. We need to chill out, hang loose, and not care too much about what others think which is ridiculous given they aren't all that etc.,

It's more like bourgie weight watchers. Real ugly. Don't let anyone tell you anti-intellectualism resides in the working classes. Some of the worst you'll ever find has been unearthed by 'obesity'.

Diet Free

I'd never have thought of excluding (weight loss) diet talk from FA spaces. I'd have just expected to duke it out with any diet mentality, wrestling it into submission with the power of argument. Or if I'm honest, the impact of dieters having their cherished unquestioned cult, questioned.

Or should I say torn apart in the way it could so easily be under the glare of a little critical scrutiny. Dieting adherents have not only not had that, they've don't realise they have and take it for granted as an entitlement.

This is why they think mere rejection of dieting is abusive. And why they seek to insert diet talk in every crevice of human exchange, even where it is wholly unwanted. They sense, the power of WLD lies here.

 At first I had my doubts about diet free space.

I felt not confronting detractors weakens you, strengthens their hand and leads to the thwarting of an instinct to defend oneself. This is then diverting to picking out whipping boys on your own side leading what's called infighting.

It's not that this is untrue, it's more, there's usually more than one approach that will do.

The upside is not being bored with healthist, dieting blather, which incidentally, can be difficult to appreciate how excruciatingly boring it can get. Think of a vicar in the pulpit who's lost all feeling or passion for the gospel he preaches.

And it's not like this is a total surprise-but when you are in there you're hyped up and super positive.

Truth is, diet free does dieters a favour, given the extent of their sensitivities, they simply couldn't hack what their credo deals. So much of what WLD/healthism depends on and produces is unedifying and weird. Their rage and fury not conducive to generating a healthy atmosphere.

I doubt many of them realise for obvious reasons.

This is reality

Perhaps my mind is just being belligerently twisty, because I still find the idea of fatness or my weight "impacting on my health" profoundly ill conceived and uninvolving.

Now before anyone gets any funny ideas. I am not an essentialist when it comes to weight. Whether you're speaking of fat to thin, some people would struggle to be anything but the weight they are, fatter or thinner. The main body of people probably fall in between.

Nor do I identify as fat. I see myself as a human like any other, which means the 'obesity' construct cramps my style and I'm going to keep saying that. And keep using every possible opportunity not to play down to it. 

It's entirely possible that if I'd grown up in radically different atmosphere I might not have either been fat, or been fat at such an early age. Who cares? That is not my life this is. My body is this actual real version, not a mythological, theoretical one.

My body is fat, it cannot be attacking some not existing version of itself. It cannot be disease unto itself. Pathogens can attack our systems internally, cancer is a cluster of rogue cells, needing a joint replacement comes from disease or wear and tear which attacking the integrity of the joint. Even the dubious, my neurosis is an illness bull pucky, works in a way "my body as disease" just doesn't. It cannot fit any cogent disease model.

Fatness can only be a symptom of something underlying in the context of me.

If my health takes a turn because of a metabolic issue like diabetes, then that is down to how said function is working. That cannot define those who weigh the same as I do any more than being part of  the highest suicide rate group means all have a higher suicide rate. My body as disease, my character as the pathogen or causal factor, doesn't scan. Not as science anyway.

There is a different balance of reaction between internal and external factors. Some people always know something about themselves, even though it is no where openly at least, in the environment around them.

Others do not know that same thing about themselves and are happily ignorant until they encounter it openly, outside themselves. Then they can never again not know. Like non dominant forms of sexuality.

If it was the case that we totally know ourselves regardless of whether anyone else backs it up or not, then it would have been impossible for fat people to doubt our own experience of calorie restriction fail.

It would have been impossible to ever assert anything different. And that would have made the delusion of fat haters hard to establish, let alone sustain. I realise I'm saying in a way that our willingness to dismiss our own experience has permitted and encouraged others to do the same.

But that's the truth for fat people just as much as it is the truth for others, whether it sounds victim blamey or not.

Human Behaviour

I got a bit emotional the other day. In response to someone telling their story of being fat then became slim/mer and the difference it made in the way others treated them. It might have been that the person abruptly stated that they'd been depressed by that difference in reaction.

It's an undersold part of fat people's experience. The unnerving nature of the way people can totally switch reactions to you. Not on the basis of how you're behaving, but of the size of you.

We hear a lot about encouraging nature of peer pressure, the way it incentivizes fat people to forgo the pleasure of meeting their needs, for a higher goal of relieving the discourtesy others choose to direct at them.

That's really what its about in essence. To make the switch the built in imperative of nourishing ones body, to preventing the threat of some kind of assault on your mind. You can see why even if you exclude the ineffectiveness of weight loss dieting on metabolic function, you still have a pretty uphill climb to replace necessity, with what is unnecessary.

It is imperative to remain sane, but will how often will that supplant the desire to continue one's existence?

Anyway, this switching leaves an element of fakery and in authenticity about others that's hard to shake. More than anything, for me anyway, is watching people jumping to orders without questions. Of internalizing them as if they're their own, when they most clearly aren't.

You can start to really question how we actually function in terms of our beliefs, do we really have any? Now, this isn't new. I worked out a while ago that we work on the elders of the tribe pass on knowledge to the rest of us, their subordinates-as above-and we then go about as if no right thinking person could possibly have thought anything else.

These 'elders' can vary, bullies, the charismatically sociopathic, can substitute, I'm thinking of poorer communities where the criminal code of silence reigns despite their outrages. I say criminals though I can't forget a brief and abortive game I thought up when I got a bit harumphy, how the professional classes are just like street gangs.

I'd probably just heard another story about how when some professional is mind numbingly incompetent, to the detriment of those who reliant on them, and is just given a nickname by the rest of their fellows because well, goodness forbid anyone would be struck off for being useless.

Think of what it took to get there!

Usually, we all strive to appear interesting, together, in charge, confident, funny. We put our best foot forward, trying to make out like we are about something. We're in charge of ourselves, we're independent.........thinkers. We may be like ducks, peddling furiously underneath. But we must try to present a calm exterior.

With weight people show you the joins, because they've lost sight of them, themselves. They've lost the capacity for self observation. The elders said they could. Everyone else is doing it, so it becomes less visible.

If could see what you're seeing, they'd be angry with you, to be revealing themselves to you in such a light. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't know this at some level and that is part of the fury they aim at fat people.

Either way, I rather resent having to see them like this. I prefer their good foot and would very much like to see that again.

Fat People are just so Tiresome

I know this because, even after doing everything we were told, except die on cue in the required numbers. The race is on to convince us we are more dead than alive anyway, LOL.

Certainly fat haters must be intent on boring us half to death getting their jollies from their compulsive indulgence in frenzied doom laden predictions.

Who says fat hating slimz aren't funny?

An example cutely fuses ageing with the horreur du fatisme. Which is funny-ha and peculiar-because arguably, older folks were a group more recently (and to some extent still) targeted for attentions sharing aspects similar to those meted out to fatsters.

That's the previous social conviction that maturity required folks to start dragging up in oldster drag, crap clothes, hair dont's, get depressed and cranky. Just basically have the decency to fall apart physically and mentally from the age of about 30 onwards.

Only to be described as a burden, which threatens to implode economic healthcare systems and civilization as we know it blahddy, blah, when that behaviour didn't suit. Hope no fatz are disappointed that we aren't the only ones. We aren't special.

Apparently, "longer life doesn't necessarily mean healthier life". PAUSE to consider the logical cogency of that statement........... mind gives up. I move on.

Whatever the truth of that, I've always wondered why it would be a given. The longer anything lives, the more likely it is to accrue greater physical degeneration. That's seems embarrassingly obvious.

My favourite part of this reportage is when the journalist informs us;

“Despite their longer life expectancy over previous generations, U.S. baby boomers have higher rates of chronic disease, more disability, and lower self-rated health than members of the previous generation at the same age,” the study authors wrote. “On a positive note, baby boomers are less likely to smoke cigarettes and experience lower rates of emphysema and [heart attacks] than the previous generation.”

[She's quoting from some study or other.]

So they're older and feel less self declared health than previous generations who died younger, smoked more. They're also less prone to the number one killer of human beings in the developed model world.

I hope this isn't another one of those back handed adverts for smoking that the 'obesity' furballs, the crusade narrative keeps coughing up. I mean what are we to ascertain from this? That tabs make you feel cheerful, whilst they kill you?

It's odd when you assert people are better off not smoking yet then suggest that somehow means they aren't.

This could be read as really about seeking to remain (positively) active as you get older. Obviously not manual labour, working in a factory or as a cleaner, that sort of thing, which is not the right kind of active so doesn't count.

Rather than say that though, it has to be framed as a dig at fat people. 'Cos we are just arrogant enough to go on living past the allotment assigned to us by the panic mode of our humble betters. 

Bio ethics sans ethics, sans much bio either

A bioethicist named Daniel Callahan wrote an essay about the crisis of fattery called "Obesity: Chasing an elusive epidemic". It was well written yet left me too dissipated to deal with it due its skewered reasoning.

So I left well alone. And wouldn't you know, open access to it has now been revoked, so, no intimate dissection!

He argued health professionals need to raise the bar on stigmatizing fat people, insulting us openly and directly through campaings. Rather than more the more snide approach of  now which consists of venting their feelings through hoi polloi as the sockpuppets disseminating their displeasure.

Apparently, health professionals ought to break cover jettisoning an important facet of their influence, the appearance of authority as inherently benign and just go for the jugular.

Perhaps that's the missing ethics. Professionals, put aside your self serving impulses in order to save civilization from doom. How heroic! I doubt they're not up for it.

An ex-smoker, Callahan tries the DOA tacit of pointing to anti smoking campaigns by way of comparison. Smokers are treated poorly. They could have learned from the experience of fat people or even those some of them currently appropriate from, drug addicts.

If you're in confessional mode you are in a weakened position vulnerable to a contemptuous response even from nice people. It seems to be some kind of animal impulse. In this situation, you have to police the response to you, ensuring you allow people to let off steam without allowing them to go too far.

Those who know authority up close when it's baring its teeth, such as some addicted to illicit substances know this. Which is why everyone's addicted to something nowadays, despite the stigma still attached to real addicts.

Smokers have fallen far socially, partly because they assumed they'd be treated better than fat people. That the stigma against us was to do with being fat, when it was actually more a facet of the position we were put in by cynical medical professionals and obesity research.

This fall from grace bears no comparison to fat people. We've been in a similar position when smokers were high toned, which is part of why we couldn't warn them, they looked down on us.

That's leaving aside the obvious fact that smoking is a hazard and for many a nuisance. This theme of smokers, ex and current who feel their resentment about their unrewarded repentance, has somehow got to be avenged on fat people, due to their erasure of our experience, is tedious. Butt out!

Fat people have already accepted that we need to diet and become slim. Messed ourselves up, woken up to the horror only to begin a magnificent potential triumph, surprising everyone by showing why each human brain is wholly contained in each individual.
 
All without any real public money being spent to achieve it. Money has mostly been thrown around after the fact. It's not what got fat people narrowly focused on calorie restriction for the last 40-50 years, in the West at least. 

Callahan asks, how far can government and businesses like firms that employ go to change behaviour that's harmful. I'd answer, if the supposed change to the presumed harm actually was effective, that would be a question.

If you have to threaten the health and liberty of others, to make them healthier you have the wrong approach. War on drugs anyone? Especially given that enough of us have woken up and will no longer take this and just say ouch inside our heads anymore.

That's a difference those who leave us out ignore, we consented in the past. Actually we led. However much of a cheat that consent was based on this co-operation is no longer guaranteed. The honeymoon is coming to an end.

That puts the ball in the obesity wallahs court and all they can do is repeat. That's the nub of the issue. The refusal to accept reality. 

For instance, he referred to the effects of anti fat stigma already in evidence, then directly contradicted it by stating his 'new' proposal of more effort towards degrading the humanity of fat people, would be "stigmatization lite."

Say what?

I repeat, he pointed to something that was happening and said, it should start happening and that this would be a lesser version of the worse version already in effect. Less is more and would work better, yet would in reality add something worse.

This was the pattern of the essay and what I found most remarkable. It read like incompatibly opposite narratives advancing one way then sweeping the traces of it away and behaving as if it hadn't.  Like leaving footsteps in the sand, sweeping them over then stating you wish to walk that path, again, for the first time.

It epitomized the whole mentality of the crusade. Because it cannot do what fat people have done, accept the remotest possibility of its own fallibility, even when it describes it as accurately as Daniel Callahan.  

Reading had the mind numbing effect of an on coming headache. 

Beautiful

I was surprised that describing yourself as beautiful still had such currency. In the 60's it was "Black is beautiful" because those who were not Black defined BP as "ugly", due to their fusing of racism with an aesthetic.

It's a terrible burden when people are disgusted by your appearance due to what's going on in their head. It's not so much needing to be beautiful as not triggering a sense of aversion.  Being linked and associated with those feelings.

The eye is attached to the brain. Seeing involves brain processing.

As I'm usually thinking in terms of the crusade, rather than the media and people's looks. And any way I saw that as something that tends to even itself out once you no longer see through the halo of slim goggles.

Of course, not everyone's mind has unravelled that. 

Things happen in a different order for different people. The pieces of the puzzle may be absent or present.

Beautiful is used to describe feelings as well as aesthetics, always has been in most languages. Instinct draws people towards proclaiming this, partly as a way of restoring an equilibrium in the way people feel about them.