"Nobody wants to be fat"

There's a lot of this little meme going around right now and it needs to be lanced like the sneaky little boil it is. If I'm correct, it flows from similar in conjunction with gay people. i.e. "Why would anyone choose to be gay [in light of homophobia]."

It's one of those observations that very quickly becomes an unsavoury trojan for expressing profound loathing.

We get the truth of human cowardice. Yet, equally that is countered by courage, isn't it? If not, little if any human progress could occur. So much of it has required some one or people, usually outnumbered at least at first, to defy overweening hegemony.

This repeated chant has rankled for a while, souring the conversation about sexuality. Helping to posit gay people as objects (yes) of pity. 

Now this rancid turd is being carelessly applied to fatness. Virtually everyone I've heard saying it lately hasn't been fat. The endless basting in the butter substitute of the superiority of slim is getting old. It never gets sufficiently into the meat though does it?

Okay, enough of that.

More than the one-sided premise, this sentiment misses the point, about fatness anyway.

It would not occur to people to most people to choose to be fat. Because contrary to the reams of BS written and spoken about it-there is no obvious reason to be fat. Why would you choose something that occurs not via your conscious mind, but as an adjustment your body makes to a mix of your internal and external environment?

Even gainers bodies have to co-operate with their intent. They have to have the capacity to gain and maintain. The tolerance to push themselves through barriers of boredom, discomfort if not outright pain at times.

I can only relate through my experience of trying to diet the other way. 

Social stigma is not 'proof' lack of choice. If people's need is important enough, it will out. I don't go along with the implicit ideology. That we are motivated solely or even most importantly by opprobrium or lack of it. That we have no needs, wishes dreams of our own and act solely on the basis of the avoidance of hurt.

If avoiding unhappiness is such an exemplary motivation, why did I and millions of others willingly though unwittingly sink into a mire of self hatred? Endless declarations of my senseless greed and indolence, didn't make me happy. Trying to short change my appetite especially and hunger didn't either. Nor did the constant sense of failure and trying to make up for the fault of being fat.

I noticed that I reached the point years ago where the idea of happiness doesn't particularly inspire me as I've spent so much time being unhappy.

I don't say that in any princess tiny tears way. Happiness is pretty easy. It doesn't actually require a predicate. If I put my mind to it. I can be ecstatic today. It might take 50 mental steps from here, but so what? I learned 'discipline' enough whilst experiencing the repeated failure of based-on-science. It's not that hard.

The point to note about fatness is it is spontaneous. It's a product of the body's mechanics happening outside conscious awareness and not directly under its control or direction. And that needs to be understood, whether people like it or not. It must be gotten over, that elective free will, though important is not the only the sole controller of us/our bodies. That needs to be fully understood, without kicking off any hysteria, temper tantrums or denial.

Given fatness is mostly associated with a lesser suicide rate, even at times in the face of greater suicidal ideation, seems a good reason to choose being fat. A sense of physical presence and power's another. A greater sense of emotional stability.

A gemütlichkeit physicality, sensuality. There are are as good reasons to want to be fat as to want to be slim.

Fat is one of the great survival instincts. It's about surviving relentless battering, an unforgiving grind.  I don't feel like cheapening this exposition of the will to prevail with some tawdry-historically speaking-five minute hate campaign.

I dreamt of being slim. Yearned to bring it about with all my heart. That was wholly genuine, I'd never deny that. But it was also very much my duty. Like, not being a "slag". It was thoroughly contrived, faux tho' real as they say. Like building muscles, you go to the gym regularly, lift your weights.

And you get muscled. That's real. If you stop, that lessens.

Wanting to be slim was a bit like that. It was something you just lifted up and down, up and down, in your mind. Never did you stop re-enforcing it, working it, enhancing it, till yeah, it was totally natural. Unimaginable that one could reasonably feel anything else. Usually, we call that self control.

Willpower.

And when you stopped, though not immediately, you began to forgot the feeling. Then why you wanted to be slim. Then what it felt like inside to want to be slim. I don't object to the idea of it, just that its something other than it was, with its themes of wanting to be seen to be a good person.

Weight is ultimately pretty, meaningless over and above the meanings we choose to give it.  At least, it's meanings are obscured.

I'd say its slim pickings on the self esteem front. If something has to be maintained with serious browbeating and threats, that's hardly a compliment to it.