Personal Responsibility

The aftermath of seeing the low probability diet success won't rise in the face of willpower is becoming curiouser and curiouser. It is predictable that if your crusade is predicated on a falsehood, you need to keep that going, to keep it going.

If that's busted, keeping things the same means, re-arranging the surface. So that things 'change' but remain the same. The phrase "personal responsibility" is currently being bandied around to bring to achieve this. On the face of it reasonable. We should all take responsibility for ourselves right? In this instance it has little meaning. It's purpose is to erase action in order to deny the outcome of said action. Which is undesired.

Thus re-asserting calorie restriction as dependable and up to fat people to make the necessary effort to make it work. Rather than accepting the truth that this is highly unlikely, due to the way we as humans are made. Let me repeat this is not about being fat, its how our metabolism is designed. To return weight more or less to where it started after loss.

You can see it in fat people, you can see it in thin people repeatedly losing 5 pounds over  and over again. So for now supporting and increasing well-being and health is needed. Plus more research into how to alter human metabolic function. As this isn't just about weight, it ties into dealing with actual metabolic problems. And yes that includes for some people, matters of bulk and mobility. 

Anyway, this attempted flummery is bad enough, but ironically, what makes the unknown quantity of insisting lay people do some self-experimentation awkward, is this level of responsibility is simply not the expected norm.

This is something that is consistently alluded to, not often openly. Contained in such phrasing as, "Nobody takes any responsibility anymore." Ahhh, that old chestnut. It ironically critiques the-effectively-thin privilege enabling conscious actions to be declared, disease/illness/nothing to do with me guv, when they're troublesome. i.e. They're hard to get rid of or even bad for your health.

Well, riding a motorbike can be deadly if you're unfortunate, we know this and are able to state it without calling it disease.

I repeat the weird thing is a group who've left themselves and been mostly left out of this is fat people. At the same time, we have been made to epitomise the very lack of responsibility being complained about, which is really anchored in the social kudos of slimness. And the respect for its little fee fees, up to and including taking over fatness to use to create a bogus identity of false superiority.

In the guise of health.

It's not even unusual, it's just a more obvious microcosm of what goes on whenever there are race or class structures of contrived inferiority and superiority. The two become half of the human character. The latter get the good half, the former the bad.

What tends to happen then is the "bad" becomes the route to expressing what is deemed wrong about human nature-personal or general-and vice versa. If you're a baddie and wish to express your goodness, you tend to have difficulty. If you're a goody and wish to express your badness, you tend to project it onto the baddies and deal with it in them. Often beneath your conscious awareness, which is the point, this allows you to be all good. And being all good is in its way as dehumanizing and unsustainable as being all bad, though less damaging.

The general personal responsibility set by privilege- and deemed not good enough- is being projected onto fat people and critiquing slim people and their privileging, indirectly. There's a stupid hack piece, which I wouldn't bother to read unless you wish to soil your brain, but it does display this mind-altering effect;

‘Well, what diets have you tried so far?’ asked the GP, flicking through the patient’s notes. I was an innocent trainee doctor on my general practice placement at the time and watched the interaction carefully.‘Look, I don’t want to go on a diet, I want you to prescribe me these,’ snapped the patient, bringing out a neatly folded page she had torn out of a magazine. The GP, rolling his eyes at me, took the paper but didn’t read it. This was yet another example of what’s becoming a very British epidemic: obesity being self-diagnosed as disease.

Being fat has been defined as disease by researchers and invested with medical authority. Requesting pills for every ill is de rigeur and has been embraced by medical professions. As much a product of psychiatry as anything. Defining habits of thought, mood and behaviour as disease is perfectly mainstream. Even taking fatness as behaviour, which it isn't, if asking for pills for it is degenerate, so's the rest.