Monday 30 December 2013

Nope, not like cancer

Apparently, people have a lot of trouble grasping why the 'obesity' construct is defunct, useless, doa. Just to recap I don't mean 'obesity' to refer to fat, fatness or fat person/people, though that is who it refers to. I mean the idea that it is disease.

Not "a disease" because that's its first fundamental flaw. It ends up defining bodies therefore people as disease. By defining humanness as slimness and fatness as a covering, it tries to pretend that all people are slim and fat people are slimz with a fat suit of disease. This doesn't work because we are whole.

You can see this through what happens when people try to lose weight. Their mythical slim bodies do not yield the foreign fat. The body reacts as a whole and when the body shrinks, it still behaves as if it is fat, whilst not being that size.

What we describe as the almost inevitable "regain" is actually the reassertion of a size that was never really lost. Only attacked and overwhelmed, only for it to strike back with a vengeance as time goes by.

Part of the legacy of the religious separation of soul-seen as the essence of self- from body means the idea that we aren't our bodies is deeply ingrained. Even secular folk claim to be "living in" their bodies, as if they are a tiny little essence that lives somewhere within the larger structure that is their body.

This melds with the fact that our mind is self reflexive-meaning it can observe itself, in action. This gives the impression of two. Imagine if your mirror image could observe you observing yourself.  

Whilst I don't seek to abolish that, we must remember than objectively speaking-we are our bodies, whether that feels right or not. We are. When someone defines us physically as disease, they define us as disease.

This is not a viable proposition. It's one that should be rejected on hearing. It isn't though and this is causing a lot of conceptual problems.

I'd say it is the basis of why fat people aren't "taken seriously". If you know anything classed as neurosis, it will eventually take over your mind. If it becomes serious enough, you will start to become as much or more the voice of it as much as you are yourself.

This is how fat people's first person testimony is viewed, there can be no distance between them ,and the disease of themselves.

In psychological terms, this kind of mess is usually only experienced by people in extreme states or out right mental illness. There's something rather schzoid about it. You are yourself but psst, some of you isn't-don't tell that part I said so!

Only those with the kudos to get people to accept ideas uncritically could get away with inserting this kind of nonsense in everyone, including the self respecting. As well as fat people themselves. That's why FA is recovery. It's when you realise how crazy this shit is. And yes I said crazy.

It's a vicious cycle being seen as the voice of the disease of you. you cannot be taken seriously, because you're disease. And no, that doesn't happen to people with cancer, though they have their own crosses to bear.

Nor is it like alcoholism or drug addiction. Neither of which are diseases either, but they're habits anyway,  not bodies.

Of course it must be said, fat people should not take most criticisms of their self acceptance seriously either. 

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