Inevitable Realism

An article is making its way around the fatsphere generating no little bathos. A six hundred pound est., man entered a hospital leaving a trail of mawkish self pity and passive aggression in his wake.

“My stomach hurts,” he says, his voice surprisingly high and childlike.

It gets better;

It’s hard to tell, exactly, but I think his pain is coming from somewhere around his stomach.

Pure gold.

Now, whenever I hear about stories like this, I'm always rooting for the person concerned to assume a haughty froideur.

The hospital was not fully equipped for this guy. They couldn't x ray him and he was not surprisingly uncomfortable keeping an awkward position for too long.

We start an IV and get some blood work, all of which is normal.

Lmao. Oh man seriously, how pissed do you think they were about that?

I talk to the patient between procedures, trying to get a sense of him as a person. He recites a litany of consultants he’s seen for his back pain, his headaches, a chronic rash on his ankles, his shortness of breath, his weakness, his insomnia and his fatigue. All of them have failed me,” he says, adding that the paramedics didn’t have the proper ultra-wide, ultra-sturdy gurney to accommodate his body. The Americans with Disabilities Act says that they should have the proper equipment to handle me, the same as they do for anyone else,” he says indignantly. “I’m entitled to that. I’ll probably have to sue to get the care I really need.”

Atta boy! [I wonder if he used to be slim?] Don't take any nonsense. This is a start. I just can't stand any more tragic capitulation. At least he's trying.

This is the endgame of not listening when people tell you, doesn't work. We told them!

To rely on doesn't work in the face of what you can see, with your own yes, well, there's no happy ending for you.

It's just possible that the increasing reality of them having to deal with theirs and society's folly, will convince them to relent. To tell the field of "obesity" to get its bloody finger out and start being reality based, believe it when I see it though. 

He lies at the very large center of his own world — a world in which all the surgery mankind has to offer cannot heal the real pain he suffers.

Yeah a world in which you have to run around after him-between trying to dump him elsewhere. I could live with the doctoring/research/quackscience classes throwing up their hands, but why wouldn't they let us progress? Why did they keep shaming us into repeat, repeat, repeat until we could stand it no more? Why did they have to waste our stentorian efforts? We could have faced the truth and shared some of the load. We were so willing, we participated in the experiment with slavish devotion. Why couldn't more value have been extracted out of that? This could have been a unique experiment of partnership between lay and professional. What you could have had now!

Instead, you have a lot of exhausted people trained replace their thoughts with bullshit, which is the last thing any of us needs. 

The patient lies trapped in his own body, like a prisoner in an enormous, fleshy castle.

Oooh, get you being all picaresque. But we know you're talking about yourself and your own feelings. You are trapped by your professions' own hubris. And whatever is really at the bottom of this reluctance to get real answers.

And though he must feel wounded by the ER personnel’s remarks, he seems to find succor in knowing that there’s no comment so cutting that it can’t be soothed by the balm of 8,000 calories per day.

Oohooh bitchy, did you see that? Well, perhaps you'll seek succour in your hospital supplies of ethanol. I understand some of you do that.

Just goes to show bullying people doesn't bully biology. Margaret Thatcher used intone thunderously. "You can't buck the market." You cannot buck biology, not with denial, delusion, quack science, nor iatrogenics.

Later on in my shift, still feeling traces of the patient’s presence, I sit and stare at my 700-calorie dinner, all appetite gone, wondering where empathy ends and compassion begins.

No worries there as you haven't got any. However this reality check might start people realizing agreeing a false reality doesn't change the real one. Sorry about that.

I know why my colleagues and I are so glad to have this patient out of the ER and stowed away upstairs: he’s an oversize mirror, reminding us of our own excesses. It’s easier to look away and joke at his expense than it is to peer into his eyes and see our own appetites staring back.

Golly gosh gee whizz.

This unfeasible tv proposition achieves its popularity through the sight of punishing consumption. In the guise of fat people starving and purging away their sinful "unhealthful" countenance. Though, never unhealthful enough not to drop dead under conditions that would fell many of those baying for their sweat. This serves to purge collective guilt about rampant consumption and avarice. The voiding of fat bodies becomes an exorcism of everyone's suppressed sin and above all, fear that payment/punishment will be exacted at some future point.

Fat's fat

Ragen raises a good point about prioritizing health being used as justification for making fat people unhealthier- to manifest the already pre-destined prognosis of 'obesity'. Yeah, that's a headful but it's true.

And no, it's not because people are eval and wicked, it's the nature of how your brain works. If you keep suspending your ethics, morals and reason, that flows into more and more dubious morality. What else is it going to do? Where will it if you don't or others don't counter that?

It's easy to overlook the notion of health as a maximum priority, because its such hooey. Often working class / people of LSES [sorry, but I sometimes dislike saying "poor people", lack of money doesn't define you as a person] have to jettison their health in order to do the jobs available to them. Other people undertake perilous work that may or may not be relatively well re-numerated. Building work, labouring, working on an oil rig, etc.,

I mean, do police working in high crime areas prioritize their health? Does a fireman/woman? What about someone choosing to work in a country where healthcare is sparse and underdeveloped? Rescue workers?

The instinct to try and save people from fire, flood and earthquake is part of what makes us human. You may say, that's for a reason, for a purpose for a good. But the truth is, a lot of not prioritizing your health is, just on a lesser more everyday scale.

The family wo/man doing a job they detest which is grinding them down spiritually, mentally, psychologically and physically, is doing it to make sure their children are taken care of.  They may rely on things that aren't "healthy" to do it too.

Those trying to get an education and support themselves, meaning they have to knowingly use themselves up for some period, whilst they complete their education.

What about even, the way we take a course of pills to support our mood, nervous (system) function rather than go straight to counselling to unpick and unravel the cause/s so we can emerge without anxiety disorder or depression?

Of course being fat is stigmatized, not actions. This is just something to say. No matter what fat people do, they'll always be a problem because erm, fat's fat.

Gaunt

Rachel Frederickson caused consternation by recently winning the show Biggest Loser. Not because that show's an abusive race to vomit fest, where psyched up gym bunnies reveal more than you want to know about their mental profile. More due to her looking a bit ravaged in the process.

The show's set around fat people competing to lose as much weight as possible via serious calorie restriction whilst overdosing on exercise. Frederickson began at 260 pounds or just under 18 and a half stones/117kg and ended the show at about 150.

She returned to film the episode that crowned the winner (her!) at 105 pounds/just under 7 and a half stones/46 kg. Drawing gasps of shock even from the wing-ding gym torturers who see nothing wrong with driving people to physical, mental and emotional breaking point.

This unfeasible tv proposition achieves its popularity through the sight of punishing consumption. In the guise of fat people starving and purging away their sinful "unhealthful" countenance. Though, never unhealthful enough not to drop dead under conditions that would fell many of those baying for their sweat. This serves to purge collective guilt about rampant consumption and avarice. The voiding of fat bodies becomes an exorcism of everyone's suppressed sin and above all, fear that payment/punishment will be exacted at some future point.

It's a relief to see fatz getting slim because it means everyone else can save themselves too.

Kind of stupid, but, whatever.

I've always been averse to those who conflate thinness with anorexia, even before I got not all anorexics are slender. I am not censorious about a person being classed as "underweight". I don't even think people shouldn't be "too thin" if they want to be-providing they are not tearing themselves, I don't believe its necessary as long as you're at a certain metabolic place. People smoke and drink to get drunk after all.

I'm also wary of remote diagnosis of ED's and any bullshit concern trolling. However, there are reasons to suspect something may not be right here. I must admit, something about her attitude to weight loss in the preamble set off an alarm.

Still, I dismissed it as, me judging in retrospect. Then I saw her. And no, for me any way, it's not about being a white woman thing. I still remember the shock of seeing the late Luther Vandross after what turned out to be one of his latter weight loss diet efforts. I knew instantly something was very wrong. His face looked cadaverous.

And anyway, you may have noted this kind of weight loss endeavour can take it out of many people's faces.

In Frederickson's case, I can honestly say there are grounds for genuine concern. Her face is gaunt, it isn't just thin. I don't feel that's any more of a gratuitous reference to her thinness than noting a face bloated with fluids- has to be an untoward referencing a person's fatness. Though I daresay it might sting.

Here are a few thin people who's faces aren't. Thinness does not suck the matter out of a body and a face, often the most telling of all, wasting does. She may re-gain some weight in due course. The extent of her ability to exercise may well be based on her prior (relative) inactivity and she was in a competition with a large prize. Maybe she gained it to lose it, who knows?

If she's okay, then I apologize but it's worth her and others in a similar situation just being aware, of what her activities maybe revealing. It'd be easier to deal with on this side of it, than the other.

People actually die young from anorexia nervosa (it's a pathology, not a person) rather than merely being a much touted promissory threat. 

Those trying to turn all observation of people into "shaming" (see comments) are revealing not only their wonky eye sight (what is it with people of all weights who cannot see individuals once they categorize them as weight pawns?) But their tired projection onto fat acceptance/fat people, crafted in the reverse of their own hating.

When it is a rejection of the basis of defining people the sum total of good/bad habits.

There is no point in ignoring signals of distress. That's not what is meant by refusing to define people as inherently pathological based solely on their weight. Thin and slim people are allowed to be what they are. Fat people aren't, therefore reference to the latter tends to have an agenda absent from more legitimized bodies.

I do not define thin people in my head, as a class of disease. They are not all the same. I'm not in disagreement with their bodies. Plenty can be sprightly and robust as anything at 105, usually those who are that way naturally, for want of a better word.

Anorexia has been policed into disconnecting it from weight loss dieting for quite a while now. Weight loss dieting impersonates anorexia. We are expected to believe that restricting calories and exercising to lose weight has nothing to do with the so called mental illness of anorexia. When it so obviously does.  The temporary proto-anorexia of eat less do more until you've expended the weight you wish to lose didn't really matter, when it was presumed to be a temporary one off.

The real problem arose when it was realized this didn't accord with bodily design.  It's designed to restore any loses and mostly does.  The instruction morphed to keep dieting-for life. Or "lifestyle change" that is what turns a dieter from a temporary user of anorexia, to someone who intends to pursue it as way of life.

That will beat most people up until they tire of this, but those with anorexic susceptibilities will find their bodies succumbing strangely to this pressure. No-one knows exactly why. My feeling is chinks in their defenses (against lost weight).

People like Frederickson should not become pawns in worthless weight battle trumps.

If she is slowly being pulled under the wheels, now's the time for her to cut herself loose, whilst that still makes sense (to her). Because it might not later.

BL's process has uncovered someone with some combination of this quirk in a way that it could not quite avoid. It's wryly amusing to think that could be the beginning of its undoing. After all, who cares about fat bodies being wasted? It's only when the size enters legitimacy does pain become real.

They couldn't tell by looking at her previous 18 stone frame. Nor could you tell when she was a college athlete that she could become fatter than most fat people in few years. This urge to re-feed after athleticism is not unheard of, though it's put solely down to emotions. Sometimes the body has a little bit of a plan. 

After famine there is feast. And again in the case of this particular famine.

So, whether she's sailing close to the wind is of course her affair and I truly hope she's not overwhelmed by the attention which is getting out of hand must admit. She should not be criticized or attacked, but merely informed. With the obscurantism surrounding anorexia, it's only fair that both she and people similar situations realise the possibility, so they're given the chance to act from an informed basis. That's all.

Pathology Fetish

Here we go;

If you'd asked me 24 days ago if I was addicted to anything, I would have laughed in your....face......I am a slave to nothing and to nobody, bar my toddler and my mortgage provider. Bring on the dancing girls –I have this life thing licked.That, of course, was before I decided, on 1 January, to give up sugar.

You may see where this is going;

It's been both ridiculous and terrifying to see how closely...sugar deprivation has mimicked.... "real" addiction. I'm craving the stuff all the time. I can literally feel – or feel I feel – a hollow inside me that only Cadbury can fill. I can't concentrate. I'm foul-tempered. I'm consumed with guilt and self-loathing. How did this happen? How did I let something come to have such a hold on me? Most addictions – in my anecdotal experience – stem from patterns learned in childhood or people's need to escape from some unhappiness. Mine's just the result of mindless greed.

Mindless indeed.

This keen invention of ways to slap the label; disease, illness, sickness, addiction on yourself. When offered to fat people with (hyperphagic eating disorders). Apart from those wholly obedient to the mainstream discourse-and even then-not so enthused. This is because fat people have had to face up to the idea of culpability without mitigation. Don't expect anyone to notice that though, including fat people.

These (mis-) labels are superfluous and strangely irrelevant. Even the fatz who try them on, because whatever slimz do is all there is to do, or because they think it'll shield them from aggression or because they feel it a useful model to adopt, don't sound remotely convincing.

Slimz do, they really believe this shit. It's trés authentique coming from them. I can't help but watch them with fascination, wondering what its like to be so incapable of telling the difference between a stubbed toe and a sta.

It takes real oblivious self absorption/confidence in your own feelings to compare suddenly without preparation or substitute, cutting a major source of energy from your diet with this:

The closest I've ever come to describing it to a friend is; You know when you're underwater, and you need to come up for a breath? And it's taking too long to get to the surface? That feeling, of having no oxygen left, your whole body feeling like fire, salty and aching with the desperate need to breathe? That's it, only not exactly, because it's worse.

At one point, I went into the bathroom, and found Lawrence -- all six feet, two inches of him, tattooed and scarred up and tough as hell, having lived through one of the most astonishingly hard lives I'd ever heard of, curled up in the bottom of a tiny, filthy shower stall like a little escargot, sobbing and shivering in desolate agony.

 You may say that's a little unfair, she included a caveat;

....sugar deprivation has mimicked what we will, for reasons of limited time and space, just have to agree to call here "real" addiction – to booze, fags, drugs et al.

It's somewhat equivocal though. Nor are cigarettes an addiction of any sort. That's another sop to smokers to shield them from aggression, others and their own, a perk of what others deem thin privilege.

Are these differences really that hard to spot? Don't get me wrong, opiate withdrawal can vary quite a bit. There are many who are untroubled by it. But that does not mean its any old thing.

The obesity cult shows fear of death by pushing ideas of human morality onto fatz. Insisting we personify "slow death", degeneracy, corruption and decay, of all sorts. We are 'unhealthy' and dying. This is superbad of us, morally like.

But their branding their own fetish of things like illness addiction etc., as "brave" and "honest".  I can't quite remember why right now.

The need to be pure is the mind finding a focus of worship again. Lifestyle anorexia is the cure for the spiritual guilt of consumerism.

What's even more odd, is the way certain labels shift meaning according to who they're applied to. Being a drug addict is bad, but its somehow addict becomes honourable if you are slim and its "food". But not if your BMI's 30+, then you're/its a dirty shame.  The addict kudos (for faux addicts) is based on our terror of death. Genuine addiction can continuously brush with death. This seeming insouciance in the face of the much feared creates a gravitas, amidst the profound contempt for dependence. Or enslavement as Mangan referred to it.

"Mindless greed" makes me wonder if this is another instinctive nod to getting fatz to sign on for faux addiction. Rather like some slimz used to put down thin people in order to act like they were getting on side with fatz.

They'd hide behind us of course, using us to express their own shame...about what? About having a fat not slim condition, what will the neighbours think? Frankly I don't give a shit. I'm just not and never have been an addict.

I've been through hyperphagia - an excess of hunger signals (when your nervous system is so jacked up that every emotion, stress and even action invokes your appetite and hunger.) At its worst, I, can only describe it as feeling like I was possessed by a malevolence that god botherers would call old nick.

But I can tell you, that simply was not addiction. Nor is it useful to see it in that way and I don't care if it is for anyone else either. They're entitled to see it that way. They're not entitled to insist that has anything to do with science or is something everyone must get on board with. Let slimz "confess". They have a choice, their bodies aren't defined as guilt.

I really hope fat people keep saying no to meaninglessness imposed upon them without giving a damn what they might think about it. That's only in keeping with a slim halo. We've been through too much to sell ourselves out to things that do not acknowledge the meaning and effects of our experience. 

We've more than earned the right to say what that is, without interference.

Learning at once Remove

Bullying others teaches you to how to be bullied. Now that everyone's so graciously accepted fat people as the cause of their own disease, the inevitable has occurred. All human beings are responsible for their own disease;

Most adult cancers are a consequence of personal choice.

 Huhooooooo sacrilege!

It's fine to say that about 'obesity', but to test the waters on those unused to this kind treatment is bold. You know how people always pretend hating on fat people is brave? This is the bravery they mean.

So how do people respond to this? If you're fat, see if you can "guess".

I lost my father to cancer. He didn't smoke or drink or eat processed food. But why should that matter?

Yep, good/bad fatty. Having your personal integrity attacked through "lifestyle" starts that script.

Telling people they create their own disease is a paradigm shift. Not because the medical system was so forward thinking, as we assumed. More because that suited its method, mainly around magic bullets and other interventions. That's about listening to your doc and taking your meds. The end.

To be the cause of your own disease makes you, not just someone who can take care or live right, it makes illness guiltiness. For lovers of retro, this is time honoured, some might say, positively stone age. That can go with the diet. 

There are similar rules and drives as those of the 'obesity' crusade;

Dr Christopher Wild, director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).... said when people know his job, they asked whether a cure for cancer had been found, yet few think about preventing the disease in the first place. "Despite exciting advances, the report shows that we cannot treat our way out of the cancer problem.

Not disinterest in science like 'obesity' more fatigue with the progress and prospect of it. This is part of what happens when you stop trying to teach science properly to all. It becomes the province of certain classes, who cannot produce sufficient numbers who acquire that tag from their raging curiosity, rather than desire for the acme of societal kudos.

The biggest burden will be in low- and middle-income countries, where the population is increasing and living longer.

So, that's the real driver of cancer, in the western (model) world. And increasingly every where else.

This may seem like exaggeration. That this will just be a question of more people taking better care of themselves, or that those who live right will not be subjected to this.

I beg to differ. Slippery slope aside, this is a culture shift. It won't be immediate. It will happen over time, but not too much. I remember when fat people as fully human still made sense, (about, 15 years ago?)

When enough time has elapsed for people to forget what it was like to not believe people create their health, then..... people will see that mental health stigma will be the norm of how physical illness is seen. That's an unexpected development mental health activists weren't banking on. Maybe it's a trend?

Mind you, 'obesity' by defining people as disease and insisting dieting totally works, makes fat people technically cray cray, anyway. (You become the voice of disease, therefore what you say has no credence.)

The worrying thing is the emphatic nature of "lifestyle" as the answer. If weight loss dieting's anything to go by, they'll be denial of any failure. Though, must admit, I don't think it will get that bad for others.

I've always said though, I'm not actually bothered by the idea of culpability in at least some health issues. We probably do cause a lot of our own problems, or facilitate them certainly. So what? It's called being-not even just being human.

Where I felt the problem lied is defining people as intrinsically pathological.

That more than being blamed for illness is what is so alienating. Black people have borne this burden since spotted by White people. You don't have to be defined openly as disease in order for the same instrinsic pathologization to have the effect of dehumanizing you.

Anyhow, the ubiquity of, your own fault, the fact it could theoretically touch everyone will alter its dyamic. It might even give some people pause for thought when it comes to 'obesity'.

What's "obesity related" mean, exactly?

I've realized I'm not entirely sure what the real meaning of that term is. It can be illuminating to check out genuine disease;

Some medical disorders have symptoms that mimic allergies or asthma. Some related conditions are extensions of allergic disease, and sometimes allergies or asthma can worsen symptoms of related diseases. The lack of an accurate diagnosis, treatment plan and coordinated care can leave you feeling miserable.

That's pretty clear. Some things have similar symptoms to asthma, some things tend to come in the wake of asthma and some of those can be worsened by the symptoms of asthma itself.

Some symptoms can be worsened by weight gain, some made lessened, alleviated or even delayed or avoided. Ditto slimness. It also varies individually in a way that's hard to assess in an objective gain/loss dichotomy.

I left the last sentence in for fun. Well, as much to show how the aim with genuine illness is almost always to reassure as anything.  Panic is not thought to serve real emergencies, more the creation of them.

In the days when I bought 'obesity' wallahs' spiel more or less, hook line and sinker. I assumed "obesity related" meant; take the amount of illness slimz have, from the amount fatz have and the product is "obesity related." So, if fat people had Y level of heart attacks and slim people X, then; X - Y = obesity related.

That seems kind of silly now, but, I didn't put any thought into it. My brain just manoeuvered there, given the information, then stopped. It was all on the reputation of those saying it really.

Then I took for granted fat people had more, though I knew enough to assume that it wasn't likely to be by much.

It was still odd even then, because, how would you know when a fat person had whatever condition because they were fat, when slim people also got the same conditions? Without a distinct difference how could you know whether that would have happened to that particular person, regardless of their weight? That or something else?

My mind worked out even then that because 'obesity' has no aetiology, it cannot be said to cause disease. Association is not the same as cause. Illness is more prevalent in Black people, working class people, women as opposed to men and vice versa etc.,

I put all this aside, it seemed not central to the issue at hand. But then, obesity wallahs hadn't got round to insisting on framing fat people as costs. They seemed to borrow from drugs charities who used costs of drug addiction to alert the people to the price of drug prohibition. 'Obesity' wallahs twisted, corrupted and mis-used that as they usually do.

In that context, more recently I realized it's often referring to the costs of treating type 2 diabetes an actual disease. So its an association of a condition which elevates risk of ill health; fat associated with type 2 diabetes = overall increased risk of morbidity.  My mind interpreted related as having a clear pathway to point that out. Which the complications and co-morbidities of diabetes have. Fatness does not.

It's like defining type 1 diabetes as slim related, because its more likely to appear (be apparent?) in slimmer people. If you compared that form in a slim person and a fat one, would you be able to tell whether being fatter would have meant the person avoided it?

The way that doesn't scan is kind of how people feel about relating illness to weight as a rule. Weight is a metabolic outcome, it can undoubtedly signal health to the good or ill. The problem is, it's usually too much part of an individual profile to be abstracted on its own.