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.