In a society when people drug everything from their moods to reaching for a pill 'cos they've got a 'ickle head/tummy/butt boo boo. Fat people were told er, *you people are too much, you need to starve and run around till you've expended your largesse.* Then latterly, * you just need
Our response to this request was: "Okay, if you say our bodies are a problem doc etc., you must be right. You all seem like reasonable nice people. We'll do as you ask!"And we did.
Just. Like. That.
Not only did we accept such an insult to our form and person. We accepted the unnatural and instinctively disgusting plan of weight loss dieting.
Despite this not even this tender-hearted enthusiasm could make such dysfunction viable. Aiming to stay in a state of hunger is unnatural and pathological.That means it moves towards unhealth and ultimately death. Not always that ultimately. Some anorexics actually die the young deaths so many are desperate for fat people to.
But the point is we really, really, really tried, over and over again. Without the millions, yes, millions spent, telling people to put their litter in the bins provided... rather than on the ground...which will then have to be picked up by someone and put in a bin......
We starved, swooned, dieted, sweated, wired jaws, took pills, ran about, had organs banded, re-routed and removed. And that's only some of the least unseemly!
All because you know. When someone tells you on good authority that your body's all wrong and that seems reasonable and you know they're good people, it probably is.
The pathology of open-ended hunger used to be readily understood. And probably still is in countries where starvation is a more current or recent threat. But not in more sophisticated realms, no we aren't allowed to state openly that the cultivation of unending states of hunger is undesirable and unsustainable. The body is well constructed to defend against it.
In lieu of this agreed recognition of obvious fact. There needs to be an explanation for people's now seemingly inexplicable attachment to food.
Addiction.
You do not have hunger-a signal that your body requires nutritional replenishment, mainly made up of energy. No, your hobby of eating has hi-jacked your brain and you are now allowing it to do you the harm of 'obesity' blah, blah, blah shoddy pseudo-science emotive 'addiction' criteria.
Regardless of whether weight is a real question for you or not, the answer's most definitely not a stat of proto-anorexia. Turns out you have to have some susceptibility for that to be remotely possible. Enough to stay this side of safe and sane yet stay on a diet for life. Who has that? Just be hungry all the time, but eat, unsatisfyingly, things you may or may not wish to eat and don't eat things you may well feel to eat. And go for the burn.
What makes me laugh is that we thought that was perfectly reasonable for so long. Not other people, who could at least preach fatuously in ignorance of your pain and discomfort, whilst taking their pills for oh, just about anything remotely disagreeable to them.....which less face it is many things a whole lot less bothersome than knawing crazy making hunger.
Has any one said hunger can make you crazy? Resisting the pulsing drive to fulfill it can literally drive you out of your mind? Even if you have such a mental block that it feels like you can barely manage to eat? Those recommending it, should try it. For a limited period, just to get a feel of never being free of hunger.
I don't mean no food-that's relatively easy once you get going. I'm talking about eating inadequately, always being dissatisfied, irritable. Eating things you don't want to eat and not eating things you do.
It's not just the psychology, it's the stripping of some emotional ballast. That increases your sense of vulnerability. The absence of the pleasure of fulfilling a necessary drive, properly. You do know the satisfaction of your hunger is part of your daily pleasure quotient? And that when it's undermined you acquire a pleasure deficit? i.e. your mood starts to sink. In the end you'll be reaching for something to end the torment of tussling with yourself, even more than the actual physical feeling of hunger.
Being ravished by hunger is emotional.
Dodging it is boring. It repeatedly takes over your mind to the extent that you find it difficult to focus on other things. At some point you'll find there's no free bits of brain left to hold other thoughts, so much of it has been taken over by the imperative to just relieve this damn nagging urge. Its the imperative to do something that you cannot (won't) do that's even more wearying than the hunger itself.
Hurting yourself makes you feel very sorry for yourself indeed. The one safe space, yourself is no more. The one person who should nurture take care of you, is the one who's denying you and letting you suffer, for what? It's humiliating. That's the so called shame of eating disorders, anorexia-the way we're always told what genius high achieving in control anorexics are. And the poor 'over' eaters who are just ashamed they eat too damn much.
NO.
They're both ashamed because something that they were born able to do, they've managed to mess up. That it's for your weight, your "health" doesn't mean shit. You can't even eat properly, you can't meet your own needs, you're incompetent enough to have dropped that ball?!
When you are hungry enough often enough, you can forget.....you do forget....in the end you just don't care. You are too beaten and exhausted to carry on. What it for anyway? You just want your brain back, to feel alive again. To know what it feels like not to have that unchanging feeling in the background. To be able to think about something else to be able to feel something else. To not have your mind and body hi-jacked by a primal urge that you're resisting.
This is what people mean when they allude to food addiction/overeating whether they quite realise I don't know.
Surely not? Surely "food addiction" is excess, but what is excess? Who defines it when weight is deemed the direct indicator of intake? Consider the way weight loss diet defenders think. How they refuse to acknowledge the failure of their favoured strategy, claiming its actually almost 100% success and the fault is fat people lack stoicism.
(*)
If you re-frame hunger as 'addiction' somehow you can re-frame your battle with hunger as an addict resisting the urge to fulfill an acquired craving. This will give you the same magic that addicts have when they go cold turkey (Ummmm turkeeeey). Which incidentally is FN. Well, they can use drugs to help them get off the drugs can't they?
It's a plan. Just like the one where you're supposed to tell yourself its not a diet, it's a "lifestyle choice." It's not hunger, it's addiction. It's not real hunger, look at the size of you! Which means you know, you can take drugs...for your addiction.
I remember years ago, in my dieting days, becoming intensely frustrated and enraged, considering an overview of ceaseless attempts to get on-and stay on the straight and narrow yet again.
I remember thinking loudly, "the only way I'm going to be able to stick to this is if I was on heroin!!!*^$"
I weighed it up coolly. Heroin is highly addictive-but, having survived so many wretched attempts at self-enforced hunger how bad could it be?
I giggled. I so wasn't going to find out.
I couldn't even take diet pills.
* Decided to take this line out, it could be read as attacking drug addicts. That wasn't my feeling or my point. I was referring more to those who use drugs to ease minor aches, pains or their emotional issues, rather than alter aspects of their character personality or self-use often hiding behind 'illness' for that purpose.Then feel bad about their own lack of stoicism and outsource their own shame to fat people.
The problem with that is not that kind of drug seeking in itself it's that their attitude and framing squeezes out what is a necessary self critique they're avoiding and not resolved in their own minds. What they are saying to fat people displays this.
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