Bite It

Birmingham, the UK's second city [not the one in Alabamy] has finally noted its density of fast food haunts, decided too high and will hereby restrict further excesses. Yet another case of this arse-faced crusade era's shutting the door after you opened it to allow the horse to bolt in the first place.

The point is not that this should or shouldn't be done, that its good/ bad, will or won't work. Its more, if you insist on a particular course that demands certain actions, plus the avoidance of others. Can't have one without the other.

When you demand people must go to war with their hunger, don't permit your cities to become filled with easily available, universally appealing calorie dense food. This shouldn't be a problem. Being fat is supposedly eating too much/wrongly. The avoidance of this is no issue for slim people, they're already there, which is why they're slim.

Really, the fat stereotype is a shame fuelled exaggeration of human tendencies. We like to have the food we like within easy reach. Ancient compounds unearthed usually find places where energy dense and energy efficient foods were stored. Tubers, starchy root veg, grain stores.

Access to food affects where we live.

What's the hunting like? Can we gather enough produce to keep us going? Is it fertile, what can we plant? If you don't feel comfortable when there's no food in the house, why would that change on a collective basis?

The flaw in the false dichotomy made between slim and fat is exposed by societies creating a flood going against the progress of law they've laid down for fat people. We hear; "Why should we [the unfat] be denied because others [i.e. fat people] can't control themselves?"

Because you insisted weight loss must occur and via one route only. None other should be available. Weight loss should be like this, it should be this bad and ineffective yet can somehow be made to work because um... innumeracy.

I find it hard to care that much about this kind of thing now, it's all too late. When the high streets, especially in lower income areas were filling up with these kinds of outlets. I was already struggling with imposition of lifestyle anorexia-for my sins. This gave me a bad feeling about what was going on around me. I felt it would be yet another obstacle for me and people like me.

We had to accept this because our burden was framed as all about self control-or the failure of it. Though it was demanded that we engage in a wholly unnatural, pathological, punitive, unsustainable stance and were clearly struggling, we were not just on our own fighting against primal forces within we had to add, swimming against the tide of other people's resistance.

No attempt to help us meet the demands placed on us was insignificant enough to be considered. No maintenance of any balance was too minimal to be jettisoned all whilst the cries of crisis got louder and louder. Those less prone to weight gain, instinctively wanted nothing to do with any interference or threat to their needs or desires.

That's about how we're all made.  Fat people just accepted going against essential human nature. No wonder it felt right to dehumanize us.

Having seen all this, I quickly concluded the only feasible solution was through science finding a way or ways to reverse [and advance] weight that didn't require something quite so unfeasible. Something that didn't get in the way of slim/mer society as that was a pointless waste of energy. That "no" had to be accepted.

It hurt to see the remorseless dismantling of everything that helped temper the potential for vested interests to get a formidable grip on our food environment. Whether commercial interests or food fanatics. Especially for ordinary children who were clearly deemed expendable, unworthy of effort for the sake of our sacred covenant with children-to the best we can for them.

No more kids growing plants/vegetables, no more school cookery classes, no more attempts to feed children a balanced meal, etc., etc., I totally get the sentiment people are have about fat acceptance should advocate for the end of food desert, but it is mis-placed. I can put up with a lot, but that is a battle I don't have the heart for. 

All this was a hell of a long time coming. It was totally obvious to me at the time, and most of the time folks could barely manage to give a damn. Even when they could, that was undermined by the "personal responsibility" get out clause (ironic that). You cannot claim we are all islands unto ourselves but we require an environment that respects and supports our innate inclinations. 

I feel like where have you been all this time? People spoke out about drugs infiltrating communities, they spoke about crime, about economic deprivation, but barely a word could be heard about the logic of our environment v demands made. Now because you think fat people are unseemly, you can suddenly come back to life and give a shit? And you expect that to become my life?

Again, no country has managed to sustain a reverse in their rate of fatness, or even slim down those deemed less than 'obese', no one mentions that the whole weight graph is moving to the right, not leaving a gap between the righteous and the sinful bodies.

Those who talk crudely about the "nanny state" are also naive. They don't realise this balance of forces is the so called  'discipline' of previous generations. That "eating competence" as the marvellous Ellen Satter calls it, is not maintained magically from some intrinsic unimpeachable source, it must be cultivated from within and the environment must match that. A history of lack is not that. Poverty is not discipline. Inefficiency of means, isn't self control.

Basic truths about human nature must be recognized, you cannot treat food like Ayn Rand treats human will. We are not creatures solely of elective will, it only feels like that because what will we do have is contrasted with our more unconscious wiring. We are animals who within our internal dynamics have some element of what we can perceive as will power. It's part of the whole of what makes us, it is not the whole. Our will is not linear it is more curved, spiral even. Shaped by and prone to interruption then overthrow by basic instincts.

Declarations of purported self mastery can go twist on that.

Though fat people accepted this ultimately deranged ideologically based proposition and were keen. Nobody else matched that enthusiasm. Before you get to any question of efficacy there's implementation.

I've no desire to fight other people's perfectly natural sense of threat to their ability to nourish themselves (amongst other things) then nor now. As I've said and never wavered from, the ability to adjust weight, forwards or backwards is required-end of story.

So why not just bite that bullet? It is medically necessary due to the central influence of human metabolic function on human function. It is a stepping stone to other things and a route to better medical treatments as promising in its way as the much touted "genetics."