Stuck on Repeat

Imagine walking purposefully to a meeting, when someone leaps out and starts barracking you. "You look like shit, you are worthless, stupid, you don't know what you're doing or who you are. I do, I know everything about you...." Etc.,

You continue on, in any state from bemusement to alarm. Then you're waylaid by the charming Shiloh Marie, informing you that by this, you'd not deigned to acknowledge their views and had decided they weren't "valid."

I think you'd be a little surprised. Especially if you'd spent your life doing nothing but acknowledge these 'views' to the detriment of everything. Your own thoughts, feelings and above all, an acknowledgement of yourself.

What's more, the value of this approach to those who demanded it, is eloquently shown by their denial and erasure of it.

Assuming that because someone starts randomnly talking at you, that they are talking to you and about you and that this must have something to do with you, betrays an overdeveloped sense of responsibility for what's going on in other people's heads.

If fat's a "feminist issue", this is where it starts.  It's not a woman's duty to soothe men's anger like that of a toddler having an epic tantrum. Nor even with begging the feminist slimstream to stop colluding with this.

Fat phobes don't have a legitimate point of view and that is their decision, not that of FA's. What they want is for fat people to do exactly what we've already done. Over and over again. Whilst they continue to deny it, because it hasn't and doesn't work.

The slimming industry came to the UK in the 1960's. We're talking a good half century of serious dieting culture. And I'd say nearly forty years of this weird scientifically/medically ballasted loathing. No matter what you think, no matter how it seems, there has only ever really been one view.

The instinct seems to be that because people tend to counterbalance any views that may or seem to go against them, by naturally giving good account of themselves, that this must have happened withfat people. It barely has.

Fat people were as committed to this more than anyone else. Even people burned out by dieting still carried on assuming their bodies and/or they were bad and/or wrong.

There was an overall tunnel vision that losing weight must be done and it must be done via weight loss dieting, shared by fat to thin alike. It was the way weight loss was sold. As scientific fact that if you take in fewer calories than you use, you'll use up stored fat and that will be that.

This didn't not simply feel duty or obligation, as a burning desire for ethical absolution. We felt the sting of being in a state of sin on a moment by moment basis.

We were silenced by the collective hoodoo surrounding calorie restriction. Like all quackery, it relies on the way you act and (supposedly) think. When efficacy can't deliver on the hopes invested in it, an atmosphere of superstition flourishes. We came under pressure to be positive at all times, our body's natural reactions to the imposition of famine became the sign of our internal corruptness-not corruption, corruptness.

It must be repressed, lest we ward off success by a show of reluctance or bad attitude.

That would be pointed to as the source of dieting's almost inevitable failure. No failure was allowed, ergo press repeat, forever.
   
We learned not to complain about anything as that was this was thrown in our faces as proof of; lazy, greedy, reluctant, not complying, failing. In that silence calorie restriction went unquestioned to an almost unprecedented degree. The idea of god was more countered than the idea that fat people should be slim by dieting or trying to at all times.

An incredibly heightened anxiety around being called out as fat to develop. It reached astounding levels.  It wasn't so much the power of the word, but of being called out and cornered stripped of any defense or neutral explanation.

Walking on eggshells, trying to be ultra pleasant, all things to all people. Avoiding confrontation, in the hopes that this bomb would not be detonated. It was soul tiring. The tension that was in my body. I was like an Egyptian mummy.

I'm saying this to remind everyone that all this went hand in hand with the so called 'obesity'  crisis/crusade, whatever you wish to call it. So how could it possibly reverse or prevent it?


In the end, given we're as assorted a group as any, we exhausted this line. Don't forget that your local council can't get people to stop dropping litter. We're talking here about fighting part of our will to exist.

That is what fat phobes want us to go back to. Any thing they say is a cover for that. But don't take my word for it.

Not only is that as undesirable as it is untenable. History is denied by them. Those invested in this cannot take responsibility for their reign of error, choosing instead to blame the results on us despite following instructions. They cannot do anything else, given they cannot accept reality.

That makes it even less an option. If we're going to get the blame and be denied the efforts we've made, then we must responsibility for ourselves, whether we anyone likes that or not.

I get that Shiloh Marie was trying to set out what she said are the ideas involved in the fat acceptance debate. What I don't understand is why someone as educated as herself cannot recognize such an absence of ideas.

Or even why she thinks health is a debate at all. It's about making people healthier, not dehumanizing and attacking them. And even if there is a debate, why does she assume it would be between FA and a fat haters diet club?

As far as I'm concerned, they've never been the issue. That has always been fat people's mental and physical recovery from the damage this has done. As well as learning to plot our own course divested of its baggage.

She's not the only one who keeps making this error. It's good FA's are catching on to just how intellectually barren fat phobes are, by actually trying to reason with them. And its been every bit as nerve shredding for them, as she found the whole process.

I felt for the way she's been mistrusted. Others like myself have endured far, far, worse, believe me. A lot of that is down to the lack of respect fat people have in themselves. That's what a lifetime of pathologization does to your internal view of yourself and other fat people and most don't even notice it.

Along with other more serious prejudices. Fat people could have been a force for tackling those. Instead, they prefer to turn themselves to nothing making a lot of noise.

FA is not an echo chamber. We can agree on very little. I can't even get people to acknowledge that dieting isn't the whole of weight loss. Or even to question whether there is any real desire for fat people to become slim, or if its really about us continuing to diet and rebound, tied to that treadmill.

We are so used to societies fighting useless phoney wars that perhaps we think, this is just another one of those. I wonder. Seems to me that its prefaced an approach, which realising rightist patrician religion has lost ground, seeks to use science in its stead as a route to bypassing critical faculties in order to micromanage people's lives.

It's working. It's it amusing to hear leftist and liberals talk "personal responsibility" in that brain dead way. Failing to see that 'obesity' epotimizes why that approach is hollow. In the time that cancer has gone from unspeakable, to death sentence to in some cases short term or chronic ailment. Ditto AIDS. This faux disease has achieved nothing.

It can't even manage to get rich countries to feed their children properly, something stopped after not before it!

The real problems lie with fat people. Trying to debate with hate has become a way of avoiding facing up to just how little we trust ourselves and how little we are trusted by others. Who have no reason for this beyond the pathologization of fatness.

It all becomes the body as an opinion or set of views. The bodies of fat phobes, always having been deferred to, are deemed logical, no matter what they say. That's what is being read here. An idea of what certain male bodies stand for. Women we know are irrational, emotive, illogical, unscientific. That comes along with the wrongness of fatness.

The meaning of what people say is in the value of what they stand for. What they say matters no, because the meaning is projected onto them. It is as objectifying and dehumanizing for fat phobes as anyone. No matter what they say, they are never really heard properly either. They are made to look better than they are.

Fat people have a big problem with realising they are right and fat phobes are wrong. They're too used to being cast as totally wrong. It's almost intolerable for many fat people to accept they're right. It's just too far from formative experience.

So they look for ways in which their detractors are right, regardless.

I can't say this effort was as useless as I'd assumed it would be. I was wrong on that score. I'd put that down to the qualities of Shiloh Marie which she wasted on a bunch of mind numbed boneheads.

It would have been better to examine the official, "obesity science" /medical doctor endorsed view  and fat acceptance instead.

These jokers are just their puppets....at best.