Not Tonight Irene

Fat people suffer as much from poor health as they do from poor image. They also die younger. My mother, always fat, died at 61. She suffered for years from carrying around an extra hundred pounds. She was intelligent, beautiful, loving, kind and industrious, but sadly I lost her too soon due to her being over weight. It is too bad we can't promote a healthier body along with a better image of our body.  ~ Irene

This is the kind of comment caught me unawares from the get go. Here's someone stating that their beloved mother (father/partner/ or other loved one) died of something, yet couldn't seem to care less that there was nothing available to prevent this.

You'd think that would be of primary concern. Instead we get the insipid: "...too bad we can't promote a healthier body along with a better image of our body" and the like. What?

How would "promotion" have reversed her mother's weight by 100lbs? Is this a product launch or a matter of life and death? Perhaps most puzzling of all, why do these people direct the dead hand of their minds at lay people, when it is scientists that produce science?

Legislators/politicians local and national are the ones who influence and decide the allocation of funding for said science, don't you think writing to them might start concentrating minds? Why would a group advocating for the valuing of fat people-so absent from their minds attack said advocacy?

Have you ever heard the like of this elsewhere? Because I most definitely haven't.

Even when you come across people whose relatives have traumatized them through their behaviour under the influence. They still talk with feelings of sadness, regret and love. Even if they ultimately felt they had to disconnect from the person, due to their behaviour.

I know abstinence is bunk, people's assertions that there ought to be more provision for it at least focuses on trying to help the person concerned.

Not people like Irene. Too often, they're curiously disinterested in direct assistance to their loved ones. Nor am I yet to see convincing show of grief;

My mom is slowly killing herself.  She won’t live to old age. How the fuck do you want me to feel?  And she’s not enjoying herself, either. Her joints hurt, she has breathing problems, she can’t find clothes in her size, medications don’t work properly at her weight, and when she needs a surgery she will be at a considerably higher risk of complications.  The FA movement would have me applaud her for this.  Well no.  Fuck that.  She’s my mom, and when she hurts herself she hurts me too.  You wouldn’t stand idly by while your friend committed suicide or spiraled into drug addiction, would you?”

That's exactly what these people do, do, stand idly by, that's what is so shocking about them. Does this person really think their use of "fuck" hides the absence of real emotion?  Her joints could be helped by changes the things going into her body. Her breathing might possibly be eased through exercises and her medications adjusted or other things tried.

I don't and wouldn't applaud the stasis of dieting or be damned. What for?

Why do they continue to draw attention to themselves? Presumably, they do not have a clue as to how they sound. I suspect that's partly down to the unnatural absence of response from fat people to anything fat haters say to us. This was due to the suppression of any remotely contrary feelings about dieting being an article of faith.

I'm sorry for the mother's suffering, but I'm most sorry of all that she has this unit for a child. What's amusing about this is clearly, this person has caught on that there is something profoundly wrong with how these people go on, using their often dead or dying (they say) relatives to concern troll. Or should we say, death troll? This is using the ill health/death of relatives, to tell fat people off for advocating self restoration, respect and care.

Do you feel he's gruff but with a heart of gold? I'm afraid I don't. Perhaps I've been too spoilt by hearing a lifetime of genuine expression of grief and sorrow for loved ones. It's not simply the absence of that, it's the lack of genuine feeling.

You'd have to be a bit if a brute, not to find his unconvincing straining for effect somewhat amusing. The fakeness and lack of humanity engendered by the 'obesity' crusade that seems to warp minds this way. Specifically, accepting the person is disease dehumanizes, not dehumanizing, I mean it removes the humanity from a person and the person who accepts it too.

To accept that, your critical faculties have to be switched off. And that must account for this out of tune reaction. There was controversy when the dsmv proposed enduring grief as a pathological condition to be treated with anti-depressants.

Here's a natural antidote. Get people to see their loved ones as self inflicted disease and voila, no grief. Maybe they could check out their brains to see what area's suppressed and come up with some way of replicating it for the illness of grief.

This is the outcome of avoidance of discomfort. Grief isn't nice, so you don't have to feel it, as long as you see people in the right way.

I was going to say that you cannot grieve a thing, but of course, you can. Come and see me the time when my computer locked and I couldn't use it! Looking up a way through, there was more honest show of grief in others experiencing the same fate, than any of these jokers.

One of the best things about landing on a site like Nurse Naomi's blog about her young daughter is to finally have the privilege of witnessing a person behaving as you'd expect under the circumstances.

Her daughter is a real person, not a cypher or a stick to try and beat someone else with.

She listens and relays what her daughter is experiencing. She describes Hana's feelings in subjective terms and her condition in objective terms. 

She can't sit and wait for science, she's out there researching and scouring the earth for possibilities, leads, anything that might help. Her entreaties are directed at scientists, obviously because they do the science. And she talks of saving Hana.

She seeks to garner attention for the plight of her daughter Hana and others, you know she could not sit idly by. 

And what doesn't she have time for-as far as I know? That's right, FA. Because we aren't the reason why the science in this area is so undeveloped. Hypothalamic obesity was apparently isolated in 1901.
 
Hana of course, has an actual condition. She's not just a person being defined as a condition so there's something to describe.

Trying to save the life of your loved ones with all your might is the least I'd expect you to feel moved to do, according to your abilities. Re-routing the course of metabolic function doesn't bring amateur to mind.

If the Irene's of this world made noise about the absence of any means to save their loved ones and aimed it at those with influence; politicians, medics, public healthists, scientists themselves, metabolic science would have become the worthwhile and important subject I've always suspected it is. That would help anyone reverse weight, whether triggered by tumours or not.

It would attract better minds, and they'd perhaps be an honest humane and progressive discourse, kicking into touch the debased hate-fest that passes for "debate" right now. People like Irene have had a part to play in allowing things to come to this and I can't for the life of me work out why.

So the question is, why do people like "Irene" not know how strange their behaviour is?