Shut-In

I see our friends at channel 4, those who forgot themselves and brought you, my mad fat diary-are back to their usual mining of fatsploitation-[anorexia-by-proxy, agit-prop]. An upcoming one that sounds really edifying is called "Shut-Ins."Can you guess what that's referring to?

Permit me to give you a hint.

Here's me saying we've (all) been bricked into lifestyle anorexia/exercise bulimia. Actually, we're bricked in to wherever our bodies do or don't go, with one exit only marked the above. Then C4 goes ahead with this;

.....with 2.5% of over 16’s now morbidly obese.........an increasingly large group of Brits are now unable to leave their homes due to their extreme weight gain. Many of them depend solely on their partners, parents or offspring to look after them, unable to take care of themselves sufficiently their family carers become a vital life-line and link to outside world.

I feel like I've watched it in all but detail. Where's the money shot for research fat phobes-you know those who are so grateful to fat people for telling the truth about 'obesity'?

With lives on the brink The Shut-Ins will follow two such people and their loved ones, both of whom who are held hostage by a life devoted to food. 

That could be a life dominated by an excess of hunger but hey, nevermind;

Fixed rig cameras will be set up in their homes and a life-changing crack team including a GP, dietician, psychologist and bariatric surgeon will be enlisted to monitor both their relationships and their diets in a bid to turn everyone’s lives around.

Ah, there we are. It's not just a prurient documentary taking full advantage of unnecessary and cynical marginalization, its got the weight loss porn tacked on for your erm..... explosion of catharsis. That must be the equivalent of the Bedlam going to see the crazy people.

Those punters were easily pleased though, as I don't remember them demanding to get their full jollies seeing them being "treated." See, people don't have problems, they have fat. It's the old, there's nothing going on but my obsessions. They may think this is fat people being subjects, but I doubt it. If I see it though and I'm wrong, I'll write a corrective post.

The disinterest in actual people's actual problems gives the whole crusade a fake aura of people chasing a pretense of care they can't really feel. Amazing that seemingly opposite feelings produce no tension whatever. Such is the deadzone effect of a complete lack of integrity, curiosity or even professionalism. 

This neglect of the person-sets a pattern that has entrenched this peculiar inability of fat people to mount an effective defense for so long.

There was a recent programme on about the representation of British spies on film. It spoke about a character who'd been scarred by this job- which consisted of him pretending to be other than he was in social as well as other settings.

They described this man as hollowed out by this. I thought *bingo*-that's it. Instead of being able to acknowledge your efforts-because the results are so universally refuted-you're forced up against pretense.

In the course of all this, you repress, deny even disconnect from your true feelings and experiences. Ending up bonding with a version of you that isn't in existence.

The refutation of repeated reality hollows some aspect of a person- dispossessing you of some part of your self knowledge, sometimes leaving an oddly childlike, deeply passive space in you.

Our capacity for adaptation kicks in so quickly, we adapt to this odd limbo that's invested with so much hope. Hope that can outlast reason and at times sanity.

This refusal to see a person and their actual problems is as imprisoning as being forced down one route to altering metabolic function. A lot of our experience is made up of solving or trying solve our own problems.

Indeed, some view life as a series of that. Imagine not being able to really focus on them somehow. That's as much why people disappear down this rabbit hole as anything.

Of course other people's hackneyed suffocating projection is everything. Aftab stays indoors and sometimes eats up to 12,000 calories. No wonder he's stuck indoors, right? Wrong.

I mentioned a woman presenter who said she heard about the reality show Ruby and wept when this very large woman spoke herself tearfully of eating thousands of calories a day. This particular woman said at the height of her hyperphagia, she considered 15,000 to be her having a "good day."

She weighed under 140lbs.

There's also a picture I remember from years ago of a kitchen stocked with food, four loaves of bread, vegetables, everything a family of four would need for a week. It was the replication of a teenager's last meal. She was bulimic, it killed her. She weighed even less than the presenter.

It's as much a mystery as to why more people don't achieve "shut-in" status, than it is why more aren't 140lbs/63.5kgs.

Intake and weight are as much about the luck of the draw than anything. And if Sharon, Aftab or anyone else's body wastes most of their intake, their weight would be unremarkable. If you ask fat people why they not fatter, you'll too often get the same bone headed vanity you tend to get from slim if you ask why they're slim.

Find a way to reverse the process. It's a whole process, but a set of interconnecting reactions. One key in the right place reverses the whole, just as smoothly and as holistically as it advanced. Appetite, hunger, weight, they're all just parts, they aren't cause.

I don't know if that term's as evocative for you as it is me. I keep thinking of the first Mrs Rochester who represented women losing their minds, repressing themselves into the feminine ideal, rather than, you know, being.

Until their mental springs went pop or they crossed some invisible (not blurred) line. 

Who'd have thought, a person could end up this way, purely because its been decided that this the route to preserving the medical monopoly and its hierarchy?

Towards the end of last year, I happened upon an impressively upbeat woman named Mandy Sellars. She has an extremely rare disorder that's made her legs grown to a combined weight of 238lbs/108kgs.

Now what immediate approach do you think doctors took to try and help her? Yep, they sought to stop her legs increasing in size. Because containment is an obvious first goal in cases of excessive growth, not wastage. In doing that, you are potentially finding an active route to reversal of that growth, anyway.

The insistence on wastage or bust has always been a point of suspicion and is why people feel like hiding at home.

The 'obesity' crusade can get away with a lot with fat people. One thing it cannot do is stop you noticing what scientists/researchers medical professionals do when they truly mean well