No Extension

I had one of my periodic inclinations to write a post about the politics of 'obesity' recently. What derailed the post intended was coming up hard against another clear explanation of what the 'obesity' construct is really means in this preposterous effort by a person paid to teach youth *shudder*.

Incidentally, it throws a tipping point in society's upward curve in body mass the influence of American Negritude on Caucasoidal integrity....file that under btchplz. Nothing to do with the science-blocking refusal to do real research rather than a panto version of it then....

From the nag's mouth;

It was obvious that the young women in my classes were concerned about being accepted for who they are -- excess weight and all.

They saw those extra pounds as an important extension of them as human beings, not as a problem to be solved.

Emphasis mine.

"Saw those extra pounds" as if its some kind of outré phenomena to recognise your whole body as wholly your own. How is it possible to be this idiotic, without shame?

"An important extension of them as human beings," That is exactly where what the term 'obesity' defines starts from.

Here, human being =slim.

It is solipsistic in the extreme expressing as it does the mind of someone else coming up against the difference that is you, unable to expand their frame of reference to accomodate such minimal divergence from themselves.

Seeking instead to subordinate it to their own idea of themselves.

A balloon could theoretically have more or less air in it. That doesn't compute, instead a smaller balloon is contained, in a larger balloon. As if the very idea of a bigger person engulfs the (smaller) observer. Like really? You want people to see this struggle?

Have you so little sense of ambition? Lols.

This smaller balloon in a bigger one is the basis of the 'obesity' construct ideation, its notions of 'obesity' causing this or that issue and "obesity-related".

The bigger balloon you are supposed to be encased in is attacking the smaller balloon within, the real you, the slim person screaming to get out of a fat body. 

This is why I put 'obesity/obese' in quotes, to remind people always that has nothing to do with the way any sane person sees themselves or can see themselves-from the inside out.  Why would I see myself as a locked within a bigger structure when its all me?

'Obesity' is embarrassing for these reasons, not because, wobbly bottoms. Any humour in that pales into insignificance when one asks oneself, "How did wanting to be slim come to this madness?"

Feeling like you've allowed this to be foisted onto you is part of fat people's so called "low esteem." Fat people don't have low self esteem, they have this shit to deal with and they are responding appropriately to that.

Having too look through the 'obesity' cult lens instead of your own. Having to keep going round in the same quack circles, rather than try to understand the genuine complexity and beauty of the way the body regulates its own cells-because people aren't done with pretending this is "science". That's fat shaming. Knowing your place and being kept in it.

Anyone who's been seriously troubled by advance stages of bullying know exactly how it feels to have to act as if bullies lies are real. When everyone turns against you and your friends can't stand by you because they'll be swept away by hate....

Don't make the error of assuming this has anything to do with whether you wish to be slimmer or not. You are not required to compartmentalise your body into mythical parts. Your body is whole no matter whether you want its physical dimensions to be lesser or the same (or greater).

It's as if the impact of the 'excess weight' coinage causes this mind to split another person's body from itself. That's a real dumb-dumb right there. And you're stuck in that.

A More Apt Response

Woman "...chops off her own finger with bolt cutters." I beg to differ DM. She cut off the top two joints of her pinkie. Still the fuss about her act of self-mutilation is more than I've seen for the whole of the current drive to remove healthy functioning stomachs merely to facilitate starvation over more extended periods. 

DM calls Ms Pinkie Cutter's act "bizarre". They quote others as saying its 'crazy', 'disgusting, 'stupid'. In the comments she's described as an attention-seeking, substance user, a candidate for sectioning, a disappointment to her mother(aw), [the ubiquitous] narcissist, victim of a childhood head trauma with 'questionable' parents, and a 'sick puppy.

Ms Torz Reynolds-her actual name-indicated that she went with an aesthetic feeling and pronounced herself pleased with the result.

"Healing so well and totally love it!"

Sounds familiar, except the first part would be more a cause for sorrow. Healing tends to signal tapering off of precious weight loss.

Even Ms Pinkie Shears draws the line at seeing healing as a disappointment.

The Social Model of Dis-Abling

When I first heard about the social model of disability, I was agahst about emphatic nature of those asserting it. The social model of disability is that disabled people are disabled only by society's lack of acknowledgement of their needs, rather than their actual impairments*.

The medical model of disability views disability purely in diagnostic terms, seeing that as the primary cause of the person's difficulties. The social model clearly had a profoundly liberating effect on many disabled people, freeing them from having a burden unforeseen by people like me. The medical model, probably unwittingly dumped the burden of society's neglect of their needs on individual people.

It took the social model for me to realise this.

Subsequently activists and others have found its limitations for themsevles, this doesn't invalidate the positive.

When I came to the fatsphere especially, I said that it was not fat acceptance that was radical or extreme, it was the 'obesity' cult that was outré. What everyone fears about extremists, that they'll set the defining standard, is exactly what 'obesity' cultists and food faddists have managed to do.

The 'obesity' industry's increasing promotion of gastrectomy has presented another surprise.

Gastrectomy disables healthy function to bring about its effects, not as collateral damage for something theraputic.

By this it establishes a notion of disability as healthier state than able-bodied.

As this conclusion is the product of social disapproval, it validates a premise in the social model of disability. That real disability isn't your function, it's in other people's attitude to it.  

* Impairment is a term used by Karen Hitchcock to refer to weight "....no drug can fix the functional impairment of being obese". Though she vociferously refutes the favoured lie that 'obesity' is disease. 

Fat isn't a Time Thing, its a Function Thing

I couldn't for the life of me tell you why I became fat-accepting that question only makes sense within the construct of 'obesity', which I've no time for. People are obsessed with their Holmesian search for the original culprit, it's more projected fiction because I couldn't tell you any why for sure. Nor do I know why that's supposed to matter.

Like 'obesity' construct in general, its largely irrelevant.

I can't even tell you for sure when I became fat. Others assert they cannot grasp why fat people don't notice pound upon pound building like brick upon brick of a wall. I started to think of dieting at 7. I was not what you'd call fat, but I certainly felt like I wasn't thin either. That feeling was relative to my experience of my size up to then.

Was it then? No.

When I was 11, I imposed a rigid diet plan proper-as opposed to "watching what I ate". Was it then? In the sense that I felt in the intervening years I'd reached a point where I had to go total wl diet. So I became fat at 11? So when was the actual moment? Was I fat at 10? Nope.

Somewhere between then and 11, I felt I became fat enough. I crossed a line, when was the moment though, when was the day? Why had I not noticed?

I had, but I was concerned about stunting my growth-seriously. So I concentrated on avoidance. For all I know, that saved me from even greater metabolic mayhem.

I'm not simply extrapolating from my own experience, I doubt becoming fat is a gradual day by day process for many-though those who fatten in adulthood may have a different experience. Either way, its more about the nature of your function. Its the moment when the arrangement of that, the posture of your function gets to a certain configuration.

What is day by day is the time for it to play out, from that moment. At times that process is elongated or condensed, often varying within the same person.

Conscious Engagement is The Act

"...I have an eating disorder. Time to remove the stigma", the writer a self described middle aged person with anorexia and bulimia relays such a typical line in what anorexia/bulimia is that it could have been put together by committee. It's the same mindset that created and imposed the construct of 'obesity [slim-person-plus] on fat people;

1. Hype into assertion of disease/illness "Anorexia and bulimia are mental illnesses". Check AMA and check ABCD 

2. Concentration on how terrible this all is

"suffered from an eating problem," ".... I am hurting myself" Check sick fat and check poison fat, its bad

3. No interest in cure, only treatment 

"I’ve come to believe that eating disorders can never truly be cured" "The knowledge that disorders can flare up repeatedly throughout life,"
Check treatment no cure. 

This could be narrowed to a two-step; 1. Hype Phony disease/illness, 2. No resolution/cure.
The AMA traded in this act presuming it a universal- slim people set it and fat people have observed that. As usual its taken for granted fat people wish to emulate whatever slim people think or do. Slimming feels like aspiring to them and in their mind that becomes a global, want to be all like a slim person('s idea of themselves).

If you step back, its about; disease / [mental]illness validating the person's feelings. They're saying; "I suffer, recognise, acknowledge this" by deeming it disease/illness. Buuuut, don't take it away, completely.

I don't wish to be mean and imply, they want to suffer, they wish to be a martyr and complain about it. It's more invidious than that.

Eating disorders-and we all know that means anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Usually start with an intention-to reverse or preserve current size. They have a method which is to reduce your response to hunger signalling [eating is the response to hunger signalling] and possibly to increase output via voluntary movement. And/or to purge by vomiting etc., food from the body, before it can be properly digested.

Both [seek to] induce weight loss using the restriction of calories. That's a heck of a lot of conscious engagement. Intent, planning, action-repeatedly. It is this exposure that triggers this to become compulsive rather than merely voluntary-in those with such tendencies.

We all become a bit 'anorexic' if we diet hard enough-the fatsphere's "no diet talk" rule was an example of seeking to sidestep this funk. The difference between us and true anorexics was susceptible physiology-we didn't have it. Our bodies fought cal res and won, time and again.

This conscious engagement seems to be the root of the strange affection people with anorexia/bulimia have for their condition. They love and admire it and feel badly towards it at the same time. Rather like someone who rarely stops complaining about an abusive partner but won't leave them.

Such conscious engagement gives these conditions an oddly personal quality so many vocal anorexics/bulimics relay. It has been allowed to set the framing of what you're supposed to feel and say when you have an eating disorder. To the extent that people with other hunger/eating disorders attempt to mimic it.

In the case of hyper-functioning hunger [HFH] though, this conscious engagement is simply not there. HFH is physiological in operation. However you class it, it doesn't use the conscious mind. Heightened hunger is like heightened blood pressure in that way. That's not to say the brain or even the mind isn't involved, it is but as a part of the whole not a leading role.

Hence it has no narrative of the kind typical of anorexics, bulimics or even drug addicts and alcoholics. It's not impossible by any means, but it would be of a different type and quality, due to its differing nature.

The double whammy is fat people's inner stream of consciousness has also been heavily repressed, so there's also a missing narrative of engaging with experience over time. Almost like a kind of amnesia, except the memories weren't allowed to form in the first place.

In the best of cirumstance either would require a lot of focus and effort to overcome. But in the current climate it's virtually impossible. The collective (un)conscious aims to repress any thought, so it can impose its fictions in place of truth.

Hyperhunger doesn't require any intent; planning, or carrying out of action. It's a physical adjustment. And at the risk of re-enforcing stereotypes, that happens to be true for being fat too.

Now this is just stating facts to me though I'm sure this has another tinge. It'll seem [be made to seem] what people with anorexia/bulimia are trying to do. Claim a kind of innocence. Far from it. A fat person cannot be innocent anyway, such is the nature of the way we see weight.

I have to say this because its true and because it explains why I find anorexics and bulimics so utterly alien in their mannerisms. And have no interest in copying my idea of what they are doing.

Its of no use to me or fat people. I've mentioned that never at any point did I ever feel or think that hyperhunger [or anorexia/bulimia] was remotely unresolvable, even when I couldn't articulate my situation properly due to its non-appearance in ill-fitting barely relatable coinages like; binge eating disorder, compulsive eating disorder, food/eating addiction etc.,

I was also completely resolution-orientated, had zero time for 'illness' nor did I feel like I was "suffering from it" though I acknowledged that it caused me a lot of distress, frustration and at times outright despair. What I wanted most of all was to be heard, to be understood-that would have provided immense relief- the one thing that was and still is denied.

I didn't need nor want sympathy, I needed to find means to restore normal hunger function, the end. I really wish this could be enough to get across just how totally uninterested I am in the usual anorexia/bulimia pathos. Not zero, minus.

I don't see the use of it, I don't care for it, it has nothing to do with me,  it bores me, m'kay?

Now I do not claim to speak for fat people, I can say with confidence virtually all fat people felt/feel the same way about mere fatness. They're not interested in this faux disease/no resolution act, they wanted/want results.

May I remind people that the whole point of the fat phobic hatefest is [supposed] to 'motivate' people to escape fatness, as fast as humanly possible.

This moaning about it, but dragging it out is the momentum of conscious engagement and having no real need to move on. Whereas the shame fat people feel is not about what they're accused of doing, but that they aren't consciously directing matters, when they feel they should be. I'd say that's something for anorexic/bulimics to think about, in the sense that they assume if people saw them as less in control, they'd see them more favourably. When its precisely that much denied lack of control that is the basis of the contempt we are held in.

Except, the rules don't apply the same to slim and fat so pish.....