Embodiment not weight as identity

N.B. It's rather strange that this is breaking about now, "Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship". I wrote this piece yesterday before I heard anything.

A reminder to those going around claiming their "fat identity" is insufficiently possessed or recognised by others, i.e. lacking this fat identity is a main source of woe. 'Obesity' is all about creating and imposing a "fat identity" from the outside, in order to direct behaviour. 

This is that identity sold;

Obesity, we are told, is a personal failing that strains our health care system, shrinks our GDP and saps our military strength.

And this is that learnt;

the fear of becoming fat, or staying that way, drives Americans to spend more on dieting every year than we spend on video games or movies.

This too;

Forty-five percent of adults say they’re preoccupied with their weight some or all of the time

This especially;

......so many of my sources.......double- and triple-checked that I would not reveal their names

And this

One remembered kids singing “Baby Beluga” as she boarded the school bus

Unsurprisingly;

“I have this sense I’m fat and I shouldn’t be,” he says. “It feels like the worst kind of weakness.”

Arguably most of all this;

I waited to do things because I thought fat people couldn’t do them.”

This too sticks in the mind;

I avoided so many activities where I thought my weight would discredit me.”

The nature of the way-the "weight" is separated from-the "me" takes a lot of untangling.

Before anyone says anything on this, it's entirely possible to even hate your size if so inclined, without that having any real affect on your sense of self. Think, people who say-they, hate their hair-either how it looks or when it won't behave or style in the way they intended. Consider how little this defines their sense of self.

Weight as identity is the way your weight can take lumps out of your psyche. This includes slim people.

Weight as identity is not the answer, it's the problem. WAID started with slimness being seen as somehow, inherent to being human, rather than a size human beings come in.  

This affected the way anything outside this range was defined, driving a desire to confect an ID for higher weight to try and give meaning to the creation of humanness based exclusively in slimness.

That kind of slimness is the origins of weight identity. Fat people's indifference to perceiving weight as a subject for identity, plus learning an outer defined view of themselves- meant the grab to define this fat adjunct had nothing to contest it. Fatness belongs exclusively to slimness, becoming just more space to project whatever they disliked about themselves.  

People seem to see climbing into this "space" as the only thing to do, because there is no real fully formed normalcy of embodiment and because they seem to feel whatever slim people do must contribute to the sense that they humans living their best life.

'Obesity' cultists have little problem with it in essence with weight as ID, it makes their "war" feel to them "provoked", defending a rational non(proactively)-aggressive idea of themselves. They pick out and twist what is said under the banner of fat ID to re purpose their favoured themes. Fat people stigmatise themselves, rather than learn the same "grammar" of body size as everyone else.

An aspect of this fat ID has even turned up as a "cause" of staying fat; "You really identify as a big bear of a man and that's stopping your 'weight loss'" etc., Becoming something to pin the failure of calorie restriction induced weight loss.

What people lack is not ID, it's more a history of metaphysical embodiment. A sense that this body and the experience and history of it is inside out, not the other way around. That doesn't require you to bother with someone else's imposition of weight ID.

What's notable about the above examples, is the lack of anything present inside to counteract them. I don't mean argue, I mean the feeling that outer falsehood is hitting a real sense of (inner) perception. If someone claims you have stolen something, when you haven't, you don't feel pushed over by the accusation, you know what you have and haven't done. And you know that comes from inside you and doesn't require validation to even think or be aware of this. Regardless of external doubt.

Fat people learnt the same way one way of seeing as everyone else, except, it was them being seen by others and they learnt this, rather than seeing themselves from the inside out. 

We learnt the outside in one at the expense of awareness of our inside out one.

The rareness of this makes it harder to spot and counteract.

My term in place of embodiment was sentience, the awareness of your own unique existence. Constructing that-I don't know that it's ever been there, in this area-requires not simply a mental grasp that you know your life experience is yours, but an embodied feeling and sensibility.

There's no obvious route map, but the sense of your life being yours needs to get (a whole lot) stronger, more present and unspoken, the sense that others can wrongly contradict this needs to weaken to the dust that it really is.