Though its rather a crunching gear shift, at this time especially perhaps, it's hard to overlook the difference in the way fat people claim to see the difference between manipulating human reproductive and metabolic systems.
The inherited activist position is weight loss is some kind of affront. It's deemed inherently fat phobic to wish to be able to alter one's weight at will, in a downward or reverse direction. It's based on the totally false basis led by the slimming industry, that calorie restriction induced weight loss is the only possible form if weight loss, ergo is weight loss.
It's clear that weight loss is an end, not the means to that end. Cal res dieting is and should be separated from weight loss itself. Preventing and aborting pregnancy has already identified efficacious means, so the quarrel is around blocking (or not), access to those. In the case of weight, the blocking of weight loss, has occurred before a viable method of resetting has been identified-in a (modern) Western-model context.
We are being denied the ability to stop, reverse or even decelerate increase by a tyranny of pseudoscience along incumbent 'pro-life" style fanatics. Who also purport to be "pro-health" but are equally obviously nothing of the kind. On the contrary, they thought nothing of the abuse they inflicted and encouraged others to inflict on fat people, until we consistently spoke out against this.
Folks recognise a form of control of women is exercised through denial or threat of denial of access to controlling their bodies as they see fit, similarly, the control of fat people and others is exercised through the absence of any viable efficacious and benign means of altering metabolic function and body mass.
I believe it is that absence more than anything which truly leads to the anything goes to try and make the failure succeed desperation we see. The lie that dieting is weight loss also assists people's preparedness to abuse themselves by keeping our expectations of weight loss is, set by dieting, rather than by our body's benign and easeful fluctuation.
All the unpleasantness associated with weight loss, is about attempting to induce it through cal res. Rather like a "backstreet" unsafe abortion by the improperly trained has a deservedly notorious reputation. Desire for weight loss is part of the same desire for bodily autonomy ["Body Politics-The Republican Party's global war on abortion"] that marks the desire for access to reproductive management. And led pioneering feminists to try bringing about abortions amongst themselves, successfully.
Perhaps that could be revisited to help keep some of these entitled pricks a bit more on their toes.
When it comes to weight, fat activists are in the equivalent of "pro-life" position, along with fat phobes, insisting weight loss and the desire for proper means to it, is inherently wrong, responsible for discrimination against fat people. This is not convincing, anomalous as it is with their attitudes to reproductive control.
Looking at Sonalee Rashatwar for example, self-described as representing "radical fat liberation", insists her exclusion from potentially manipulating her reproductive system-using the morning after pill is "structural medical fat phobia". At the same time,
Your dream to lose weight comes from a deeply internalized desire to assimilate into colonized ideals of white supremacist beauty and health that morph arbitrarily over time due to capitalism and fat phobia.Not at all ironically, this presumes that because the western model has made such a balls up of weight, than everyone else must have too. This is not correct. A lot of so called actual western medicine had a lot of input from an erm, global support system.
Africans, Asians and Muslims (crossover I know) haven't got anything on hand, and neither has the West. Co-incidence? You decide.
That statement also tries to pretend/erase the desire of all comers to be able to alter their weight. Just because desire for anorexia has not reached such giddy heights elsewhere-in the main-does not mean people have not sought to alter their weight or be slim.
People certainly like this "Capitalism hates fat" but it ignores the currency a "slim pill" would bring. The main reason it hasn't is failure is more important than that currency. Failure is being monetised to keep it going. To stop all but the most greedy or bigoted from reconciling with the truth.
It also incidentally, ignores the way, calorie limits caricature a (mocking) idea of communism and the way 'obesity' discourse is a flat out anti-capitalist screed. Like it or not, the notion of weight as an accumulation of energy,-currency even (one activists support)-does match excessive self-enriching feudalist storing of economic energy.
The only place many Right wingers can connect with an honesty about Capitalism is through 'obesity' wittering. On twitter, someone mentioned they'd been told fat people are to blame for climate change. I'll bet that was a R-W person. They find it truly liberating to break their silence in this way.
Fat phobia is an issue, but only with the absence of power in our own hands, enables that to amount to anything much. With the ability to alter weight, how would that happen? The ability to alter your own body in this way would tear up the crusade from top to bottom.
This bizarre non-argument of; "Fat is very bad, means you must diet even though it has failed", is a way of blocking just getting on with that." Yet look at the extent of support for Jack the Rippering people's guts.
And the most prominent fat activists it seems tend to go along with this blocking. Pretty much everything fat activists say leads to the same place as the 'obesity' crusade. You must be branded 'obese' or "with" say fat phobes. If you are not fat, you are "eliminated" say fat activists. You must keep repeating the failure of dieting, say fat phobes. Weight loss is verboten, say fat activists.
Fat phobes say, "Dieting and weight loss are one and the same", ditto, fat activists. It would be easier to come up with something fat activists say that doesn't lead to exactly what fat phobes are imposing on fat people. Activist want "fat justice" which consists of people stopping the unpleasantness that is largely either the substitute of proper methodology, or has grown out of it.
This ignores those who are being neglected because this area has been stymied by 'obesity' /weight loss quackery.
SR says, "It's okay to be disabled by your fat..(sometimes)". Certainly fat phobes agree with that. They can't wait to disable your gastric system. The reason people are getting to 700lbs plus in the main is lack of any options. If you can stop someone at 600 rising from getting to 700, then you can stop them at 5, 4, 3 and so on.
Obviously, access, to facilities, is important the higher up the weight spectrum you are, but for me, access to altering the course of that size is at the top of that list. Anyone who wants to be 700 can be so just as well if they can easily avoid what they currently have little real chance of given the forces acting on and in them.
It also means they can unchose it if they so decide. None of the business of fat phobes nor fat activists. Just like contraception, except drugs aren't necessary.
Tweaking metabolic function is far more "natural" than making yourself temporarily infertile. It's far more instinctive as our metabolism is constantly fluctuating according to its own function and purpose. It is constantly self-adjusting to your requirements.
Not to mention, dieting and the threat of it has already manipulated/altered the course of many fat people's weight and health. Even if a person is naturally fat, i.e. their body just goes there, it still wouldn't necessarily have gotten exactly there without the help of cal res dieting and homeostatically induced restoration.
Dieting distorts appetite and hunger function. It alters energy expenditure and though it may well have had some downward pressure on some people-demographics beg the question of whom-it has been well-known to push people's weight upward.
No one can really say whether their body was destined to be where it is. Weight is not even less of a polarity than sex, how can one bypass the latter but promote the former?
As Rashatwar has so astutely read, dieting is not really consensual. It was previously enforced by lack of alternative and lies. Increasing the coercion is more and more open, though hidden behind copious nonsense-jargon like "weight-management", "intensive behaviour therapy", "nutritional-counselling", "food/sugar addiction", "binge-eating disorder", "obesity-treatment" and other weaselease too ashamed of itself to openly state exactly what it is.
Repeat what has led us here. Repeat dieting by any other name.
So I will also say it again, being denied the means to reset weight must cease. We should be able to apply our conscious attention to bring it about, in some way gentle way which uses the bodies own abilities, the question is how? No-one should be forced to "lose weight" regardless equally, no one should be forced to be fat/ter than they want to be either.
In the same way that no woman should be forced to be or not to be pregnant.
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