cowcake

Slut

2012-01-14T05:18:00.000-08:00

At the time of the creation of slut walks, I struggled to put into words the extent to which it was a big fat no for me on any level I could think of. In the end I gave up because it was just too hard and many other people were doing it and let's face it, the atmosphere of especially racial rancour was not conducive to calm rationale.

I don't know how many of you have had the privilege of encountering "male feminist" Hugo Schwyer. Now despite not being a radical feminist-not hating, just don't have that kind of instinct (about feminism anyhow)- I've just never understood the point of male feminists. The point has always evaded me.

I can't begin to get why anyone needs to announce their 'maleness' in order to state ideas they connect with as if somehow the latter would somehow be an attack on the former. I quite liked the surrealist leitmotiv when I was younger-that what is really real to us is our dreams and the world of our fantasy and imagination.

I connected with this as what? I'm not even sure, possibly an entity? Certainly I don't remember needing to assert my lady-bits as somehow pertaining to any feelings of connection. The significance of moi, moi-meme, une femme, gets surrealism because that's not like manderstanding, its proper getting it like, or something, would not have formed in my head.

Anyway, even though I've heard of HS, I'm lucky enough not to care one iota about his brand of femanism and thought it superfluous to my understanding of things. So I've skirted his scent 'til now, never say never.

Whodathunkit? He's just gone and touched on why I have always felt the word "slut" has got nothing to do with women therefore the idea of 'reclaiming it' (plz) is a mis-fire.

The genesis of slut is to do with how men's sexuality is directed and when you realise how this affects women, it's unsavoury. Feminists, given who's the central contingent could be in part to blame for this misguided notion of slut/slag etc., being about women.

One of their main techniques being to step into certain assigned notions and roles and shout back. Rather than pointing and saying, this is about you, why not deal with that? Apart from the motive or emotion behind that-a sort of pedestal mentality-it just ended up getting in the way of men examining how they felt about being incubators for the ideas that lead to this characterisation of women.

It always seemed to me, from the moment I found out what it meant to be essentially man hating, despite the extent of mysogny, that was an adjunct to woman's role rather than the end in itself, or as is said by feminists, controlling women's sexuality. That's a given, the purpose of slut seemed to me to be about controlling men's view of themselves, their sexuality and directing its use;

“So you’re saying that when a man comes on a woman’s face, it’s not about making her dirty — it’s about making him feel clean?”

A person can only feel "clean" in this circumstance if they generate dirt. And it is that dirt that dirties women, turning them theoretically into sluts or slags.

It's always felt like something men need to sort out and whilst I can understand Flavia's annoyance. Dirty ole' men and why they need to clean up.

It's a New Year! Again

2012-01-03T08:42:00.000-08:00

Well Happy New Year. I'm not going to not eschew mentioning that because it may seem a little trite, because I mean it. I'm going to make it a happy one mostly by calming down, seriously I really need to just to ease off the ranting a tad, not least because being calmer seems to be just about the most annoying any fat person can do.

If there's one thing we are supposed to be its quivering timorously like jellies, permanently receptive to fat haters deranged orders.

"Eat healthily and you'll become slim", but HAES is eval because its not lifestyle anorexia and exercise bulimia.

Power corrupts.

They just don't know what they want because they're a bit squiffy and under the influence and hey, it's all such a trip! Society says they get to boss us around and treat us like toys because we are bad and they are good, way hey, how often does that happen?

Do I have any other sort of resolutions? Not specifically, from back when I was gung ho with the old yearly plans, mine usually were pending from the previous year and centred on getting myself together.

That one goes back so long and has been such a constant theme it feels like an aunt or something.

Anyway, let's be hopeful if not 'realistic', may all your wishes for this year come true for-which I'm sure are only righteous. I mean, when people can be turned into disease and some talk about what sustains us as being "addictive", realism it seems is what you make it.

Thinspired

2011-12-24T08:39:00.000-08:00

I was fascinated to see this response to Jay Smooth's video criticising some laughable effort on the part of some 'anti abortion' activists to give something up until abortion ends. The post did not take the turn I thought it would, no bad thing, because of course fatties have been thrown under the bus by just about everyone and it is a pain in the rectal region that deserves ruthless and clinical exposure.

I'm not feeling up to that right now, so I'll take an easier path.

Before I start, this so called abortion 'debate' is yet another on the working my last frackin' nerve list, let's get this straight (hur hur), anyone who's "against abortion" should cease participating in sexual intercourse whilst fertile with anyone else who's fertile, unless it is agreed by both parties that they wish to reproduce, alright?

Insisting "sex" is the same as intercourse and then claiming to be against dealing with the consequences of that construct is not a credible moral position. The overwhelming use of sex in the whole of human history is to get/express happiness, to get to know someone, get off, get some stress relief, raise morale, m'kay?

Not to reproduce, that is the central purpose of intercourse. The conflation uses the prospect of pregnancy as a punishment to control sexuality. Linking the pursuit of pleasure to the "pain" of creating humans is the product of the sociopathic element surprisingly evident in moral rule.

A bit like using the prospect of "food addiction" linking what gives us life to death and self abuse to order to control people's eating, which is of course supposed to control their weight.

Since the feminist second wave, the idea of "sex" we've been inculcated into should be open to challenge/redundant, because human sexual consciousness is no longer in the grip of bitter old geezers or patriarchy as some might call that.

It reminds me of that slogan to encourage condom use, "no glove no love". I'll amend it to, permit me the indulgence, "No contraception (which includes abortion) no fuckee fuckee". If fulfilling an urge is enough to risk the creation of a sainted foetus, the time to get a moral dudgeon on is before not after the (f)act.

Folks will just have to rub along more and frankly that's no great loss. Everyone's feeling the strain of insisting that we all pay tribute to fertility every time we want to get jiggy. There needs to be more "intuitive sex" going on where intercourse happens because people feel the urge for it, or wish to create a sainted foetus, not because we've been condition to feel the urge for pleasureful intimacy can only be realized via that route.

Anyway, getting back to Mr Smooth I have to say from the little that I've seen of him I've found him to live up to his name. If you want to grasp issues surrounding racism from a non threatening source-I'm not being snide-he's a good one to go to.

I must admit I enjoyed his video and thought the central point was bang on, the exposure of the laughably shallow pomposity at the heart of too much of the dieting mentality, which FA keeps hiding from itself by tidying it up, attempting to give it a cogency and dignity it doesn't and will never possess.

Mr Smooth having no need for this can see the impacted self obsession at the heart of this cult of anorexia more clearly. It's that unwavering driving force that has seen it successfully hijack mainstream consciousness before most people knew it was happening. Everyone is running around after it, including Mr S here.

He's also highlighted the moral erosion of needing to build social status around what you do and don't eat and by implication what you may or may not weigh. As this has always been a moral crusade, despite its pretense to be about slimming fatz or saving our health by destroying us. Its only real code is to perpetuate itself and make its surround as much in accord with itself, rather like a parasite.

It is absolutely laughable that someone thinks that the acme of your moral feeling is just be another chance to "thinspire" oneself the idea of something not being about you flies out the window in the face of a far greater imperative.

As usual, youth expose the reality of adult conceits in ways that shock us if we are not paying attention.

Although I've no time for the "anti abortion" movement, I do recognise the underlying immorality of the strong, attacking the weak and that the foetus is a potential life.

I refuse to go down the route of "collection of cells" a tendentious form of words that clearly recognizes what it is trying to distance itself from and I really don't care if certain "feminists" want to get the hump about that.

The abject misogyny of not thinking about where the problem really lies because its obviously those C-nuts again-the cause of all the problems and they're going to get it, is abhorrent. Hate always distorts and often vanquishes morality.

Using your purported distress about abortion for weight management/social advancement purposes shows a shallowness of mind though forgivable in youth it's still leaves one a bit mournful that this is being passed on to them as something to do with morality, that is of course the real hook into the crusade, far more than bullying. Jay Smooth rightly shows the upshot of this 'logic', if you believe dieting is a moral good, then "pro-choice" are doing you a favour.

As for should or shouldn't eat this or that HAES is in line with that too. Though I agree with ttuos, there's something a little off about making it fat acceptance versus food shamers.

Compliments of the season to one and all.

Hostage of a crusade

2011-12-01T10:08:00.001-08:00

It seems the child removed from his parents for being; too fat/short/ unable to dodge inevitable rebound weight gain-take your pick, is probably black/ PoC, yet again. I thought as much from hearing that he'd attended "the Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital" the impression confirmed from interviews with his neighbours.

The the facts are he's an 8 year old from Cleveland Heights in Ohio, weighing 218lbs or about 15 and a half stones in UK parlance. Apparently his BMI is about 60.

A lot of people have gone with the mother not trying hard enough, inadequate food environment and so on. The real issue centres on the refusal of professionals to reconcile themselves to the facts of their failed investment in calorie restriction.

That it is ineffective, impermanent and unfit for purpose, full stop, will have to be addressed. At some point human metabolism will have to be mapped according to the way it actually functions. Something food is being used to dodge. You can understand that, going from knowing it all to knowing nothing, must be like a rich wo/man becoming poor, it's harder because you used to be rich.

Even the most unhinged fat hater will at some point notice the picture of irrelevancy, despite the admittedly compelling distraction of harassing fat people.

I've said before scientists/ medical professionals do need to deal with children who are gaining tremendous amounts in short periods, whatever the trigger. They should not just be left for their bodies to go where they may when there is clearly something off kilter.

The few things that are known, for instance that the loss of a parent through bereavement or even relationship breakdown can create a trigger in those susceptible to weight gain. Has that led to all children in at least the former category being routinely provided with some kind of therapy (i.e. group)?

That would at least be a positive legacy to come out of this wretched witch-hunt. If you deal with the things you know, you increase your knowledge through exposure. I'm definitely not advocating drugs here, at all.

The focus on eating has been spectacularly overplayed, it is not an appendage of character it's created by your individual metabolic function. It is part of that, not the whole of it and though across any population there is nuance and variation, on the whole that approach does not lend itself much to re-routing of what is creating and supporting weight.

This leaves little room for manoeuvre regardless of age or circumstance.

Relying on the childhood tendency towards obedience and openness to the wishes of those they look to for care can only go so far and still requires you to accept the likelihood of minimal success or outright failure.

The mother tried to go along with the requirements dictated for her son that is the option given to her. It's the choice of those who've mandated it as the only possible means of weight reversal, even though that is clearly false. If it was the only one, it would be effective. I daresay there could have been an element of culture clash, not everyone accepts the authority of nutritionists.

I would resent having to be judged by those who've achieved nothing and their breath altering denial about that.

Approaches need to be found that are effective, I was going to say and suit the needs of people's real lives, but non punitive effectiveness would go a long way and that has to come. Those who wish to employ people to tell them what to eat can go for that.

The child lost some weight for a while then regained, par for the course deficit creates largesse, famine creates feast. It turns out (other) family and friends gave him food. It's impossible to know whether this was the usual teasing/ sabotage people can insist on when someone is trying to shortchange their hunger, or whether it was his distress that moved them to relieve it.

As someone who struggled with a rampaging appetite from a young age, fuelled mainly by my dedication to restricting calories. I found it very hard going, sometimes torture. As someone who hated being smacked, it's the one instance where I'd have favoured it over restriction, that's how bad it made me feel. I never stopped trying though, filled with a constant sense of dread.

I don't mean the rumbling of hunger or of loss of habit. It's more a monstrous feeling that takes over your whole body and mind, as if you are under attack from outside though you know its something going on inside you.

There is often a sinister feeling of being haunted like being in a dark alley with menacing footsteps behind you. It undermines your emotional stability, you feel stripped of layers between you and the world whether you lose weight or not, your nervous system is seriously jangled.

At the time I had no idea this was my body's defence against famine in action, literally rattling away fighting off my efforts. Nor that the strange way hunger had became such an invasive mind bending assault was the effect of it being ratcheted up as part of breaking my will to hunger.

Or that a lot of my overly "anxious nature" was my nervous system sensitized from the constant threat of attack. And no, it's not 'addiction' it was mostly the product of a wrong approach.

There is no reason for weight loss/reversal to hurt. It is the nervous system fighting off the assault of lack that hurts and calorie restriction is not weight loss, though it's an often pain inducing punitive method of bringing it about. It often fails similarly even when those defences don't cause pain, because success doesn't depend on that, it depends on design to see off CR or the mere threat of it and unlike the 'professionals' it knows what works.

I can't imagine what it must feel like to feel being mashed between impulses like these and having to lose some weight and keep it off; or else. Children should not have to go through this because of the whims of those who have the luxury of not facing facts.

Not one jot of this is "officially" entertained anymore than the just as intolerable though less dramatic feelings of gnawing insatiable hunger most go through. It's not even a fat thing, many slim people are just as diet proof too. They can walk away.

Honestly, all those involved in removing this child should be forced to endure the reality of their own prescription.

Such is the peculiarity of this situation, that it's just as likely that parents will get into trouble for their inability to sufficiently abuse their children in the required manner. To watch them suffer in ways they wouldn't otherwise entertain. I know that some feed their children in a disjointed and imbalanced way, or give in to demands for the kind of industrial food waste cynically created and packaged to appeal to children.

Even if the mother is at fault for not being able to get her child to stick to his diet, why frame that as 'abuse'? Why not just say she couldn't cope with the regime? No matter how together someone is, there are always things they don't take to, that can never be 'abuse'.

But that isn't really the problem here, they wouldn't have taken this child if he was thin like his older sibling regardless of the make up of his diet. The issue is weight, so pretending that its about "quality" of food or exercise, is nonsense. Calorie restriction is often just an added kink for the body's weight regulation, on a surface level, it appears to be succeeding whilst often sowing the seeds of its own disintegration and problems of its own.

Using the state to prop up weight loss diet is futile. Energy, should be directed at reversing what triggers and supports weight creation. Removing its underlying support so that the body can settle itself in the same manner it came on, in waves or stages, whilst the person eats, moves according to their needs and in ways that make sense to them.

Not anti for

2011-11-26T03:06:00.001-08:00

I'm not an "anti" person, I don't even like being called "anti racist". Since racism is BS of course I'm against it, why wouldn't I be? Naming or thinking of yourself by what you aren't or don't like, is not something I tend toward.

I'm an atheist not because of the god question, but because I believe in something else. That may or may not put me at odds with those who are religious, but it is not my defining mode. Incidentally, I find 'arguments' about whether there is or isn't a god pointless and sterile and I have no time for the so called "unbelievers" seeking to indulge.

I suppose my feeling could be summed up as the destiny of humans is in our own hands; through the understanding and mastery of ourselves.

Phew, I think I'll go and lie down.

I could be wrong, perhaps it isn't. Maybe that's the road to hell it could all depend on how we understand and where we go with that. I'm saying this because I do not and never have defined myself by being against the 'obesity' crusade right? I'm against it like I'm against kicking puppies, it's so obviously a bad idea, it's often difficult to understand how any one could genuinely see it as good thing.

To define myself as against it, it would have to announce its intentions clearly. I'd have to know exactly what it was for most of all though, it'd have to make sense and apart from at some point way in the past, it doesn't.

And I must say, the more I unravel the self immolating behaviour encouraged by being under its cosh, it makes even less sense than that, on its face. It's clear that it is about somethings, many things. Certainly smoking doesn't compare, we all know what that's about, but 'obesity'? What even is 'obesity'? A 'disease' with no symptomatology or cause, apart from EXISTENCE.

That's the real cause of 'obesity' existing in modern society with some degree of susceptibility. So presumably the 'cure' is to transcend society and create a virtual bubble of slim which you can walk around in like a computerized space suit.

It's hard to be against something that cannot even stand up on its own terms let alone any other.

Those familiar know what I'm talking about; fat people eat unhealthily. They must eat healthily to become slim, they must not eat healthily and exercise because that is giving up if its not a diet. Fat people's problem is comfort eating, artificially inducing extreme discomfort is required to reduce this. Fat people have never tried to lose weight. Fat acceptance will kill you because it will keep you from doing what you've never done anyway and so on, so stupid.

Calories in/ calories out used to make sense, the number of calories you take in must be exceeded by the amount of calories you expend. But hey, what about the rest of "in", stored energy?

There are times when I almost admire some fat acceptance folk's ability to-it seems to me-create a cogent narrative out of this premo grade hokum and critique that, but then some or most seem to define themselves as against the crusade, rather than for something else.

There's also definitely a shared culture, it's very middle class and the sort of attitudes you find in the crusade are shared by many critiquing it, which makes for some weird exposure to class solidarity.

There are exchanges that go on that only those who are part of that are party to, just like the rest of the internet. Accommodating other voices is really hard, I can see that better now.

I don't like it, I think it's pathetic that its this hard to be able to communicate with people you supposedly agree with, but to be honest, I'm getting past caring or trying. I thought fat acceptance was a chance to move beyond this sort of thing, to some extent, but it isn't and that's that. If it is, I won't be a part of that, enthusiasm has gone the way of indifference.

All I can do is try and say what I have to say to the best of my ability and leave it at that. And stop behaving as if a cause could be more important than what divides, right now, it isn't.

Fat cats are okay?

2011-11-25T11:49:00.000-08:00

Given the -ism shifting fat phobia of the left. Sorry about that, SOSDD.

Some in FA are disappointed that the term "fat cats" has gained currency in capitalist challenging rhetoric/ imagery. There's some to and fro, it has accrued traction as something to avoid being identified with.

Question is, should fat people feel implicated by this term?

It's use as a political term is attributed to a man called Frank Kent who used it to write an essay about big money donors in the world of politics wielding undue influence over the whole system.

Prescient indeed; isn't OWS's reviving that exactly?

What's fascinating about this term is it uses the word "fat" in a way that doesn't refer explicitly to the crusade, though operating in a fat baiting context some do try it on. Its meaning does not refer directly to everyday fat people it explicitly refers to the kind of middle aged upper class men of no specific weight category, you can be a slim "fat cat", who occupy power wielding echelons. Though always illustrated by fat men or animals.

It's fat as sitting at the top of the tree living easy off the efforts of others in that it voices a lot of underlying fears caricatured in fat hating tropes "lazy" springs to mind. The ill defined chant of "unhealthy" is an attempt to weaken fat people's access to the strength of minds and body. The conflation of fitness and thinness definitely smacks of a sort of Napoleon complex of weight.

It has been marked out as not "fat positive", in that it's not celebratory of fatness, but how negative is it? Is it close to being fat neutral in that it can be anyone who fits the definition, rather than a number on the scale?

I mean we use all sorts of terms using words also given to weight bands. Thin skinned/lipped,wearing thin, none of which are positive at all, should they go too? Doesn't this predate 'obese' pathology and shouldn't we keep a hold of that rather than forget it, leaving only the current derangement a clear field?

Its also powerful to be a fat cat, isn't there value in having a symbol of power linked obliquely with fatness? Do slim people on lower incomes feel implicated by rich slim people? Of course not, so why should fat people on modest incomes feel particularly got at by this term.

As has become the rule with "social justice" economically challenged representatives of whatever are brandished around when needed to give kudos to an oppression narrative and put away as soon as there's something for the 'chosen few' to discuss. Thus it is used as a reason why the varied narrative of fatness, must be crow barred into a crude and I feel, unrepresentative "poor benighted fatty" one which more high falutin' fatz are convinced will push the fat agenda up the SJ hierarchy.

When fat people populate the homeless, the prison population and those with mental disorders, disproportionately, you might have a case, right now, the more interesting thing is why they don't seem to be.

It's a laughable failure of self awareness as much as anything, not grasping the rabid depths of class hatred amongst those they come from/identify with.The only people more openly derided by the impacted bourgies are the working classes in whom as many coded -isms are hidden as obezoids. And anyway, "feeling" sorry for people happens when people pass through authority to a pronounced degree, the desired pity is visceral not abstract.

I have never been convinced for one minute that insisting poorer people are fatter, if its even true which I've always had varying degrees of doubt about, will produce the required simpatico feelings expected. I remember when I first hit the FA nets I said more than once, "Fat people are just not sympathetic", I wasn't regretful on the contrary, I felt FA might encourage us to set a certain boundary on trying to prize a necessarily withheld empathy.

Despite in fact probably because we look too robust, too rude in health a bit too energetic somewhat immovable, sometimes indomitable, unreachable even, we are just too far from the most universal evocation of vulnerability, slenderness. Breaking boundaries is fine but instinct says what we'd have to do to overcome that would simply not be worth it and we should allow that to settle the matter.

Part of the challenge for many of us is to believe that slimmer people despite any acquired capacity to work themselves into mouth frothing ire are still threatened by fat people the idea of us in some ways, rather like many of us are jealous of others and our idea of them.

It's a pain in the arse, one of the reasons why I so resented fatness is that it didn't reveal my poetic (though I don't get on with it strangely enough) soul. What about my wistful ethereality? How would anyone properly get me, if I looked like I could play women's rugby? (Yes, slim women, excellent players and no you don't have to be fat to etc.,)

I've gotten over that, because funnily enough it fits most snugly into an aspect of FoBT, weight as an indicator of character. I mean its a question of having the confidence to be. After a while, you get caught up in that and funnily enough, people who get to know you know you. We all have mistaken first impressions and it seems like a lot of people don't "match" their image.

Who cares if people mistake you for, in my case once a hearth mother type who must be able to pass on a desired recipe, as I remember it, she indicated I was of no use as any thing else, cheek!

She was disappointed and I habitually apologetic, yet I didn't feel any way about it, I just like to help if I can.

(It turned out later that I could have advised her, but though she rightly identified the dish, I didn't know it by that name).

In some ways the real fight for fat people is whether we are going to go with the fact that we are still standing and stop fighting due to things like self consciousness about size, the grass is greener. Or if this will mean being boxed into a "strong fatty" trope, which can be self negating.

Or whether we are going to keep faith with how the damaging self betrayal of being an 'obese' has inflicted on us as and get others to be nice/r, or something.

It's often occurred that if only I'd shown the same kind of resolute no nonsense attitude to things as the sterling defenses of my "diet proof" body, who knows how I'd be feeling now? They say free your mind and your body will follow, but it feels more like allowing your body to inspire, even instruct your mind.

No drama

2011-09-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

A while back a typically passionate * [T/W for those offended by soulful takes on the sacred R-O-C-K] Mary J Blige recorded a seriously heartfelt track called "No more drama" in which she excelled even her usual resolute delivery.

In it she described breaking free from an disturbingly abusive relationship after the drama of it exhausted her habit of clinging on for whatever she was getting or thought she was getting out of it.

"Drama" does that. The constant everyday ups and downs are a vortex drawing you deep and holding you as you adapt to that and forget before.

Until burnout loosens your grip.

Its a strange thing to come to your rescue. The imperative to GET AWAY crowds out and upturns the status quo, whether you have any idea how you are going to manage or feel up to escaping, or not.

Physical, emotional and psychological withdrawal, as far as you can manage is the only order and that's all there is too it.

We can probably all agree people do things because they are not fully aware of the consequences or the risks they are taking.

From there assumptions differ.

For instance reversing that to presume if others appear to be doing something considered risky, it is due to their lacking awareness of assumed risk.

Some of us will have to disagree.

If you extrapolate from there insisting the more associated risk is exaggerated and dramatized, the more you can affect your target's reactions, you'd probably be correct in that.

You can even direct all behaviour that way, but what you and your drama cannot do with it is dictate outcome.

That is decided by the efficacy of the actions you are eliciting.

If you are going to ignore that fact and continue to manipulate people into actions you desire, prepared for when people become too weary and tired of your antics to care.

And when that happens, as the lady sings, people will have to cut you and the ugliness you're dealing in loose.

It's called, survival.

Mr Twerp

2011-09-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

I've already written about Stephen Fry, someone I just about had some respect for until he ended that by exposing himself for the arse he is underneath his genial countenance. He was probably one of the first people I went off because his rabid fat phobia was so stupid that it appalled me so.

This is a man who lost virtually a whole side of his family in the Holocaust, yet used the usual "no fat people in the concentration camps" to bray away even a pip of rational discussion about fatness.

I've little but contempt for people who try that "Jewish people have been morally cleansed by the final solution" BS, but I just felt at the time that is him, this is what he is really like underneath and that is what I didn't like.

And that was way before 2009, so you'd think he'd have worked his previous "insight"into that mail article using his massive brainpower to explain why it failed to be the scything shield cutting any prospect of adiposity to ribbons.

He has taken in many with his posturing of the genius professor, fair's fair, he's not unaware of himself;

'I am cursed with big feet and blessed with a big memory,' he shrugs. 'I wouldn't call myself an intellectual, but I do like to collect learning.'

"Collecting", not necessarily possessing.

I subsequently learned that he was "bipolar/manic depressive", does that make any difference? Funnily enough it doesn't because being bipolar isn't spelt A-R-S-E hole. His hateful fat phobia is yes a vehicle for his self loathing but he is mistaken if he is passing that off as created by his condition when it is mainly coming from him as a person and how he views his condition.

I'll say little more on that except to say its a bit like people who hate themselves because they are fat-that is not seen as perfection and they feel they are/should be, rather than those who hate themselves because they are fat; for other reasons.

He can turn on the oleaginous charm at will (sounds kind of bipolar, cause or effect?). This is effective a lot of people adore him you could do worse as long as you avoid hearing him vent on easy targets.

Such is the extent of conformity when it comes to fat hating, we all have our own rules as to mitigation, one thing I cannot stand is fat fools in the media who go about trash talking fatness or fat people and/or making us a target for pity.

Leaving ordinary folk to reap fuller consequences of fat people's lowering social status, these people think of nothing, not the rights they didn't fight for may be under threat because they cannot get a grip of their selves.

Despite wiping their tears with banknotes.

I take no pleasure whatsoever in the fact that he like many others is regaining visibly, its more that when you empty a sewer into where you live because you think you're gone for good, without regard to the consequences of those still there.

You will meet that mess when/if you get back.

SF, wouldn't do this with his mental health disorder, nor drug use, nor anything else but fatness. He can speak about it as honestly as he can without having to demean the status itself. So take a tip FF's in the M (fat fools in the media).

Other people should not have to be increasingly menaced by the state busybodies whilst those with a little influence cannot get over themselves enought to and think before they speak.

How mean is fat acceptance?

2011-09-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

The appeal for FA denizens to tread lightly on those who've kicked the crap out of fatz has forced me to consider this question, is it cruel to people who are used to having a soft landing place for their feet swinging limbs to withdraw that and let them fall on their own momentum?

That may seem like an idiotic question when you say it like that, but there is no doubt that in general we fatz seem to be awful reticent about calling our tormentors to account, for their own freely chosen behaviour.

This wasn't altogether unpredictable, after all, I myself have as much reluctance as anyone else but I try to overlook it somewhat because I feel it is old habits dying hard, namely being outer directed, focusing on other people's feelings with disregard for my own.

Then being asked to account for what I was supposed to be the product of what I was not paying attention to and also repressing. You can say its forcing myself to get back in touch with my own feelings, rather than distracting myself with others, I trust them to take care of themselves in the meantime.

I've also noticed a lot of the hurt people feel at fat people's emergence from non sentient outer directed. There's an element of we thought that was settled and we were happy with that. As you know when you put anything down that can become a makeshift storage or table, it exerts a gravitational pull bringing all flotsam and jetsam of the universe.

Okay, people put stuff on it.

People put a lot more stuff on our erased, obedient, genuflecting selves than I ever thought possible. Or maybe its that the things they put on them, got things put on them and enabled all sorts of things out of reach things to be tantalizingly touched with the finger tips.

By trying to regain the humanness of that part of ourselves, there's a sense that we are cruelly disregarding all this and we are in our way just as reluctant as others I sense. We don't want to be where we are, but its the change our minds that will have to come about that we ambivalent about.

If you want to look at it this way and it is fair to a fault fat acceptance is cruel or certainly feels it, both ways. From looking outward to restoring inside, from thinking about how you look to hostile others, to how you actually feel as an original autonomous being.

You know as in existing with the flow of your experience inside and out, rather than watching yourself, looking to catch yourself out before you do any fat creation whilst you're not looking.

Relative to before it can feel incredibly self absorbed, I certainly do feel I have become that way myself and sometimes overly analytical and precious.

Isn't it grand? In the past I would have worried, I'm a fat person being precious, oh the shame. Now I just think lighten up or get over it, I treat myself according to the way I'm being, not how much I'm making up for or not being fat.

Sometimes, it's almost fun.

The 'cruelty' of fat acceptance, is really the cruelty to ourselves of going along not with cals in/out ideology, anyone can make a mistake, no it was by accepting the hostility that increasingly went with it, for that reason.

For not policing boundaries by saying "okay you can say I'm in the wrong but that doesn't give you the right to act up like this, back off" etc., Its the lenience of "anything goes" as we are fat and wrong that was really cruel to ourselves.

And if you view this belated push back as a cruelty to those who've for instance gotten used to us making them feel better because we seemed a bit more beaten down, then let that be a lesson to us all.

If we carelessly allow cruelty to ourselves that builds future "meanness" towards anyone nice enough to take advantage.

Scant emotion

2011-09-01T11:36:00.000-07:00

There's a really good post over at Feministe, not least due to the excellent commenter's who have written about their experiences with eloquence. It refers to the chef Karl Wilder's account of trying to live on a low food budget (food stamps allocation). It feels more real than these accounts often do. By relaying the kind of emotional toll it can take,I found myself relating to it in ways I usually don't with these experiments.

Managing on the lowest income requires a high level of skill in many areas, the opposite of what's insinuated by the some of the more self flattering classes. This tension of incompatible opposites is the genesis of (a) double consciousness.

When a particular groups real life or functioning existence is at odds with what society insists are its universal values.

More often low income is equated with; low skill, none too bright/ ill educated, sullied if not somewhat degenerate, the cries of "all you/they have to do is x" are defensive.

I've no objection to teaching children some home economics alas vulnerable to being thrown aside for that which is deemed "more important".

Its a general rule that the greater the level of skill required for anything the more people will fall short of that standard.

The emotional component of managing low finance tends to get sidelined. My cooking can be erratic from out of sight to unspeakable, more so when I was very low on self belief in general. If I'd had more confidence and faith in myself, I would have done a lot better.

What brought me down even more than the lack of money was the feeling of being trapped with a tightening noose around my neck;

I am opening all my cupboards and checking every item in the freezer. I am hungry and want everything I don’t have.

I felt hounded by this feeling way too much, it could become acute in the blink of an eye. Don't get me wrong, I'm profoundly grateful to live in a society where people fought for that most basic of provision.

I can't explain some of it, often these feelings got on my nerves. I get people who've always been in low paid employment who think, for goodness sakes, that's how they express the pressures. Sometimes I made a game of it; being crafty, planning things out, noticing every little way I could make things go as far as possible, getting into some kind of rhythm.

Other times I found myself out of synch and falling short, not always sure why.

I'm neither justifying or not, just saying that's how I felt about it. Give children as much training as possible in as many areas of food and its preparation, growing it to if possible. Variety and flexibility really can make all the difference and is some defence against the blandishments of the marketing budgets selling overly processed fare.

But also, tell them the truth about being poor, they often have to be better whilst being painted as worse.

Stroking your id

2011-08-30T05:10:00.000-07:00

We all like speak the good word about ourselves; the internal pep talks, reruns of favourite praise and compliments thrown our way, shimmering memories of our perceived triumphs great and small.

We can be very high maintenance when it comes to keeping our spirits up.

As long as a person can get over the feeling that it makes them a bit of a shit (plus pathetically needy), an endless cycle of self praise can be set in motion by making sure that when you insult others, you are really praising yourself.

It can give an extra (((((frisson)))))) lacking from even the most gratuitous self praise.

Um, achieving more potent effects through indirect rather than direct means, where is that lesson being missed?

It’s worth bearing in mind when fat people are being insulted, its usually just a means of pressing the real hot button marked "ego boost". A bit like those study mice who'll press the reward button until they're exhausted, sometimes even dead.

That's how fat haters are sometimes genuinely surprised (and irked) at the extent of fat people's upset at these taunts. "It's not about that silly", but hey, they're not going to tell fatz that, directly, that would spoil it.

Whatever's been set up as the opposite of fat is ergo the opposite of the insult; "fat people don't like to work." “fat people are careless with themselves" "fat people are not good looking".

Who's industrious, responsibly self caring, well groomed and stunningly gorgeously attractive?

Coothcie cootchie cooo, whoever's not fat, that's who!

I suppose you could call it a "comfort insult". If you work it right you are always supporting yourself (why there's a need for it is a whole other question) but some think its a necessity, which is perhaps why they claim fat people have "no self respect". If we've succumbed to an idea of ourselves that is intrinsically insulting, we've not only wasted an opportunity to tickle our egos, but actively putting them down.

What are we like!

Ever wondered why the frenzied circularity of fat hating insults, the way they are so boring and never increase in subtlety or wit? Wonder no more. Someone is having an experience. Without that cushion of pleasure haters would bore themselves into some creativity at least.

So next time you're flamed/shamed, try and have some fun working out the compliment haters are giving themselves.

Proportion control

2011-08-27T05:36:00.001-07:00

The alternative universe that is calorie fixation spews up a lot of babble to support its suspended reality. Terms that hold little or no meaning over and above expressing its misdirected rationale.

One premier fallacy is the idea that the body has little internal self-regulation of appetite, hunger (or body weight). Hunger by the way is about the amount you need to fuel you and appetite is what you need that to contain. According to them, people "mindlessly" eat whatever's in front of them without any regard to any internal dictates or requirements indicated by rising sense of satisfaction peaking in fullness and satiety.

Nor does any amount people eat ever have any affect on what they may eat later on. So for instance if someone eats a lot at lunch, they'll eat that has no effect on the amount they'll eat at dinner. If you eat a lot at one meal, you eat more overall and forever. They then reverse that, if you can just eat inadequately, you'll not get hungry any quicker that if you'd eaten what you needed and you can of course, keep that up for ever more.

Sometimes its hard to believe we've been in thrall to this for so long, oh the desperate mindset of magical thinking.

The purpose of this favoured absurdity is to hide the futility of re-drawing those bounds according to inadequate or an artificially low calorie limit who's sole imperative is to induce weight loss, rather than meeting your body's needs accurately and efficiently.

This has the exact effect its supposed to be "overcoming" it disrupts your body's hunger signals and mechanisms and often weight regulation itself. If when you cry out for your needs to be met and you're short changed. You tend to make that known, don't you?

When your body does this, it is then blamed on your greed or lack of will (to resist your body's attempt to meet its requirements) or your "emotional eating" / "eating disorder"/ "addiction". Either way, this disruption is caused by you, not the imposition of their cultism.

This shaky grasp of the purpose, point and nature of the necessity of eating and food, forms the basis of terminology.

One of their faves is "portion control".

It refers to controlling your appetite and intake by eye because the real control cannot be trusted to starve you sufficiently. The inflexible and inadequate calorie "allowance" strictures don't relate to the varied nature of what you are served in the real world.

Now they have calorie counted menus, that is probably next. Restaurants and other eating establishments will have to weigh each serving every time and check the total is acceptable to the haphazard, though gravely delivered faddists. Exact righteous blocks of calorie allowance must me served at all times by everyone.

Yet, with all this control which is of course supposed to be innate in slimz, why so little sense of proportion about the extent to which you will demonize fatness and fat people, in order to support and manipulate your own behaviour?

Portion control is supposed to be an understanding of how all the pieces of a picture fit together. How one part affects the other that is knock on effects. In other words, a sense of proportion. So if we are expected to believe that the portion controllers have so much of this, why do is their demonization of actual people and their bodies so unpleasant and ugly and so without any sense of limitation?

Just on the off chance that it might serve their ends?

Their control is no control and has the effect of robbing both dieter and fat people as their foils of real control over ourselves.

Force is always needed for so much cost to so little end.

Accountability

2011-08-18T10:08:00.000-07:00

The urge to hold the 'diet industry' accountable for its undoubted shenanaigans is the easy part. The knottier issue seems to be the accountability of the scientific and medical establishment/s (and professionals) for the climate of hatred towards fat people.

No one could possibly pretend they are not the ones who's gravitas has raised fat hate to this pitch and extent of credibility, could they? Yet for some reason or other, that seems to be the deal with many amongst fat acceptance seeking to pretend that businesses, who relatively few are under any real duress to keep giving their cash to, who's stated and unhidden intent is financial gain, has no dictate of "do no harm" that has been thoroughly supported by those who do, nay saved from bankruptcy by them at one point are somehow more to blame for the 'obesity' mess than anyone.

I have to hold the professionals more accountable for what we have had to endure and I don't really see, morally speaking, why they should be allowed to get away with it. I can understand why emotionally people might want them to carry on regardless. I can trust them to weasel out of their misdeameanours as skillfully as ever, but I simply feel that whether we or they like it, if they are not held to account for their own actions, they will be empowered to repeat this and probably will.

How do we feel about that, okay so long as its not us?

The other day I saw a comment trivialising weight matters as being "taken in" by the diet industry. If I was taken in by any one it was the science and medical establishment. What upsets me is not so much that they did, I've gotten too used to their breathtakingly low standard of behaviour with regards the fat issue-yeah and I remember the "good ones" like they remembered good fat people.

What really grabs me by the throat is that I never suspected they could behave in such a way, if I had, I can assure you I would have saved myself earlier, guessing that's the same for a lot of fat people out there, currently disabling themselves on doctors orders.

Part of the reason some won't contemplate the possibility of the disregard shown to them and their sometimes excrutiating efforts is that they cannot begin to imagine how they will deal with such a sense of betrayal.

Maybe I've just answered my own question.

So I can delete the rest of this post.

Note to 'undercover' fat hating foodists

2011-08-16T07:31:00.000-07:00

Classist fat hate, shaming and talking about 'obesity' is not the same talking about food access.

Cart after horse

2011-08-13T08:40:00.000-07:00

It's worth saying that immediately going from a high degree of conscious restriction to a normal/intuitive eating pattern is not necessary if that doesn't suit your situation or is too scary.

I did go through a period of letting go completely after a long dieting career I found I could no longer restrict calories.

The defence our bodies mount to overthrow a calorie shortage of calories is taxing. If you repeatedly subject yourself to it long term, fatigue will become ingrained to the point where nervous system shuts down it ability to carry out your orders. Like the wild horse throwing you off by rather than you having to get off.

It meant I had to allow myself to eat things I tried to avoid, in other words, what I "felt" like eating. I couldn't wait for that period to pass to be honest, it felt like I was being directed by a backlash from a habit of imbalance rather than current needs. And at the time, my whole eating impulse was stuck in its down phase, so eating anything was always rather blah and unsatisfying..

I didn't feel any more in tune with it than I did with calorie restriction, it was after all an extension of that process, rather than my own desire. Although I accepted the need for it and was fine with it, that was undoubtedly the end for me and dieting. I actually planned to start again afterwards! But just that little bit of ease made the idea of re-starting (afterward) intolerably repellent.

That's when I realised just what it had taken to keep restricting over and over again, day after day.

I kept checking for when I could engage conscious decision making again without my body/nervous system screaming in protest.

I found that feeling started to pass after about 3 and a half weeks.

I guided myself toward some of the things I'd been missing out on in that preceding month, checking for even the slightest feelings of resistance. If I had no feeling then great, if there was so much of a squeak I left it alone.

That period of release and checking for the end of it gave me the confidence to be gentle and extremely patient with myself. Not saying IE type eating can't work straight off, just that it can be far less suited to people who've had long experience with disordered eating and eating disorders, especially from a very young age. I had both they ran into each other.

Often there are different rules for what could be seen as ingrained disorder and the more situational kind-related to your actions as opposed to self generating.

A negative mentality about food eating and being fat had built up to such an extent that when I tried to eat mindfully-with a complete focus on what I was eating- it felt unbearable and soon descended into an even wilder chaos than usual.

I didn't realise the extent of it until then.

I had to dismantle at least some of this before I could think of normality and would not have fancied eating to the rhythm of it, in fact that would have been more or less the same as before, except without the pressure of calorie restriction.

That can mean a lot, it may even be the most decisive factor, but then again, maybe not. The most important thing is anxiety releases, the release of pressure and stress. The system overall is overexcited and frankly, most would be better off taking up something like meditation and waiting for that to calm things down.

The release of the threat of starvation is a bit too specific.

The thing about eating after all this (or just having had the threat hanging over you for a long time) is to remember that imbalance is not caused by any engagement of your conscious mind in eating, its the over engagement of it. Making (or attempting to make) it the basis of all eating.

That undermines the rhythm of your function, even without limit, such as those who go gluten free and so on. Interestingly, more people can manage that and it tends to get easier, which is what happens when changes though demanding make some sense. Its what people want a restricted diet to be like, but it isn't, because of the body's homeostatic regulation asserting itself.

Your mind is more of a channel into which information from the whole of your body flows, allowing you to respond to that, it does not create your hunger or appetite. It can and does influence it, through other parts of your nervous system function, your emotions and your thinking and things like your habits, history, environment, assumed or otherwise likes and dislikes.

The latter affect what is already there, they are not why and what causes you to eat, solely. It can have a huge influence in the sense of creating a chain reaction-which is why I believe there is some way to change the course of weight- it is not its underlying basis of creation though. It is always acting on something, that's why dieting is so misguided mistaking what effects something, for that it is affecting.

A bit like mistaking writing for the paper you are writing on.

The idea that eating is consciously generated, which exists to serve the calorie restriction model only, ignoring the automatic process already occurring, trying to duplicate it badly getting in the way of what is actually designed for that purpose causing disruption. That's how dieting, with its overly rigid attempts at conscious control creates disorder, it gets in the way and forces the body to mount a counter attack.

All this leads us to think engaging the conscious mind is wholly bad when it's really the over and wrong use of it.

If our conscious mind is unsettled, it needs to be emptied of all the myths and nonsense we collect from our environment, including food marketing yes, but also from healthists and others pushing modish forms of eating.

I went as far, at one point as emptying my mind of ideas of what I liked to eat. I just tried to let go of any feeling of liking x, y, z as much as I could. That was a bit odd, but I wanted to off load as much baggage as I could and experience things freshly. After a while, it made me more responsive to amounts of things, it was this that helped me find out that I tend towards eating lots of different things, rather than full meals of a few food items.

Both it and the increasing release of tension allowed my enjoyment of food to return, after it had been killed off by years of attempted restriction and the upshot of that.

So rather than withdraw completely unless its provoked by diet burn out, in which case you'll have to pause for at least some time, you can do it the other way around and indeed this is the way it should always be to me.

For instance, moving more because you feel like it, mentally and/or physically, rather than making yourself move until you feel okay about it.

Removing all negative, mistrustful ideas about food, eating and being fat. Let go of your ideas and assumptions about the things and ways you like to eat and let your eating change in response to that. Keeping a conscious overview and using your instincts to guide you, listening always with kindness and care.

The key is to permanently de-stress yourself and your body, before during and after eating, train yourself to be calmer in your life in general and that will flow into everything, eating included. So you can look at it directly and/ or indirectly.

Do what you can do, what either works or feels manageable to you.

In general its usually okay to take an overview of your eating every now and again and think "um, I seem to have forgotten about this kind of food/food group", everyone gets into a rut overlooking good things at times.

Less respect for who?

2011-08-12T05:16:00.001-07:00

A study is reported to have found those surveyed say they have lost more respect for smokers than they have of those who are fat.

Oh really? Why would that be?

What no-one cares to survey, evah, is how fat phobia and anti smoking fervour affects the respect fat people (and/ or smokers) have for haters. Especially watching the contorted minds and faces those choosing to be most afflicted.

When still hunkered in the collective hegemony of fat phobia, I used to think I had some idea what people believed, whether I agreed with them or not.

I've lost count of the times I've thought to myself-in the midst of this- "who are you people and what the hell do you really believe?"

Is this what we really are like underneath all the endless prompting and direction as to what to think? We are told this is the side to be on and this is what this side thinks?

Whilst no one's perfect, it's difficult to know what to think when people who claim being in favour of the death penalty makes you unspeakable tell fat people flat out that we should be allowed to die whenever possible.

Or how about those who claim to believe the world would be right if everyone just obeyed authority, those people should be treated right, they are responsible! Yet not only don't recognise an example of it before their eyes, they characterize it as lack of responsibility.

So what do these people actually believe in?

When people send endless death threats our way, robotic litanies of every disease possible written by fatness, do people really think the respect fat people have for them remains as before?

Because frankly, hearing how for two pins our lives are costing them a few mythical shekels doesn't exaclty make me think, there's a fine upstanding gentlewo/man, I really admire the balance of their ethical sensibilities.

I don't know how we're expected to take seriously being told that we don't care about our health when the idea that fat people can positively embrace health advice (that's supposed to make us slim) is a case that has to be made at all, ever.

Because it has been decided we must do or die(t) instead.

Do people really think about how they sound and look whilst going off like all ugly like that?

If fatz have the same respect folks they did whilst seeing themselves in a more punitive light, I'd have to question why.

We know what love is

2011-08-11T08:02:00.000-07:00

I was going to leave the Weiner piece alone due to the amount of things wrong with it, but I can't help but be struck, predictably enough, by the title.

"Loving my body almost killed me"

It was according to the author supposed to be "provocative", that's as maybe, but what it brought to the surface is the way abuse is constantly presented to especially fat women as love. It made me think of something like "My partner hurts me because/so *(trigger warning; even worse) they love me" or Orwellian doublethink.

I'd be lying if I said I feel particularly upset in the way I might have before, this explains an important part of why. Encouraging people to be open to abuse and to abuse themselves, is as immoral as it is stupid. The extent to which this mentality repels me is putting increasing distance between me and people like this who are just so out of touch from so much of fat people's experience.

The assumption that fat women are so unloved and not of this world that they do not know what that is or feels like and can therefore need to be told by a magazine is getting increasingly laughable. Let me try to explain something about basic ethics, if you ever reach this point, where hate=love etc., rethink as a matter of principle, okay?

If that doesn't occur, why would you think any fat person in their right mind needs to take you seriously? I am not asking for rigid agreement amongst those who are into fat/body acceptance, on the contrary, I cannot understand why fat people ever feel we have to give up the basic norms of character and personality in order to fit into the box assigned by those who think they must define us.

Sticking rigidly to their caricature of what a fat person is they talk at that, not grasping how many of us have already gone unwittingly down the hate route from way aback and have had to claw our way back, because we were utterly mashed up, sick and tired of being sick and tired.

People like this do not speak to that, I don't care whether she is fat or thin, "body acceptance" or not. I do not claim mine is universal either, but it does reflect what so many of us have been through and how this has silently affected us and how we seek to redeem our situation, positively, without the permission of anyone but ourselves.

People like that are on our way back because our tolerance for this kind of thing has been, intellectually, emotionally, physically exhausted, many times over. Not just once around the mulberry bush, hemming and hawing whimsy.

I don't worry about "fat positive", are you kidding me? Just no longer attacking myself feels like enough of a holiday, that I could be miserable as heck and still feel like I was skipping around in comparison with before.

Having had an eating disorder, I'm sure this could have read more like a genuinely personal story and less like a public information stereotopia, telling clueless fatz how to find our arses.

Agree to disagree

2011-08-10T11:16:00.001-07:00

A lot of the trouble I get into is due to the fact that I do not share the same operant premises as the general discourse. Even when I agree with starting points, I don't necessarily agree with conclusions and conclusions I accept for differing reasons to the main.

I didn't realise this was going to cause me problems as I figured

a) everyone's always going on about diversity

and;

b) some of the things I think are things that people used to think but stopped thinking because that was the way the land lay rather because they found fault with the underlying logic.

I'm a bit lazy/efficient that way. If I think something is right, I tend to keep right on thinking it unless I'm persuaded otherwise. I also like to know what I think, therefore I tend to have to translate what I hear into my own words because to me, understanding is not being able to repeat what you've been told, that's often the first step if you don't get something immediately.

But really that's recall, the precursor is memory, understanding is when you can shake it up a little and it still makes sense, when its become part of your brain.

When it comes to fat acceptance, I find that people seem to share assumptions with the mainstream of mass opinion and yes, fat phobes, that I just don't.

Even if you are in disagreement, you can share the same underlying premise. So for example, if someone said "Fat is unhealthful" and you responded with, "Fat is/can be healthy", we would seem to be in disagreement, however, the basis of assumption is exactly the same that health is actually pertinent.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't give a rats gonads whether fat is healthy or not when it comes to how you treat fat people.

Full stop; THE END.

I don't care if being fat makes your face fall off and your arms twist around the wrong way and slap you upside the back of the head, that has nothing to do with anyone's hating, which they had no excuse for and never will.

EVER.

This means that I often feel like I'm on the wrong end of side split in two. Taking a look at some of the themes that come up;

The shared underpinnings of the "health" issue is because awareness of risk can affect or stop bad behaviour or risky behaviour it is caused by lack of awareness of how risky it is.

I don't agree with the reversal, lack of awareness of risk is not the only cause of risky behaviour and even if it was, once you've told people the risks for decades as long as many were born and they try and try your remedy proving they've listen.

Get on the pony marked "eazy sanctimony" and ride out of town before you descend into denial of those efforts so you can continue to justify your on hating ways.

In your dreams.

I've always believed the most important reason people stop doing what ever is they have an effective way that works. Now you'd think that would be obvious wouldn't you?

It doesn't even matter how much you don' want to stop if you can find a way that's easy peasy for you. In that instance, it may matter how long you stop, but it will stop you better than all the will in the world with a route that is a useless cul de sac, as many of us have found out the hard way.

So whether fat is healthy or not has importance in terms of truthful representation of the variety of fat experience, but nothing whatsoever to do with whether stigma is acceptable it isn't ever and the dependents need to wean themselves off it, before we are ready to really give them a rude awakening.

We can do anything

2011-08-10T11:12:00.000-07:00

Its giving "the oxygen of publicity" time again, I avoided Ms Weiner as at the time I wasn't feeling up to negotiating any trip wires between a lack of shared basis of argument, nor wishing to be part of any boo hoo inducing "backlash".

'Luckily' for moi, an actress called Mila Kunis decided to get silly well, she is manifesting the effects of calorie restriction.

losing the weight has entirely changed her views on body image.

Yeah, it'll do that. The widespread extension of fat hating rides off the back of this effect which is some kind of chemical change that alters or is itself an alteration in the way you think.

It would be unusual for someone not to be able to "lose weight" as that happens as part of our body using the calories we ingest to supply us with ready energy.

"Losing weight" has quietly replaced what was supposed to be the real purpose of dieting, to become and remain slim. It's an admission of defeat by fat fighters which they are trying to deny to themselves because they're ahem, better at accepting others imagined wrong doing than their own actual error.

It started off that if you expended energy you lost weight that would make slim and stay that way and that was that. Then we discovered rebound, we all thought that could be conquered with persistence, wrong again, but no matter we'll parlay that into something healthy lifestyles.

Dieting soft enough to keep up permanently plus exercise, alas that's too soft on fatness. Society's weight overall, has not reversed one iota since the advent of healthful lifestyling. So now its "lose weight.

Uhuh, okay, I'll see you after a visit to the loo. Well, it can mean anything.

Our erstwhile heroine decided to lose weight for a role in "Black Swan" this was somewhat of a revelation;

'I don’t think I ever fully realised what a human body is capable of doing

In case you're wondering, she wasn't talking about the the way billions of brain cells are packed into 3lbs of set porridge or the way thirty foot of digestive system is snugly bundled into your body cavity, she's referring to losing 20lbs.

'I believed I could do anything. I never for one moment thought that I couldn’t do it. I believe in hard work. In self-drive and self-worth.

Yeah, whatev's, that what we thought when we started, hey, do you think maybe we're slim and don't know it? I've been reading how you can "identify" as fat, whether you are or not and that if you do people shouldn't rain on your parade.

She basically does that really cute thing clueless fat fighters do, positing reporting fact as "negative" because we have to be super positive and pretend we don't know any better (oh how we tried) but wait, then she thinks that's why people 'fail' to ~~"lose weight"~~ become slim.

Thanks for having so much faith in us MK, now we know for sure we can take fat acceptance to a new level of consciousness, because WE CAN DO ANYTHING.

I knew that, no-one who spends years of their life trying to outwit biology the wrong way being hostilely directed from the outside, co-operating and being smacked down for it, whilst being taunted and insulted by all around empowered by authority and is still standing afterwards could ever be chopped liver.

Moral illumination

2011-08-06T08:54:00.000-07:00

I think quite a lot about the overapping moral dimensions of how fat people are seen, noting its effects on my own views on morality and how I see morality assigned to people in other areas.

Everything from ends and means, to how mis treatment of oneself can become a moral question in itself rather than just a mere extension of autonomy and at what point. I never for instance thought of the implications of body hating's containing and therefore conveying a lot of misogyny in the past. That's a glaring oversight on my part, I tended to switch off when hearing about how society controls women's bodies through the ways they look, so I think my quest to be slim took me to where I wouldn't necessarily have gone otherwise in that sense.

The thing that's come to mind right now is more about the extent of our duty to support moral precepts when we are the baddies. How far is our sense of duty-if any- to that process of judgement? Has the experience of being labelled bad and offered a false route to redemption affected how you look at others who have broken (more directly) some other moral construct?

Does it depend on the extent of 'wrongdoing' ?

I'd be interested to hear how people like Katie, Shoshie and others of a religious or spiritual bent who may be more used to directly balancing and weighing up moral strictures feel about being cast as sinners. Has it informed, challenged or changed their views about that status and sin itself?

Do they feel a difference in their idea of themselves now they have the experience of being cast in that mould? Has it affected their sense of being (I'm assuming) "good people"?

I feel this has always impinged to some degree on my sense of goodness-although I assumed I was good underneath- and to some extent my sense of 'innocence', I mean that it actually took me a while to realise that when some event came on the news and folks were described as "innocent" that I in the same circumstances could be included in that.

I felt disconnected from the idea that I could ever be described thus in such an unqualified manner, is that odd?

It did to me when I finally realised the extent of this feeling, I don't think that all fat people feel this way at all.

There's also the question of being assigned the role of transgressor without directly deciding to break the rules. That is truly odd, like sinfulness has gathered around you, rather than you going to it. Some like to assign motives of rebellion to fatness, but the way fat people behave as a whole shows clearly that fat people are not rebellious by dint of being fat.

People who decide to break the rules deliberately tend to have a different mindset and behaviours. They've made a better study of authority and how it actually works as opposed to how it claims to work, we are probably going through that in retrospect through changing our minds about how we want to be treated.

It's not that I rule out choice as part of the equation, more than it is not usually direct. I'm in favour of changing our understanding of choice from the narrow basis of elective direct choice we tend to couch it in.

All this also makes me wonder about keeping to the rules selflessly or expecting to be rewarded for doing so.

The medium is their message

2011-08-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

I’ve always really liked the aphorism, "the medium is the message".

I think about it both ways turning it around and around in my mind-the message is the medium. I had it somewhere in my mind when thinking about how fat acceptance should write itself by via its own experience and not be sunk under a lot of irrelevant ideologies and positional conceits that are often don't add any tangible meaning to it.

Or seek to be no threat and fit into what other people have laid down.

McLuhan described it once as meaning;

The content of the medium is never the message, any medium, at all creates a new pattern, a new atmosphere a new environment of human perception, which works upon the whole man, it works upon the whole society. That is the message.

He was referring to mass media, I think it works for any message- the shape formed through a message expressing itself is the message it conveys.

Its not too hard to see this when you think of how people repeatedly recognising the futility of “proving” stuff to fat haters.

We all start from the rigid hegemony of what fat or thin people are like, fat and thin alike with differing consequences. All the terms of reference, of meaning are set to serve ideas of eating as an extension and measure of character and the conscious mind the creator of eating and through that the decider of weight. That's in the service of fat phobes.

It empowers them.

We don't get kicked around because we are repressed, or because we lack the capacity to speak about ourselves, we argue solely on terms based on us being defined by what erases our experience. Our assigned place is to be described by what we are supposed to be.

Drawing us in to play the same old game same rules trading on that common ground and reviving it in our minds with us in in the same old position of answering to the kangaroo court.

Its not what they’re asking “prove your healthy/fit/sane” etc., its the medium of us as supplicants, running around after hostile diktats.

Our views are formed in response to the same old medium of fat hating, rather than an assertion of our own.

Radical fat acceptance

2011-08-02T03:18:00.001-07:00

Not my definition.

I rarely manage to lead with ideology about the way I see the world. Even when I find myself in agreement with people I tend to part company at some point along their arrival at a conclusion.

Which I may also disagree with.

I daresay I'm not alone in that we come together on what we can agree on as much as anything, although what we can't be allowed to get in the way.

I've been puzzled from the start by the cry of how “radical” fat acceptance is supposed to be as is. An "Uncle Tom" mentality is pretty ‘out there’ compared with a KKK one when it was the norm but really, who cares?

N.B. I'm using that to illustrate the point not to call anyone an UT or anything else, just in case that's a potential point of confusion.

An extreme view can be acknowledged without it defining yours, whether or not it is the norm. Its always annoyed me that something which should never have been in doubt is presented as ‘out there’ because its fat people reclaiming it, belatedly. Am I the only one uncomfortable with the idea that its "out there" for us to acknowledge we have a conscious awareness of ourselves, from the inside?

I see others under a lot more duress, oppression keep a hold of that, we do too in other areas the question is why such a difference with fatness can that really just be about other people's insistence? That this can be derailed but never replaced or switch off until we are?

Doesn't that haunt anyone else?

Reasons why don't get rid of that feeling completely.

I'm not wholly surprised people are putting up a fight against us regaining this aspect of ourselves, the primary strategy is to keep us tied to the same old thing, "answering" the same questions responding to the same points knowing as long as we are doing that we are still operating by their rules.

Our behaviour was/is such that they think they are in control of our thoughts with their "We can't tell fat people its okay to be fat". We agree insisting we were wholly forced by them, by their words.

A lot those fighting us are up to their necks in knowingly bad behaviour choosing to indulge themselves, opportunistically. We can see they feel badly, hence the repeated insistence that "its for our own good". Yet I hear plenty about how "well meaning" that is.

A lot of fat hating is on the defensive, if we recover ourselves we maybe asking them some questions they may find tough to answer. There's an element of denial, keeping us tied is easier than than that.

That won't change until people feel that is the losing side, we are all like that to some extent.

Many of us seek to reassure that fear (often) we don't want to go there we say, others are a bit more reticent because really who knows? No-one has any idea how people will feel when they've forgotten how to pander hate. Are we really sure every one's going to be so forgiving? It's not been for free there have been costs.

I'm beginning to think perhaps the cries of radical is the same restlessness I often feel, a sign others too recognise the mindnumbing circularity of an FA that will not stop congratulating itself by comparison to the low standards of wilfully ignorant hostility.

The whirligig does move overall a bit, not much mostly its just round and round, defined by its supposed "opposition" clearly that’s not what we came for, if so I’m glad because I was beginning to wonder.

What we need and want is a fat centric point of view that starts from us (which is the norm for all humanness) and is not merely opposing the same old worthless erasure of us and endless piles of straw.

Defined by our restored consciousness and understanding of things. We are as capable of being objective as anyone (or is that the worry?) and I'd have thought possibly more so as many are tired of being juked by falsehood.

I wouldn't say we are asking for dignity etc., I don't think you ask for those things do you? Others get used to you not standing for anything less.

This is one area of deviation from the norm, we are not survivalists about to decamp for the woods on this particular question we differ from the mainstream. We have different/ no religion, I'm sure we can break away on this thing alone, without having a mental breakdown, we cannot be compared on this level as we know better.

We should be as wildly different from that ‘standard’ as is necessitated by our experience.

Often the tooing and froing between the mainstream mentality and an FA which chooses to be formed by it many feel it feels like being dragged endlessly to the same level. And that's way more of an insult to FA than it is haters.

So why does FA have to keep being turned into a gigantic response to straw? Rather than being about fat people's needs? For some, that's all about throwing off the burden of stigma, that isn't the same as people needing to be relieved of actual ailments and distress that is sometimes reflected in their overall functioning including in their size. Can we get over that because we are no longer care about performing for others?

Why are they more important than those submitting to weight loss surgeries NOW? Sorry, but something has to be done about that. The "keep trying" brigade have done untold harm to fat (and other) people's health. They've done it in the name of the current crusade they are milking. Let them deliver up solutions and clear up the mess they've helped to make of some people's lives and health.

They have been avoiding this from the start, its really hard for them to get outside the prison of calorie restriction they've built but they need to, just for once, can FA stop body shielding them? They should be made to deliver on the false promises they've made.

A need for intellectual purity is better served by shaping your own worldview rather than not and then tripping over fat people to fashion the appearance of it.

There are other reasons, knowledge and understanding of how we as humans actually function, if we'd known that would have known better, this crusade has advanced mis-using science egregiously, eschewing knowledge is no more an answer for anything than, "Let's not tell children about sex in case they start doing it" style arguments. Ignorance is never an answer.

I'd also like to say something else.

If you think I've made an error or a mistake or you want me to/ think I should clarify something I've written here (or elsewhere) there's the comments or an e-mail button on my profile, use them, I'll do my best. If the latter doesn't work, let me know in the comments if necessary (stating if you don't want me to publish).

You can tweet me, if you prefer the button's on the side there.

I think I've been around long enough for people to have some understanding of me, don't assume you're so easy for me to read or that any tolerance is one way. I recognise I require that, I extend it too. I sure there are limits on both sides. If you feel I've reached that, let me know.

In depth

2011-08-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

Not saying this isn't a good post in some ways, but I found it too snaggy, mentally speaking to be able to support it wholeheartedly, it's as much about interpretation as much as simple outright disagreement.

I find this a lot when it comes to FA, when it comes to blogging, I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that its too crude a format for the job that needs to be done re fat acceptance. There isn't the trust or respect that we see endlessly for those thought to have more 'kudos'.

The extent to which we cannot maintain a disagreeing interaction is unprecedented amongst such a thoughtful group of people. In fact, it's down right odd, I can't think of a comparable example off hand.

To discuss our nuances of disagreement we need a forum specifically for that purpose. I know we have some already, but they don't to my knowledge have the same focus. We need one to go through and discuss all received ideas and those of FA with as open a mind as possible, to test them and see if they hold up.

FA is perhaps too unwieldy to be one thing. If people get together with the specific purpose to generally go through ideas then maybe we can shake the dust of some of the more banal/suspect ones.

Writing your own obituary

2011-07-30T07:42:00.000-07:00

I've often wondered why there hasn't been more of this. Rather than whining to anyone bursting the calorie restriction bubble, as if calling out false promise extinguishes something real.

A woman called Lillian is directing her complaint about the way things are in a direction that finally makes sense.

Unfortunately, her demand is not for proper research and science i.e. find out how to stabilize weight, once you can do that repeatedly and predictably you have effects to observe, narrow in on and extend to actual weight reversal, because to stabilize in a sense is to reduce, by not adding gain that may have existed without it. And so on.

Instead her cri de coeur is directed at weight loss surgery.

Ain't that a doozy?

The waiting list for these operations is supposedly about 10 years, the writer a Nova Scotian feels she may die from her various health challenges whilst waiting for "life saving" rearrangement of her vital organs.

I've never understood for the life of me, why if fat people really believe they are dying, why don't they plead for their lives? I know the endless warnings have had an effect on a lot of our psyches. To this day, I often find myself wondering if this or that twinge is the end, I’m not kidding.

So how much more if you really believe the end is nigh? I’ve asked this repeatedly, to little avail.

There’s a lot of talk about how "we need allies" again, why haven't those who we know love us stepped in here long ago, surely even if they think we are too greedy and lazy they don't believe we should die because of that?

Even before things reached this point, why so little to say on the efforts they’ve seen us make to comply with our instructions? They’ve seen us; they know what it meant to us, why so little challenge to those claiming we’ve done nothing?

Ditto the professionals, I've heard concern from them and how worried they are about the health of the fat patients they tend to for a variety of reasons, yet when I ask, why don't you and your colleagues get together fire off a few e-mails about how something needs to be done the game's up, clearly what we have isn't going to do it, save these people!

The strange idea that we need to persuade "allies" to come forth when many have needed little persuasion to join in the burial of our efforts and how we really weren’t taking it seriously enough, they don't seem to need too much persuasion for that kind of thing.

If their loved ones are dying, or they merely believe we are, they surely would need no persuasion, they’d be coming forth themselves in a terrified condition, full of the stories of all the mountainous pile of fat bodies whom their loved ones are joining and what is to be done?

Wouldn't you feel like that if you thought they were?

Sociologists and other observers should be commenting on the dwindling numbers of people on low incomes dropping like flies because the “epidemic” of fat, the mother/fatherless children and so on.

Save them! Would surely be the cry from all sides.

Even now, I really don’t know just how much people really believe fat=death and how much it is a conceit that has gotten out of hand, like people believing their own lies. Because if they truly did believe, I find it impossible to accept they’d be so blasé, it’s eerie, and somewhat implausible.

In fact, I humbly suggest we start asking that question of people, rather than endlessly running around after their ‘questions’.

I have too much faith in people to truly believe they are not exaggerating, going along with the panic fatz into action trope, because no way are people who love us going to sit and watch us dying whilst the professionals are doing nothing of any effect apart from pointing fingers at us.

Finally, an example of someone who at least acts as if they believe what we are constantly told, that we are going to die, soon. And I daresay she does, perhaps.

Either way, a bluff is being called so good on her for that, despite the endgame. If I was her I'd get her relatives and friends to write to their political representative and go as high as necessary if they get no satisfactory response.

Everyone should know who's doing research and they should be watched closely for how any developments can translate into practical action. Believe me; they'll be falling over themselves to be against stigma when its biting their behinds.

Writing her own obit is very dramatic but in the process she turns the whole “why don’t you think of your family/society/country” trope on its head. She means something to people and puts that forth, she is loved and would be missed, she is not an intolerable burden, she’s not a just a cost to others, she's a contributor and will be a loss to someone like YOU, she is a human being.

The absence of fat people's humanity has been a glaring omission from crusade discourse. Well done Lillian for taking your humanity in your own hands and not waiting to be given permission! I’ve always said, no matter what your views on fatness are, no matter how rancid, fat people can still stop selling out their humanity, this shows it.

Its that more than anything which has really cost us ground not our self hating, but when we stopped being people and became ‘obeses’. She even shows how you can use that, without it being a replacement definition for your humanity.

The reaction was varied, but mostly predictable, referring to the appearance of passivity.

The irony is that reaction is not exactly wrong.

Yep, that's not one of my typos or disintegrating syntax, I meant to write that.

This is the essence of prejudice towards fat people, its one of omission from the niceties shown to others. Its a discrimination of partiality, that’s what is so odd, you are “dehumanized” by being represented as human as we all are.

That’s why I have trouble with this way of looking at it, I say, why not use this to deal with our shame about our humanness and pull every ones shields too, so they can join us?

Lets’ face it, if all look at ourselves more truthfully, we’ll all become more civilised PDQ.

No, don’t fancy it, wanna get back in the tent with everyone else?
Thing is, if people didn’t want to get out of there, they wouldn’t be using us to dip their toe in and seeing as we are out.....

That dependence is the state we’re in under the grind of the medical machine. If she was a patient with an acceptable profile, she’d be seen as virtually faultless.

She has the number one criterion need to reach the acme of being a good patient, compliance. She’s followed instructions, in this case dieting herself up the scale, now that she has exhausted her nervous system and cannot continue, she is denied the likely end of the path she’s been put on by those who’ve dictated her action and those directed at her, apparently she was put on skimmed milk formula as a baby.

To get to this point, a lot of our agency over our health and well being has been thrown overboard we’ve become helpless dependents waiting for the next pill to be doled out for whatever problems we have. Because everything that happens to us, can affect our sense of well being and health for good or ill, so medicine and health becomes like religion.

God can heal your life, so can following “lifestyle” advice.

You can tell how bad it is, FA is an attempt to take control of your existence and yes, you’re health, to decide for yourself, look at the reaction to it. Look at the response to HAES, fat people exercising, eating the kind of diets we are supposed to. That is the extent to which we have become cogs, all signs of initiative are verboten.

It only seems achingly clear to people because its a fat person as we are excluded from the norm. It’s nice to know all that hate is serving some useful purpose; I hope that’s a comfort to everyone.

Part of the increasingly untenable pressure on medical professionals is they've become exhausted with this situation, which they and their professional bodies sought to engineer. It’s the usual reason, to solidifying and increase status, empowering of the professionals relative to the dis empowerment of lay people.

This is why they say, be careful of what you wish for, the medical professionals yearn to be imbued with the type of influence that leads to unquestioned authority over lay folk. They love being able to make people better, you can see the way so many of them keep over dispensing meds. The more dramatically the better, not saying this is necessarily bad, just that its gotten out of hand.

They’ve been allowed to; we the lay folk have colluded with the process in the way we did with the idea that they knew how to make us slim, for the similar reasons, convenience being a big one.

We don’t have time to be part of the system and take time out to deal with imperfections or crises often induced to some degree by the demands made on us by that same system, which is itself one big experiment on how it is affecting humankind.

Power is often like that, from one group to add to another. We've had the idea of health stolen from the extension of our agency, replaced with the idea that we are inherently self destructive, irresponsible and above all too incompetent not to mess up without instruction and guidance from experts.

So called preventative measures are sold back to us as the self help we crave, look at all that g**gling of conditions, interest in vitamins, supplements tonics old time remedies and health systems, alt med and so on, that desire rigorously poo pooed rather than harnessed by the professionals.

Now they’re too tired and angry to do anything but lash out at soft targets and start pulling the plug, withdrawing treatment, the thoughtless cruelty shows its all become too much.

Look also at how scientists sidelined what they call the 'placebo' effect, rather than making it a prestigious and important field wringing every last drop of the body's capacity to heal and re-generate itself.

If we are to become the centre of our own health, the whole way we deal with health, including research and development needs to change. The way we investigate the human body has to change, right now its about how to find areas at which drugs can be targeted at.

You can see that with fatness where they investigate the balance of chemicals which ‘cause’ hunger and appetite.

As usual, far from fat people epitomizing all that is wrong by being wrong, we show up what is wrong by doing the right thing. We did as we were told, the fact that can so easily be made to look like nothing is a comment on what we were told to do, not us.

If we are to take over the reigns, so many of us have shown how its done, the level of responsibility we've taken is beyond a lot of people who are actually sick and if I hadn't been exhausted by the negativity invested, I'd still be at that level.

I often wonder how much our erasure and the way we've been set up for failure (keep dieting) is that we are an example of the extent to which ordinary people are prepared to go to be responsible for themselves and their health.

It doesn't follow the script of lazy indolent lay people messing themselves up, then letting the poor overburdened professionals clear up our mess.

What you eat is a non story

2011-07-13T06:01:00.000-07:00

Remember that.

I truly sympathize with Michelle Obama, the way certain people's deep resentment makes them constantly attack and try to erode her dignity and sense of self worth is nasty, its something I in no way seek to join.

And yes, scrutinizing her eating no doubt has some overlap with that, however what is really at the heart of it is the weakness of using food as a part of the focus to regulate weight.

It fosters disordered mentality of fixation, without even trying.

Fat people are expected to put up with this all the time, indeed, it is seen as a favour to us. We should aspire to a watchful paranoia about food anyway, because as we can see this is "the secret" of the slim.

Constant vigilance.

We "choose" to be fat therefore have no right to choose what we eat, certainly not unmolested by the spectre of what we coulda /shoulda, didn't oughta have eaten. Our "decision" removes our agency in that regard and other people's projections take over along with their superficial hostile gaze.

"Moderation" doesn't translate. As someone pointed out in the comments, this can leave people with a sense of having to keep up appearances, which then lends itself to the assertion of fat people's "dishonesty", denial and secret emotive eating.

MO decided to get herself into this of her own volition, a choice not available to fat people as this food fear it is part of the means proffered to us, to make our weight acceptable. And that is our designated imperative.

So says sociedee.

Its a little disconcerting to see an honest sense of this unfairness coming from those who usually pretend it isn't when directed at those they do not accord body legitimacy. The hot sting of injustice, the feeling of being cornered the sheer frustration of being misjudged, adding stress no body needs linked to the act of eating.

Above all, the confidence to assert this as a given truth. All would be ridiculed and derided in us.

We feel the same but have no such luxury of putting it across in a way that appears meaningfully. Even to many of us.

For many these feelings have become obscure, repressed under the need to present the correct face of fighting one's deliberate creation of fatness (try making sense of that one), if one gets past that, the reward is being nullified by derision and assertions that feeling this way, is why we are fat.

Always with this crusade is pathologizing what is normal, when it is felt by fat humans, making us seem like there's something wrong with us, when there isn't. Re-learning enough trust in yourself to realize just how everyday and rational your reactions are is a real challenge for a lot of fat people.

It's easy for us to have a totally false sense of neurosis foisted on to our honest reactions, being constantly made to feel we are behaving strangely, when we are not. In the main to hide glaring double standards from its proponents, who clearly know better.

Reading these occasional incidences where the "legit", wander into the line of fat hating fire, can feel like catching your stolen dress shamelessly worn by someone else.

You think, hey, that's ours.

Real people....

2011-07-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

...in the flesh that is, are not photoshopped.

Said by the medical establishment. The voice of authority.

Let's see if that version can be twisted into a tedious fat v. thin slanging match.

Wrong way around

2011-06-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

I was intrigued by reading a post which brilliantly exposed the genesis of the "eating addiction" trope. You start with the assumption that dieting is absolutely viable, in total opposition to reality;

“Initially I tried to crash diet and even spent three days nibbling my way through just one can of tuna.

You then posit its almost inevitable therefore failure as defining you;

“But I quickly realised that I couldn’t diet as I love food far too much.”

That right there is the basis for the idea of addictive eating. Okay, this is an extreme version, but what people don't understand that even unextreme respectable dieting is likely to be surprisingly similar in terms of failure that people become convinced there is something very wrong with them.

There must be if they cannot 'stick' to this perfectly balanced, nutrient rich, tasty full of lovely fruit vegetable brown rice whole wheat goodness. There must be something awry. Even more than whilst eating this way, their appetite becomes really really big their intake, lots.

That's often how people diagnose themselves and how the professionals who still invest in calorie and dietary restriction, not because they believe it works but because they feel they need something.

I get it, the latter is how my appetite rose unmanageably and in a way both it and hunger started to break down in terms of functioning in a meaningful way.

Strange the way the idea of the way our bodies are supposed to work, defines as pathological, the normal response to that, even stranger, the status of the subject is what makes it this way round.

Celery Sticks

2011-06-17T11:47:00.000-07:00

I suppose this ad was meant to be funny-the celery sticks cancelling out a slice of cheesecake- was a dead give away...yet doubt remains as this is the kind of weird trip the mind takes under the influence of calorie manipulation.

Like when you're asked why you don't use the energy you're using to protest fat phobia, in the gym. Because expending a set amount of calories in the church of gym is somehow more.

It certainly made me giggle and when the other women comes to join the first one and she says-oh you've lost weight-I admit, I burst out laughing. It thoroughly exposes the overweening emotionalism of calorie restriction, something to think about when having to listen to the yawn inducing tedium of how "emotional eating" is a big problem fat people need to 'fess up to and how it is the key factor in compulsive/binge eating etc.,

Its also partly because it now does seem oddly abstracted, reminds me of those comedy sketches when people put a macguffin phrase in to signify some banal trope insiders exchange portentously; unaware of how absurd it is to those not under the influence of the spirit of the group.

I wonder if they were told it must be in there so they just dropped it in like stone, up 'till that point, it had a real air of veracity.

This kind of talk is highly recognizable from what feels like forever, from people mostly but not exclusively, women. I have to confess one of the main things which put me off ever trying slimming clubs, was the fear that I too would develop this kind of mentality.

I still remember when slimming club "points" came in. I heard a woman really going to town with how she realized that if she saved some of her points during the week, she could have a fun sized chocolate bar at the weekend.

I cannot tell you how furious it made me, I mean she sounded like it was the most exciting thing that could ever happen to a person. In fact, now that I think about it, she was probably having a small episode of hysteria, hey, it happens.

Even though my resentment of my weight was still in full swing, something else kicked in, a kind of feeling that it was beneath our minds to think this way.

The ad has created a fuss from those who identify as having eating disorders and apparently this is no surprise to some. On the other side are those who find this precious that those complaining need to get over themselves a tad.

I consider myself reasonably capable of telling when a mark has been overstepped, or I used to, now I'm not so sure.

Because if you really have an eating disorder, why would you think this kind of internal monologue was in anyway specific to that as opposed to the norm for most people who count calories?

A split was established by those who advocate for those diagnosed with eating disorders who insisted that the world of dieting had nothing to do with their condition. Wilfully overlooking the fact that calorie manipulation, weight loss dieting is a flat out disordered.

FULL STOP.

The authorities as usual are determined to create artificial chasms between the disorder they promote and that other stuff over their that is deranged weird and neurotic, usually enabled by the same impacted misogyny that has facilitated the characterization of the 'obese individual' (hurl).

What amazes me still, although I should have gotten over it by now, is the way that some wish to collude in the fiction that there are "healthy" and "unhealthy" calorie restriction approaches and the difference between having an eating disorder is following one or the other. Even though at the same time we are told that ED's are 'genetic'.

The real difference between someone who has a fully blown eating disorder and one who doesn't is not 'behaviour' as we keep being told, but how the body reacts to the same/similar behaviour.

Or to put it another way, if you've dieted hard like many of us in FA have, if you are not an anorexic, it is not because you were more 'sensible' it is that your body (I include your mind in that) responded differently to anorexic behaviour.

It didn't succumb to the pressure or the right detonator was not available perhaps.

Like the difference between a fat and thin person who are in all different ways similar in age, experiences, class, gender etc., is a different pattern of activity in their respective bodies.

What's interesting is the way this is subtlety being portrayed as a failure of awareness on the part of the advertisers, yet the real failure seems to be those complaining who seem unaware that there is nothing special about this kind of thinking, whatsoever.

Something reflected in the comments on various blogs to this story.

Those of us in FA who cannot stand "diet talk" when we are kicking back perusing the fatsphere, feel similarly. Some people enjoy mocking this but it shows people let their guard down when they are getting in touch with and examining their deeper feelings.

They are not in the same frame of mind as usual and that is why I cannot understand why any one would be triggered by this, when they have their guard is up, this must be all around them.

It's not that I'm unsympathetic as such, more puzzled by the desire to enforce distinction where there is none. It's again that weird conjunction where those who identify as having eating disorders enforce a boundary of bona fides between themselves and behaviour that is also disordered as if they are unrelated..

Well they need to realise that the reality of our anorexic worshipping nations has caught up and overtaken them.

Lose some hate

2011-05-19T04:44:00.000-07:00

Seriously, do.

If you have the nerve to respond to objections to your discourtesy, hating and wretched stupidity with "lose some weight" because you think that in some way justifies your attitude or removes your responsibility to know how to comport yourself in a civilised manner, then BITCH, you need to lose some hate.

If you wish to hate, have the guts, have the self respect to be culpable and accountable for that hate, rather than kidding yourself that you are somehow forced into it by people being fat at you.

Or the bogus propaganda the cynical feed your easy little head with.

Not being able to accept you choose to hate is a sign of conscience salving, it means you need to misrepresent things to yourself, so that you don't feel being mean and nasty makes you a bad person.

You are pathetic.

When we fatz thought we were bad, we thought it all the way, we didn't cling on to or hide behind others, we took it full on, often as children. That you can't manage shows exactly why you are involving yourself in hatred in such a cowardly and self deluding way.

In your mind blunted by your own disappointments, all this makes your sorry little selves come alive, well done in finding some way to feel like your miserable existence matters. It won't do you any good though, because it shows you have lost hope in achieving that in a positive manner. You know yourself.

Way to advertise your despair.

Your greatest punishment is being stuck in your bone head 24/7.

Poor you.

Obesus physic

2011-05-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

Physics has for some time required a new branch in order to fully contain all the observational data on how energy functions coming from 'obesity'- i.e. fatness in a Latin fright mask - that wisdom must not be lost in the ether of random speculation.

There's the base of what's known as the 'fat contagion' hypothesis. That's when a fat person close to you is able to provoke your body to start storing more fat. The free floating energy of their presence is converted into stored energy in your body.

This process can be so powerful, that it can have a kind of placebo effect. The mere existence of your friendship, getting in contact via e-mail or phone, or even just thinking of them, as in, "I wonder how my (fat) friend so and so is doing".

All pose dangers of energy conversion for the unwary.

You'll only win if you're a 'fast burner' as your system draws progressively more of this 'free energy' increasing its release leading to weight loss among your family and social circles.

None of this is scientific, it is based on science.

“Carson gets fatter as his dog gets thinner from diet and exercise”.

The fat transference phenomenon. As we know, energy (in this case fat) can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form. In this case, as someone (the non specieist definition, natch) releases fat from their stores in the form of heat, that then turns back into fat in someone eles's body.

The amount probably depends on some process of entropy.

This explains the seeming incongruity of successful weight loss industries along side society's upward weight drift.

I hope those encouraging fatz to lose weight are aware of the risk. More importantly though, this is no excuse for fatz to relent in their efforts to lose weight. If it ends up on someone else, you'll/they'll just have to live with it, dog eat dog is apt here.

We all know that we are surrounded by energy dense foods, what people don't realise is that these are not 100% stable. Although minuscule, some atoms of energy can escape into the air. This is mainly a problem for the susceptible who act as a magnet for them, a bit like this.

Hence the much touted, "I only have to see food to put on weight"etc.,

All this insight must be logged and collated. If studied, for its underlying meaning it could reveal missing secrets of the universe.

In the event of crisis PANIC!!!!

2011-05-16T09:05:00.001-07:00

Or perhaps, not.

Because that's total nonsense, isn't it?

This is usually more like it. In the context of a declared crisis this ideal is made more compelling by considering the track record and motives of those trying to stoke us into a state of panic and keep us there.

They know full well that beyond a certain point, that state is incompatible with higher forms of reasoning.

Which is exactly why when there really is an emergency, the thing to do is to remain as calm as you can, so you can deal with it as best you can, without succumbing to any rising feelings of fear and doom.

You know, from the emergency.

In fact isn't the ability to try to get oneself exciting a sign that there is no emergency?Although who knows, if we can panic, we might be about to create one by rushing around manically not looking at what we are doing and what our efforts are actually achieving.

Musical Youth

2011-05-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

I loathe campaigns to teach fat children to know their place or "obesity prevention" as they are creepily tagged. I've already said how unimpressed I am with Michelle Obama's insistence on taking this stance, I have to say though, I quite enjoyed this video and found it unexpectedly uplifting.

If anything that again shows how pointless and unnecessary it is to target fat children, rather than concentrating on building on the joy of movement and physial expression in children. Something we actually owe them for its own sake.

Teaching children to take possession and direct themselves physically, has a spiritual element. Not only is it an avenue of expression, release and sense of freedom, it can increase their sense of confidence.

Apart from natural highs, this helps to ballast their mental health and decrease the neuroses that seem increasingly prevalent among them.

Watching it made me wonder if someone has gotten through to those running the campaign as it features a noticeably fat child very prominently from the start, something I can't easily recall in the usual mainstream efforts to invoke child activity.

Although it's as likely to be in part cultural expectation, fat people are not by necessity excluded from movement like they are in those led by commercial interests, who see fat people exercising as tthreat to their delusional pretence that fatness is incompatible with (any) activity.

When it comes to dance its almost a mode of conversation, a bit like some cultures associated with gesticulating to make, support and underlie verbal expression.

As with those cultures he is expected to be part, keep up and express himself in his own style, included along with everyone else. I note the featured routine is a mix of running on the spot, alluding to skipping and certain kinds of dances that have relevance outside the usual context of 'exercise'.

I also suspect that might be behind Beyoncé wearing heels, if you look at her beforehand you can see she changed from trainers. I think that's about the constituent of teen girls who tend to stop a lot of physical activity quite abruptly at a certain age as part of defining themselves as women.

Hence singing pointedly about "a little sweat never hurt nobody".

A fraught sticking point with those not wanting to mess up their hair by getting sweaty.

Very important.

It does occur that it's a bit jump heavy and although one might dance vigorously in a club, I would not advise anyone to be jumping up and down on a regular basis like that in heels.

The spectre of things such as "Shin Splints" hover in the air.

But then, that's as much a defect of trying to use calorie wastage via activity to regulate weight, it's fundamentally flawed notion at the best of times.

The routine also reflects current fashions in the fitness industry, conditioning the body from a standing position, fewer gaps in shorter routines and using the whole muscle groups together to increase energy expenditure.

In other words, exercise has had a slow drift from punishing de-contextualized repetition, to more and more imitate real and/or pleasurable movement. So predictable and so funny. When I think of the people they've written off who struggled manfully with their more ill conceived efforts.

No matter, as long as kids of all sizes can be given more options to express themselves physically, as phys ed has virtually been jettisoned in favour of sitting kids at desks to make up for inadequate teaching and fulfil parental ambition.

This campaign may not do quite as much harm as I feared.

But I'm keeping my eyes wide open as it is very much a hope.

Downward dodge

2011-05-07T07:26:00.000-07:00

We all still start from the premise of thinness as the default and calories in calories out (CI/CO). The idea that human energy is a balance of what we eat and how much we use up in being active.

From this many fat people surmise we are efficient at storing calories.

But what if it makes more sense the other way around?

Starting from the very *(link contains weight loss dieting) fattest at over 1,000 pounds. Regardless of the amount eaten-that is part of your metabolic functioning anyway-the fact that anyone can reach that point requires a greater explanation than what someone eats versus their level of activity.

Fat people of all weights can tell you their weight is gained in stages, which means metabolic stabilisation occurs in between without necessarily changing eating or activity. So talk of "blowing up" or "ballooning" are a particular subjective take rather than a more balanced reflection.

No-one continually gains weight as people who've been on a weight loss diet for a while and 'take a break' do. They gain weight at a staggering amount a pound a day is not unheard of.

Rebound after loss often only takes a fraction of the time it took to lose it.

None of the fattest people ever recorded can have gained weight anywhere near that rate in a sustained manner from day one. To put that rate in perspective, it would take about 4 years for Mr Uribe to have reached his lifetime high.

What an extraordinary thought. That many who may be hardly fat or less have at certain points, gained weight at a rate which if continued would surpass the overall gains of the fattest of all time.

Which suggests the extraordinary pressure on weight is down, not up as we have been taught to think. And that's true for the overwhelming majority of us we are closer to slim than the fattest ever.

Phooey to 3,500 calories = every pound of your weight. Fattening is like the receeding of overwhelming force, rather than people jumping up for heady thrills.

As people get fatter we tend to expend more calories merely existing and in any activity. This seems like putting the lid back down, but not at the same point as when it was lifted.

A lot of fat people's weight reaches a stable point or range.

An explanation is required for why the receeding pressure is not being countered as well as why some bodies don't succumb in the first place. That is equally important and part of the reason why the idea of isolating fatness is unconvincing.

Slimness needs to be explained as much as fatness weight should be seen as a whole, which is why the segregation of 'obesity' requires explanation.

Rather than seeing fat people as efficient storers-we are just storing more, not the same thing-we can see slimness in terms of less upward counter to the overall downward pressure.

“Real fat women”

2011-05-03T09:17:00.000-07:00

Although sceptical of actual advantage of privileging thin in the main, one of the more surprising things to come out of this thread is how insecure a people are about their own sexual prowess and attractiveness.

Seems that when it comes to things related to sexualness fat phobia is being seen as an opportunity to to offload those insecurities onto us to make us epitomize sexual pathology.

People just cannot stop being "shocked" that anyone could possibly... or some of us actually do, even though all we hear about is fat children and their fat parents.

This "shock" is like fatty contraception.

It seems many people really need fatness to represent ugliness, sexual rejection and as fat people can never not be implicated in this kind of projection, we are also sexual refusers. Through our bodies.

"Not saying fatness is fugly of course, just that everyone thinks it is so although it isn't, that means it sort of is."

Our fatness is always 'talking' to other people. Fat at ya indeed.

It’s a tribute to my own past as a “real fat woman” that I've failed to pick up on these insecurities in others, even though its not exactly hidden.

(And note how often we are told off for various mis appropriations of real women and yet constantly accused of being "false" or "PC" when we attempt to deviate from excoriating fat hatred).

Like general body hatred has become the authenticity of slim women, fat hatred is our version of this, great.

How has it come to this in the age of feminism?

Now I see this goes deeper than I realised considering it from the pit of loathing fat bodies can become mired in.

I never quite understood the intense identification of “real women” as devastating insult to slim women, as the original point was women in the flesh v women as image, as much as it is about weight.

Fat

See 4-FERTILE.

Slim.

Basically the stereotype of unsexualness speaks to a lot of people's deeply held fears, offloading theose onto fat people is a route to settling the issue, oh the irony. Our sexual insecurities are no different than anyone else's, but if we can be made to epitomise them, everyone else can be freed!

What this shows above all is how insecure we all are and how difficult that can be to perceive in others, unless we can all agree on who's, "sexually repulsive".

I had no idea.

Shifting moral sands....

2011-04-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

The central posit of the obesity construct is weight as a product of your lack of moral will being the agent of your doom. You have therefore become your own enemy.

You must go to war with that enemy within. You must expunge it, in doing so you will attain the freedom of slim.

Whether that is true or not it’s fair to say people signed up for ‘anti obesity’ on that basis.

Vanity can make you try but cannot make you keep going. A deeper hook is required. People are right when they say pure vanity is shallow it is, surprisingly so.

That should be good news but in the topsy turvey world of fat hate, it's something to be shamed for.

On the basis that weight was in our power to control and that if we weren’t controlling it we were being neglectful in our duty to ourselves and our society. We could keep fighting what was effectively a non-existent "will to fa"t which actually turned out to be our own will to be.

We could see we were ‘wrong’ because we are good people. That's the source of vulnerability, not oppression, but the belief not only in ones own goodness, underneath it all, but even more in the goodness of others.

We assumed it would be simple as said. Eat less, do more, didn’t think they’d be any more to it. When it proved harder, that is what many of us tried harder. Even if we didn’t or couldn’t, we had the sense of decency to feel bad about that.

Everything changed the moment it was decided fat people were actually bad people as opposed to good people falling short, behaving badly, being fallibly human, if irritatingly so.

B.A.D-F.A.T.T.Y was the end of all that.

The first thing that flew out of me when people started asserting, a fat person is a bad person was “No I’m not.”

It came from deep within, if it hadn't doubt might have stopped me saying it.

It came from the part that’s still comparing your acquired ‘beliefs’ to actual rational common sense.

That was probably one of the first times I’d asserted myself naturally and unequivocally since starting my food restriction career. It was like the voice of me that had been stifled by complete obedience.

It was the first time in forever that I’d spoken from the heart, kept the faith, stood my ground with what I knew to be true about myself as if I was just a human being, rather than an empty puppet to be guided by wiser heads.

It was the start of me speaking against the flow of what I was told, it was the first resistance, the first limit to be set on the extent of deference.

That is when the crusade began to seriously overplay its hand.

I didn’t sign up to be my own enemy, abuser, avenger and destroyer. I got caught up in that as a side effect of keeping my eyes on the goal and doing whatever it took.

In a way, I was slowly drawn in and mesmerized by my unending gaze. I didn't connect the effects with the cause because it was "the right thing"

As we all know, if something bad is happening, it flows from the actions of badness; right?

I did not sign up to bear false witness to myself, but to uncover and face the truth, no matter how uncomfortable and act on it.

After B-A-D.

No matter what I or anyone else did, that sense of acting according to moral duty was over. Never again would it be anything more than mindless obedience and that just makes a mockery of all we have put ourselves through, taking for granted that we have no sense of self preservation or desire to protect ourselves from harm.

IOW owned for life.

That's always the way with bullies, once they've hooked you, they never think you will ever resist.

It turned people from moral agents of their will, into fall guys suckers or as it is said over here, complete MUGS.

Oh gluttony!

2011-04-28T09:49:00.000-07:00

How terrible thou art, fatz have to learn....

Wait a mo.

No one cares about gluttony.

I walk past excuse me, vomit past and present in the streets because people drink themselves to that point of intoxication, i.e. they poison themselves with booze until they have to hoick up the wretched surplus.

I can say this because boozing is cute and the signs that you've indulged overly, amusing.

Not being an imbiber myself, although I had a few "adventures" finding that out, I was actually shocked when I found out one can become singly or doubly incontinent under the influence.

Not because of that, but because I kept comparing it in my mind to their reaction toward any hint of 'over'eating. I couldn't help wondering, what if eating lots had the same effect, people would like, explode wouldn't they?

Not to forget the numerous associations alcohol has with all kinds of violence and abuse, although I've never been sold on the "S/he's so nice until they get a drink in them and then they become a monster" speaks more of polarity than enemy within, but anyhow, gluttony in the form of drink is acceptable.

Even though it speaks very badly of those who like to drink and get drunk, if you examine the themes closely. I've never quite got what to make of the "I want to have fun/relax etc., so I'll become oblivious to myself".

Like fun and myself, or the self with all the defenses I've built up is something I need to take a break from.

Ok.

Somebody commented on another thread about "celebrating gluttony" and I responded that gluttony wasn't necessarily anything to celebrate. In fact I don't having been a former glutton myself, I found it genuinely tedious and stressful burden.

Well, I say former, I think I can honestly, although I actually feel greedier now than I did then, because although I ate more my life ended up being built around trying not to be. I'm guessing its supposed to be a substitute for freedom, but feeling free is about being able to satisfy your needs with ease and being able to feel satisfied and enjoy it.

It's also about being able to feel hungry. I don't mean necessarily ravenous, but in need of energy to replenish your body.

But in truth, it's already celebrated elsewhere all around us. Alcohol, which is of course a food too, as well as a drug, drugs, clothes, gadgets, you name it, we are unquestioningly gimme, gimme.

I don't know how much is me and how much is my history of trying to restrict my eating, but that contrast never ceases to jar.

The 'need' for it, is already the failure of it

2011-04-26T03:56:00.000-07:00

I seem to be going through one of those phases where I'm not sure I know what anyone is talking about including myself.

So whilst I get to the other side of that, I thought I might mention that I didn't start saying "diet's don't work" until I got into fat acceptance. I'd heard it before for obvious reasons but felt reticence about asserting it. I thought that was about 95% or whatever much disputed figure-is not 100% right?

I'm sure that's innumerate, it is about probability that is out of every attempt 95% et al, will fail, (pre goal weight) rather than out of all dieters 5% etc., will succeed.

Although dieting is clearly a massive failure, how could it not be when it preceded the "obesity spike", which wouldn't have occurred or would have been swiftly reversed by it, let alone the actual crisis which was a consequence of that spiking. Apart from statistical inflation.

Equally, that's true of the need for dieting itself, the existence of which defeats necessary basis of calorie restriction. As 'fat humanity sceptics' (haters) are fond of saying, how long does it take you to notice you've gained weight? Not long, correct, as soon as you do, eat less/do more is put into effect.

Except that doesn't work hence resorting to a more extreme version of it.

There has always been something of the ritualistic about the whole culture of weight loss dieting, a smokescreen for the inadequacy of calories in/out with the distracting creations of magick.

Maybe it was this nagging at me.

Someone

2011-04-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

I found a picture of myself the other day and was taken aback. It was one of those head shot passport style photos, ones that are notorious for making even the stunning look wrong.

I remembered it as myself looking at my most disappointingly foul. I even remember the lower half of my face looking a bit shady.

I was mesmerized by it because I looked different. I could see myself and actually looked like someone rather than off putting. I was no longer an object, I hadn't even realised that's how I saw myself until now.

When you start to see yourself as you are making serious inroads in a habit of self loathing-and its true whether you are fat or thin-some people call that surprise beautiful. Sometimes it is, but more than any positive feelings, I just looked different, like someone, somebody, rather than just something to look away from.....

Lost identity

2011-04-18T09:42:00.001-07:00

I can't help thinking too great a love of quotation is the sign of a mind that thinks its cleverer than it is. However this one struck me immediately.

Without love, we lose the ability to possess a proper identity. Within love there is a constant confirmation of ourselves. ~Alain de Botton

When I was a girl, I made a profound error. Between my earnest little soul and whoever knows what, I'd got it into my head that people are so selfish, self centered and self absorbed, naturally, and that I'd better not bother with my ego or I'd become horrible.

I should concentrate my attentions elsewhere, on being good as it would be needed there. I was wrong! It seems the ego needs a surprising amount of maintenance, cultivation and above all protection.

Live and learn.

Alain de Botton's quote speaks to how absorbing fatness from the outside in, has robbed us of identity then love and vice versa. That curtailed and suppressed our own true responses, to the extent that they were not able to develop or even, appear.

FA is a reaction to that surpression, our induced passivity and where that and the hostile defining have led us. It has not restored a self defined fatness, beyond this, yet.

That is not a putdown of fat acceptance, but a recognition of the extent to which the view has interrupted a distinct view of our own.

The demands of answering to others meant our own connection to our feelings has faded and a fat identity is in a state of arrested development.

That lost (self) love has created an emptiness at the heart of our thinking and means we have circled around a shallow opposing of what has come at us.

Which is also, inside us. It is not so much internalized fat hate as we are part of the collective consciousness of default fat phobia.

That was where we truly "let [part of] ourselves go".

Use self or lose self.

Even those who have a relatively positive view of themselves as fat people, are part of the same, there is no escape. It's not enough to not hate yourself or your fatness, you actually have to think without quarter and I've yet to come across anyone who really does.

Self hatred is on top of that and is more in the fighting of weight and the yearning not to be what you are, not an admiration of thinness/ desire to be thin.

A lot of people will probably disagree with that, but I don't see why admiring other body types and and envying them means you have to count yourself any less.

It's the striving without respect of pain or cost that both creates and demonstrates the extent of your hate. In time, if we go about it the right way, we will rediscover and change that, restoring creating, getting in touch with our own sensibilities.

Before any expression or response to outside orders had to be 100% affirmative, anything less than that was labelled as the cause of our fatness. I'm not talking about mere objection on our part, I mean any thoughts that were not what they should be. Gung ho, proving we were committed to becoming something else.

We had to view ourselves as temporary, always ready to "move on" at any point.

We are the disease so we effectively had to fight an invention of our inner degeneracy, which turned out to be us.

There could be no middle ground, no righteous, balanced, fat view. No conversation or communication, only complete obedience any thinking which does not totally agree is non-compliance.

Full stop.

Either pepole believe in method, or in (the biology of ) people and no-one, including ourselves chose to really believe in us.

In modern society's framework of self definition and expression, this is unusual, I cannot think of anyone who matches it, although if they did, would I notice from the outside?

This unprecedented hegemony, between inner and outer worlds made one whole unbroken consciousness was conveyed using the influence of science.

Science finds truth and brings about answers with that. As we have all gotten used to it doing this, it has started a dynamic which can be reversed in our minds to our answers or wishes can create science, or truth.

Trust in its truth finding has made it powerful; "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Our challenge is demanding, what we have to be freed from is a view that is as much inside as outside us. We need to relearn how to feel about ourselves as fat people as we do about ourselves as individuals, as a continuous flow.

No split or switch.

We have not so much internalized as replaced what would be a naturally occurring view with something else, which wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't the view of those who are not fat and are hostile rather than objective or curious. It is not only their view, it is all their phobias and hang ups. Irrational fearful, illogical unreality, distorting any real observation or meaning to lies.

Removing one that is equally inside us as out. But it isn't fully realised yet and that is the real difficulty, even more than the resistance of others.

Of course they are resisting, that is the extremeness and narrowness of their chosen position, they have nowhere to go, there is no give in their stance. If they were going to do anything else but resist, they would not have erased our view in the first place.

The way things are now is more or less the only way that can serve the crusade. The decisions cannot be others because of that, crusaders will just have to reconcile themselves to our efforts, we cannot appeal to them.

What we have to decide is whether we really want that, or not.

Duty

2011-04-17T06:57:00.001-07:00

One response to society turning on fatz I’m not feeling is "We don't owe society health" etc.,

Apart from rejecting the idea society or its authority always knows how to 'acquire' health. We have a sense of duty about our own well being anyway. I see no evidence to the contrary unless you count not necessarily wishing or being able to do exactly what certain self declared experts want us to do any time they want us to do it.

Society though can speak to my sense of duty anytime and I will certainly consider it. Not out of toadying acquiescence, but because of all the mostly unknown people who strove, fought, suffered and refused to give in to whatever low standard was the form of their time.

In spite of the price they had to pay.

Whether they were privileged or skating the edge of destitution, whether they made their aim a small point of eccentricity, specificity or an all encompassing vision of better lives, they contributed.

Because of them many of us are alive that wouldn't be or still in the game in a better condition than we would be, they've increased our well being as well as our health. If that sounds overly dramatic, take a look at the infant mortality rates of developing countries and their overall life expectancy rates.

Take a look at the lives lead and see the absence of people who care enough to fight.

I move, freer, easier, better not just because they existed, but because they refused to let things lie as they were.

That is why any society I live in can ask me to do everything from pay tax, to re-cycle my rubbish, because if I can't do something to make the world a better place in any small way, I endeavour not to leave it worse off so that those who come or will exist after me will not have to reap that.

Thing is, if family, friends, community, authority, society invoke our sense of duty to take extra care with our weight because it is deemed a potential or actual problem. We listen, because we believe in them. That belief has to be be mutual, or not at all.

If it is not, that is where any duty they can invoke, ends.

Once that fault has opened, the duty relied upon is suspended along with the trust and that's fair enough because those who needed to forgo trust in us to formulate their premise and didn't and that was reason to rethink, should expect no better from others.

Until a way is found to re-gain trust withdrawn, any target of this has the right to withdraw its trust from society in return and tell it what to do with its proposition.

If I have a duty to consider advice as far as it is honestly known, it has to be honest and there is a duty not to impinge or depress my health in the process. That should go without saying, but as it clearly hasn't.

Society has a duty not to stigmatize us, for any reason or to any end if it seeks to, it forfeits any right to lecture about the health it seeks to mishandle. If it claims we are doing the wrong things because they're expedient for us, it has no right to do the wrong things for its own expediency, either.

Simple.

We fat people have already acted in good faith according to society’s dictates. We expect that good faith to be returned by observation of the facts. If that is not desirable, it should not desire to interfere, harass in anyway, until it is.

If success depended on acting on the advice of authority, the weight of society would have gone into reverse without any shadow of a doubt. It did not, because that depended on what authority could not deliver, efficacy.

Society has the duty not to mea culpa and not pretend we are to blame for that.

It is truly a tribute to the good will of fatz that it has taken many of us this long to begin to catch on to this, hence the dawning anguished fury of to hell with duty and so on.

I can understand that.

But this low class crusade and the base motives of people acting in accord with it, no matter how decent, will never write my heart.

That's already been done by better and that is that.

The only thing it can do is change my view of society and the people in it, most especially authority.

Things can never been the same as they were before due to the way our sense of duty has been cynically mis-used.

We are entitled to be more circumspect, the suspicion that was absent from the start of the project now, isn't.

Safe space detonator

2011-04-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

It's ironic, the other day I was defending "safe spaces" in the sense of what's the superior alternative? My point was, the so called "free speech" shouting down or erasing certain voices doesn't define or indeed respect free speech itself or there wouldn't be any need for these spaces for those who's points are logical and worthy of consideration, whether you agree or disagree with them.

I've never been at ease with the concept, apart from anything, they aren't as safe as all that. My feeling was not so much safe as space to explore what the mainstream has to squeeze out. Fat acceptance is because it has to be and I couldn't see how the ideology of the crusade could get beyond that without changing its objectionable nature, more or less wholly.

If it wanted to do that, it would exist in the first place.

I took myself off the fat feed because I didn't feel my feel for "safety" was in tune with what seemed to be the general view. Despite feeling I'd regularly been called out unfairly, I accepted if it was that regular, my feel had to be off, whatever I felt about it.

Although unsure about safety myself, I've not experienced all the horrors of the world so it's not my place to speak to the needs of others.

The way I saw FA spaces was a bit like one sees a college of law. If I crash a lecture on family law, insisting forcefully that I wish to discuss crochet, on the grounds of exercising my freedom of speech.

I'm still going to get told to leave because people are there to learn about law and wish to do so in an environment conducive to that. They put it on the tin "Law School". Fat Acceptance, see that? To attract the interested, but to dissuade the unwary.

I'm not being prevented from discussing the art of craft, and to insist that I am merely because I wish to impose myself into any context I feel like is churlish in the extreme and goes against any freedom of speech beyond my own idea of what that must be.

Creating a tyranny surreptitiously via free speech, yes, that is possible if certain things cannot be said. Yes I know that may sound to many like Orwellian newspeak, but it is actually their rigid idea not of what free speech is, but how it is maintained or works in reality as opposed to the romantic abstraction most of us cherish to some degree.

Linearity is often an abstract construct ignoring the way things are really more circular. That if you just keep going on and on in what feels like a straight line, without care you often end up coming back around on yourself beginning to achieve the opposite of what you were previously.

The feel and form maybe different, bu the effect becomes the same. That is why results, feedback, have to inform at some point.

There is a lack of faith in humanity here, if it was really so easy as freedom versus tyranny, this side of the line or the other that would be simple. They'd be no wars, no conflicts. Are there really people out there who believe these things happen because people just feel like eschewing clearly demarcated lines for bloodshed and turmoil?

Its the difficulty of managing an optimum balance and all the myriad cross currents of experience and belief that trips us up over and over and causes and increase strife between those with differing, sometimes similar views.

The thing about safe spaces is that this particular knot is subtle and hard to foresee (specifically). When you do not confront bigotry directly, however good the rational for that is, that impulse does not go away if anything, the confidence and conformation of like minds, strengthens and clarifies it.

Which means even if anyone on the same side pokes their head above the parapet in a manner seen as vaguely awry for any reason, no matter how trivial or even irrelevant, that can become the detonator of those frustrated impulses.

People in safe spaces need to try and keep in mind all forms of conduct have their limitations which have to be assessed along with their value.

Hate says the darndest things....

2011-04-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

I don't know if you've seen or followed thingsfatpeoplearetold. It could be painful viewing, I found it surprisingly cathartic in the main.

Along with people feeling liberated to behave anyhow, is consideration of the malice lurking around in our heads which moves us to air it, given opportunity.

It's supposed to be more acceptable in this case because we "choose" it. Nonsense, people choose a lot of things it is deemed unacceptable to witchunt them for, it does suggest people really need to say something to explain their need to vent. To justify it to themselves more than anything.

The urge is to demoralise fatz, with the kind of things people fear or have possibly been told themselves. To make us give up on whatever it is they claim we lack already, ironic when we are so often accused of "giving up".

Actually, I don't suppose it is that is a dominant theme of viewing the crusade and its effects, always seeming to induce what it claims to fight.

That element of trying to induce demoralisation feels like a personal reaction on their part about what people have come to believe should happen to anyone deemed persona non grata. A resentment that these things have been aimed at them and were not deserved and not at the real wrong doers, represented here by fatz.

This re-confirmation of belief and attempt to discharge what may have been used to police them, makes me feel we just don't have enough accessible ways of dealing with a lot of the nasty things we are told and how we store them in the basement of our minds.

We don't even seem to recognise how much they hang around. If they are hidden, or memories fade, we may boast that we can take it, we're tough. But of course this effusion of spite says not.

Our sense of acceptance of this treatment as something we have to grow a thicker skin about becomes a sense of hopelessness. This impotence makes us ripe to turn on each other and those running things sense and exploit that.

I suppose it goes 'up the chain' for all; it's a matter of degree.

Over and above the effect on fat people, I can't help being dogged by the familiar feeling of seeing people in ways I wouldn't usually. That if they were not under this influence, they would not wish to be seen in this light, at all. As perspective has been lost on potential effects on us, so too on themselves.

We are so used to people trying to people trying to show themselves at their best, the opposite is disconcerting, like bearing witness under some kind of false pretense.

When people talk about getting tough with fatz, apart from being laughably clueless, they don't seem to understand the way they are showing themselves has to change the way they too are viewed.

Gravitas, doesn't spring to mind.

It's so taken for granted that we have been cowered by the power of righteous rhetoric, how much of that was about seeing things the same way is not perceived. I feel we have been beaten down by that as much as the firepower of the crusade.

We unwittingly assisted and any absence of that is going to be hard to replicate.

Often the way repression of any kind fails is when the energy required is more than the perceived reward. Change will be proffered before collapse. Perhaps that's what this 'food addiction' meme is the beginnings of.

It will be very interesting to see the effects of all this as it begins to strengthen and increase, whether it strengthens or demoralises those who don't quite realise how easy they've had it thus far.

Either way, they'll lose, its just a question of when both they and fat people realise it.

Suspension of goodness

2011-04-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

A while back I worked out a pretty comprehensive overview answering the what is fat acceptance question. I worked it all out on cards, used a diagram to connect the main themes overall. I was truly inspired that day, unexpectedly so.

Alas, I left it some place and that was that. Usually things like that wouldn't worry me as themes swirl around my head and I feel able to replicate them.

This time not so.

One I do remember was the "suspension of disbelief". I meant why people find something as simple as don't stigmatize fat people too complicated to grasp. This is of course absurd in a little like going back in the day when it was too weird to say black and white people are equals.

As a girl, I used to joke that MLK could have been described, technically as insane for proposing this, given the cultural climate of his day. As we know, insanity is culturally mediated. Often that means majority madness=sanity and minority sanity=madness.

As many fatz are finding out to their cost.

People have to suspend disbelief to get on board with the crusade fury. They have to pretend fat people are their designated 'obese' role because they know us, we are them and they us we live amongst us. It's a bit like an actor in a torrid soap opera being fused with the character they play.

Often people who think they're above that 'confusion', only hoi polloi get carried away with sort of thing, but listen to any interview with an actor who's played some beloved role in some indie film and you'll hear the same you/your character, you s/he did, mash up in interviews.

When people latch on to a good character, villain or goody, it makes a noticeable inroad into our sense of the actor's persona, more so the actors themselves.

Fat acceptance is like those who insist firmly, they are not their character. Its hard to be relaxed when you used to be overtaken by the role yourself and are still squeezed between the aftermath of that and those who wish to keep you pressed into said role.

But really there's another form of suspension on my mind.

If you are on fire and I beat you with a heavy blanket or roll you roughly on the ground. I have to suspend good manners, propriety and most especially your autonomy to put you out. That's fine, I'm saving you. It would become problematic though if I only thought you were on fire and you knew you weren't.

Even if you were in some other kind of trouble, it wasn't that.

Yet, here's me insisting that you are and that trouble is fire and I'm going to beat heck out of you, to "put you out".

If I refuse to listen to you, which is effectively feedback on the situation-taken as I am by my conviction, I'm just beating you up, abusing you because of what I insist on believing. What could possibly be my motivation?

Further, where is the line on my actions and their duration to be drawn? If not by feedback, by what force?

Thus we have the so called "well meaning" fat phobes, suspending their own goodness in order to push us to do what we've done already, many of us still.

People some in FA think this is a comment on the character of the well meaning. Presumably because fat phobes insist on the doing the same, fusing their discontent with our weight with how they should judge us as people, when they accuse us of being sinfully culpable for our fatness.

No, saying they are not well meaning is a comment on this suspension, how it makes it very difficult for them to judge any feedback that will alter their behaviour to the better. That should be evident from I imagine that person's unhealthy, that means I can stigmatize them into better health.

But even if we overlook that, there is the construct they are operating in which requires them to write off any discomfort, distress or pain as just the devil within trying to have it's way.

And that is why no matter how nice people are when they start, they quickly descend as we have seen with certain folk recently.

My essential disagreement with the crusade is not the possible fat prognosis if that indeed that makes any real sense outside the calories in/out model, but of the crusaders ethical stance.

I have always maintained that I, we have nothing to fear from people who believe fat is bad news and are concerned only with our own well being. So are we. Even if there is disagreement on prognosis, they are not likely to bother us much, we will just disagree.
What I think most if not all in FA are saying is we get that you think we are heading for trouble, that is still no reason for stigma, full stop. We are rational, we have shown by the way we responded to all this that we are capable of being reasoned with.

There is no reason for any untoward emotive behaviour directed at us and we judge it for what it is, not for any purported intent however noble, we call BS on the premise.

The beautiful flow of discourse

2011-04-09T05:19:00.000-07:00

Trigger warning: The first link is to a site that deals with maintaining a weight loss diet, although that particular thread is probably ok.

There have been a couple of really interesting threads recently around the area of food and weight. Both show what can be achieved when there is trust. One of the saddest things about the whole *obesity crusade is the way we fat people have been robbed of an equilibrium of trust in common discourse.

That is too often ignored by those who seek to characterise this as a two sided battle between equally wrong/right ideologies. We in FA aren't getting a chance to be properly wrong or right as our contribution is on the defensive against histrionic attacks.

Its not that we are seen as suspect, we are labelled completely untrustworthy disseminators of our own (ascribed) set of pathologies makeing it virtually impossible for us to contribute anything that is more than crudely defensive.

Indeed that is the point, to erase us as our contribution can only undermine the convenient fiction written in our absence.

People who speak of pure debate-on whatever side-overlook that a necessary basis for useful discussion is an assumption of good faith on both sides. By that I don't mean, gullibility in terms of accepting everything say, fat people may say as the absolute end, but merely in order to hear what is being said and respond to that. Like a chain of exchange.

Nor do I mean gullibility the other way either, to take on face value what (anti/pro obesity) crusaders say is what they actually mean.

That is disjointed because they are clearly conflicted. It's not that I don't believe crusaders have no point of view, its just that view does not hang together cogently because they seek to represent what they themselves admit is bad as the height of moral goodness.

For instance we are told that it s good for fatness to be made such an intolerably painful and uncomfortable existence, via peer pressure that we seek to do anything to reverse it. At the same time it is claimed this is morally good because it is better for us and our health to engage in attempts to reverse it.

Whether we can succeed or not.

At the same time performing the actions associated with reversal has become more important than what is supposed to be their end, mainly due to the refusal to acknowledge true efficacy or lack of said actions.

So we fat people are stuck trying to engage in discussion as we always have we have been excluded because the desired fiction au courant is agreed upon by others (and some of us to be true). Which is why FA has been revived, to give ourselves voice, not to segregate ourselves.

All this is a waste, we have a lot to offer in terms of understanding more about how we function and what we need to function well and in balance and those against us could benefit from that too.

When you see these two threads, you begin to understand just what is missing from the crude and largely irrelevant discourse who's imperative is to make being fat hurt rather than advance our understanding of each other.

*Not 'anti-obesity' just 'obesity', due to the way the results do not tally with the intent, I feel the need to keep an open mind on intent.

Our credibility

2011-04-07T05:21:00.000-07:00

Talking (see comments) of credibility for some reason the focus is wholly on fat people's supposed lack of it, even we in FA tend to view it from this end. Why?

We have credibility, it just doesn't feel like we do.

Even those who haven't dieted cannot help but be immersed-to some degree- in that atmosphere of self disbelief. That is the source of our lack.

FA is in part about restoring things like this for ourselves and not just waiting for haters to bestow it on us (heck no).

First off what is credibility?

1. capable of being believed; believable: a credible statement.

2.worthy of belief or confidence; trustworthy: a credible witness.

Ask yourself do you and your experiences merit the above definitions? There's no point in referring to fat phobia on this, not because I disagree with it but because that position currently cannot accommodate our truth in any way that doesn't parrot their fantasy of what a fat person is.

The truth is we all exist in credibility, until something impinges on it, like a stream that flows freely unless its path is blocked.

If nothing interrupts this process we are at one with what we are doing and what is actually happening to us being the truth.

So we are credible, we just don't feel it emotionally. That is where our memories of the denial of ourselves really sits.

The interruption is the constant disbelief of the obesity construct, necessary to its existence as is and our acceptance of that disbelief as the truth. This not only interrupts our own, it replaces it. That doesn't stop the truth at all, it just causes our to be internally suppressed with falsehood doing the suppressing.

In order to recover from this, we need to remove those blocks imprinted in our brain and nervous system, allow the truth squashed and flattened underneath the lies to rise to its fullness.

That is not easy, it's pretty unprecedented to have such a direct experience of clear truth flattened under such blatant lies, the obvious parallel is being mentally unbalanced, when people think their fantasy is truth.

That is what we have been put through other people's fantasies imposed upon us and we need to understand that. We need to get a sense of our amazing resilience in remaining (relatively!) stable under this kind of duress, many of us since early childhood onwards.

When it suits, take a break and just connect with a sense of all you have done to fit society's model, all you have accepted-in the past- all you have acted upon, all the results, the ups, the downs, from as early as you want to through even to battling with trolls on the internet etc., if you want and just let that flow swiftly through your mind, calmly as you can.

For now, don't go too deep or upset yourself, keep the distance you need and jump over anything or stop and recover if it gets a bit much. You can come back to it.

Allow yourself to think and if it comes feel, this is what I've done, this happened I know it. Even if that seems odd, just stick with it to connect your mental understanding with that sweep of memory.

It doesn't matter if you don't feel anything at all emotionally, the point is just to go there in whatever capacity you can. As you repeat this, or of course, your way of connecting your emotional mind/brain with your memories and your conscious mind.

At some point your emotions will catch up (more) with what you know mentally, consciously.

Indeed, that is one of the great purposes of the conscious mind, to enable you to figure out what you can't always feel now, so that you can change or correct from the past and don't become a complete prisoner.

I'm sure the experience of FA is doing this, but it's just a suggestion of helping it along. Of respecting what you've been through and taking care of yourself.

It's important to stay relaxed and keep it light, be guided by how you feel. As you repeat this and/or develop your own rituals of connection, your experience will become more whole again.

Addicts, addicts everywhere....

2011-04-06T11:49:00.000-07:00

It's a staggering testament to the power of defining reality that an idea, no matter how absurd can just keep going regardless, because it is convienient to those in authority.

Because it is not accepted that calorie maniupulation is inherently defunct and that science has no answer to it's construct 'obesity', we are now to be labelled addicts.

This has of course been coming for a while, the only thing that has delayed it is not lack of 'evidence' (oh, since when has that stopped them) no it was that the idea of 'food addiction' is as ludicrous as it is reprehensible.

And guess who's well behind this swill? That's right our old friends (whom we should be so grateful for) because they study the effects of "weight stigma" for us out of the kindness of their hearts. No one has managed to note the effects of stigma on human beings, thus far, have they?

Addiction to food is a degenerate idea, because it yet again seeks to pathologize the human condition by pathologising the thing it needs to exist, food. I doubt very much that they are observing more than the heightened function of hunger and appetite systems, which can come in the aftermath of diet rebound.

By the way, what is happening to science? This feels like some kind of counterraction to the previous more progressive ideation of the discipline, as if an anti human original sin mentality is seeking to use science to impose itself on human consciousness.

Truly unpleasant.

As someone who should be fully on board with this bilge, I know that my disordered eating was a severely heightened response of hunger and appetite, not searching for highs, not that I'm hear to criticise that, but it is a mistake to see it this way.

We are designed to use food as a support for mood, if it dips low enough to try and stop that progressing, it's supposed to be a temporary measure, if matters are not resolved it can continue, but the answer is to resolve the underlying problem not to attack the defence.

Imagine a sword fight where someone snatches the shield because they've decided that's why the swords are flying. It really is that stupid and its all because those who are observing these things, insist their boneheaded reactions and prissy responses take overwhelming precidence over accurate understandings.

There does also seem to be the possibility that when your nervous system is too tense as a matter of course, this tension spreads to hunger and appetite via the nerves controlling them-why wouldn't it? And that causes this oversensitivity.

The reason it difficult to get rid of is because it is attacked directly, rather than treated holistically, reducing the tension in the nervous system overall. That's probably why it can yield to varying degrees to psychological councelling as that can cause tension that hangs around in our bodies.

Fat people's stock has fallen so low on the back of people's rising obssessional hate has twisted minds to such an extent that they are prepared to hurt themselves to get at us, seriously, thin privilege was one of the first instances of that if I think about it.

Rebuttal of this meme is usually met with the comparison with smokers or drug addicts and alcoholics. And that is the problem for all those people who keep on with this individuality ad absurdum, whatever you choose, is ok, as long as it doesn't affect anyone else, but we know this at best comes under the term "useful fiction", because here's where it does.

Drug addicts are right to accept the term as it describes a physiological condition, however things started to slide when the arugment about psychological dependency was lost-that it too should be deemed addiction.

Then there were alcoholics, again alcoholism in the susceptible can cause a physiological dependency. The problem was with labelling it a drug when it is both a food and a drug, which helps to explain its unique place in the history of humankind, virtually every civilisation brews some kind of alcohol.

Even though I don't drink I objected to this unbalanced reading of alcohol through the lens of those who have problems with it seeking to dissuade by pathologizing.

Then smokers mainly psychologically dependent on their habit sought to use the term addict to resolve the success of anti smoking campagins on their psyche most of them say they want to give up, versus their lack of this enabling them to do so.

So many of them sought the term addict as they felt this was somewhat of a shield for the undoubted hosility shown towards them in recent years.

Now this is moving on to fat people some of whom I'm afraid are using the same defence as smokers to try and parrry the intolerable hostility of the crusade. The implications of this are worrying, one thinks especially of children, if fatness is labelled addiction-which presumably means thinness has to equal anorexia, you cannot have one without the other- then the prospect of taking children from their parents or guardians increases.

Imagine people seeing fat children in the light of being fed drugs by their parents? As stupid as that is, the meanness of the crusaders is pretty reliable.

All I can hope is that enough fat people refuse this definition-I'm wary after the "real women" debacle that they may not-to dump it in the trash and bring some of the other crap down with it.

One thing is for sure, if it does become the law, it will be open season on the empire of rehab which thus far has not been subject to scrutiny as its victims are willing.

I really hope fat people are not suckered into this and kick the bejeezus out of it.

People not "at risk" for being themselves

2011-04-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

I clicked on this link from Lara's latest post, between both a couple of things brought me up short. First of all this from the OP;

Fat people due to stigma, victimization and villianized suffer low ecomonic standards of living which means we are more likely to rely on state services.

What stigma though? That of race, gender, class or fatness? The latter seems to be in effect, however its hard to see how that can be isolated from other factors. I think the truth lies in something highlighted;

Those of low income or lower socio-economic status [interesting phraseology] may be at greater risk for overweight and obesity, though the risk varies depending on age, gender, and race-ethnicity.

Presumably "lower socio-economic status" is some kind of euphemism for things over and above income. It is certainly arresting to see the suggestion that you can have a societal status that is the equivalent of having an actual low income whether you do or not so blatantly stated.

The claim is if you have a low income, or the status of someone with a low income, then you are more likely to be fatter, or not;

The study, published in the International Journal of Obesity, revealed that children from families with an income between £22,000 and £33,000 were 10 per cent more likely to be overweight or obese than those from families with an income of less than £11,000.

Seems poorer=fatter as a hard and fast rule is still open to doubt (though there may be a difference between the US and other countries) as my observations tell a slightly more complex story. Ethnic variance is also interesting as black women are significantly fatter than black men in both the US and UK.

Recognizing my doubts falls mainly under anecdotia as it is based on observation, I wouldn't say that's definitive without corroboration. Unfortunately the standard set by obesity hype is so low that one has to fall back on talents somewhat overshadowed by the age of 'evidence base', so it's not all bad then. I've always found it odd that so many people in FA seem so keen to go unquestioningly with that line.

This makes it seem a little too convenient for all concerned, possibly for divergent reasons.

Either way if the proposition is x people are more likely to be fatter then I'd advise "well meaning" (paid) wonks to state that plainly rather than convey any message of the lower orders as disease.

An "overweight" is a person, an "obese" is a person yes seen from the perspective of their body, but until anyone can show me what part of the self is not contained within that very body, then we can leave that supernaturalist hogwash of one's body separate from one's self aside.

A person cannot be "at risk" for being themselves, that is NONSENSE ok?
Because as we FA people keep saying, the human body cannot be characterized as a disease, if those who have the privilege of working stuff out have to come to that conclusion to get their point across, that is where they know they've got it wrong. If those on lower incomes seem human to them, of course.

The current urge to turn every aspect of human existence into the disease model as if it is some kind of quasi spiritual validation of us, is an unwise route to go down. Apart from it having an air of the occult, it gives an unbalanced and ultimately unbalancing view of human nature.

Whether you're a fat phobe or not, if they advance it with fat people, is anyone really dull brained enough to think that is where it will end?

It is too extreme a power play not to become a tightening noose around all our necks.

This isn't so much about whether people agree or disagree on the various weight prognosis bandied around it's as much about what you are really seeking to convey with your definitions. The vainglorious idea, real or imagined, that the sort who write this kind of thing are the standard by which all humankind should measure themselves by is something they should not seek to validate by inveigling it into 'science'.

Luckily no-one would be silly enough to insist higher incomes/status are at greater risk of thin or underweight.

Whatever.......

2011-04-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

It's funny, I'm rather flitting between trying to shift my focus away just responding to general fat hating idiocies and trying to untangle the knot of how I express myself. The two are related, even though they are getting on my nerves separately.

I'm still writing stuff and thinking, but it is surprisingly tricky to move towards a positive view from a more reactive one.

The problem is not disagreement it's the frame.

As I keep saying how can there be 'sides' and what is the one other than the only side, our own? The idea that being concerned about obesity is a side is nonsense, people who work to eradicate real diseases (and that may be the definitive clue here) are never on the 'other side' of those with said condition and if they find themselves with differences they seek to persuade because that is their only real point.

This is not about fatness, but 'obesity' a meaningless construct of turning a body into disease whilst pretending that confection means it is a separate disease. Like saying being working class is a disease called plebesity but it's not against plebs, it's against the disease of plebesity. Oh what's that? Being a pleb.

Indeed.

So this is for the health of fatz right? So we are clearly in favour of that. Great, so who's the 'other side' of that? As we cannot be against ourselves and have proven beynod doubt we are not, whoever is against us is on the 'wrong side' in fact they are on the side of what they claim is the problem a threat to health. That can be the only other side to us.

Whatever the origins of 'obesity debate' it is haters who deal in it. How many times do you see that phrase come up in the 'sphere? It's surprisingly rare and usually in reference to crusaders 'logic'.

That may be why they are so fond of this 'debate' coinage.

They started with the erasure of us, again (ask yourself why if we are the aim of the crusade) so they can insert their own creation of us and themselves, for if it is not about us it's about them and what they need. If altruism was the motive, they would not need anything, the reward would be helping us, instead they end up creating the conditions in which to most bring about the prognosis of their construct, presumably so they can see it well enough to fight it.

Anything we say that is not on their script is something to be 'debated', presumably whilst Rome burns as the adipocalypse proceeds.

The crusade starts from an adversarial position, wholly inappropriate to health, it's more like an an anti petty crime drive (why they changed the name of that campaign and didn't stick with "jump for joy" which is lovely, I don't know).

Whilst disagreements about strategy, treatment and prognosis may occur, there can be none when it comes to the health of the subjects concerned or someone is in the wrong. And it isn't us, as we've shown by our willingness to follow orders that we care about our health and believe in acting for it, like anyone else.

When it all became too much, sometimes after a lifetime of it, we are seeking to detach ourselves against totally against the tide, undermined, blocked, ignored, when not erased and told we are not doing what we are doing.

When we were throughly disenfranchaised from mainstream health, we sought to include ourselves, whether HAES, or do our own reserach find our own ways, because the drive to heal, survive and thrive so strong was thwarted.

We have nothing to prove to anyone, including ourselves, about our sense of responsibility and our need to take care of ourselves, it is those who claim there is another side to that, who need to explain themselves.

All of this knock about stuff is fine but I'm tired of caring what people don't think. I am bored with feeling stuck up in the head of those who are seeking to remain stupid because that is all they can do, because here is where they need to operate from. I mean that it the ancient terminology, as in refuses to acknowledge the truth. That has always been the strategy of the crisis.

It has gotten ahead for two reasons, for who supports it, number one and by its use of the injury done to fat people by the exegeses of the calorie restriction and it's assorted emotive paraphernalia of self abuse, hatred and a sense of being a dupe and a scapegoat.

When they publicize said views, I want our thinking in its variety to be there for other fatz reading to know that isn't the way the truth and the light as presented, but I don't really feel it's my duty to disabuse anyone of wanting to hate fatz as long as they don't make it so by acting out in terms of discrimination. In the same way it's not my duty to dis-abuse anyone of religiousity merely because I am atheist/humanist.

In fact I'm ambivalent about denying them the beauty of discovery for themselves, or indeed a more human/e centred religiousity which is good enough for me if that's what speaks to them. I still trust haters enough to believe when they see our recovered presence they will respond to that as they responded to our continued abandonment of ourselves.

It can be a thin line between challenging an orthodoxy of falsehood and being drawn back into an unwinable battle. I don't mind lost causes it's lost causes, but tedious ones, I cannot stand. I usually feel argue your corner to all comers and win or lose at least raise your level of debate, but the extreme fundamentalist fiction of this precludes that growth.

It has no flexibility. Either we are in control of our weight via counting calories or we aren't. What is the 'moderate' centrist view of that? Its falsehood has been exposed, by its practice, reality has defeated it. How can we better that?

Contact with it feels like it's regressing me mentally, even if I get better at making points.

You know how black and/or working class youth are caricatured as being reverse snobs, celebrating ignorance and stupidity as authentic?

Well this obesity crisis is the real deal, this is where stagnancy and stupidity are celebrated and the height of intelligence. It's the usual, we are asked to prove dieting doesn't make thin, by those advancing the idea of fatness reaching a crisis point-during the era of mega profit slimming and fitness industries. And a boom in money spent on obesity research which in the main has not broken with it.

In other words, the premise of the crisis proves our case.

That is why fat acceptance's scurrying off to 'prove' what is evident is not elevating intelligence how can bowing and scraping to stupidity do that? It makes you mind supplicant to the mentally flatlined and how ever silly, they lead.

If we held out more they would give us more and that might require more of a challenge. But we let them off the hook and wonder why we feel so unreal. We are never going to feel more real until we stop behaving like their factotums and more like their equals.

Society is owed nothing

2011-04-01T07:02:00.001-07:00

We are told endlessly about the costs of fatness to society, well I can tell you, being 'a unit of obesity' has cost us plenty.

I'm not in the mood to go into that, suffice to say, we owe society nothing. If fact I'd say, it owes us. Not only for ignoring that we've tried everything we've been asked to try, done everything we've been asked to do. But for holding us responsible for the dysfunction of what we've been asked to use.

We were and are not responsible for that failure.
We have been directed in our actions from the outside, we did not insist on dieting, it was insisted that we must diet to lose weight. It isn't the fault of the designers that they've failed by they are responsible for refusing to acknowledge the results and they've failed because they refuse to learn from all that we have given to their method.

If people are disappointed with our lack of weight loss, so were we, we are learning to get over that, so can society, if it wants to. If it cannot, that is not our problem, not should we be harassed, taxed, insulted or have to pay for it. We've paid more than enough, in things more precious than money.

'Estimates' about health costs of fat people, from those quarters who refuse to acknowledge are impossible to trust. Even if they were there are other costs to society, social costs and we have no idea of who costs who.

Any extra costs, perceived or real are generated in the current system with fat people stricture to a great extent into required behaviours, that makes society accountable for any costs it feels fat people accrue as it interferes greatly in our behaviour from childhood onward.

Anyone who feels any of our costs are too much, should consider themselves no longer a believer in stigmatizing fat people and the consequences of that.

Mind the gap

2011-03-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

Doing my usual hiatus thing amongst other stuff for now.

Anyhoo, (via Bri) this is what I mean when I say thin(ner) women must reclaim their bodies from the (mis) use they've been put too. What's really being sold here is not 'skinniness' but lifestyle/proto anorexia more than anything.

We know this, for instance the lack of people becoming skinny not only makes no difference in curtailing or ending its influence, it actually seems to increase it.

On one side aspire to thin bods on the other aspire not to be fat creating a lovely pincer movement.

Charming.

People are thin, by their physical nature and inclination. Some may live by HAES, that is they maintain what's termed a healthy lifestyle for their sense of well being and health. Perhaps some do manage their intake somewhat as do many of other weights on a varying scale.

Unless they are restricting to wastage and ill health, they should not have to put up with being symbols of semi-starvation and pain merely because their bodies are repeatedly associated with this by commercial and other interests.

We should be careful to refute it using their bodies to symbolize what we are refuting, accepting the bait and ignoring the switch occuring. It is not necessary, their bodies are not the problem anymore than fat bodies. It is the underlying philospohy that is the problem.

Teaching young peole especially that they should abuse themselves to become acceptable, or even that they need to earn acceptibility.

If slimmer women also refute this, it will help us all to remember bodies are selves, not aspirations or cautionary tales. They need to assert the truth of their bodies the same as fat people are in the process of doing, talking about themselves holistically and not allowing this view of their bodies to be the only ones.

As we know fatness cannot be conflated with 'overeating' calories in/out is a misdirection, which is why following it creates such collateral and other damage. That also means that skinnies or (death thinz, ha, ha) aren't necessarily starving either, capicse?

To say either one is to use ci/co as your default position and defines purely weight as the outcome of an eating disorder and calorie manipulation-too much or too little. Apart from the ideal BMI of 18.5-25 and they should be afraid of becoming fat and join in to 'prevent' it.

We need to critique what is really being sold, ideology of weight loss. Remember saying thin bodies are starved is the same as saying fat bodies are overfed, you cannot have one without the other and the absence of stereotype in one, absents it in the other.

Don't we not know any thin people? Are they all swoony from lack of energy, exercising for hours a day nibbling on salads? Are there enough hours in the day for them to do a commensurate amount of exercise more than what many fatz have done only to remain fat?

I have stated time and again, weight loss is not the same as calorie manipulation, the latter is supposed to be the former but clearly cannot be as perverse as that is to the literal minded.

That means weight loss is not inherently dysfunctional that's calorie manipulation, even on the occasions that it doesn't particularly hurt.It is the nature of it, versus the response and design of the human body.

Thin bodies are created by the unique interplay between genes and circumstance the same as any other size.

Don't make the mistake of being a willing recipient to the lie of bodies as conflated with stereotypes of behaviour and eating as you are automatically doing the same to your own.

Whatever thinner women think of FA, we all need to unite in an unofficial alliance to tell certain interests that our bodies are not for sale. They cannot just stereotype them and use them to symbolize anything they please, leaving us with the fall out of mutual and self alienation. That "speech" is not free to those paying for it.

See you after this one.

Bullying

2011-03-21T07:23:00.000-07:00

I was surprised by my reaction to the Casey Heynes incident. The violent ending sickened me. As much as that was the sight of two youths stuck acting out a scene set up mainly by the wills of those not present.

One ended up being slammed very hard into the concrete reality of consequence unlike those who've helped set this up. Literally and metaphorically, his world was turned upside down as bully became victim and victim became avenger.

The only people who 'deserve' that more are those who think mob rule is just a part of the toolkit to pursue their own ends however deranged. Convincing themselves it is for the good of others to disconnecting the obstacle of conscience.

The one who found out that his quarry was as human as himself and could like himself be pushed to a point where the normal rules don't apply was of course Ritchard Gale, the smaller boy in the video. The other boy whose fear and fury he was unfortunate enough to detonate was Casey Heynes.

The games society plays often comes out in less conditioned minds, in this case children, but not only. We are oh so shocked of course and we utter some mindless defence about how "children are so cruel" etc.,

Children don't tend to know enough yet unseasoned (/deadened) by the acceptance of a critical mass of hurdles which obscure motives or finesse re/actions. The gaps they slip through and the ways they do, break through our sense of order.

They are still learning.

These two are the ones who got hurt both of them, Casey over a longer term and Ritchard over the shorter term, for now. Even if this was a private matter this will stay with him into the future would you swap with either?

The latter was lucky to escape with the damage he sustained, he looked very shaken, possibly concussed/winded if the wrong part of him bore the impact that would have written a more serious ending and who would have payed for that?

I don't think its too much to say this is a pretty accurate microcosm of what's going on with fat people generally. We can see who represents us but also who represents the common or garden folks on the 'other side. Both manipulated by the same distant hands and left to fight it out amongst and police each rather than either or together confronting those who would wish to set people against each other.

It illustrates some of the complexity part of it the way victim/victor are flipsides of one another and how the former can erase and reduce you. The shock that anyone could be 'angry' enough to taunt, hit or hurt you is something that is so inexplicable, that part of you can remain frozen in that initial shock for there on out.

What the bullied position can hide is your thinking as well as who you are, Casey clearly a bright and articulate boy didn't hit back before just out of fear, but out of awareness of his own growing strength and wariness/unsureness about that, in other words, ethics. Those who can't stand to be hurt often cannot stand to hurt others, equally.

That can place them in a position of withdrawing, which can draw out the bully in ourselves into advance, merely by the absence of a perceptible counter force. Often its a question of how soon that effect happens to us all. This cycle can continue its dynamic and only when the reasoning brain can be overcome by something more primeval and direct is it arrested.

Those who speak fatuously of the "time bomb of obesity" need to understand this is a real ticking time bomb they might want to consider when they insist laughably that its time to get tough with fat people. They might want to consider what reaction that leaves to having one too many boundaries overridden.

Because when you push beyond another then another this little vignette sums up your course. I don't necessarily mean violence, hopefully its more reassertion of selfhood after being inveigled into partial surrender of it.

Then too is the shakedown of all the feelings repressed in acquiescence to the crusade possibly along with any force that has liberated them. Something we all know phobes have a low tolerance for as it forces them into contact with their less noble qualities.

They resent both this and being encouraged to go this far by their 'betters', something fatz who assume any potential backlash against the crusade managers will come purely from fatz.

I think people are right consider whether the response was disproportionate, it's true, he could have assumed a more assertive stance and warned him to back off. But Casey himself has spoken perceptively about this, he knew things got ahead of him and mixed in with this explosive rebound reaction was the fear garnered along the way to it. Those seeking to test people's limits should factor that in under risk.

When you play with people beyond their capacity to tolerate it what you find may be as much of a shock to them as you and not wishing to find out may be what's keeping you 'safe' more than simple fear. Feelings remain unexplored for a reason. Beyond past abuses there was being hit squarely in the face, more threatening than being hit lower down somehow, even if if it is less painful.

The final straw was the little dance by the smaller boy, that complacency left an opportunity for a surprise counter attack. A person can tolerate in sadness what they cannot in being toyed with.

The balance of power shifts from one to the other, in an instant.

The reaction of hero of a revenge fantasy is fascinating. It confirms the suspicion that a lot of haters underneath their bluff and bluster are desperate for fat people to reassert boundaries that have been breached in different ways by all.

And problematic as the hero worshipping is aside, there is something repellent about a lonely person gaining 'friends' via that narrative.

Those who believe in constantly appealing to the pity of those who've willfully taken the bully route should remember that the fat boy became someone a lot of people could identify with. Because violence aside, he became present again when he re took his ground.

Fat acceptance all the way along

2011-03-19T07:05:00.000-07:00

I started this as a response as I wasn't sure how long it would be, I decided to bring it here;

I agree that we live in a society that teaches even thin women to think of themselves as fat.....

I think this is the key theme here, I've gone on record as having no truck with any false equivalency or attempts to assuage guilt about participating in fat hating by trying to shut out fat people's full voice but for me, this is something else.

Its about the energy and potency of fat phobia and hating. This has by that potency of investment spilled out onto virtually everybody. Therefore excluding anyone from participating in an honest embrace of whatever sense of plumpness/chubbiness/fatness they relate to is essentially self defeating.

It just shuts off a channel where that potency can remain intact to be re-invested in the whole.

I really find this sense of erasure by the mere presence of someone else's body to be a hangover of being shamed by said body type. Slimmer people need to wake up to the fact that going along with the aggrandizing of their own bodies has turned them into a living reproach of other bodies, it has depersonalized their own bodies, differently.

So called thin privilege does not come for free. They too need to reclaim their own bodies for themselves like fat people. Part of that is to no longer be afraid of or hate fat/ness, in others or perceived/ feared in themselves.

Needing to reclaim their bodies from what may have seemed to be a position of strength but was only relatively so. A less weak position rather than a strong one.

Each body must be capable of being taken in its own right and draw its own rules not just exist in comparison, positive or negative with others.

That goes against what fat hating teaches us to do-to compare bodies, to our own detriment or praise rather than from a self accepting curiosity or celebration of a varieties of quality or type. Nobody's body should be seen as a cipher of 'purity' to insult or browbeat another's, in the same way fat bodies should not be a cipher for 'impurity' or badness to create fear or hostility of becoming so in fat or thin alike.

We can delight in our differences in ways that don't have to annihilate anybody. If we feel that the mere presence of someone thinner does then we have to push on and find ways to work through that. It is showing up that habit of comparison and how automatic it has become.

That's why I love this post because it suggests what is possible when you no longer see your body through hostile gaze. Other bodies no longer assault or belittle your own and you can appreciate them as they are.

Fat acceptance spaces are great in that they enable us to create experiences where we start that process of exploring and working through how we feel. We are letting our guard down by doing this and this can cause things to sting or trigger us in ways that may not when we have our defences up in the world.Where our learned numbness of survival and hurt is in play.

I don't blame people for feeling upset and angry about what feels like a dominant and privileged body pushing out their own belittled one. But that is the shame or self consciousness of what we seek to throw off inside ourselves and out.

FA can extend to learn not to allow those rules to reign in the fatsphere by seeing those bodies in their own right, rather than as they are usually presented to us. To develop a new relationship with them as well as our own. Just as thinner people need to develop a new relationship with theirs and ours that is not based on superiority but on acceptance of the validity of all.

Only approving your body because it is assigned as 'better' also means that it is not good enough as it is, it has to be made into 'better' before it can be worthy. Think about what that means. That is hidden at least in part because of the constant comparison with negatively rendered fatter bodies. It is a loss made to look like a win. Ironically it seems increasingly so as fat bodies are hated more which then encourages increased hatred of fatness. It is a vicious cycle of its own.

I'm afraid this is the deal a lot of thinner people have bought into. A little bit of fellow feeling for fatz could have saved them from it, that is why some of them keep trying to make equivalent what is not. They think they can avoid it that way.

We have all done things to be ashamed of to varying degrees, we all have to try get over that. We all are facing this, fat people too. We are not 'winning by victimhood' so trying to make out that thinz hurt in the same way is not the response needed.

What is required is for thinz to want to reclaim their bodies from an illusory 'pedestal'. The question for me is are you up for that? Do you feel like you are giving up something?

That has to be worked through because you are not. Respect and positive rapport with your body cannot be surpassed nor equaled, certainly not by any relative 'privilege' that brings with it anxiety and fear that you may become what you most fear.

It's similar in a way to smaller fatz and larger fatz dealing with your position in things without feeling your experience is belittled or erased merely by being contextualized.

Step away from the fat kids, Michelle

2011-03-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

Seriously, back off. Under the pressure of her campaign against childhood obesity her mind appears to have been taken to a new low.

Fat children are helping to destroy the US economy?

And to think fatz are called (((((paranoid)))))

Those people who insist on going on like Martin Luther Fatz going about the nobility of the person underneath the virulent irrationality yakka yak, really need to get a grip on themselves.

Well meaning is as well meaning does. And I'm sure MO is well brought up enough by her charmant mother (and late father) to know that means its not what you do, but also how you do it that matters.

She speaks approvingly of their influence on her and her brother;

"I always felt that my father and my mother were unconditionally rooting for me. And kids need that. Looking back that played such a huge role in building confidence in me and my brother very early. Whether we succeeded or failed, we had two people who lifted us up and supported us....."

My emphasis.

Every child indeed, unlike this;

Childhood obesity is affecting your workforces too – obese children are less healthy and miss more school on average,” leading to more parental tardiness and absenteeism at businesses in their communities, she said. “When we talk about childhood obesity we are talking about the workforce you are trying to build, businesses you are trying to attract, budgets you are trying to balance everyday,” Obama said warning that businesses may be reluctant to invest and build in communities with an unhealthy future workforce.

I don't give a flying fig if hating fat children senseless cured cancer if anything good can be achieved, it can be achieved in a good way just as easily as bad one, it depends on the way your mind is cast on it.

And what about the fact that POC/ working class children are fingered as disproportionately fat? Do they really need the first lady talking things up in this way, now attacking them as drags on productivity present and future?

There is a background to this of the black/POC middle classes feeling able to say certain things using obesity as a cover for what would be given greater scrutiny otherwise-as ever with this trojan horse crusade of pointless blame.

The is complete diversity of unity on that one, doesn't it make you feel all warm inside?

It doesn't matter what people's faults may or may not be the crusade cannot help because the hatred turns into a self perpetuating momentum with it as the primary object. Other righteous things which can be achieved without it, get pushed out.

I remember when Barack Obama was campaigning and he got a bit 'down home' with a crowd of (mainly) black people, telling them in effect that they need to lay off the fried chicken if they wish to succeed in shattering the paradigm of seeing themselves only through the lens hostile/uncomprehending eyes fused onto their own.

Sorry, did I write that out loud? I meant to say, if they wish to get healthy/bourgie/ acceptable. Even if he and other feel black people need to look at their diets, he has to recognise that they and other POC/ working class people know the obesity campaign;

a) ignores and/ or denigrates them their needs such as the physical energy they use in their work.

b) has a distinctly off putting theme of cultural dissemination of certain values (assumed to be socially improving rather than a product of being and a support to being MC), no1 anorexia as a lifestyle. How would that make sense when you're always pushing yourself hard?

Yet seeks to c) demoralise any seeking to try and inch up the income/ class ladder, by diverting their time and energy into the gym, as well as making them feel lowly for not being any bit more than thin.

The narrative of "I have so much more energy since I've gone to the gym" doesn't necessarily work if you use up a lot of energy in your daily life.

I'm not against physicality, on the contrary, I come from a culture where movement is virtually an extension of speech.

I feel like you talk with your body, feeling disinclined to move-if there is no physical impediment- is like losing your voice.

Being told to keep talking when you've been shouting at the top of your lungs all day and want only to whisper or be quiet by someone whose whispered all day in an sitting around in an office who needs to shout and bawl to release a build up of nervous tension. Well, it hardly smacks of tailored or unbiased 'advice', when some need restoration others invigoration.

This doesn't go with the burn calorie frame because it doesn't recognise movement as a healer only as an energy waster. Low income folks flogging their guts out making minimum wage a living wage also disprove 'active lifestyle' shibboleths about 'being active'=healthy and slim, to the extent that they are erased as 'inactive'.

People don't even bother to check out the validity of their ASSumptions when they manage the picture is not so conforming as phobes want.

What is bad about this speech, and I sincerely hope its a blip and either her innate good sense or some adviser/factotum will pull her from the precipice, is not so much what it says, although that is enough, its that her mind is showing the signs of this obesity fighting mental implosion of reason that is so unnerving.

I'll say that because I wish to bend over backward to avoid trading in any cod mental diagnosis, but I have seen this happen time and again where any one declaring war on the adipose cell as personnified by fat people child and adult alike reaches a point where their brain turns.

Like the momentum of 'fighting fat' causes the mind to cross a mental line a kind of reductio ad absurdum descends and they can no longer see any sense worth a damn and lose all perspective that they are talking about human beings like themselves. Or in this case, like their own children.

Jamie Oliver springs to mind.

What is upsetting is it never matters how nice and well balanced the person is or how well they start off.

I say this without mirth, it is always sad to see this happen and I've never seen anyone who doesn't if they go at 'anti obesity' hard enough. I feel I need to stage an intervention here because I would not like her mind to go the way of other fat fighters as it is an insult to intelligence of any kind.

Your weight is the whole of you

2011-03-18T06:43:00.000-07:00

Fleeing the mainstream view of weight is not easy. We have all been formed by it to some degree, alternatives have slowly been erased or sidelined by its need to re-create things to serve it and in its own image. It is difficult to escape it whilst it still forms the basis of your own understanding too.

At the same time, trying to find out and express a new basis of seeing which reflects your own understanding and experience.

The basic premise we've been taught is control of energy=control of weight. Everything about diet lore has to serve it, because reality doesn't. It created this hegemony by using the former necessity to replace reality.

That's why we fear extremists and extremism, its impulse has to be to re-create reality in its own image, which suits few if any or it is meaningless. That is the truth of the crusade rhetoric and why restoration of truth, destroys it. And why it must be resistant to logic, it is too narrow and inflexible to absorb it.

The first thing is it detaches weight from self, setting up a false view that weight is detachable. We hear an example of this when people say "What about fat people's excess baggage? They should be charged for that, as I'm charged for any extra weight in my luggage."

This is a bit like calling yourself your body as if the latter is a possession owned by the essence of you floating around in it like a little pixie made of air.

Truth is, your weight is yourself it is the whole of you and indivisible from self, no matter your feelings about that overall size.

By that, I'm not talking essentialism, saying that your weight is destiny or has to be, I'm saying whatever you want for yourself/body, it will be with the whole of your self/ your weight that it will make it happen.

It cannot be you as a slim person with excess baggage that is just a metaphor of the idea that weight is an extension of your character which you can jettison at will.

Even if you could change or control your weight, that metaphor would still be wrong. Whether fatness is, sometimes or wholly a process/es of some kind, it is clear that it would have to be the whole working together.

The same way weight is gained.

It is of course also true of our feelings especially our most heightened emotions good or bad, something our cultures do not allow for. But the fact that they are using us to tentatively ignore this at arms length, indicates that is hypocritical BS.

So no fatz needs to be on board with it, unless they want to be.

So what does it mean to think of weight as the whole self, rather than a jerry built extension attached to the real you?

I'm not sure I know, I'm just taking the plunge.

Fatshion

2011-03-18T06:10:00.000-07:00

I have to say, I've little interest in clothes. This wasn't always so. Way back I was really big on self expression through clothes. Then as time continued, I found myself increasingly caught between my vision of a slim canvass that I could never make manifest and the reality of what was available to wannabe fat style icons.

The implosion came when I threw a strop and dropped out in a tizz, I just couldn't deal with this anymore.

I tell you this hardly interesting little tale is to explain how surprising it is that even though my style impulse continues to languish in oblivion (as far as gladrags goes) I still find the fatshion scene, specifically on tumblr to be a compelling and moving view.

It's not that I feel to go and check in with any regularity, as I do with the wordy fatsphere but when ever I do for some reason or other, its arresting.

It seems more accessible and more effortlessly diverse than the wordysphere although dealing with images will bring that out more clearly there does appear to be a greater representation of fatz of all varieties.

It sets up an alternative view, rather than reacting to a redundant one. It looks at the fat body and deals with stuff through that. It doesn't so much bypass the "oppression narrative", but by looking at it looks forward, rather than looking back at fat hate and trying to tunnel out with 'evidence' of what has no basis above the desire to hate, full stop.

It deals directly with peeling off the layers of fat phobia by coming to terms with the vision ahead.

The equivalent of what a lot of the wordysphere does imposed on to fatshion, would be to set it in a clothes store that only went up to a size 14 and then attempted to use its stock to explain why this is not good for sizes above.

It just creates for fatz using our experiences to write fat acceptance. In doing so it restores more of the vibrancy and character we've lost to the annihilation and erasure of the crusade.

In a way its an embodyment of the normal eating/intuitive eating process where you bypass a mind overloaded with unbalancing negativity and go straight into setting up a positive realitionship with food by doing so establish a new positive loop.

Rather than battling old negative ones within the terms set by that negativity. Giving the chance for it to be at least be tamed by that abandonment and withdrawal of energy.

My combative side, which dislikes a situation where there is only one point of view pretending to be the only one possible when it is not. Even more when it splits itself in two and assigns a bit to those who oppose it because it beliefs that is its privilege.

Then claims this is a "debate" because it is rightly ashamed of its own hating view, like spraying perfume on a turd.

Engaging with it as if it is anything but what it is enobles it and allows it to continue to set our agenda, in its own absence, power indeed.

Power it does not deserve on any level.

The proof of that is fat people referencing themselves and the normalcy of that for all people, in doing so, they reclaim it for themselves as a matter of course.

Cant, spiked

2011-03-15T04:29:00.001-07:00

Sp!ked recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. They should be congratulated for personifying the truth that if you are truly a humanist-with or without religion-the crusade cannot really make sense.

For the uninitiated, spiked are not liked, the founders include self declared Marxists who continue to proclaim themselves such. The reason they are not liked is because in the post fall of Communist leftist shake down, their political settings appear to have shifted out of kilter with what passes for the general left right now, or the other way around, depending on your view.

Questions about their political position come from all sides. However for me their take on a lot of things, whether I've agreed or disagreed have made more sense than many of the more mainstream left.

They take on many unpopular stances ironically Patrick Basham himself a former tobacco lobbyist had the nerve recently to question anti smoking campaign tactics. Whether you agree or not its worth bearing in mind that the obesity circus is unseating smoking as outstandingly harmful by virtue of both its peculiar hype and its linking of fat prognosis with that of smoking.

There was a time when I thought that potential bang up would cool the heels of anti obesists, wrong again-almost always when expecting reason to prevail.

Fat person admits: "Its self inflicted" over here....

2011-03-14T09:18:00.000-07:00

Gotcha!

Having one of my periodic mental fluxes where many things are flying around my noggin, but I can't get a handle on them. People who say "Tell us more about your FA journeh the vulnerability the struggle, so that we can identify with you." etc., Don't seem to realise that the mechanics of mental change/adjustment can get old.

The romantics!

Whilst trying to sort out my ludicrous "drafts" folder, I've been trying to put into words my feelings about why we should absolve (no I'm not afraid to use that word) medical professionals and scientists for their part in the stigmatization of fatz . It seems this is unconscionable because it would hurt their feelings- they believe they are saints and pure in heart and deed no matter how they act- they don't deserve it apparently.

Why?

Because they have the insolence to demand a free pass to mis behave in exchange for moving towards a more ethical stance. We are not yet able to be so demanding which makes it our duty to shuffle along and absorb this and not go along with it as usual.

People will listen to us, if we stop being defensive for non fatz, defending yourself against attack, however early, for fatz= feeling hurt about being hurt.

Lets not get any airs and graces, after all it upsets everyone why not stick to our role of cringing arselickers, grateful for anyone who might pay us some mind for a mo? So they claim, whether they follow through or not doesn't matter, we'll just try harder.

To hell with any potential negative consequences of this to us or anyone else we don't have time or energy for that after considering every one else's trauma about confronting what they're capable of.

Indeed, why not also seek to pretend to the old 'absusers logic' "I hurt you, because I care".

If they didn't care, they'd just have left us alone and at least have done us no harm.

Now that I have partially managed to calm down, I'm still struggling to put it into words because after a calm start I just descend into the fury of Hades and this time I say, no, I will endeavour to calming explain why that is bull hockey.

Ho hum.

Anyway, I'm just going keep at it until I at least can say what I think needs to be said, as well as wrestling with this time I can say it, totally self inflicted ish-yoo.

Ahhhh, that last bit felt good because this time, it's true.

Open Windows

2011-03-10T02:10:00.001-08:00

A while back the fatsphere was up in arms because fat people were being blamed for global warming. The real irony was rather than fat people being a metaphor for human destruction of the earth fat people are more like the earth itself.

After insisting we must have certain goods and services, out of more than necessity to support our various cultural peculiarities with attendant status symbols. We use up the earth in pursuit of these skimming over consequence. Especially if it clashes with our reading of what the bottom line is.

The earth, although we know it has its own design, must obey us thus the dance between that and how it actually works begins...

When signs of the earth's accommodation of our will shows in ways we deem offensive, fury ensues and accusations are flung around. The earth is bad, non complaint and misbehaving for doing the only thing it can, operating to its own design.

I wonder though if my brain was pointing to something else, what if a better model for thinking about human metabolism, is weather and climate rather than "thermodynamics"?

I don't pretend to have any real grasp of either. I've no doubt physics can explain exactly why diets don't work. Some people have already spotted the cals in/cals out flaw, more calories in, more expended, less calories in, less expended.

As for climate, all I know is that weather is climate adjustment on a more day to day basis (hence climate change) and the earth's temperature control.

In the post ci/co hangover we still told to assume weight is a mere product of eating and/or activity, when maybe it has a different primary or secondary purpose to merely being the sum total of eating and activity, and that is to regulate and control our inner climate and temperature.

Eating is obviously about energy and nourishment for the body to use to rebuild/replenish and even destroy its cells, a basic definition of metabolism.

We are told from ci/co, that if you take in more calories than you use, you'll gain weight.

I've lived with one of those types who eats a lot and remains slim. The type who often sweats when they're eating a hearty meal. If you put your hand a few inches from their forehead, during and some time after a meal, depending, you can feel the heat coming off them.

It's not unique to them more a question of extent. There are other sites on the body that are supposed to do similar. There may be other things that also waste energy along with this, gut bacteria for instance.

So for them, rather than energy intake causing weight gain, it triggers their body to just waste any extra through burning. It's like opening the windows in a house that's too hot. What happens if the place stays hot? Is fat part of the body's transfer of energy to cool itself?

It reminds me about years ago discussing why people gain weight with someone trying to wriggle out of the straight jacket of ci/co, I ended up exclaiming "It's like it's [the body] stuck on store, stuck on store!!!" Storing fat that is.

Something triggers the body to keep storing, it stabilises or continues gradually or less so. Sometimes it seems as if once that pathway opens or is opened, it finds it easier to keep using that way for whatever purpose it is putting it to.

Fat people use up more energy in survival and movement, if size is adjusted for our metabolic rates don't vary much with slimmer people. This is the factor of stabilizing weight in some of us.

But now I'm thinking that maybe these counterbalances either don't kick in or peter out in some people.

I don't and have never believed weight is purely a question of genetic destiny. It is too responsive to and influenced by too many other factors. It's not so much saying everyone can be a weight outlier, but far more can probably than do. And that's probably a matter of circumstance; genes, environment, absence/presence of counteracting factors.

By the latter I mean things like pressure and stress, how strong and long term and unrelenting they are. That can play a crucial role and is for me the source of any weight/class differentials rather than food which I think most suspect is largely a dead end. Even if it wasn't, there is no reason why it should be the way even if it was true.

Weight change is noted after the fact, mostly it requires no effort and is a product of either time or underlying change. That is the only viable way it can be reversed. The idea that any pain or torment of any kind must be present is purely a sop to those who insist on their favoured * trigger warning fetish of restriction.

Muscle confusion

2011-03-04T10:59:00.000-08:00

There are some extreme fitness workout regimes dealing in a notion calling itself muscle confusion. Your body adapts to a regular set of exercises so if you keep switching them you'll 'surprise' or 'shock' your muscles into a greater response. Taking your fitness to greater levels, as it adapts to this new stimulus, more than if you kept going with your same old routine.

It's the surprise that is said to 'confuse' your muscles. This came about due to a plateau effect occurring when dedicated gym goers stall in their progress towards their fitness goals.

The general idea should sound pretty familiar especially to fat people who've had a career of using dieting and fitness regimes to attempt to become slim dandy. You'll have noted that when it happens to you, to your body it is not happening it is dismissed as examples of your laziness. You plateau because you are not doing it right or you're shirking lying and kidding yourself about what you're doing.

Only when it happens to the slim gym devotees, does it actually attain validity becoming observable and worthy of response. That last bit should especially be emphasised worthy of response.

It's how progress happens, one thing leads to another this is a microcosm of how fat hating can induce a punishment of boredom and mental stagnancy on being being fat, overall. I'd be surprised if this effect was not being parlayed into 'fat people's smaller brains/stupid' trope.

Sometimes it is you that becomes 'confused', often you can get to the point where you don't actually feel sure yourself what you are and are not doing, not sure enough to stand your ground in any open discussion.

So you go on with your life and eventually somebody 'valid' enough can give voice to your experience. When this occurs, fat people are never referred to of course ever. Never "This is what so many (fat) people have been talking about/ referring to in the past" etc., Nor is there much doubt amongst the devotees that they're too lazy or incompetent to be able to describe the things that happen to them as if they are real and define human experience.

Such can be the strange spectating role of a fat person, removed from their own experience. Only having it confirmed for sure by others. When this effect builds to a certain point, you get that haunting lack of credibility effect that we mention so much, in varying guises.

Imagine if we'd been able to be as human as we were, how could we have innovated and added to the fitness genre? How could we have shaped a more generally inclusive fitness culture by merely responding directly to our needs and therefore others not fitting the gym bunny ideal?

How much better off would we have all been?

Self harm

2011-03-01T09:17:00.001-08:00

Whatever we human beings do for themselves no matter how strange hard to fathom or self defeating it seems-to others- are always trying to do some good.

I loathe the snide take of people harming themselves as a motive for their actions, or "self harm" as it fatuously calls itself. It's like a factory owner polluting the environment, the motive maybe profit or achievement, the pollution a side effect, not its purpose.

It's not actually needed to call in question the cost of our actions to ourselves and/or others. Its fine to say someone is harming themselves and they shouldn't, it's defining that as their ends which is cynical as it smacks of putting someone in their place, whether that helps or not. It's about putting the needs of the caller before the called, as with concern trolling.

Which is of course the source of this rubbish, other people claiming to act for others may well intend to do them harm as a defining cause for those actions, that's plausible. And that illustrates the phrase, to convince you that you are as much your own worst enemy as someone else who may well be, usually to compromise or impinge upon your will in some way. Persuading you to give it up to others who are more trustworthy and legitimately motivated than you, after all, they told you what you are for you.

Wasn't that nice of them?

This label has taken root whenever people think something shocking is going on real or imagined and people are behaving in ways that are causing them or others around them especially problems or just discomfort but they cannot just stop right it right then and there on demand.

They get this label and they have to 'confess' to it as they tend to be told portentously, this is the first step to dealing with their inconvenience and in their desperation to move on/ please others and/or themselves, they submit.

Any objective questions such as, how often can the urge to do certain things be stopped dead through direct force of will alone? Even if they are not seen as negative. I mean, if you study history for years see the world in terms of it, love it, can you stop thinking about it like that?

What's the difference between that and not be able to stop a negative behaviour dead? When does it cross the line from how the mind works to pathology? That's the problem with flogging the disease model to describe every inconvenience or imperfect situation, the danger of pathologizng humanness. It gets to the stage where normal existence feels like a sin or wrong in some way.

Because if the answer is hardly as by this point most people who could stop would have already, then classifying that inability as "self harm" assumes a deliberate willfulness that may not exist.

There's also the self serving instinct on the part of those who do not have the 'problem' seeking to use that to create a more positive view of themselves, and not having this particular issue makes them very clever and knowledgeable about how to end or reverse it. Knowing nothing equals knowledge.

Their brilliant insight is along the lines of;

Stop doing what you're doing and the urge to do it will go and you'll no longer be doing what you're doing. That's if it's even the cause of whatever they deem the 'abuse'.

They can't see any reason for any one to do that, because....they're not, this means not doing it nor wanting to is the same as feeling an overwhelming urge to do it yet not acting on it.

Absence of imperative is the same as ignoring an imperative.

The saints may sneakingly admire those they perceive as sinners but in their head, the former assume they are not because they fear the harm it may do them. But having unexpectedly positive feelings toward someone does not mean you want to do as they do, not seriously. It's an assumption that you need to be stopped by anything but absence of inclination.

Like those who claim they'd love to be unemployed and laze around. No they wouldn't or why aren't they? It's an expression of their frustration not a life plan.

Putting it down to a judicious assessment of risk because that makes people feel better though. Every cloud has a silver lining. Someone's problem is another one's opportunity for self esteem building, even if the scope is limited by the fact that you are already much better off than they.

Hummm.

We can see the outcome of this, that the obesity=death angle and the pretence that dietary finagling is the answer means that we fat people can easily be characterized as 'self-harmers' as we won't stop being fat.

Real women

2011-02-26T04:12:00.001-08:00

"Real women have curves" started out as a play written by Josefina Lopez. "Real" refers to women in the flesh as opposed to the airbrushed images of women used in advertising. The title as a whole is most of the response to a question. Why do actual women, women in the flesh not resemble these images? The response; because real women have curves.

'Curves' was not necessarily a euphemism for fat per se, it has an undertone of the way women from certain classes or groups might be thin or thinner if they did not exist in their social/racial/ class milieu.

It referred overall to the kind of body not honed in the gym or by exercise regime but shaped by the activity of a living working existence, often discounted as activity because it doesn't appear to make or keep you thin enough. It does not by definition exclude slim or even thin women, nor necessarily include fat women many of whom do not see themselves as having curves or being curvaceous. I never have.

It touches on a precursor to the current computer airbrushing controversy, which is nothing new. Before computers it was the skill of the people like make up artists and more especially photographers that created these images.

It is problematic in part because its not from the usual feminist sources but a more lower middle class take. It was the assertion of pride in being a woman in the flesh who felt the pressure to aspire to a certain size yet was fighting back through asserting the reality of their existence.

It's that pride and directness of assertion of body integrity that was picked up by the late Anita Roddick's Body Shop with its Ruby campaign.

Looking at the campaign poster you'll find that it is about supermodels versus all other women fat thin and inbetween alike of real women versus the images of women presented to us, affecting the way we all see ourselves regardless of weight or body type.

However when you read Anita Roddick's explanation you can see problems arising, it derides the bodies of the thinnest women. You might also note that Anita Roddick was never exactly fat, she actually once put on a fat suit.

And this is often part of the problem, when those used to a certain level of entitlement tend to return fire, they do it from there attacking other bodies to make the point rather than being positive about everyone's.

In the midst of an establishment crusade directed at pathologising their bodies it's not surprising that many fat women have picked up on that way of trying to reclaim self respect, when just being positive about a fat body is almost meaningless being way too broad a leap to make. They can see 'curves' more readily as a positive way to represent their fatness amidst the most unbalanced and hateful negativity. To assert and restore a sense of integrity to themselves and their bodies in lieu of anything else.

And it's often to answer more or less the same question that hasn't changed, the irony is this has now been medicalised and lent spurious authority by what purports to be a health campaign underpinned by science. It's like full circle, the message conveyed by RWHC is accessible with a directness that speaks to many in a way fat acceptance does not.

Most people have heard the term "Keeping it real". That use of the word already had traction and meaning before marketing used it.

Its an empowered and empowering response for many, in spite of its problematic elements, to something that should not be asked in the first place. It's assertiveness appeals, it seems empowering and does not require people to label themselves as oppressed or victims which is demoralising and humiliating, something some people in FA just can't seem to get their head around.

Even though FA wants to be diverse, this tends to be upturned by only listening to the kind of people it wishes to impress.

Mainly the same types of people who are directing or making it their business to enforce the crusade socially. Who feel at liberty to make assumptions and to interrogate the kind of women who are feeling the "real" thing, about their bodies and lifestyles in a way they would not tolerate directed against themselves.

I'm not talking just about race or creed and not one social class either, both Josefina Lopez and her central character in the original play managed to get to university. It's about people who have low incomes, work hard and aspire. The kind of people who's lives commitments and actual real life existence the crusade blithely disregards and sees their perception of their irrelevancy to it and it to them and their needs as an expression of the degeneracy that makes them fatter or plumper than they the better off feel they should be.

I'm afraid fat acceptance is not reaching them much right now and when it does, it doesn't appear to be greeted with much enthusiaism. Maybe that doesn't matter after all that's pretty much in keeping with the general view.

But if we are expected to bend over backwards to understand the more elevated classes and their contemptuous attempts to hide their disdain in concern trolling, then I fail to see why other responses less offensive than this should be dismissed without consideration merely because it doesn't cloak itself in any airs and graces or the language of acacdeme.

We can choose to keep slamming this out of hand, or we can seek to ask or even try and understand why it seems to be such a powerful message speaking to so many different types of women. Either way, it does not seem to be going away.

Defining compulsive eating

2011-02-24T11:48:00.000-08:00

I happened to find this entry in wikipedia, it was one of the most upsettingly ignorant things I've laid eyes on in a while. What could motivate someone so clueless into bothering? Rarely is this subject covered and on a rare occasion that it is, the person clearly has absolutely no idea what they are talking about and is credulous and offensive with it.

So I decided to try and describe it from my understanding and I warn you I do not go for the typical eating disorders mentality, this is my understanding of it having experienced it myself.

Compulsive eating happens when your natural hunger and appetite signals increase substantially out of proportion to the current energy and nutrient needs of the body. Eating is normal so its switch hunger can be less or normal or above.

It is not a mental illness that definition comes about by starting from the same basis as dieting and mixes in a bit of obesity nonsense too. It goes we are in full conscious control of what we eat , therefore if we are eating a lot it is harmful/ a killer and because of that a compulsive eater must be mental.

Rubbish, it is a mechanical imbalance, like having eczema because your body's production of skin cells is out of balance. It can often be caused by stress and emotional issues but it's also often like being fat, it's not the seriousness of the situation that causes CE or weight gain, but the sensitivity of your response to that stimulus.

So if your body is sensitive to stress in these or other areas these responses occur at the same level of stress as those who remain thin or continue eating normally because they don't have that tendency.

It is the case though that in some it is triggered under duress, mine was elevated to disorder by trying to restrict my intake of food to a healthy diet. It upped my desire for foods that I wanted to avoid and that developed a momentum of its own.

There is also feelings of upset about having the problem adding to the distress which can put you under a lot of pressure. But I'm reluctant to describe eating disorders even anorexia as mental illness because I find the basis, dubious a lot of it is down to the reaction of other people, like fatness is defined by everyone else whilst we are silenced.

As the basis of eating is normal and we have to do it, the appetite needs to be back in harmony and the hunger signals/desire to eat, lowered. And as the aim of addiction is usually to stop taking the substance neither the treatment model nor the definition make sense or are useful. To me, other people differ.

The only food addiction is alcoholism, because as well as being a food, alcohol is a drug and that has another genesis, craving rather than above normal signals.

Hunger rises from the body to the head. The idea of false hunger or head hunger is wrong, hunger is hunger it may be of a different kind, like when you have a craving for something as opposed to acute hunger, just needing energy, but it is no less powerful a signal for the fact that you may not need the energy to live.

The body has the capacity to trigger hunger (how much you need to eat) and/ or appetite (what you need to eat) in response to moods and emotions. What's called comfort eating. This tends to be mostly innate and widespread. Some don't have it, some have it a little, others have more but don't put on weight or much and others find their limit is inexhaustible.

The problem is not the eating, that is a symptom, the issue is to relieve the problem that caused it.

Dieting or food restriction is a very bad idea if it is in full flow, it will only stoke it up, I didn't realise this until after I stopped trying.

The thing about compulsive eating is its not about pleasure its about the opposite in a way, lack of pleasure. You'd think that would cause the hunger to fade but it doesn't in this case it seems to stimulate the signals further, in order to try and close that gap.

All the time I had the problem I honestly cannot remember once enjoying eating, I felt embarrassed about this for a long while, it never affected the drive. The only pleasure I got was the relief of these endlessly nagging signals that actually did almost unhinge me at times, because it felt like nothing I did would make them go away for long.

It made eating a demoralising experience in the end and boring, yet, that never affected the overriding need to eat. The only pleasure I felt was a bit like when some one's standing on your foot and its hurting and they (eventually) get off. Its relief not pleasure.

That's why its so well name as compulsive, it is a lot like compulsive actions like hand washing. Eating becomes a mechanical hand to mouth process with no shape, no peaks, just the grip of a mounting panic like desire and the temporary relief of it.

It's like the desert, really dull and stretching out seemingly forever.

It's as if your overall lowered mood of depression or heightened mood of panic/anxiety (or all) has spread to your eating and appetite too but instead of quieting down, it starts to shout moan and nag endlessly.

Everything is ramped up to a higher setting, hunger, need to eat, reaction to the sight of food-you feel totally distracted by it, that gets really old too as you can't concentrate on other things and the way hunger feels has a strangely overpowering emotional impact I didn't notice until I really started recovering.

It's like the feeling shakes you up in an unnatural way the difference is quite disturbing. It is ludicrous to say it gives you a high because you can only enjoy eating so much and more doesn't equal more enjoyment or any.

It is a relieve of the trigger which may be raised or affected by emotional disturbance mood imbalance but it does not dilate your pupils or make you walk unsteadily or fall over you can tell when someones high if the writer can point to footage showing compulsive eaters falling about in a food induced stupor I'll be convinced that some people get high from it. There can be a trance like quality during an eating spree but please, you can get that travelling down the motorway. Trances are everyday phenomena, I don't need a disorder to go into one.

Otherwise I'm calling BS on the high, altered state of consciousness salaciousness.

As for not being physically hungry, no, but your body is often prepared for it and that's what no-one points out. I'm sure some people vomit or whatever at times, but mostly your body accommodates it. When your hunger is functioning normally that tends to be really hard work sometimes impossible.

I know I can't force myself to eat stuff if I'm not hungry so I know the difference. He says that the brains of people with CE get more stimulated by certain foods, but when they analyzed the vomit of bulimics they found they were made up of the foods they were avoiding.

Though never that, I can relate, my diet was increasingly split and the foods I craved were really the ones I was trying to avoid. That's why in the end I've had to let go of healthy eating as it would not let CE fade if I'd kept it up.

It isn't just cutting calories it's restricting foods that can trigger episodes of eating. All that he calls withdrawal could be and are consequences of trying to treat it. Which I'm not sure about because I wouldn't touch OA (I refuse to link to them) with an extra long barge pole, but I think they do exactly what made my problem stop eating certain wrong foods.

Some of them also calorie count and believe weight loss=recovery. The only reason they go on like this is because they are useless, they do not treat or cure it, they just fight with it and presumably support each other in that.

They are welcome to it.

So summing up this page it is overwhelmingly utter tripe.

Addicted to survival

2011-02-23T09:21:00.000-08:00

Bri led me to a discussion about fa(t)shion, I'm afraid my interest in that area is still dormant (not sure exactly why). So the comments gained my attention more than the post itself. Although the usual fat hate derail was present and correct spewing its usual effluent over proceedings it still managed to be unusually varied. It featured other streams of thought one about the place and value of allies.

I've been looking forward to people reclaiming these 'events' by being taken up with the intensity of actual ideas. Although I know moderation has to have a hand even to this extent, I hope this is the start of something.

I have to admit though one of the trolling moments caught my eye showing as it did how the rage and fury has meant a lot of notions are going unquestioned at all ends because they are usually either not heard or ignored.

Someone called April responded to the 'food addiction' wheeze haters think is eau so clevah right about now, at the end of this comment;

Lastly: How can you be addicted to something you have to have in order to survive? That’s like saying I’m addicted to breathing.

The response from T:

I am not trying to diminish the rest of what you say…. but “How can you be addicted to something you have to have in order to survive?” Are you joking?

To be fair, it might be in the wording but what is the counter you might ask? Me too, let's find out from :[

Gluttony, or eating in excess, is the addiction of food.With your logic, anyone who has ever tasted alcohol will forever be alcoholic. It doesn’t make a lick of sense.

It's easy to laugh, we've all under the pressure of hearing something that outragous to our sensibility failed to be able to explain why that is just sooo ridonkulous.

It amuses the way they dealt with their unquestioned sense of righteousness bumping into a modicum of polite countering. Parlaying their shock into that is just so absurd I can't even find the words, which of course hides the fact that you have no counter, doesn't it!

(I won't tell them if you won't)

This tactic might work (thus far) in the context of fat but when you start invoking addiction, you are talking about something else.

What April says is true of course addiction is the wrong model to use for what is necessary for our body's even if it is in excess because that excess has to be an imbalance of what is required rather than the acquired necessity of that which isn't.

That it seems difficult to differentiate actual necessity from that of acquired necessity shows in part the amount of leeway given to the subjective feelings of addicts about their addiction. I have to say that has always seemed to me to be because the addict persona comes from the male persona.

The extent of this means that something we all need food and eating is compared to something we do not, as in our consciousness, the need the addict feels has assumed a greater power even than the need to eat. IOW addiction feels more real, more of a necessity than eating.

Part of that is also the trivialisation of female experience or ability to define human reality from her experience, i.e. fatz. This has actually compromised all human beings ability to understand how eating works, which is why it can be described without irony in terms of addiction.

The irrationality of all this has always pissed me off no end it permits the rancid " you can be addicted to anything" horsejiz.

NO YOU CANNOT.

If we continue the example of breathing, hyperventilation or over-breathing would be the correct model-if imbalance is actually present- and that hyper pre-fix tends to be used when vital processes are out of whack.

Because they are innate they have inner machinery-so to speak-dedicated to their continued function. These cannot be attacked or removed without doing the same to existence, so they must be balanced. To be frank with you that would be a better bet with addiction, in the sense of re-balancing the underlying chemical basis of addiction.

Addiction is when the production of pleasure chemicals we need to function (rather than survive) are compromised, due to manual intake. The body reduces production as a reaction to them being taken to reduce the possibility of overdose. To a certain extent depression has a similar problem, it can be a deficit, like addiction or a faltering of the system under assaults on your nervous system.

When you have an idea of how depression can undermine function, reveal aches and pains-mental and physical- you otherwise wouldn't feel-you begin to get a sense of part of the addiction process but also why abstinence is such a load of shizz. And why it fails.

Yeah, that's sounds familiar doesn't it? Judging efficacy by its actual results rather than what they are supposed to be. Keep doing it and blow your mind.

The difference between the way we see over-breathing and overeating, shows how far off a rational track the crisis mentality has put us. The excess in a necessity especially is usually about lack elsewhere in the same mechanism, like a see-saw with one end up in the air and the other down on the ground. Not knowing what that is makes it hard to deal with genuine cases of hyperphagia and/or polyphagia.

As an aside, binge/compulsive eating disorder/s should probably be "polyphagia or hyperphagia nervosa". Because a) that tells you something about them and b) it's not about eating nor is it necessarily about damage to the structure but provoked by the physiology of the mind and nervous system.

Addiction may be like that in certain aspects or may feel like that emotionally, but it is simply not appropriate to form a basis of understanding from the unnecessary comparing the necessary to it as if the positions were reversed.

Mis-using addiction this way is about the agenda of hype and panic, there is also stigma. There is a real cruelty to that, just as addiction was beginning to be seen by wiser heads for what it is a physical rather than a moral issue, others seek to use the stigma invested in it to add extra to others, underlining both.

As we've all found one way or another, fat/self acceptance tends to occur when we realise that obesity doesn't describe us but the opinion of fatness, it is a phantom and we are just chasing that. The root of obesity is ob edere basically "to eat " doesn't that sum it all up? Normalcy patholigzied and replaced with a normalized pathology.

I mean, who doesn't eat? When fatz do it becomes a pathogen causing the disease of fatness. You couldn't make it up. Oh, actually you could, if you have the privilege.

When fatz believe in this we end looking to confirm what isn't actually there. It is disconcerting how easy it is to do this with the duress of authority pressing on you. Turning your everyday existence into signs of the demonic eval you are creating with conscious intent. I wish I'd noticed that if I was creating it I could just stop creating it the same way.

Such a costly oversight.

Ethics and placebos

2011-02-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

It's sometimes hard not to be amused just seeing the title of things like this post "Pretending that evidence is difficult and complicated".

Indeed.

The first thing that occurs is the way the complex 'obesity' and weight loss is going around serving as an explanation for the results of repeated failure. That tells us nothing other than that approach is mainly futile. To boldly state from that what something may or may not be seems overly descive.

You can only assess the complexity of something if you've studied it rather than what you are convinced will/should/must be true. I never liked the 'complex' argument even when presented by fat activists, it seemed to me yet again to pay extreme regard to what has been a rather mindless approach of late. It behaved as if the study of obesity has been rational therefore we can draw rational conclusions from that.

How can we?

Anything is 'complex' if subject to endless blunder. They say simple when you know how, which can also mean simple when you are taking the right approach, when you are looking at it the right way up.

The idea that the repeated failure of a guess = complexity just gives yet another out clause to on the cynical farceurs who've run around like Keystone cops (place cursor on the +) in the face of facts they're studiously blanking. For their own ends.

Then there's the complaining about things like homeopathy. I was slow on the uptake when it comes to the medical ethics and placebos, due to the way 'advice' on calorie manipulation has flown in the face of that with a shocking disregard.

Apparently professionals are not supposed to engage in treating people on the basis of placebos because the investment of belief in them may require a false presentation of facts, or outright lying. And lying to patients is unethical even if it might benefit them.

It seems logical now, but I'd never have guessed, I thought I was just upset because of a petty sense of injustice.

Even if they have nothing else to offer and feel bad/ ashamed/ powerless about that.

They still shouldn't tell people something works to manipulate the patients behaviour, the authority we invest in them could make us very vulnerable to this form of persuasion.

They should acquaint their patients with the facts, so they are informed and can based their consent on meaningful. Doctors wouldn't want patients to consent to what they wouldn't if they had a more balanced view of the situation, would they?

Therefore telling people to do stuff that is ineffectual at best let alone harmful is unethical.

Umm.........

Whoop de don't

2011-02-21T03:30:00.001-08:00

*Trigger warning: Weight loss dieting featured throughout and in links.

The thing about lionizing the absence/shortfall of fat hating in those who make weight their profession is it's obliviousness toward those actually in need of bona fide treatment.

Its hard to see issuing guidelines to the medical profession ~~to stop harassing their patients with quackery~~ about the intricacies of "weight management" as anything to celebrate.

Really, who cares?

I mean what's happened here?

They've (partially) acknowledged the biological reality of which there can be little rational doubt. After all if that were not the case, there would be nothing to manufacture a 'crisis' out of.

Do we have such a low view of the medical profession because of the low standard set by 'obesity' that this is a cause for celebration now? It's partly because I thought more highly of them that this kind of thing doesn't seem like anything much at all.

And are we really so self absorbed that we consider the real problem to be the iatrogenic mindwarp of pseudo anorexia worship rather than why obesity professionals don't have anything for people like Georgia?

That should have been their purpose all along. There was a time when I thought this was the point of making it about all fat people in order to overcome the lack of interest there might of been in people who have some kind of metabolically generated problem or imbalance.

Now I wonder whether the opposite is true, that people would have been more interested in this if it had been presented from this angle with some suggestion that of course the answer for outliers would probably be the answer for everyone.

It's saying something when even the fat phobic lackey media can finally understand something more is going on than their usual hackneyed obesity narrative and ask who is going to help Georgia? They know the answer is not what 'helped' her rebound by 7 stones/98lbs/ 44.4 kilos, from a starting point of 33 stones/ 462 lbs/209.5 kilos at the age of 15.

Rebound is the end of virtually every diet attempt in people of every size including thin so this was entirely predictable, blaming it on parents or the individual is a distraction when that is the general experience and if anyone doubts it, they can look at the growth of weight- there has been a shift upward across the scale. Take a look at the growth of the industries of slimming, fitness and bariatrics in the meantime and explain why none of this has interrupted it thus far.

Those who prey upon the fattest to prove the validity of their useless cult to themselves have 'helped' her by assaulting her body further giving her system a good beating from more than one side. And leaving her feeling what is entirely typical is her fault. I'm sure many of us remember the feeling of thinking we had it sorted this time only to be carried back to where we started. Oh the fury and frustration with ourselves!

It's the vulnerability of the situation that is so evident, along with lack of ideas from those who are happy to shout slanderous platitudes at fat people in general, but quiet as mice when they actually have to push themselves. To do something difficult.

That is what professionals and scientists ought to be working on night and day. They've received funds in the name of it so what have they got?

What are the 'guidelines' for a situation like this? There should be before there are any 'guidelines' for those troubled mostly by the crisis mugging. Healers purveying and/or colluding with stigma, then stopping it partially is in my view, nothing. Above all do no harm is clear. Doing harm, then withdrawing from it to some extent, whilst having nothing for those who are in need, is risible.

The backpatting also seems ableist as far as I can tell. Those of us who only or mostly need an end to stigma are ok, so that's all that matters.

Young Georgia has more than one factor noted to be disproportionate in those who reach a large weight at a young age, parental bereavement. I once heard a bereavement counsellor who specialised in working with children state that a study had calculated targeting grief counselling at bereaved children in general would be enough to make a palpable cut in morbid obesity in children.

Let alone other things triggered by that. There's also overspill with parental seperation through relationship breakdown too.

Even now she is only 17, I wonder if having a good course of counselling for that would help relieve some of the burden of stress on her, if she wants that of course. Practical support for her role as carer for her mother is needed, she's been a registered carer since the age of ten. She wants to go to college so if help was given that could enable her to move on with her life and do something for herself.

There also could be a compulsive eating disorder response in all this which is caused by the nervous system overstimulating the appetite and hunger often triggered by being trapped in stressful situations although it can develop spontaneously.

For the record size is not in itself a diagnosis for these things, it's about the possibility of greater likelihood or prevalence which needs greater investigation.

It is not weight management that is needed, it's actually ways of turning around the metabolic function so that it weight is reversed as a side effect, just like it comes on. I don't believe attacking it directly is the answer at all, even more in this kind of case.

* (others are abuse and having a parent or relative who was/is mentally ill.)

Thinking through your body- part 1

2011-02-18T08:22:00.000-08:00

Trigger warning; mention of extremely negative feelings

Wow, even the possibility of fat people improving their fitness and/or health as fat people is just too much for some. I don't object to the questioning the study findings, but this resentment about possible loss of bullying rights is just sad.

I went through a period where I felt all I could do was swear off exercise and direct attempt at physical fitness. My demoralisation with the way we are supposed to approach the concept- run at it and try to cling to nothing had reached a point where it was just another source of hurt to add to the rubbish bin marked "pointless".

As a child I took part in a sports, nothing major I slowly burned out as the divergence occurring between my body (and therefore myself) into viewer of something to be watched in order to curtail it set in. I've not fully gotten past that to this day.

Getting to this point has meant having to psychologically unburden myself of what built itself around that split as far as I could. The harder part is to repair the actual split the physical alienation between thinking of moving and actually doing it. Either stopped before it starts or by an aggressive build up of tension or ill feeling.

Recently I stumbled on the fact that the whole hating parts of your body thing; "I hate my stomach, thighs, behind, hips etc., -or the imprint from having had long periods of this-can be enough to affect your fluency of movement.

One day apropos of nothing in particular I was of a mood to focus on each part of my body in turn, I can't remember exactly what I said, but I remember gently focusing on each part of my body and kind of apologizing by thanking each part, feelings of gratitude, that sort of thing.

Sounds hippy trippy but I was amazed that I actually felt and moved better soon afterwards. I had no idea those thoughts could just linger, even though overall I'd learned to be accepting and kind towards my body.

It hadn't occurred that the whole body might feel demoralised by abuse directed at it in the same way we can be. I'm supposing that is the mind body connection and that these attacks can become part of a conditioned reflex. The way you think about and through your body that can interrupt it's competence and the fluency of your ability to produce movement.

That is in addition to the numerous messages we get from voices of authority that fat bodies are physically incompetent and incapable due to the 'disease' of fatness. The endless warnings and orders about our health should be are one thing, but the requirement of premise that it is not possible to become fitter or fit without automatically becoming slim displays an even clearer desire to cause harm through confining to the wish fulfilment element of obesity.

That this is required to make fatness fit the predestined prognosis is the kind of thing that has undermined the belief in what we are told, over and above our own personal experiences.

Don't even talk of the female cult of body loathing as bonding etc., ritual. Yes I'm sure there's more to it than we wish to face.

Think about what that may have meant for millions of fat people filled- many since childhood-with taken for granted assumptions of their incapable "unhealthy" compromised bodies. Even if that were so, some kind of rehabilitation would be the correct response not encouraging sidelining and withdrawal.

After years of trying to attain fitness whilst whatever intrinsic fitness I had began to actually fade, which I would have been better off supporting. I felt I had to let go.

The last straw for me was when I was doing some rather tame exercises and out of nothing feeling an intense aversion crash through me like a wave.

Disconcerted I decided this time I was not going to give in. I was going to step back (in my mind) and just let whatever it was wash over me because for once I wasn't doing anything extreme, I wasn't pushing it, this just must be inner laziness coming out to play.

I'd be cleverer, I wouldn't try to suppress or ignore it, I'd just relax continue, be polite, tip my hat to it, but not engage directly or battle with it.

So I continued.

Then there was another wave. Bigger this time, step back, continue.

Hey, I thought this is alright, it's going to be ok, this time.

Then;

BOOM !!!

It was so ferocious, the feeling so piercingly intense that I was stunned. It was the most intense feeling of violation that I've ever experienced in my life.

I stood open mouthed because I had to describe that to myself, what it felt like and excuse me but the first and only thing I could say was;

It felt like I was violating myself.

I'm aware how horrible that sounds and I apologize but it pointed to the way I felt as if I has allowed myself to be taken advantage of and that upset me more than these strange responses. I'm not much of a crier but it stung my eyes, I thought just what do I have to do to make this whole diet exercise thing work?

Why couldn't I just do what I was supposed to do without finding some way to mess it up? Who feels this way, who behaves like this? That's where my head was at then. When you keep falling short and you are hurting because you are trying to prove you want to make good and you just can't, it doesn't show. Feeling it should be so simple, self pity is the order of the day.

And I felt very sorry for myself indeed.

Irresistible loathing

2011-02-14T11:50:00.000-08:00

Apart from noticing my sucktastic proofreading e.g, just noticed I can't spell 'irresistible', I hear on the fatsphere grape vine that our 'hate the fatness love the personification of fatness' friend Dan Savage is grinding his phobic axe uhr-gin. This time with a witty little 'satire' exposing the irrationality of an anti gay (marriage) bigot from Iowa.

Said nitwit feels that gay folk are a public health hazard to society as they have a lower lifespan than normals due to 'the "lifestyle" of homosexuality'. I'll pause whilst you pick your jaw up off the floor.

But let's face it, it's hard to ignore just how closely that matches the basis used to justify stigmatizing fat people and people like Savage know that. Which is why they are so fed up with fat activists insistence on pointing out how his hypocrisy undermines his message-some wag said in the comments that there is no such thing because ' fat ACTIV(E)ist' geddit?

ROTFLOL.

The big giveaway is satire’s supposed to undo its subject-the bigot- not leave that aside and abuse to allegory-fatz.

If he wishes to try this again, he should pick a group he doesn't so obviously loathe.

....even if gay people had lower life expectancies (which we do not)—and if that "fact" all by itself was a justification for banning same-sex marriage, why stop with gay people? Iowa should ban fat marriage. There are, according to the state of Iowa, more than 1.4 million obese people living in Iowa. That's nearly 30% of the state's population, and those numbers just keep rising. The social costs of Iowa's obesity epidemic are pretty staggering—and those costs include including premature death and lower average life expectancies for Iowans.

Do you hear the spear piercing the poisoned heart of homophobia? If so, yours is better than mine. It's fascinating even something as dear to him as marriage rights for gay people must take second place to digs at fat people.

Iowa, an overwhelmingly Republican state is 11th in the US league table of plumpness/fatness or 63% and 6th in life expectancy (78 years).

Savage's home, (not birth) state is 51st in both plump/fatness at just under 50% and life expectancy at 72 years respectively.

As we know round these parts figures of overweight/obesity rates are all over the place when it comes to matching them up with life expectancy and I'm sure I knew that as soon as I read his (likely to be) false assertion of premature deaths and lower average life expectancies, didn’t he check it out?

His struggle with fat hate is increasingly like a microcosm of those clinging to homophobia. Not anywhere near as dangerous right now, but how far do people wish to test that? Not all attacks happen on the streets.

There's always some 'excuse' as to why human beings are unpredictable, not paper constructs and therefore subject to laws and imperatives we don’t fully understand. So much easier to assert condemnation. This momentum of prejudice only gets easier to go on and harder to stop, I don’t expect perfection, but if he cannot root out this temptation what does he think he’s asking of others?

Inevitably many of DS's supporters who go on to spew the usual nuanced take on fatness, defend him using Swift's famous raging satire against the British establishment's murderous neglect and abuse of the Irish to explain our error to us (in case mere reading did not).

In the same way anti gay hateists feel 'put upon' by the insistence of ditching their hating certainties, so Savage and his band are fed up with those who cannot stop seeing right through him. We know that in his head he is hiding his phobia to himself as he thinks that is clever it ought not to be visible to others either. Just like homophobes who think the ‘concern trolling’ route hides a multitude of sins and are just sooo obvious.

I think he ought to dispense with the temptation to imagine the ‘swap’ playing on his mind will work out has he might imagine. Fat people as methadone to wean haters off the hard stuff. Often you'll find addicts develop a taste for both. After all these attacks on gay people have been taken and used to bait fatz to the extent that he's on board with it.

It was not inevitable.

Has all this really lessened the burden of homophobia? I very much doubt it, yet fat hating has gained a ground in the meantime. I daresay the fact that this state is a conservative one is supposed to give pause for thought by linking fat stigma to gay stigma for Republican types, to let them in on how it feels.

I can see that he is trying to hold people directly accountable for homophobia whether it’s black people and prop 8. Or homophobes who represent a ‘fat state’, but dealing in the same techniques he himself said don’t pass muster smacks too much of master’s tools.

I’ll leave the rest to the man himself;

"Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own" Jonathan Swift

'Obesity' boondogglers

2011-02-10T09:57:00.000-08:00

Well, I continue to flit between the weird sensation of feeling discombobulated and writing stuff that doesn't seem satisfactory in any way. Nonetheless, I had to respond to someone finally responding to the puzzle-if people are convinced they are "dying of fat" or whatever why they do not at least inquire as to what the hell obesity 'science' is intending to do to save their lives?

Or even, when they think they might get interested in studying weight/metabolism in ways that make sense.

Or better still, what is the purpose of the existence of 'obesity science'.

I certainly can't quite figure out the latter any further than-the continued perpetuation of its own existence.

Which is the imperative of all life force animal vegetable and I daresay mineral. Even ideas that get into your head seem to slide into persuading the rest of your mind to get on board with it, as long as you invest in with sufficient energy.

One of the more genuinely appalling things about the low standard fatz police themselves into and are policed into, is the seeming lack of interest in their continued survival after they insist they are mortally ill.

I don't think I've encountered a group with such a sense of cringing detachment about their own continued survival including those labelled with the stupid "slow suicide" tag, certainly they could take a leaf out of obesity science on that one. By any means necessary as the man said.

Which intrigues is do any of these people genuinely believe they are dying or are they so used to talking themselves into this feeling-for the purposes of "motivation" etc.,-that they cannot back down from it yet don't really believe it? I assume genuineness but they so don't behave like anyone else in the same position it's hard to tell.

It's like being told endlessly, yes diets do work you end up doubting what you feel has to be true because of the gawping mis match between fact and feeling.

Indeed, one wonders the exact same about the science of obesity which shows such utter lack of urgency as I've never encountered from a field that has talked up the lethal nature of the adipose cell to the extent where it can secure mucho funding, which is when seemingly all said 'urgency' peters out.

Not to mention its utter lack of vocation, intellectual curiosity or even real respect for reason perhaps even science which they seem to turn into a parody of itself. It has disgusted me to the point that I can barely stand to be in contact with it.

As 500poundpeeps states;

When I looked into this stuff, this was the late 90s, I couldn't find ONE study that had taken the severely obese over 400-500lbs and actually seriously studied them.

That is almost as appalling as weight loss butchery 'cos as everyone knows even if you have only a cursory interest in any topic, what's one of the first things you want to know? How bad can it get? What's the most, the least, the greatest, most extreme outlandish example of it

You want to know it's perimeters, where it gets better or worse, more or less because that gives you a framework,.

It is in the outliers that you can see the effects you're studying as most severe is likely to be most clear. Any 'discipline' that is not interested in that, let alone wildly disproportionately is not serious or even interested in what it's studying.

Indeed, they are way more interested in cases of fatness that are arguably pretty innocuous and fitting them up for a profile more suited to that which they ignore. Everyone needs to ask themselves;

WHY?

I recently searched PubMed myself to try and assess the percentage of studies on acute obesity (and similar) relative to the subject as a whole compared to acute cases of other fields of (proper) disease and I found that the lowest percentage by far was 'acute/morbid' obesity in relation to obesity.

Staggering.

That they can get away with it in the climate of obesity hype is a tribute to the success of the fat shaming campaign and the sheer ubiquity of its hold on everyone's consciousness.

Even more so, they get away with it thanks to the refusal of oh, anyone to give a damn, including those who are at the extremes and their families friends and loved ones.

It's sad that it has taken the 'crisis' to show me just how much the self esteem of those studied can affect and facilitate the study of them by others. I thought science was above that, but why should it be? Like everyone else I'm used to science presented by those who appear to be studying things without fear or favour, standing up to some relatively powerful interests-like the pro-life lobby, the whole of the general public, politicians-often with a lofty disdain. I made the error of thinking that was there default position.

I was ignoring that not all science is equal and well scientists have about as much courage as the rest of us. And sadly with some if they can get away with taking liberties as they can and do with fatz they will, so they do. Just like any other group of people, ethics can vary substantially.

It's really disconcerting to know that you actually have to come across like you are not going to take any shit and hold them accountable, or they will let you swing, simple as.

As I've said before, metabolism must be mastered/ manipulated for many reasons, even if only to save people from the odious abomination that is weight loss surgery. But until those who feel most in need of it get mad as hell

Which shows the way folks have completely written off the professionals coming up with anything-well to be fair they keep saying it themselves! (More on that later).

It's hard to see how their happy playpen will be interrupted from here.

Well, that is apart from this.

*Awe(some)fatz

2011-02-04T11:38:00.000-08:00

I hope this will see some adequate resolution this time. One of the first things I noticed that really surprised no, shocked me about the fatsphere was the atomic level fury directed at any awesome fatz (I've just discovered that courtesy of allthatihavemet at tumblr) who have the bare faced nerve to state the obvious.

That if you are further up the fat graph, you are likely to get it in the neck far more than those who are let's face it, acceptably fat. And why are we acceptably fat? Because to some extent awefatz have broken our fall, d'ya get me?

When I was young I was ahead of the obesity spike, I was just about the only fat kid/teen in the world-OK that's what it felt like-then one day some years ago, people kept telling me I'm not that fat. I thought "Wait a minute I know I'm substantial enough" it was then I noticed that I had stayed the same for a while and loads of others bigger than myself had joined the party, a lot were young true, but there were more people who I thought would be slim for life-and so did they!!

I hope this isn't going to sound crass but whatever reward comes of not being an outstanding target for intense vitriol makes up for any possible ish-yoo's I could ever have with 'exclusion' i.e. the open recognition that I do not fall into whatever category I don't fall into.

When it comes to reassuring smallfatz about their place in the movement etc., One line sums up how I feel, let alone Marianne;

Why is that the job of larger fats?

Exactamundo. I've never asked nor would ask any awefatz to give me any reassurance because I see that as my job, if I'm falling down on that I should not be shamed but I must recognise that is mine because it can only be mine.

I don't object to people feeling 'erased' when other people's experience makes some of theirs look or feel like a vicar's tea party, I've said that about thinz in relation to fatz. The issue is the ability to recognize a response that needs to be worked through because it is a projection of your inner feelings onto someone else and one which is actually responding to something coming from said person.

Incidentally, I feel similarly about thinz who keep on about how they want to know that fatz don't hate 'em. I've tried to be patient with that one for a least five minutes but found myself quickly tired to heck of being drained by insecure thinz because:

a) I recognised the futility of trying to persuade someone I hadn't said what I hadn't said because it seemed like I might of....no matter how earnest my protestations.

b) You have to question why reassurance is needed and the short answer is, thinz have been persuaded to either to phobe on fatz or hate them, so they are asking for reassurance that we are better and less corruptible than them and don't feel the same, in other words not equality.

There's an element of temperature check, they want to know how much of the noble fatz game they are oh so used to (but don't acknowledge) is still in play.

In the case of smaller fatz I would venture to suggest looking for reassurance to check that awefatz are not going to exclude them, the way they clearly sense they exclude awefatz. In a sense this exclusion has been set by "obesity science" as it is the only field I know of with such a low interest in the outliers of its subject.

The message of inclusivity and diversity has gotten across many well meaning folks desire to include is out of sync with their ability to carry it through. Or to overcome-if that is even the right word- their desire to gravitate toward their like and those they feel comfortable with.

This has meant regardless of how deeply nice folks are or how good their intentions in the real time dynamics of human interplay, they've instinctively eased a.fatz to the edges of certain spaces. I'm not saying its deliberate but if they want their own spaces it must have happened too much.

There's clearly more, I noticed before some smallfatz are passing on the chain in this instance they feel they must be noble to thinz therefore, awefatz must play that role for them. Who's supposed to play that role for a.fatz? Why no-one silly! It seems that smallfatz recognise status differential full well and just deal with stuff by moving the obesity game up the scale.

So awefatz become the obese and we become acceptably fat. The complexity of human response can never be discounted. To be fair, I think its under people's (full) awareness that their minds make these instinctual shifts, however, they do that to some extent because of the beliefs already in their head.

People sometimes get upset with me and think I'm just being a pain, but when you extend yourself falsely to others, both yourself those in the same boat who need that support tend to get shafted.

I suggest we all unburdened ourselves of the habit of faux nobility, it should no longer be our job to defuse the hate of others we now know is pre-decided and willful and perhaps we will not pass that on to others.

I'm not being modest when I say, I sometimes don't see the nose on my face. As ever I have to be open to the possibility that there is some legit basis of difficulty that I'm not seeing.

I also can tell you, I've absolutely no time for people who actually do make it their business to get sniffy about smallfatz and say they cannot possibly understand etc., believe me. I don't give a rats poo for that.

However even there it doesn't mean the underlying basis for that pissiness is not legit and some are going to have to stop avoiding that one as it is clear the line is made by both sides.

* Sorry, deathfatz is fine but it has never felt right for me to use it.

I live this body

2011-02-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

I can't tell if this is an adequate phrase to replace it, but must we describe people or ourselves as "living in this body"? As if there's an ickle master version of us floating around in a pod somewhere inside, observing it all.

It's not so much that we live inside, its that we are a whole and we have an inside, we are stuffed we are not hollow. The self that's talking to you is not on the outside, true but it is not separate from it either.

I suppose you could say your kidneys live inside you if you wanted to be cute, but saying your self lives inside your self is a little eerie. This body is you.

It seems like part of the kind of thinking which declares the mind a citadel which can control our bodies anyway we want by dictating to them via this central nub and haven't we had the privilege of seeing just how badly that can go?

It speaks to the Cartesian hangover, the artificial distance between mind and body. I wonder if it is possible for it to be a seamless whole whether we could ever get to a point, or a access a point where we could just be aware of say our liver or heart and other parts of ourselves, not just when they demand it by feeling 'funny' or making an unusual amount of noise but as a different focus of attention?

Not constant, but when directed by intent like I'm looking at this screen.

It's a bit unnerving to consider. Would it be distracting or drive us a bit loopy-like tinnitus does with some-I always found it comforting because when I could hear it things were either quiet or I was calmer, less distracted. Maybe mine was mild.

Would pain be unendurable not having to get through the numb layers of all that is cut/edited from our ready attention, in part so that we can notice things (outside ourselves) but also our attitudes to ourselves and our bodies?

Or does getting past that help gather the pace and strength of pain causing an overspill effect not always stemmed by the dimming or end of the cause?

Would being in at what comes before hurt change the way we felt and interpreted sensory distress, if not for the removal of surprise? I think the change would give us more options maybe we could change the rhythms of our impulses opening out our senses,catching synaptic impulses slowing them down, re-directing or blocking/highlighting them.

We'd feel different just existing. Perhaps we'd communicate differently too, with fewer words and more in tune with our non verbal ways.

I don't know whether its greater awareness or longer life spans but I think of what seems to be more people living with chronic pain so acute that it sometimes cannot be touched even by the strongest narcotics.

How would this complete mind/ body symbiosis change the way we see our bodies/selves? What would we not do with and to ourselves, would it not make much difference either way?

No answers today but I do know, I am this body, I live it I am not inside it is me.

Self respect whilst fat

2011-02-01T09:13:00.001-08:00

In the past, I've accused people of having no self respect. That was not always correct it was no self respect whilst fat; being it or thinking about (being) it, either of those switch it off to varying degrees, in some the difference is dramatic.

From proud to abject cringing in a second.

I noticed in pre FA days that no matter the level of personal esteem, it plummeted to the general hating levels everyone shared. I always yearned to hear someone break that ubiquity because some of us like to see the underdog come through, out of curiosity if nothing else.

It actually ticked me off that fatness never got a fair shake never got to be real, to be truth. In my case it was different though, I really was greedy and lazy. But other people weren't-I knew that-I could see it with my own eyes and I was sad that no-one could seem to even slightly defend that. I yearned and longed for someone to just refuse to go along.

When things changed and I got off the self/fat hating route this desire turned into determination. Now I would have to try and get as close to that as I could. But it felt so far away, not because of it, but because of me and how I felt about myself.

To hear someone able with a reliable ease and absence of defensiveness talk about fatness, honestly without any of the fake baggage loaded on it, would be sublime. That's the thing, its not about what I or fat people want to hear, it's about honesty.

To get away from the whole of the discourse on fatness and the folks normally so arrogant about themselves who insist on the luxury of fat hating creating two forces that can't meld. So, they project that fat loathing and low standard on to you.

Yes, they expect you to support their hating, whilst they continue a hate they are neither paying for fully, personally or socially as it is fat people on the margins who will pay.

The fake honesty of "I am an obese I'm so ashamed" is as dead as dust. Increasingly meaningless devoid by repetition of nuance and feel. People insist it is there story they take it seriously and seem to see it as a duty to form their experience around that trying to inhabit it. That often shows it up even more. It just feels like a brain deadening assault on us all. Sad that it has come to this.

I thought I might find this lack of apology in the 'sphere and although I think we do incredibly well and are often inspiringly bravura. I'm not sure anyone's really completely there its trickier than I thought it would be.

I know we will get there, but its the anticipation! The how that keeps turning around in my mind.

Hummm....

2011-01-27T02:53:00.000-08:00

I can see an end in sight though I'm not quite there yet. Yesterday I really started to feel like I was at the end of the beginning.

I've been writing posts all the way, I've deleted quite a few which is so unlike me usually I just leave them to fester in hopes I'll be able to sort something cogent. I'm laughing as I write that thinking of all the times I've pressed publish and er, fallen a tad short of that let's say!

I've been flapping and flailing around over at twitter -technical sub literacy is a pain and tidying up a few old posts. I've mostly been focusing on sorting other matters and stepping back-a little from things.

I hope to get back into the swing soon.

Munch

2011-01-17T11:13:00.001-08:00

After the low standard of obesity related research it's refreshing cleansing at times to view things through the eyes of intelligent curiosity rather than the distorted lens of pre-ordained conclusion.

Normally I wouldn't have watched *(there's a shorter linked clip below) a programme about the effects of cannabis. I happened to see the start and was drawn in by the feel of it plus some nice looking computer animation involving the brain.

It used this to show how cannabis affects the brain especially. One example followed the ingestion of cannabis through food. It's most potent chemical THC gets to the brain entering through the bloodstream via the walls of the small intestine. It goes up the spine through the back of the neck, into the brain and on to the cells of the hypothalamus a gland in the brain which the programme narration said is the "control centre" for hunger.

It's featured in this *clip by the way around 3:30 minutes in, it goes on to say that the THC locks on to the receptors of these cells and floods the cell bodies with messages to seek out food.

"Whether they are hungry or not. Most people just call this the munchies and...."

.....they are almost impossible to resist.

Try to imagine such a clear non-emotive conclusion being reached if cannabis was associated with fatness. Then give up quickly, because you barely can. It would be tripped up by the fixation on fat people as eaters, we are nothing if not that preferably 'over'. That lack of clarity is one of the ways many fat people are dogged by the underlying sense that thin people are real in a way they just aren't.

That's the irony at the heart of the "real women" debacle and helps to explain its traction amongst some fat(ter) women.

When things happen to thinz, they happen to real human beings that goes without saying, when things happen to fatz, they happen to the 'obese pathology' not a real person.

This for me is what accepting your body is really about, recovering that sense of yourself as real, as a unit of humanity in which humanness can be observed. Rather than being distorted to serve the needs of a caricature.

It's about wanting to be able to take your reality for granted enough to have a clear idea of what can be understood and what's left to find out.

To emerge from the fiction of fatness, which makes our more complex and human reality seem like the lie.

The munchies munchies can be recognized because it happens to real people, note this link conflates fatness and desire to eat and doesn't mention it potentially being applied directly to those who've lost their appetite through illness or treatment of illness.

This flooding process which produces an overriding desire to eat might well be occurring during the compulsive eating process or hyperphagia as its called. I just found out today.

And this poses something I hadn't considered before, the signal that tell you to eat or get food is not as one with hunger. Which gives a way of grasping why the assumption that CED is about pleasure is not often correct.

So obvious when I think about it, that must be part of why anorexics can feel the pain of excruciating hunger and yet feel totally unable to eat. A disconnect has occurred between the hunger and the imperative to eat. I think of hunger as an all body process which collates its findings so to speak in the conscious brain, rather than them originating there as we are told.

But it didn't occur that this conglomeration of information trips something else that is not an extension of it.

Link happy and laying low

2011-01-15T08:46:00.000-08:00

Wow, life getting in the way plus access ish-yoos has turned a pause into a positive hiatus. Sorry to leave the last post dangling believe me it doesn't get much better. I've still got a few things I need to take time out to deal with but I did catch a watchable documentary in the early hours about the wonderful Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

I first stumbled upon her years ago among the libraries music stock. Between the enlightened world music style policy of the library, the diverse community surrounding it plus some judicious ordering from dedicated musos helped me to finally get hold of things like Big Mama Thornton's version of Leiber and Stoller's take on the blues. It was only then that I realised she wrote and recorded Ball and Chain popularized by Janis Joplin, (her influence on JJ is obvious).

I remember being electrified hearing her sing the definitive "Hound Dog" treatment on the radio it TOTALLY blew the famous Elvis version -which never really scanned lyrically- to smithereens. It irritated me after that I'm not hating, I never tire of Suspicious Minds.

When you hear Big Mama's magnificent growling and warbling meaning falls into place. Incidentally some reckon Elvis saw Sister Rosetta play and that her showmanship was an influence on his.

I remember being able to hear recordings by Edith Piaf who is a national institution in France apart from the usual La Vie En Rose, and Je ne Regrette Rien. I was intrigued after reading a biography of her by Margaret Crosland. I did not enjoy it at all! I was bordering on outraged in fact, yet as I had time before I had to return them and still having vague notions of trying to extend my school French into something approaching fluency (ha!) I figured I'd just learn the songs.

I did my chores with her in the background mais voilà ! I finally heard her, I can't even remember what why I took so against her at first. The things I've ended up liking the most were not always instant.

What I admire about Sister Rosetta like so many apart from her playing and singing is her overall performance. She started as a child hitting the road with her ever so religious mother, leaving her father behind in rural *Arkansas, they landed at a church in Chicago, her precocity and talent served to attract people.

She was the first female electric guitar player I saw who could really related to the instrument with their whole being, as an extension and expression of themselves. With most other female players I tend feel they are playing an instrument whereas Sister Rosetta had total command she dominated it unselfconsciously in a way we tend to take for granted in men.

I relate to the sense of her being both a pious and a libertine she was rebellious in the common sense way, she liked to find ways to do what she wanted even if it wasn't the done thing. She is an example of the way the highs of the sacred and the piety in the sexual coalesce in the same place, if you get deep enough.

Her switching from gospel to secular and back again outraged some of her church fans. She refused or was unable to let go of either and managed to win people round with the sheer force of her talent. People shocked by her recording the gospel ballard "Rock Me" substituting God for a mere mortal, using the same approach as she would the original it becomes thrillingly direct.

She was naughty but nice a lively indomitable character pansexual in her tastes the kind who got into scrapes and schemes which made her loving friends shake their heads, there goes Rosetta.

Apropos that aritistopia link for BMT, I've just stumbled on Big Maybelle, check out her (earlier) version of a rock and roll standard plus this.

I'll see you over the hump.

*Opps!

I feelz odd

2011-01-07T11:48:00.000-08:00

I'm going through an odd week where I feel a little disjointed like my mind is pointing in different directions-yes even more than usual, cheek!

I've been reading up on some fat related or 'obesity' stuff notably our old friend Dr. Sharma who is in danger of being worth reading regularly. He's been doing the rounds on the 'sphere garnering praise for managing to inch a bit closer to saying calorie manipulation doesn't scan as a viable weight loss scheme, epidemiologically speaking (get me).

If what he says doesn't seem totally cogent, it's because it is still a huge emotional leap to face that, without having a viable solution. Try it doc, some of us have lept that one and it was like throwing yourself off a cliff. Seriously.

People assume that we in FA just don't give a damn but many's the time my heart has been thumping like a drum even though I've known better than many before I landed in the fray.

Things definitely seem to be happening and I sense a need to review the overall situation and alter my perspective. I haven't bothered to follow a lot of stuff in the field because it's frankly been a lot of nonsense and I've not been able to stand it.

I was thinking just this morning how much this has demeaned my view of science. I used to read scientific studies for fun. There is something about the way science and research has changed that has meant I lost that impetus as the trust had gone....

To be continued.

Follow-through

2011-01-05T11:06:00.000-08:00

We are romantic souls at heart assuming the crusade could only be derailed because of "Touche pas à mon pote!" which translates as "Don't touch my mate". The slogan of a campaign against racism and anti-semitism aimed at the young, appealing to them to defend others.

People love to criticise the French for what seems sometimes like a default state of arrogance, but that my friends is fraternité or brother(sister)hood. As that is a third of their national motto, maybe that partly explains their uppitiness, a little bit of fellow feeling.

Fact is, the crusade could have been derailed then as now piecemeal by recognizing more of the implications on others of allowing fat people to swing. This is why leading with the "thin privilege" angle has frustrated it appears to collude in making FA all about 'sympathy' (errrgh) for fat people, when it is crystal clear fellow feeling for fatz is grudgingly and measly.

Dealing with the implications of excluding fat people on everyone defending against that directs a critical gaze on the crisis that would stop it from going so unchecked. That seems a far more accessible and practical direction for all.

I've always seen FA as being for everyone, mainly from the view of liberating everyone from fat phobia which by the energy invested in it has been propelled it all directions. The problem is that like many in FA, I didn't realise that feeling was not shared by others due to them seeing it as affecting only us badly, not them.

When Joy's video finally loaded in my 'puter, after I'd read Lesley's piece and read the YouTube comments, I realised immediately why it offended. What she cleverly does is point out the unspoken truth that whilst people pay lip service to us reducing weight through "healthy living", what they really mean is we ought to be prepared to use the behaviours that make up eating disorders to achieve it.

Whilst of course pretending that we are pursuing a "healthy lifestyle", just like some of them. You get an element of this from some smokers (and others) too.

What the video fails to do is treat bulimic behaviour with the same reverence as those who haven't been as browbeaten with this kind of thing. These people think things must only be seen their way, tell that to those who think this is a 'cure'.

Predictably, they attack the person, rather than the fat phobia which is what has really punctured their consensus. The time for them to get upset and ask questions is when we are being told to lose weight using behaviours they consider to be a threat to health.

Isn't that appalling? No, apparently its offensive to your boo boo.

If folk have nothing to say on that, then they are at least tacitly agreeing that disordered behaviour has its uses, therefore we can talk about them in different ways, can't we? If you want everyone on board with one view, then make sure you fight for eating disorders to be off the menu, for everyone.

The obesity persona is actually an insulting caricature of compulsive/ binge eating disorder projected onto all fat people. Every time fat people are insulted about what we supposedly eat or don't eat, the overall obsession with making it all about that, is using this false association with an eating disorder, to deny our agency our subjective experience, our humanity even.

The remedy for this presumed disorder is another form of disordered eating proto-anorexia-early stage-plus a little exercise bulimia thrown in. We are urged to practise these disorders, whether we succumb to any of them depends on our internal propensities i.e. luck. But they are all presented as lifestyles, regardless.

Joy's alluding to the fact that when we are told "we haven't tried hard enough" this is what they are really getting at. It's what they really mean when they tell us "we don't get it" if that is pointed out, it is denied "We didn't tell you to go to extremes", right because if it's not said, no-one can say you mean it can they?

Puhr-lease.

People are content to use fat people, to do this they are content to exclude us. Its a double whammy. You can exclude someone from the group, but be courteous and polite to them, or you can exclude them and make use of them for your own ends.

Imagine at school, you want to be part of a group, they do not agree so they tell you to buzz off. They also start picking on you, bullying you out of a sense of ownership of yourself, trying to replace it with they want you to be.

When the people on the inside go along with this kind of thing and force others to the edge, that change of position changes people, they are more likely to develop a different perspective and attitude, they are seeing from another vantage point. It depends on the extent of the exclusion and mis-use, but in comparison they are not being shaped by the mores of the clique except from the outside.

They are more likely to develop a different sensibility about certain things based on this which doesn't necessarily match the insider view. The group needs to try and factor that in to their exclusion, all groups do.

That's what "I'd rather have so and so on the inside pissing out, rather than on the outside pissing in" is referring to. It's not always about whether you want people in or out, you have to consider consequences of either.

That's pragmatic.

Once the decision is made that they are out, the corollary is they are (somewhat) out of being policed by the group too. Fairs fair, if you are not benefiting from its courtesies, why should you fall under its direction? Denying your own experience?

The consciousness of insiders is shaped by what they are being included in, others can witness this from the outside, they can be sensitive to it as far as their imagination and capacity to notice can manage-which is why I could tell the video would offend some (by no means all)-but they are not formed by it. They cannot be policed by what may not have any real internal reference point, without denying their own.

Isn't that what we are trying to get away from? Imitating falsehoods slapped on us by the entitled and being policed by that sense of entitlement?

I do not wish to implicate Joy, the swiftness and elegance of her contriteness shows how she feels. And I respect too what I think is Lesley's view which is we can manage other people's sense of entitlement.

I'm not so sure.

It's not just that I will not, I simply cannot. I don't have the ability unless I remain in the state I'm currently in the process of exiting. I'm prepared to admit that might be a lack on my part, I don't say absence I'm saying that is too much of a stretch for me, I'm not made of rubber. Maybe its in part because there are other exclusions which have made this sensibility stronger/more varied in me than others with a different perspective.

Whatever; suffice to say I am not the same as I would have been if I'd been on the inside in certain matters and I don't feel apologetic or like pulling my head in to suit those who rarely object when it counts, when it's not about them.

I do not resent that nor am I bitter about that in itself, as long as I can operate from my truth. It's the policing that gets on my nerves. What I have a low tolerance for is people telling us how to feel as if we are a bunch of dizzy rubes and they city sophisticates who are going to school us on how to think, how they think.

They were not so morally elevated when watching us getting it from all sides as they are now.

I do not set out to be offend the reasonable nor intend to be discourteous, I came up with an example of what would be an offensive take on this, but it was really offensive, so I won't! I'm not advocating careless mockery, merely to be able to represent experience in a thoughtful and questing way.

A fat person making light of the way we are treated is not offensive to anyone but hypocrites and a lot of people including those who've had bulimia, got that point. We have things to say and express for everyone because we are as human as anyone and we represent that, we can add to things.

If you are not bothered by the way we are treated don't try to be offended by a reasonable response to that. We are allowed to express the truth of our own perspective, as much as anyone, we are not here merely to spectate.

So the next time you are watching another car crash of fat people being trashed to heck unopposed thinking it has nothing to do with you, think again, learn to consider any possible implications for you and decide whether you wish to act on that basis, you don't have to give a tinker's cuss about fat people, directly.

If you choose not to act, get ready to hear something else from the edge.

Goobye 2010: Hello 2011!

2010-12-31T08:45:00.000-08:00

Ahh! On the cusp of another year, goodbye 2010 it's been interesting in FA terms (I'm of course talking about the shift in response). Living400 has written a cool list of things she'd love to see the back of /would like to happen.

I won't touch that, but leaving you with something over the new year festivities, yes I know its by the whatever calendar, but I can't rightly be bothered right now to che.... Gregorian!

Suffice to say I acknowledge other calendars that I can't call to mind right now as equally valid in their own way yakka yah. I'm so full of charm today!

Anyhowzzahs, I was getting on to a list of more FA related stuff I'd happily see the back of and frankly over here there's still half a day, don't stand on ceremony waiting for tomorrow on any of these.

No more please, no really I insist ;

* People who claim to be in fat acceptance yet do not grasp one (FA) point of view that they already fervently disagree with.

In fact, people with purportedly polar opposite stances conservative/progressive no more about and can accurately surmise-if they had to- the other stance better than most people in FA can do the same for other people in FA that they claim to disagree with.

I understand that when you stop dieting or hating yourself, you think most work is done, we all do at first. You'll get over that, if you allow it.

Example- insisting that being absolutely against weight loss dieting/calorie restriction is 'extremism' designed to hurt the fee fee's of 'dieters' rather than a rational well thought out point of view.

When you have been told "no" take that as a "not so", not as "I'm a fat 'extremist' who talks bull and is without compassion or understanding for dieters"-and you wonder why people aren't 'nice' about telling to suck it!

If you want those under the influence of fat phobia to make the leap to understand you in the face of feelings of disgust and loathing towards you. Make that leap with your fellow FAers, umkay?

* The inability for fat people's views on anything to count unless they've been backed up by the only truth confirmers allowed on planet earth, scientists/researchers or unless it has happened to the real people i.e. people who are not fat.

Fat people are as human as any others, if something is happening more with or to us or just about only with us, that does not make it a sign of our innate degeneracy more than our innate humanity. It is happening to real humans and doesn't require the validation of anyone else. If we are not fully human, no-one is either.

* The blatant lack of self value and respect for our own fat bodies.

Weight loss surgery is wrong, full stop, no exceptions, not get out clauses, none. There is never a point when it is right or justifiable or good in any way shape or form ever.

N.B WLS is not a fat person, it is not fat people. So criticising it does not criticise those who've had it or are thinking of having it or will have it done. Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do, heroin users needing to withdraw will tell you methadone is a steaming pile, often they feel its worse than heroin, but needs must and authorities have made sure there's little alternative there either.

Maybe because this assessment is formed from the male psyche and also from those so stigmatized and criminalized that there is no need for this fatuous Pollyannaish mentality women tend to cling to-presumably as compensation-that whatever we do must make us good or its ripping our hearts out.You are always more than what you do, more than what happens to you.

Conflating your very self with an operation to mutilate your very self. Is a sign of other things which won't be resolved by body shielding things either designed to hurt fat people or with an abject disregard for any level of our discomfort or pain.

I caused myself harm by trying to restrict and reduce my food intake over many years. When I say weight loss diet culture often makes me feel ashamed to be human, I'm not casting any aspersions on myself whatsoever, because I know I am not a weight loss diet. I criticise nothing but the idea of calorie restriction which leads to this kind of thing amongst numerous others. That is not a criticism of anyone who took or is taking these drugs.

WLS is wrong because it attacks bodies, it attacks human beings, it does violence to them purely for the purpose of undermining their health. Which is the logic underpinning an unprovoked attack on anyone. It would be just as wrong if it was done to thin bodies, the fact that it's done to fat bodies makes it an equal abomination. The devaluation of fat bodies doesn't affect that one iota. The end. And before you shout 'extreme' scour every version of that opinion until you completely understand what I'm saying.

Then see if you disagree.

Any group that cannot reject such vileness wholeheartedly, cannot claim to want equality because they cannot ask for what they don't believe in themselves. If you advocate for female genital mutilation, you are not pro the equality of females, you just don't agree with it, full stop.

That is not going to change because you wish to reconcile two incompatibles, nobody is owed that. Either accept what you believe or change your beliefs to what you can accept because something has to give one way or t'other. That's how many of us change our minds not always by being persuaded directly by another view, but by what we have to accept in order to keep believing.

If you cannot stand for something, you'll go for anything, sorry, but believing in things, excludes that which you do not believe in or that which is incompatible with those beliefs. If you try to include everything you exclude by another means, so make up your mind you cannot avoid it. I respect your intelligence too much to kid you on that one.

* Taking the start of opinion from the wholly illegitimate as if it is legitimate, because of its source.

The nature of the fat hating obesity crisis is bogus and illegitimate-if anyone is genuinely worried/ terrified of fatness being a health problem, they would never recommend what doesn't work. In the same way that if your house is on fire, I'm not going to tell you to pour petrol on it, because its liquid and there's not a drop of water to be had and "we've got to do something!"

What you do is the best thing you can, not follow busted logic-petrol is liquid-regardless of the actual results. If the best you can do is to get the hell out of there, that is something enough until you can actually do better.

In fact, they'd be telling fat people to think very carefully if at all before they wasted their time. Why?

Because if you are against something you see as a threat to health, your number one priority is to not make things worse and to exclude what doesn't work, it gets in the way especially if it is widely believed to work. What you want is something effective, if you aren't interested in that, you aren't anti anything except making cash money. That's why anti cancer charities don't recommend people who claim to cure it with snake oil.

In fact they would be ferocious in exposing that because the principle of do no harm is as important as seek remedy. Compare that to so called 'anti obesity' who first of all shout fire in a crowded place, with exits marked calorie restriction even though that has made numerous people fat(ter) and has not headed off the crisis, even though the idea predates it by a few years at least.

Taking the irrational as 'one side', merely because its authority mandated and fat acceptance as the end point (and suspect because it comes from lay people), claiming bovinely that the truth is in the middle is weapons grade bilge. A bit like claiming that the KKK is the start of opinion because it too has been validated by the authorities and the NAACP as the other and therefore 'extreme' in comparison with it.

Objectivity is about judging opinion on its merits, without fear or favour, playing the ball not the man as they say. If it is nonsense it is nonsense that remains unaltered by rank either way.

Claiming the NAACP is super radical not due to its content but by juxtaposing it with racism, not matter how many luminaries put on the pointy hood, is bull. FA should be 'extreme' compared to hysterical fat phobia as any rational impulse should be compared with an irrational one. Not having a mental breakdown, should seem 'radical' compared with having one, because of the nature of the two, not because the former is deliberately trying to upset the former, or vice versa.

Now disagree if you wish, I'd welcome it, I wouldn't claim to know everything, but disagree with the actual point. I have to refer some of those who (genuinely) aren't grasping that to a lyric from a song.

"With never the need to fight or to question a single thing".

If you rigidly think that whatever authority says must have some intrinsic virtue merely because it's you know *hushed reverence* from authority, regardless of what it says. If you think the mainstream view must be moderate, purely because it is the mainstream because it must, then I'm looking at yoo-hoo.

Those who have not been or kept themselves so sheltered should not have to apologise for being more able to contemplate a wider range of possibility on that score. Others share your feelings of embarrassment and betrayal, its just that it happened earlier or deeper before, taking it out on them is not the way to go.

I get that people think that FA has to have a huge membership- I don't agree with that assessment at all. An indicator is the MC thing, that caught everyone in FA by surprise which confirms my view that not all resistence happens or is contained in FA and its a tad vainglourious to assume it is or must be.

Or that it must appeal to Mr and Ms Middle brow of Middlesbourough, but I wouldn't be quite so condescending as all that. Many of those people are far more 'radical' and clued in than you. Yeah, not everyone's a joiner.

Some people don't join precisely because they see more clearly than they should and would rather keep the extent of that to themselves. You'd probably think they were crazy radicals anyhow.

So that's enough for now, I'm looking forward to an automatic recognition by fat people that we are as human as anyone and that means what happens to us, in us, defines the truth of being human as much as any other. If we do not, no-one else does end of story.

To all teh fatz of all races creeds, beliefs, genders, whatevers there are no group of people on earth finer or better, nor worse than you.

Got that?

I'm looking forward to it being unthinkable to think anything else.

Let's go for the instant gratification we are infamous for and make that right now.

Happy New Year

Rules of eating

2010-12-29T11:38:00.000-08:00

I noticed whilst cooking at Christmas-roasting meat-that by the time I finished, I had no inclination to eat it. Not that I wasn't hungry or that I felt any aversion to the food itself, just that I didn't want to sit and eat it after I'd cooked it.

This is not a complete surprise, its happened over a many years.

It's fascinating to me as for most of the years I spent trying to regulate my (weight) metabolism through diet, I was in the grip of an eating compulsion.

In short that is when hunger and appetite signals rise to higher and higher settings either to counteract this meddling or as a response to mood disorder/neurosis, or both.

You won't be told its that though, its described as binge eating disorder, nowadays and is often touted as an addiction/emotional dependence on food, because food is non essential of course. I don't feel this is a useful way to see it, but I just thought I'd mention it in case you were wondering.

I also am not keen on the insulting and typically inept "compulsive overeating" tag, because a) I think things should be named for what they are, not the compulsive obsession to link anything remotely associated with fatness to eating. Anorexics are not called 'starvers' bulimics 'vomiters' take note of that ED dimwits.

'Science' at its best.

Over the years, I finally realised control is only control if it actually results in or is control not merely seems or appears to be.

If I gave you something that looked like an apple but tasted just like a plum, you'd at least have to accept it was not an apple, it only looked like one.

Since then as I've let go of a lot of the baggage that I accrued with that plus some I had before and during it, perhaps after too (I'm still working on that) I've found that my hunger, especially, plus my appetite has changed slowly and erratically, yet surely.

In the past, most emotional (and other) stimulus seemed to trigger a chain reaction that lead to eating. This is what ED hacks call 'emotional eating'. I'd be fine, then I'd feel oh, anything; happy, sad, upbeat, hopeful, frustrated, anticipatory etc etc, and I'd go from fine, to wanting to eat.

Hunger had moved off centre as an instigator of eating and ceased to make sense. I hope one day to tell you all the fun times I had getting high on being dragged around by impulses as non-sequitur, but that's a delight you'll have to pine for.

This kind of thing has been described as using "food as a drug of choice", please, no laughing. However, as you can see, it wasn't fulfilling any drug like purpose. It was more stimulus, trigger, stimulus, trigger.

To me even at the time these descriptions made no sense-what it felt like was my system, nervous system that is, seemed unable to disentangle the stimulus of emotion, which travels along that system, from an impulse to eat.

Weird and unexpected though that was. I slowly concluded that it was more like if your arm is relaxed, you can flex; fingers, palm, wrist, elbow, shoulder. Not wholly independent of each other, but mostly discreet.

Whereas, if your arm is rigid and stiff, to move any part is to move all. In fact the more rigid the limb the more it becomes more like a single unit.

The parallel is that it was more like the tension in my (nervous) system had reached a certain level of tension constantly enough that the stimulus of feelings was not contained mainly there as that tension caused it to act more as one unit than more separate functions.

There was little pressure on me to eat with everyone else at Christmas, but over time people have got used to the change in me and I guess it helps that I feel little obligation to eat outside my own dictates. There's no hint of aggression, ut you know when you give off a sense that the argument is lost before its begun? That people don't have the will.

Now in general terms this might be seen as rude, I play things by ear, but what I'd say in general is social contract. I'm not talking about the fundamental and deeply serious aspect but of the clauses. The social interaction bit rather than social policy.

A lot of fat people are polite, but I've become disinclined to eat on the say so of anyone but myself, no matter what anyone thinks about that. Because the day society decided to talk "fatz eat yadda yah", was the day a commensurate adjustment should have been made in anyone's entitlement to question your desire to eat/ not anything at any particular time. Merely because its more convenient or nicer for them.

The raft of special eating needs has probably helped make this a bit of a moot point, but even if it didn't it wouldn't make much difference. I'm prepared to go the 'you don't want to be encouraging me to eat If I've said no and then telling me I'm fat, do you?' if necessary. Its only fair, as it doesn't tend to work in my favour usually.

I'm not hypocritical about it, I'd loathe to persuade anyone to eat what I'd prepared if they objected. I don't seem to take that in the way I used to, although I was never insistent because I considered not eating to be a triumph, yep, that was yearning speaking. I don't mind if you don't want to eat what I give you, I don't take it as a personal affront.

The rules of you should eat what your host has kindly prepared should be changed when kindly hosts all over are asking folks to 'stop eating', if people insist, they must be prepared for that to be at their table after they've sweated at a hot stove lovingly scaling the culinary heights.

Compliments of the season

2010-12-24T04:13:00.000-08:00

Well, we are nearly at Christmas now, which lets face it was slapped on some kind of Winter festival called Yuletide.

I wish you compliments of the season-I'm sure that will do, time is tight. So what to leave as a thought? Well, lately I've been feeling like I'm able to disentangle more and more from the dominant mainstream 'view' of fatness-again. Which is just a de animated stereotype, especially evident when you let it go and seek to explore your own experience.

This time round I hope it sticks, because when you come round to a certain place again and again, if you're lucky, you'll find yourself getting if not stronger, more, your mind knows more, you've hopefully learned from the previous merry-go-around.

I'm looking at fat haters and thinking, why do I need to waste my time with you? It's so uninteresting. Why wouldn't it be, either they don't know what I'm talking about, or they seek to be ignorant-as you do when you take on other people's ignorance in place of your own possibility of knowledge.

And that dear peruser is what I wish for you this season, your own experience, unfiltered and unadulterated by the ignorantly overbearing who seek to impose the curtailed and strictured guesses.

Live and breathe everything that happens, both good and bad, though I hope its much more of the former than the latter of course. Maybe over the other side of this time, we'll all have something new something fresh to say and mull over.

No matter how many times you wake up and exist in the particular form you come in. There's always a new angle to perceive, to view it.

FA 101

2010-12-21T11:37:00.000-08:00

Fat acceptance 101 is perplexing. FA has always seemed to be slight at times embarrassingly so, philosophically speaking. It follows well aired ideas of equality etc., I have never cared one jot about that, my feeling is our protest is reasonable so if we feel there's something to complain about, that is likely to be correct.

We certainly need to be heard, apart from anything we've followed orders.

Even if something seems trivial and a lot of people care about it, by that fact it ceases to be trivial.

What excites as opposed to exercises is that it falls along a network of differing conjunctions and themes which reflects the uses people make of the obesity persona. It looked like a microcosm of so many aspects of how society regulates itself in a way that is not so obvious from other angles. A lot of them are surprising unpredictable, fascinating.

Crusade BS is the surface is dull as ditch water when it isn't mind numbing or laughably appalling. What some groups in society can get away with is truly breathtaking-again.

Take the way that it has become a vehicle for a strange voyeuristic at times rather lascivious observing of the bodies of (fat) children, with women joining in at times. Pouring over fat children's bodies commenting on every detail in a most unwholesome tone. How ironic in the midst of the often mentally dead farrago surrounding sexualisation of children.

There was a study that uncovered the possibility that fat girls were more likely to have under age and (unprotected) sex than slimmer categories. What mainstream comment ignored is the effect of this invasive attention on their bodies.

Teaching them to see rather than feel and exist in their own bodies, on the contrary, prioritising weight loss can cause a numbing and estrangement from their own bodies and/or selves. Coupled with sometimes being ahead developmentally whilst not necessarily mentally and you have the potential for exploitation.

Down grading of one's sense of self worth is not good either and fodder for them that prey on those who are insecure and unsure.

I'm digressing point is, why would you need FA explained to you I thought? It's difficult to know what there is to explain, surely its harder not to get than not? Let's stop stigmatizing fatness, or treat fat people as any others, apply the same rules to them as anyone else.

People know this full well, and they've literally decided to suspend disbelief about ascribing the obesity persona to fat people. They always claim we are forcing them to mess with us, because we are talking about good people having trouble owning their wilful conscious badness.

Rather like you do when you fuse your favourite TV character with the actor playing the role. Drawn to the character as some point the player becomes the role, the character you can find you forget the actors name.

This is similar to what has happened with fat people, everyone knows we are the same variety of people as them, in essence yet they at some point decided or agreed to go along with the fiction that we are "the obese", the cyphers for what that's come to represent and now they can't remember that they are doing this themselves.

It's all so real.

You cannot imagine how odd that looks from this end. It's tolerable until you add a superiority of people who because they have the mainstream guff down pat, have to be imbued with the assumption that fatz are stupid (yes even though they are themselves) and they need things eck-splained to them. If you're starry eyed asking people to teach you about something, try a bit of humility i.e. acknowledge and respect your own ignorance. Or don't and forget about it. And hold your credulity about fat people until you can grasp what is being said.

Questioning is not the problem, it's the assumption that you're right-because you are imbued with the mainstream, and people in FA must be wrong, because you've dumped the stereotype of fat people on them-to get it off yourself.

Really, don't sell yourself so cheaply.

I finally understand that the best way to understand a fat acceptance101 is a list of pointers to help people to stem the course of their own suspended disbelief. Whilst they continue with it.

Maybe that can work!

Perhaps people are desperate for FA to be so convincing that they are forced to abandon their nonsense, other than that, they will continue.

So me thinking, why not just stop pretending and see if that makes it all better? Isn't going to cut it.