BMI Reparations

Hands up if you think reparations-that's compensating Black people for the consistent open ended robbery that is systemic racism, colonialism, etc., is super unspeakably radical/militant? Well, in the words of our US bretheren, you can just sit your punk ass down.

I've just caught up with an attempt by certain outfits to construct another fatty reparations model.The inversion being fat people will end up paying to be discriminated against-discrimination is robbery- as usual. Few pay more for being than fat people. We've paid and continue to pay; mentally, psychologically, physically, financially, healthwise, socially, in terms of quality of our relationships, and with our own self esteem and so on and so on. We've enriched liars and grifters at every level of society, professional and charity, governmental and private sector to degrade, butcher, mutilate and starve and run us ragged, only then to be blamed for the failure of the noose around our necks.

That's not enough though, now we have the prospect of being traded as a sort of loss commodity through a proposed system of rating companies by certain purported health measures, majoring in BMI measurements. Specifically, how many employees are in the "at risk" category, given the agit-prop produced by "obesity researchers" associating fat/ter people with lowered productivity.

The consistency and unchallenged nature of this wretched cult and its complete failure of a strategy- CRIWL means increasing the avenues to monetise discrimination. A huffpo article states this move by the "wellness industry"-yet another industry created off our backs- taxes business but that will be passed on to fat people, it already has.

You get robbed, then you get taxed for being robbed because everyone supports the construct making this possible,

“It does inadvertently put a target on employees’s backs who are dealing with obesity,”

Always accidental isn't it? In fact it is the 'obesity' construct which put not only a target but imprisons people in discrimination-full stop. I'm sure you can tell from the "dealing with obesity" where that's coming from. Those who also support the construct causing these problems. It's a tribute to the barely challenged nature of 'obese' that you can present yourself as on the side of fat people, whilst upholding the basis used to royally fleece them.

Furthermore, if you're interested, this target is being painted on all our backs using this as the entry wound. Those fat people who claim to adore slimz need to start thinking very carefully about allowing themselves to be an instrument in their downfall,

[The]....federal government is already taking the first step towards endorsing this Fat Tax by allowing companies to require employees to hand over genetic information as part of wellness programs.

When I first got into the fatsphere, I made the observation that 'obesity' was a threat to all our civil liberties. Increasingly that poison is spreading. All fat people need to start taking this into account. It's not simply about you anymore. Similarly for slim people who feel immune to the discrimination they're supporting for others, its going to bite your acceptable behind too.

Anyhoo, reparations, eminently mainstream, until it comes to certain folk obvs......

Weight Stigma

It's Weight Stigma Awareness week from the 22-26 September 2014. it's the third of an annual event from an organisation called BEDA-Binge Eating Disorder Association. It's purpose is to raise awareness about binge eating disorder [BED]. Sounds ominous.

The last grand push for eating disorders awareness was anorexia which started thin people getting harassed and accused of being anorexic on sight. Similar may happen with fat people being defined as binge eaters on sight. As has already happened with the risible "food addiction." Plenty of fat people will "confess" to it too, whether they have hyperphagia or not. There's the definition of fatness as eating disordered and the indistinct diagnosis.

I couldn't diagnose shit with this sort of thing. Nor am I sure I can grasp or be sure of what binge eating disorder is as distinct from hyperphagia nervosa or compulsive eating disorder though I do see there does seem to be some kind of distinction. I get its eating a lot in a short time. What I mean is a deeper sense of its specific discrete momentum. All of the major ED's have them.

It's absurd that its in the DSMV, but as ever "millions of people are now recognized and validated" is the reason, not fact. I'd prefer explanation and an accurate grasp of my condition. No one should look to psychiatry for validation, that's giving it even more power than it already has.

They have a twitterstream going right now @WSAW2014, which is where I saw this;

Weight Stigma Awareness Week 2014 is only three weeks away. Tweet me your best idea to discourage weight stigma. #WSAW2014
— Karen R Koenig (@KarenRKoenig) September 3, 2014

Weight stigma could be said to be just another way of saying fat stigma. Discouraging that requires people to stop stigmatizing fatness. To undergo a process similar to neurotics seeking to re-train their nerves to a calmer state.

Treating Black Women like they matter Improves their Health

Black women are often taught to put Black men first, last often always. To the extent that women can lose a sense of who they are, especially by the time it comes to parent.

Apparently, responding to them as real beings who matter. Counselling them, addressing their needs/ offering hope to that end, giving them even periodic advice, encouragement, attention relieves some of those tensions, alleviating depression. Wowsers.

Under what pretext was this tested? A study of a "weight management programme" charmingly called "Maintain, don't Gain." The aim is to stop especially black women gaining any weight through changes in diet and habits. The purpose is to prevent moving into higher risk weight categories.

It featured 185 "obese" low income women with BMI's between 25-35 [yeah].

What is it about this crusade that it never starts with the fattest people? If you are going to perform this kind of study and claim it as establishing something close to an evidentiary principle. They would be the most in need and reveal the most about any underlying technique.

Don't worry about the trope about how black women struggle to lose weight because black people are indifferent to/ glorify 'obesity'. It is a tiresome and lazy falsehood. Why aren't white attitudes to women as trophies who do nothing but reflect the glory of middle/upper class white men's ability provide or whatever, pointed to as a thing?

Not being as wholly unbalanced and deranged about weight as other races/classes does not equal fat positive. That is not metaphor. The investment in calorie restriction by western model countries has departed the shores of sanity. Yes, middle/upper class white people can do that too.

Being disinclined towards the strange and suicidal impulse to fight and repress hunger-which is part of our means of perpetuating life-as if its a pathology, is perfectly rational.

The fervent belief that white people are where human reason lives, doesn't make it so. Nor does the assumption of black people's unreason mean we don't retain rational after others have lost theirs.

I also note that the pressures of racism, are skirted over. There's an increasing urge to submerge racism [amongst other things] into "obesity." Part of the flexibility in pathologizing beings rather than naming an actual process.

The burdens of sexism aren't mentioned either.

Misogynoir, refers the different interplay between the two in black women. Being black does not invest with magic to swat this away as if its not there. Women don't sit around feeling sorry for themselves, but they aren't able to completely conjure away all feelings of being trapped by the trip wires of race and sex from doing its work on their nervous systems.

That trapped between multiple stresses factor is seen in working class women of all races who tend to be fatter. Whereas men are more likely to have a more varied spread of weight across income/class. If you wish to turn medicine into a quasi religious form of sociology, being on the receiving end of structural and social discrimination should be deemed risk factors for ill health.

The usual squawking is about "sedentary", including those working minimum wage type jobs. But what does that really mean? Contained, constricted thwarted, blocked, trapped is what it means. There's evidence that this changes the effect activity has on your body.

Some of the probable reasons for black women's purported greater difficulty have not been revealled in black women. Ellen Langer's highly underrated and revelatory study-which always felt like an exposé- points to how cynical and damaging that branding of "sedentary" has been.

I'm glad these women got 12 months of much deserved and clearly needed attention, affirmation and a sense that they matter. That their needs are valid and worth being catered to as say, the ladies who lunch. Weight stablisation doesn't introduce the threat to restrict the body's ability to nourish itself properly-including enough to cope with the demands being made on it, I make no bones about that.

This cannot be denied despite this all bodies are the same default that is often the assumed basis around any discussion of weight.

Black women have amongst the lowest suicide rates of all. Situational or structural depression, i.e. awareness of conditions you are in, rather than a condition being led more by personal trauma/upset + susceptibility.

This is itself suggested by;

These findings [of reduced depression] were not related to how well the women did in the weight management program nor whether they were taking depression medication.

It will be interesting to see whether and how this does get constructed into a "model." Whether it's to prevent disease or if it will be seen as a way to depression in poor black women and others. If this study shows anything, its that low income black women, especially, need more self-affirmation not less.

[h/t to New Black Man (in exile)]

Man V Collateral Damage

Adam Richman is an ex-professional feeder  who presented a programme the attractions of which I simply do not understand. Seems that's due to its basis being anorexia worshipping societies boring obsessive compulsive food fixation. Even the mere veneration of it produces a displacement effect similar to that found in actual anorexics.

Anyhows, Richman stopped eating to the dictates of his career-eating amounts he doesn't want to eat and has lost some weight. He posted photos of himself on his instagram account in praise of said weight loss. One of hastags he used in this was #thinsporation which =Thin + inspiration.

This prompted a follower to get in touch with Amber Sarah who has the barefaced nerve to be a fat activist, non of this [""]. Not sure why "feminists" can't take other women seriously, probably waiting for men to do it first, giving them permission to.

She responded by, as far as I can see, calmly calling his attention to the term's inappropriate "problematic" connotations. He and others claim he had no knowledge of the origins of the term. That I doubt. It's in the air, he probably picked it up symbiotically. Funny how those who deem others guilty by existence trade so much on innocence. [Or perhaps not].

Thinspo comes from amateurs who take the 'cure' for 'obesity' to its logical conclusion and flat out define anorexia nervosa (and exercise bulimia) as a lifestyle. As indeed does the establishment-for fat people. One of the props for this turn of mind is the use of the objectification of women in the form of often doctored photos of slim and thin women to "inspire" them to continue starving themselves.

It's what a consciously induced famine requires, constant reminders to keep on doing it. All things being equal, you'd just eat when you're hungry, that's kind of a default necessity. Unless you have a form of anorexia so overwhelming that it more or less runs itself 

[There's an ironic counterpart-fatspo fat + inspiration. Referring to the fact that it takes just as much continual will for fat people to swim upstream against society's imposition and view yourself as fully human, as it does to constantly and consciously contrive anorexia. If not more so.]

His first response was to state he had no fuq's to give. 'K. This prompted Amber to call on her followers to let him know the significance of ED's i.e. anorexia.  

In short, Richman then went apeshit. Not merely angry but revealled he has an extent of problems way out of keeping with his cultivated image as a charming happy stuffer-shall we say. He actually called women c-nuts and went so far as to say to someone else;

seriously-grab a razor blade & draw a bath. I doubt anyone will miss you.

Can you believe that? I'm not that bothered by offense, but I found that repugnant. So much so that I forgot myself and honestly expected forthright condemnation, at least of that. You can be a fat hater and realise that crossed a line. After all, remember all the fuss about abuse on the internet of certain women on the internet.

What was I thinking? I know better.

Thinspo is persecuted by both the establishment and middle class parents with anorexic children, mainstream feminists and the like. Its the usual displacement of their own class attitudes showing up (mostly) daughters. They're keen to point the finger of blame elsewhere away from themselves, usually to where you'll find the expression of said attitudes.

Culture's a tricky one. We tend to be so much a part of it that seeing your children interpret it can be the first time you get a clear view of certain of its themes. That can be a real shock. It probably does feel emotionally like its coming from somewhere else.

In this way, thinspo has been saddled with the same kind of displacement as the fashion industry and its thin models.

Let's say, I'm unimpressed by anorexia and have a low tolerance for either its worship or Stockholmed too often fat phobic followers who insist others should also bow to the might of their friend 'ana'. What they deem insight, is too often expression of their inability to see how much of a hold it still has on their minds. To be fair, in a society that supports that.

Despite all this, I have sympathy for their position, and none for those who cynically use them to body shield their own disgusting capitulation to promoting this pathology, in the name of things like "weight management." With respect to Amber, I think any fat people joining in the point scoring about thinsproana should examine their motives more rigourously.

Fat activists need to learn to treat their own experience with a bit more respect, before joining any crude chorus of mindless disapproval, as a matter of principle. I've little problem confronting entitled pro-ana's who think they have the droit de seigner to abuse fat people. Though a little more understanding though of what drives, often children to pro-ana might be better when it comes to mainstream discourse is needed. A little less of the mindless replication of accepted hypocrisy.

Authority's persecution of "thinsproana" has always been self serving. It's motivated by keep up the pretense that there's a yawning chasm between anorexia nervosa and the imitation of it as a way of life, by anyone, including fat people. That its pure co-incidence that the amount of eating disorders have risen and disordered views of food have become the norm, indeed "healthy" during this 'obesity' crusade.

Because fat people's experience is almost completely erased, people can keep pretending calorie restriction as a "healthy lifestyle" will not keep spewing up its numerous sub-pathologies. Often assigning them to 'obesity' because they submerge the reality that fat people have already lived a pro-ana mindset and/or lifestyle in trying to slim the way we've been ordered.

They're also trying to continue the pretense that it doesn't require everyone to live by pro-ana, merely to implement it as the way of regulating weight. Society is required by that strategy to be the gastrectomy. That is in the nature of human design. Restricting necessity is unnatural, it requires rigid and constantly enforced artifice-before you think about results.

Instead, the voice of delusion continues to post-pone the day of reckoning. Those who wish to can still kid on about individuated harm free calorie restriction as the basis of weight regulation.

Hence this kind of tussle between anorexia as the 'obesity' cure and the value of thin/slim people damaged by it, occurs. You could say it will be interesting to see whether fat phobia or the value assigned slim people will win out.

Bite It

Birmingham, the UK's second city [not the one in Alabamy] has finally noted its density of fast food haunts, decided too high and will hereby restrict further excesses. Yet another case of this arse-faced crusade era's shutting the door after you opened it to allow the horse to bolt in the first place.

The point is not that this should or shouldn't be done, that its good/ bad, will or won't work. Its more, if you insist on a particular course that demands certain actions, plus the avoidance of others. Can't have one without the other.

When you demand people must go to war with their hunger, don't permit your cities to become filled with easily available, universally appealing calorie dense food. This shouldn't be a problem. Being fat is supposedly eating too much/wrongly. The avoidance of this is no issue for slim people, they're already there, which is why they're slim.

Really, the fat stereotype is a shame fuelled exaggeration of human tendencies. We like to have the food we like within easy reach. Ancient compounds unearthed usually find places where energy dense and energy efficient foods were stored. Tubers, starchy root veg, grain stores.

Access to food affects where we live.

What's the hunting like? Can we gather enough produce to keep us going? Is it fertile, what can we plant? If you don't feel comfortable when there's no food in the house, why would that change on a collective basis?

The flaw in the false dichotomy made between slim and fat is exposed by societies creating a flood going against the progress of law they've laid down for fat people. We hear; "Why should we [the unfat] be denied because others [i.e. fat people] can't control themselves?"

Because you insisted weight loss must occur and via one route only. None other should be available. Weight loss should be like this, it should be this bad and ineffective yet can somehow be made to work because um... innumeracy.

I find it hard to care that much about this kind of thing now, it's all too late. When the high streets, especially in lower income areas were filling up with these kinds of outlets. I was already struggling with imposition of lifestyle anorexia-for my sins. This gave me a bad feeling about what was going on around me. I felt it would be yet another obstacle for me and people like me.

We had to accept this because our burden was framed as all about self control-or the failure of it. Though it was demanded that we engage in a wholly unnatural, pathological, punitive, unsustainable stance and were clearly struggling, we were not just on our own fighting against primal forces within we had to add, swimming against the tide of other people's resistance.

No attempt to help us meet the demands placed on us was insignificant enough to be considered. No maintenance of any balance was too minimal to be jettisoned all whilst the cries of crisis got louder and louder. Those less prone to weight gain, instinctively wanted nothing to do with any interference or threat to their needs or desires.

That's about how we're all made.  Fat people just accepted going against essential human nature. No wonder it felt right to dehumanize us.

Having seen all this, I quickly concluded the only feasible solution was through science finding a way or ways to reverse [and advance] weight that didn't require something quite so unfeasible. Something that didn't get in the way of slim/mer society as that was a pointless waste of energy. That "no" had to be accepted.

It hurt to see the remorseless dismantling of everything that helped temper the potential for vested interests to get a formidable grip on our food environment. Whether commercial interests or food fanatics. Especially for ordinary children who were clearly deemed expendable, unworthy of effort for the sake of our sacred covenant with children-to the best we can for them.

No more kids growing plants/vegetables, no more school cookery classes, no more attempts to feed children a balanced meal, etc., etc., I totally get the sentiment people are have about fat acceptance should advocate for the end of food desert, but it is mis-placed. I can put up with a lot, but that is a battle I don't have the heart for. 

All this was a hell of a long time coming. It was totally obvious to me at the time, and most of the time folks could barely manage to give a damn. Even when they could, that was undermined by the "personal responsibility" get out clause (ironic that). You cannot claim we are all islands unto ourselves but we require an environment that respects and supports our innate inclinations. 

I feel like where have you been all this time? People spoke out about drugs infiltrating communities, they spoke about crime, about economic deprivation, but barely a word could be heard about the logic of our environment v demands made. Now because you think fat people are unseemly, you can suddenly come back to life and give a shit? And you expect that to become my life?

Again, no country has managed to sustain a reverse in their rate of fatness, or even slim down those deemed less than 'obese', no one mentions that the whole weight graph is moving to the right, not leaving a gap between the righteous and the sinful bodies.

Those who talk crudely about the "nanny state" are also naive. They don't realise this balance of forces is the so called  'discipline' of previous generations. That "eating competence" as the marvellous Ellen Satter calls it, is not maintained magically from some intrinsic unimpeachable source, it must be cultivated from within and the environment must match that. A history of lack is not that. Poverty is not discipline. Inefficiency of means, isn't self control.

Basic truths about human nature must be recognized, you cannot treat food like Ayn Rand treats human will. We are not creatures solely of elective will, it only feels like that because what will we do have is contrasted with our more unconscious wiring. We are animals who within our internal dynamics have some element of what we can perceive as will power. It's part of the whole of what makes us, it is not the whole. Our will is not linear it is more curved, spiral even. Shaped by and prone to interruption then overthrow by basic instincts.

Declarations of purported self mastery can go twist on that.

Though fat people accepted this ultimately deranged ideologically based proposition and were keen. Nobody else matched that enthusiasm. Before you get to any question of efficacy there's implementation.

I've no desire to fight other people's perfectly natural sense of threat to their ability to nourish themselves (amongst other things) then nor now. As I've said and never wavered from, the ability to adjust weight, forwards or backwards is required-end of story.

So why not just bite that bullet? It is medically necessary due to the central influence of human metabolic function on human function. It is a stepping stone to other things and a route to better medical treatments as promising in its way as the much touted "genetics."

Key in a Lock

Cue massive yawns;

For 10 years, my problem was too little, rather than too much, food. What could I, recently recovered from anorexia, possibly know about fatness?

Well done, in not bothering to find out whether that is 'the problem' for all fat people. It's true though, that anorexics should have the closest understanding of what its like to be fat. Not because they're alike, but because fat people are treated as if we have an eating disorder that will kill us, regardless of our personal situation.

You cannot weigh behaviour. Anorexia is a disorder, fatness is weight. 

In my experience, many of the more vocal often middle class anorexics don't understand a whole lot about anorexia past their subjective interpretations. Basic understanding is recognising something in its original setting. Deeper is when you can recognise it other contexts. These anorexics failed for instance to spot that it is effectively the prescription for 'obesity'. Many still find it hard even after it has been pointed out to them;

For so long I wondered how most women can diet and exercise and not develop a full-blown eating disorder, whereas I started losing weight and exercising excessively and got sucked into the spiral of anorexia. When I see the girls in the office tucking into chocolate brownies for someone’s birthday, moments after announcing their new diet regime, I wonder if eating disorders and disordered eating are actually part of the same spectrum; whether self-starvation is simply a more extreme form of female dieting. I see a lot of anxiety about weight around me; I hear a lot of guilt about food. Sometimes it seems that ‘normal’ dieting and anorexia are worlds apart, sometimes they seem very close.

Dieting is like a key, anorexia is like it fitting a lock and turning. Only one in 200-250 people have this lock or susceptibility to anorexia. Though that varies in strength too, unless you have it, then your body is unlikely to succumb to full blown anorexia. However, dieting does unbalance the mind and body. A lot of fat people have that almost anorexia and/or other symptoms, due to the extent and duration of their dieting careers, which often start in early childhood.

There are also other 'locks' bulimia, hyperphagia. Yes, a lot of people don't realise, an excess of appetite is often part of the body's way of fighting off your attempts at calorie restriction.

Think about it, if your body increases your hunger signals, that's makes resisting hunger far harder work than even it is normally.  There are other exposures to ED's. Lack of money. Some stop eating because they find it easier than eating then having to stop again when they run out of money or food. Some develop under-eating patterns so as to relieve the pressure on parents and develop that massive anxiety about eating that many with ED's get-not only anorexia.

Binge cycles can be established by having more money at the start of the month and none at the end. And this can raise hunger to the point where people would rather do with the minimum of clothes to ward off their excess of hunger signals. People become expert at getting maximum calories from minimum resources. This can also unbalance their appetite and hunger signals.

I didn't realise people conflated thinness with anorexia till I encountered thinsproana. I've known too many thin people over the years and their attitude to food was so normal compared to mine to consider they have anything to do with anorexia. Which to be honest, can give off a certain vibe. That's why I simply do not see thin people as anorexic. Though at the same time realise very low weight is more likely to be a symptom of wasting.

Many of thinz, along with others helped me to have an idea in my head of what normal eating meant. Anorexia is further from them than me in the days of my 'healthy lifestyling'!

What not wanting scotty burgers looks like

* Apologies, I seem to have accidentally deleted a post. This is a re-write.

The small town of Tecoma in Australia is protesting the potential arrival of scotty burgers.

Unlike others who purport to be oh so vexed by both them and their supposed effect on upping the weight of nations.

Good luck to the residents of that small town who are taking on this giant. How unusual. But then, the residents really don't want 'em.