Ceasefire On Your Phony War

"Britain is becoming a mascot for diabetes – it’s time to do something drastic about obesity". If Britain is becoming a mascot for stupid self-defeating behaviour-then wondering around all surprised after the fact, like a monkey who's lost its banana.

The war on obesity, which has not yet even been declared, will be won through a series of small victories and guerrilla skirmishes, just as it was against tobacco. 

How impressively butch. All reality will bow before you, no doubt. 

To your typical comparison of tobacco with fatsuity;


Both A and B, both the host and the 'disease' are is BMI 30+. As your hack-soul knows full well, there's no comparison between tobacco and the human body. It's about showing contempt.

Why that particular war metaphor though?

Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare in which a small group of combatants, such as paramilitary personnel, armed civilians, or irregulars, use military tactics including ambushes, sabotage, raids, petty warfare, hit-and-run tactics, and mobility to fight a larger and less-mobile traditional military.

A top down abuse of power is now a revolutionary insurgency against the odds?😵

Irregular warfare
...defined in US joint doctrine as “A violent struggle among state and non-state actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.

💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩

Even if this was the case, who has dictated things as they stand? As you can see in the diagram, your targets do not even appear in the term that you are using to attack them in your phony war! That obviously comes from the notion of a-slim person who has 'extra' that is with 'obesity' and is all about you.

You and your kind are in the driving seat. 

When a subject is not a study of you, negates everything you think, feel. say and do, when it doesn't know let alone respond to your needs, when it blocks even the most minor possibility of arming you with anything that will give you power or autonomy over your own body-It is not about you. It's about those writing the script.

 People like this, write the script, regardless of reality. When it comes to other people, they feel that entitled.

What folk like this want to continue with the current order where every BMI 30+ is a criminal who owes a debt to society that must be paid. That payment is a life sentence of futile diet 'n' exercise, aka starvation and hard labour. We all know, including op-ed, that this has failed, but it doesn't matter, it's about punishment above all else.

They're getting exactly what they want.

This fake war against civilians by the influential from elite classes, has been on for at least 40 years in its most recent incarnation. It never gets beyond inducing weight reduction using calorie restriction is defeated by the body's own self-regulation, because of the monstrous self-indulgence of the script writers. And their rejection of SCIENCE, in favour of turning "health" into a criminal justice model.

This is way worse than any climate change denial. Their failure and lies can be seen at all times. Climate change is not nearly so evident. 

The first line of this pile of tripe is, "You are what you eat, so the saying goes.". I'll see that twaddle and raise them an axiom, if the hypothesis doesn't match reality, change the hypothesis.

Don't change, nay mutilate bodies, change your approach, work with and use the body's own abilities. A proper physiologically honest grasp of how the body regulates itself, and means of resetting how much body mass the body sustains, is required in place of insisting people starve themselves.

How is it possible to hate science this much? Even right-wing christian conservatives don't feel this aversion. On the contrary, they've shown real respect for science in their some of their misguided attempts to reframe their holy books as filled with science. 

It's people like this who are truly anti-science. Anti-vaxxers aren't even on the same page of mess as them.

I'll put it to them in simple terms.

Either continue to do your punishment, or allow the science to be done-stop blocking it.

But you cannot turn your punishment into efficacy, no matter how much you mutilate and poison organs. And your increasingly deranged efforts to have your cake and eat it too will just cause massive penalties to be paid, and not by you, as usual.

It's called H-U-N-G-E-R

"Sell high calorie foods in plain packaging to beat obesity, says brain prize winner", a brain prize winner, the Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Prize to be precise, must know exactly what they're talking about.

We are to believe anyone who would even think of gainsaying anything Wolfram Schultz, to put a name to him, uttered on such matters would be some way out of their depth. An "anti-science" sort not worth listening to, isn't that so?  We are all cowered to be sure, 'til we get to the lols.

First, a bit of context,

“We should not advertise, propagate or encourage the unnecessary ingestion of calories,” [really?]

Then he utters the immortal line;

“There should be some way of regulating the desire to get more calories. 

What a fantastic idea, there should be. Wait a minute, there is. I've found it,

H-U-N-G-E-R!

Hand me mucho dinero. Give me a frackin' prize.

I almost don't want to go on as that sums up the mess that is the ob cult and its weight is cals in minus cals used underpinnings. That mes amis is toute-les-choses [I'm feeling all Hercule P]. You need little more to grasp just how much this type of ideology has the minds of its subjects utterly pinioned to the point where reason is wasted on them.

They don't want to deal with hunger, their compulsion to impose it, starvation and anorexia on others is only exceeded by their desire to deny this. Trying to convince everyone hunger doesn't really exist. You don't eat because you are hungry, you're not hungry, you're emotional. 

This man is a scientist but that gives no immunity from this neurosis. He shared a prize for his research into reward systems-not a coinage I've ever had a whole lot of time for, could be worse though. Yet he doesn't actually get that hunger exists to regulate intake.

If he or anyone else feels there's any problem with hunger, then that should be the target of adjustment, not food. I am literally thankful every day that I'm no longer troubled by relentless; hyper functioning, overactive, hypersensitive and implacable hunger I was in the past. Seeking to control what people eat to in this way seeks to replace the adjustment of hunger. They believe they can be your hunger better than your actual function. The one designed for the purpose.

Which doesn't go away, all that happens is the setting up of a clash with these artificial outside bounds. 

Are other people really designed to be your hunger?

Yes, it's true that food manufacturers seek to influence your eating, even to the extent of controlling it, in the sense of wanting you to chose their products over others-whether that works for you or not. However, these people do not arm folk against that, they merely become a counter extreme that turns you into a battleground for their skirmishes with each other.

The problem with the crusade and ci/co is it begins and ends it seems with eating, which is too late in the process. It comes after hunger. Eating is the response to that, not some sinister pathology or original sin.

De-contextualising eating in this way simply becomes a source of further disorder and dietary mayhem. Which intriguingly relates to an area of interest for Schultz, understanding how memories are formed, according to this geeze and others, this could help with learning how to unravel [undesired] memories. Like not being able to remember hunger exists or what its for.

All for the desire to control what other people eat.

Your Life as a Metabolic Adjunct

Adjunct adj; A thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part.

You may know that I've always said that drugging neuroses is not a good idea. By neurosis I'm referring to things like; depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorders and disorders of eating and hunger. Basically, imbalance in the functioning of the nervous system.

I recognise the need for drugs. There are a very small minority whose neurosis is a product of an abnormal nervous system, that malfunctions regularly. Their system needs to be brought up to par. Overlapping with them are those who's neurosis is at the most extreme end. At that point neurosis can become psychosis.

My objection is essentially that the nature of the nervous system is inherently self-correcting. The way it is working can be interrupted and altered by its own seat-the brain-which we have a conscious part under our charge. We feel that part of the brain is us.

So why commit to drugs as the answer when we have/are not exploring the means to use our minds to adjust our minds/brains/ nervous system function?

This is inevitable. You cannot evade it. If drugs work, they achieve the same end, stimulating/suppressing malfunction in that system. Indeed, many of these drugs are as much vehicles for invoking the so called placebo effect as they are effective in and of themselves. The placebo effect here especially, is just the assumption that this are making you better.

That is an example of your mind, interrupting your mind.

So we might as well bite that bullet with real vigour.

Instinctive objection to drugging the nervous system into submission is normal. Drug companies use of the notion of neurosis as your "illness" which you needed "medicine" for, was used to bypass that.

When really a lot of it is about convenience. So what? No one needs to hide from that. In societies where we expect machine-like infallibility from ourselves and each other, having to do anything to keep going can become part of that.

Accepting that you are weighing up that need in taking drugs helps you to keep an eye out for when that changes. When a bit of space opens up for you. A chance to try and deal with underlying issues. Or when you're tired of crude chemical manipulation.

Lifestyle, which is really a euphemism for your life, is even worse than a pill for every ill. Drugs are at least convenient and trigger your mind to help itself, lifestyle brings nothing, it only takes. It's all your effort framed as if it somehow isn't.

It cannot be classed as "treatment" it brings no active ingredient. No technique, no help, just exhortations. Like the preacher in the pulpit. There's barely any discernible placebo either most of the time. Tellingly, it also avoids adjusting your nervous system. Just like careless drugging, it doesn't bother to make use of your nervous system's ability to self correct and adjust.

Which is just as necessary and inevitable as adjusting it for your mental health.

Lifestyle has pretentions that it is a life built around healthy habits, when really it is groundhog day. Every day recreating a failing strategy. Ending up treating your life as an adjunct, a metabolic adjustment. What is designed to adapt is left to continue whilst your life is pressed to be a switch for it, day after day after day.

Your. Whole. Life.

Leading Cause of Chronic Child and Adult Health Problems? ACE's

For years now there's been talk of how "poor diet" is a leading cause of (preventable) death more recently promoted to the top spot.

I don't feel entirely at home with this kind of competition. Something makes me skeptical about the construction of leading cause of deaths when it comes to the kind of chronic conditions most associated with wear and tear.

We will all die of something at some point. Not wishing to be ageist but how old does a person have to be before their passing is deemed, not preventable?

Anyway a more pressing reason to reject this assertion and its usual shallow agenda. The health effects of ACE's aka Adverse Childhood Experiences are usually absent from the overall picture. From parental, societal and peer sources. Whether abuse, sexual and other exploitation, bullying, assault, neglect and verbal aggression. All are being finally realized more recently as sources of more chronic ill-health.

Before the "toughen up"/get over it crew get going, this is what prioritizing health and personal responsibility really means. You cannot have any of that truly, without a comprehensive index of each and every, at least major, influence on each particular person.

If you find that an unnecessarily exacting thought then you are finally catching on to what your mindless rhetoric really refers to. The crusade has completely isolated fat people as if we have absolutely no contact with any other human being and transcend our era, time and place.

I've said forever that health can be affected by virtually anything that affects you, to the good or ill. The fixation on food and eating is an instinctive and sometimes quite conscious way to dodge this. Especially when it demands disciplined behaviour from those who like to feel free to impact on people and their health.

It also tends to quickly raise political questions undermining the deliberate intent to depoliticize people's existence. 

Weight Loss Diet Burnout

Normally when you are interested in a field of study-relating to an aspect of the human condition-you are drawn to study those who exhibit said state or condition.

Whether you're a sociopath or someone with zero interpersonal skills makes no odds. This has nothing to do being nice, it's to do with your interest and desire for mastery of your chosen field. In other words, that focus that draw is intellectual, whether you're nice and caring and want to help/heal/cure/assist/treat or simply pit your wits against some tangle of human biological function.

What's been singularly remarkable about 'obesity' in the last 4 or so decades is the palpable lack of intellectual drive for most declaring themselves involved in research. In its place is a sort of reflexive defense of the calories in/out ideology.

One omission that epitomizes this void is the absence of weight loss diet burnout from discussing long-term calorie restriction dieting intentions. Let me say this right now if you diet or attempt to "for life" i.e. indefinitely-weight loss diet burnout is inevitable.

Yet, so ignored is this phenomenon, that it doesn't-to my knowledge-have a medical name. It's possible that this is widely known about, but I've never heard it referenced by those seeking to impose the calorie restriction straight-jacket.

Perhaps this is because the insistence is, fat people don't diet which is why we are fat. As dieting is "obesity prevention,"there's nowhere else you can go with a refusal to accept the reality of its failure. The idea of observing fat people objectively, is a waste of time to ideologues.

The best description I ever heard of weight loss diet burnout was "It's like having a nervous breakdown, but solely in this area". "This" being the part of you that deals with seeing off weight loss dieting becomes exhausted by a continual state of emergency/war of attrition with your body. 

Though I knew of it, it caught me unawares when it happened to me because I did not see myself as a dieter. I saw myself as a healthy (/ist) eater. You know, what they recommend now. If you have the perfect diet, you'll become healthier and means you'll lose weight. Healthy=weight loss.

Or to put it more directly-though I didn't realize this at the time. One consumes health.

What happens is one day you go to do your usual-go on a diet that is-and BAM! Some part of you screams NOOOO!!!! It's specifically your nervous system letting you know that its overloaded.

That sensation of something crying out for mercy is hard to get a sense of, unless you've experienced it.

The terms we pin to any cloud of sensory data swirling around our nervous system/s goes according to cultural expression. If this seems a bit weird, I can't fault you, but that's the best way I can explain it.

And the experience itself is like walking oblivious along a familiar street, turning a corner on auto-pilot only to be abruptly shaken out of your reverie by walking straight into some obstacle or person.

Barely a peep will you here about this from official weight loss diet wallahs because, they pretend believe fat people cannot have spent any real time in pursuit of weight loss dieting triumph. 

Merely having the prospect of dieting hanging over your body, is enough to produce some serious symptoms. Yes, our body's response to dieting  can be that potent. And people don't realise this. I'll give you a scenario.

If you decide to go on a diet tomorrow-hyperphagia will kick in between now and then. Your hunger and/or appetite will open up and you'll be stopping past the point you normally do. Iow, like when you manage to miss getting off at your usual station.

Ditto if you decide to start this time next week. This is your body starting its process of weight conservation. If you are one of those people who finds it almost impossible to stick with a diet for any length, i.e. days, even hours, then this, more than weight loss dieting may end up thwarting your body's ability to stablize its weight.

Because you repeat the process week after week, day after day even. Think about that, string together a hyperphagic response week after week, day after day and what can you get? That's right, permanent hyperphagia. In other words, your body's ability to switch off this response off 'breaks.' You're never not about to diet, so it doesn't get a chance to return to normal.

How many people this applies to I don't know. Not simply fat people. People who started dieting whilst slim/remain slim may develop hyperphagic disorder through this. Some of whom didn't particularly succumb to rebound i.e. their rebound didn't go past their starting point.

Dieting is proto-anorexia. It is a pathology, it is self abuse-whether fatness is "healthy or unhealthy" or whether its desirable or not desirable to lose weight is another point entirely.  I'm commenting purely on dieting, it is bad news.

The problem with it is that our bodies, in the shape especially of our nervous system is designed to thwart this. It's this continual invoking of these defences that finally overcomes and exhausts the nervous system-that is weight loss diet burnout.

How do you recover? The same way as you would with a more full nervous breakdown, rest your nervous system. In this specific case-stop dieting and the prospect of it, completely. That rests the areas of the nervous structure involved.

But for most people, the only thing that makes them get back on the diet treadmill after that is either a strong attachment to their identity as slim/thin or despair at aggressive continued gain that shows no sign of stopping.

Otherwise burnout is often a (diet) career ender.

Weight as Opinion

Looking back and wondering, how did some weird historical phenomena get ahold? Why some and not others? The best I've come up with is the ones that took were capable of being all things to all people. They were able to absorb projections and fulfill needs unsatisfied elsewhere in their respective cultures. 

Being on the wrong side of these can be very hard work. One learns how much we rely on taking common premises/understandings for granted. It's not just not sharing terms, it not sharing frames. Then you can easily be cast into an oblivion of mutual imperceptibility.

Difficulties are often surprising and hard to read or fathom. One of the more simple ones is that we, fat to thin alike, were taught exactly the same ideas about being fat and slim. About weight, eating and dieting.

We absorb it in exactly the same way. So, imagine thin shaming being the law and all slim people not realizing there's anything untoward about that. Like, there is one consciousness that is shared regardless of weight.

The key differences came about not through fat people being on their own side and slim people being on their-which would be the same thing as the mainstream.  It came through the reality of being fat and not slim.

This is something I thought was patently obvious. Apparently no. Not only to many slim people, which at least makes some sense, but to many if not most fat people too. Ironically, due to seeing through the same frame.

What's freaky, is that so many slimz and fat hating fatz especially, behave as if this was not so at all. They act as if fat people have always put up a ferocious fight against this shared consciousness. This non-occurrence should have happened. That would have been normal.

It just didn't. 

Fat people did not behave that way at all. Suffice to say this was all underwritten by scientists who cited 'physics' so it was "truth". There was nothing to oppose, it wouldn't have occurred. Still, it's perfectly expected that one would defend one's honour, regardless, even if its to say; "We're not all bad." Or "Consider our good points." How about, "Let the punishment fit the [non] crime"?

Even psychopaths, caught in acts of real badness will sneakily make a case for the ordinary/good people, being as bad as they are. Perhaps lacking the(ir) moxie to follow through. Given recent experiences, a bit more believable than before.

This merging of fiction over fact is typical of the cavalier way with truth that characterizes this crusade. Virtually anything they assert goes unchallenged. Not because of bullying, but because of what? Brainwashing? Nope, that word doesn't work, Stockholm Syndrome? Nah. Not quite. I really don't have a word for reality that becomes false through the reality of your existence.

There are similarities, we are like the lapse ex-religious living in a theocracy. Yet, like so much about the experience of being [fat], it doesn't quite fit other descriptions. Science is not a religion. (Not yet anyway.)

The key to this, as ever, is realizing what being weight represents in this particular scenario. It represents opinion. Your opinion. Your weight, is your point of view, it's your argument. Fat (body) must therefore be versus slim. Despite the fact that it never really was. Except in mainly isolated corners. Your body is your fightback that never happened.

Empty Rhetoric

No more of this nonsense;

Imposing the same strict restrictions on unhealthy food and drink as tobacco will curb the country's obesity scourge, an Otago University researcher says.

Says a professor of marketing. Mind you, I'm not a snobby about sources but it might explain why this (ir)rationale is attractive to this prof. This nonsensical line is  of course being peddled a lot right now and it will not do people.

Food simply cannot be turned into cigarettes;

"Tobacco is a very unambiguous product because it is uniquely harmful - some foods are closely analogous to tobacco as they offer no nutritional benefit and the research evidence suggests changes in food supply, particularly the widespread availability of inexpensive, palatable, energy dense food have contributed to, if not at least partly caused, the rising prevalence of obesity.

Balls.

Yes tobacco is "unambiguous" in the way it taxes the body, food isn't. The psychology behind smoking is another thing altogether and that has been erased to make smokers look like self destructive idiots. In order to shame them to stopping-let's face it. Having said that, there is no known part of the body nourished by tabs, yet sugar provides calories, which are the primary nutrient human bodies need.

In fact don't all beings require energy of some sort to exist?

It is not the only nutrient required, but it is required. You'll exist a whole lot longer on honey than on vitamin pills. Oh and to the silly response that not all food is necessary. That misses the point. We are designed around the necessity of taking in energy, pathologizing any aspect of that is as senseless as it is superfluous.

In order to make this kind of false equivalence-a ubiquitous big bear of the whole crusade-one has to pretend food is something other than it is, and human beings are other than they are. No thanks. Your stupid is your own, do not impose that on others.

We can see how bad it gets when we ignore human nature with something that's not necessary to life, like smoking or drugs. How much worse still with something that is? What is the point in shaming food and people for consuming it? That achieves something similar to shaming sex and people's sexuality and sexual organs, possibly worse and more destructive.

I'd advise people to read testimony from, for example, PWA who feel repulsed by human dependence on food. We simply cannot regress human knowledge for a supposed health campaign that has already had a tremendous amount of influence and failed to show anything but introduce new problems.

If you want people to reconsider drinking their calories, campaign on that. Note, it would have been better never to have mis-labelled liquid food as, "empty calories." That's exactly the basis on which they've been marketed, as a substitute for water.

When I reminded myself they were food years ago, my attitude to them did change subtly. I did start feeling it was okay to insist on water, even when greeted by perplexed reactions of how can anyone turn down this lovely soft drink for boring old water?

I'd often felt it odd to drink food with food and at times did crave water instead as it was tasteless and would not undermine my appetite for food I was more interested in.

It was more about matching my appetite better. I prefer to eat my calories. I'm not even a fan of soup!

Now if these people insist on interfering in people's actual choices, rather than anything hard like dealing with underlying problems in economies and food environments, then they should operate on an honest basis?

Those who  insist on tinkering have a duty to make any campaign enlightened, positive and above all empowering. Because we are not dealing with acquired habit. We are dealing with appetite which is an innate part of human functioning. They cannot and must not pretend otherwise.

The campaign against smoking is hardly a model for that. The decline in smoking is not the same across the whole of societies. In those under most pressure the least. So I personally am not overly enamoured of ignoring this.

Carelessly adding more stigma to the already stigmatized is an abuse of power. If you can do nothing to help don't make things worse. Theses differences become a reason to further pathologize and discriminate against people who are even less shielded from the idea of themselves as lacking control. Invasive micromanagement of their lives is waved around.

If you wish to make inroads there, you need to meet the human need to be uplifted and enlightened. Reason must prevail, not the ceaseless indulgence of the food cults and their dubious beliefs.

Fat People as Personification of Bingeing, part 1

Whether it's those thin/slim anorexics who use "the fat person in the mirror" as a metaphor for why they're starving.  Or the bitterness of people who see fat people as representing the thing inside them which made them fail to become anorexic.A certain type of slim person is still using fatness and fat people to express their personal psychodramas. If this unpleasant interlude is to be brought to a close, this kind of appropriation needs to end.

Teevee presenter Mika Brzezinski is a warrior against 'obesity'. She neglected to tell folks that she's had bulimia for years. In her mind fat people represent her urge to binge. I'm serious, the construct says so. Yet, the truth she represents runs counter to this.

That some slimz can out eat most fatz any day of the week. Mika roped her friend Diane Smith into a joint effort, her to stop bingeing and gain 10 pounds and be "okay with that." (All about weight). Diane who'd gained 100 pounds in the 15 years of their friendship, was to lose 75.

"Weight problem" i.e fatness = Eating problem kind of sums it up. Apparently Smith was appalled when she was call F-A-A-T by Brzezinski. She even used the word zomgobese. Brzezinski made big play of the beloved denialist trope when Smith's idea of herself was more than likely formed when she was slim. 

We'll forget that if the usual assumptions are true, the remedy would have been the same for both-stabilize eating-desired results follow. Rather than one swapping an ED for normality, the other a perhaps ED-I can't tell-for the impersonation of another one.

That's not nitpicking. People keep theorizing the 'cause' of fatness, yet can never demonstrate this through reversal of said 'cause' rolling back fatness. Dieting's indicates another fail.

By casting fat people as disease, "obesity" casts us with the uniformity our brains associate with disease. In the minds of those who accept this definition, fat people become one (fat) person. What goes for one, goes for all. Hence this absurdly unscientific, if one fat person can become slim you all can. If one fat person can sustain a lifestyle ED, you all can!!

This is as ridiculous as presuming all slim people have binge eating disorder because Mika does.

From Brzezinski's book;

How does a person who is not overweight write about her lifelong obsession with overeating without sounding like a narcissistic, woe-is-me skinny girl.

How about just telling your story? I eat like a fat person is supposed to, yet I'm not even chubby. And it's nothing to do with self control. Unless that's what you call bulimia, which let's face it, many do secretly.

Well, what do we expect? You've got the requirement to become or remain slim, with the emphasis in recent times on "because it's healthy." That puts pressure on people to do it in a healthy manner, which is even less efficient than unhealthy ways, making it harder to admit what might be going on.

Appetite and hunger can easily become levers for the body to maintain mental/mood balance in the face of stresses that threaten to sink your mood regulation. She seemed very nervous in that interview, still full of disgust from her rather amusing "Nutella" story (plz, it's not crack). All she was describing there was the product of the suppression of this lever, without resolving any underlying issues. Yet she was talking about how it felt like "addiction."

The capacity and power of appetite and hunger is not just as we see it. It's capable of far more than that if the trigger is there, or our system is sensitive enough. Proper scientists, need to deal with that and we need to learn to learn techniques to manage our internal stress and anxiety as a part of our mindset, like bathing every day. We definitely need to teach them to children.

This is reality

Perhaps my mind is just being belligerently twisty, because I still find the idea of fatness or my weight "impacting on my health" profoundly ill conceived and uninvolving.

Now before anyone gets any funny ideas. I am not an essentialist when it comes to weight. Whether you're speaking of fat to thin, some people would struggle to be anything but the weight they are, fatter or thinner. The main body of people probably fall in between.

Nor do I identify as fat. I see myself as a human like any other, which means the 'obesity' construct cramps my style and I'm going to keep saying that. And keep using every possible opportunity not to play down to it. 

It's entirely possible that if I'd grown up in radically different atmosphere I might not have either been fat, or been fat at such an early age. Who cares? That is not my life this is. My body is this actual real version, not a mythological, theoretical one.

My body is fat, it cannot be attacking some not existing version of itself. It cannot be disease unto itself. Pathogens can attack our systems internally, cancer is a cluster of rogue cells, needing a joint replacement comes from disease or wear and tear which attacking the integrity of the joint. Even the dubious, my neurosis is an illness bull pucky, works in a way "my body as disease" just doesn't. It cannot fit any cogent disease model.

Fatness can only be a symptom of something underlying in the context of me.

If my health takes a turn because of a metabolic issue like diabetes, then that is down to how said function is working. That cannot define those who weigh the same as I do any more than being part of  the highest suicide rate group means all have a higher suicide rate. My body as disease, my character as the pathogen or causal factor, doesn't scan. Not as science anyway.

There is a different balance of reaction between internal and external factors. Some people always know something about themselves, even though it is no where openly at least, in the environment around them.

Others do not know that same thing about themselves and are happily ignorant until they encounter it openly, outside themselves. Then they can never again not know. Like non dominant forms of sexuality.

If it was the case that we totally know ourselves regardless of whether anyone else backs it up or not, then it would have been impossible for fat people to doubt our own experience of calorie restriction fail.

It would have been impossible to ever assert anything different. And that would have made the delusion of fat haters hard to establish, let alone sustain. I realise I'm saying in a way that our willingness to dismiss our own experience has permitted and encouraged others to do the same.

But that's the truth for fat people just as much as it is the truth for others, whether it sounds victim blamey or not.

Rebellion?

Something has always narked the heck out of me, our body's defences resist dietary manipulation/ restriction and it is repeatedly defined as rebellion. Rebellion against what? It's an automatic response to the threat of unmet needs, part of our survival instincts.

If someone comes at you hands raised like they're going to strike you, your instinctive response is to throw up your arms to shield yourself. Does that make you an iconoclast? Because you aren't just standing there with your chin up to give them a better shot?

Yes, I understand that;

a)  If you were rebellious person you might be more likely to defend yourself

and;

b) Impulses are read through the filter of our deeply held beliefs, we interpret through them. Hence creation of literature, art, culture, or the variety of eye witness testimony etc.,

But its the source of this interpretation that gets on my nerves. It rests on the assumption that calorie theory is as reasonable as it seems in our minds therefore our bodies reaction to it must be judged on that basis as disobedient.

This is nonsense. How can we judge the way the body by the way we've been taught it works, treating the way it actually does as if it requires an explanation that is about breaking the rules? Who's rules? Not its rules so how can it reacting the only way it can overwhelmingly be rebellious?

I know that when some of us are lectured about food we get a sharp and distinct urge to eat verboten food. Even that though is a subjective impression, what we are really responding to is the threat to our ability to nourish ourselves.

When sources of food demonized by healthists are a useful source of nourishment-due to our training in mindlessly obeying invasive dietary diktats, mention of these foods translates into our experience of the withdrawal of these foods, ergo some get the urge to eat them.

I must admit I don't but then my history is a bit unconventional and I don't heart food as such, though I feel quite averse to any food hate.

This doesn't mean we can't change or make conscious adaptations to our diet, quite profound ones in fact. It just means we should try starting from the way our bodies actually function, rather than an incomplete abstraction our conscious brain has fixated on.

Probably because it gets the starring role.

Thinspired

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.

Proportion control

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.

Choice or not, no excuse

Shoshie makes a good point about excusing fat hate on the grounds of fatness being a choice being a bad faith argument. It makes me laugh now that people are saying discriminating on the grounds of race is beyond logic, as if that stopped it. As if discrimination is rational. 

And they don't get that point at all, it doesn't matter whether you 'choose' to be fat or not, hating fat people treating us like second class citizens is morally wrong and cannot be justified on any grounds of reason whatsoever.

The extent to which people are seeking to justify what they claim is right is truly pathetic. If its right to hate, don't justify just keep hating and don't complain when others hate you for some reason similarly (un)justified.

After all, anyone can say x or y state /stance/ behaviour is a choice, I'm now allowed to hate you.

The whole idea of fatness as a choice doesn't really hang together. Eating is said to be fully consciously decided, if so, why diet? Why not just stop deciding to eat things at source, rather than choosing and then interrupting that after the fact? Why have a plan to eat, when it is your elective and conscious choice in the first place.

Weight in general would be a totally different business, people wouldn't die from being thin. Being unable to keep on enough weight to allow their bodies to survive.

Its hard to see anorexia existing either. Starvation wouldn't develop into a momentum of its own which is really what anorexia is when you get down to it. Calorie restriction out of control, that would not happen if that was all a switching on and off of will.

When we think of choice we tend to go by the definition of cool elective choice from more than one option. Fatness is not much like that in the main.

Indirect choice is another matter. Choosing certain things and other things coming as a result of it, now that's another story.

Creating an HAES model

Here we go again with another HAES critique, this coming from FWD.

If I was looking to the sources of disquiet people have with HAES, I'd start with healthism-the belief that you can control your health via what you eat and/or don't eat plus your level of activity. As weight is seen as an indicator of health, this has translated into, healthy eating can achieve slimness as that is deemed healthy. This was picked up by the weight loss dieting industry and joined to their premise that you can (and should) control your weight through what you eat and through your level of activity.

The latter wished to align itself with healthiness as it was in danger of being fatally wounded due to its actual effects. Its useless inefficacy combined its commercial imperative helped it to spread the idea of the 'morality' of calorie restriction.

All this means healthism has become mixed up with weight control rather than being something to practice for its own sake. This has developed in it the same untrammelled elitism of the calorie restriction model. It is beyond ableism, it doesn't recognise the potential needs of people with disabilities at all.

But then why would it? It recognizes the existence of fat people only to use us as folk devils. If you are fat you are repeatedly told you cannot possibly be eating healthily or exercising. Your fatness disqualifies you.

This finds a happy resonance with the obesity crusade itself which is not interested in the fattest people and hardly recognises their existence either. When they break into someones house to free them from their bed, do you see any obesity professionals there supervising giving the paramedics etc., instructions such as cover up their genitals this time, remember they are human, that sort of thing?

You must be kidding.

The only use the crusading forces have for them is as the fatties in the woodpile style threat to the middle class middleweights (which is the crusades real cultural impulse, heartbeat and target) as their fate if they do not heed the cult of shifting a focus of their moral universe from sex to food.

HAES was an initiative by the most marginalized fat people and those interested in helping them to assist with their physical mobility and mental health needs precisely because the obesity script didn't give a flying fig about them and would be happy if they sank swiftly to their end. Hey, at least it will 'prove' fatness is bad and that's to the greater good, right?

The dissemination of healthism, the way it has come to dominate everyone's thought landscape around health means it has gone mostly unquestioned, pushed as it is by the kind that dominate the administration of society.

Fat people as much as anyone else have been taught a healthist assumptions and (on the whole) less marginalized fatties, who've been included as being in sin fat, have invested HAES with that healthism as the feeling has been to counter the fat =ill health message more than the needs of fat people.

This has been somewhat of a wasted opportunity as there are many people who've become alienated from their physical instincts and impulses, disturbed, guilt ridden and confused about eating by ideologies of calorie and dietary restriction. Many would love to find some positive resolution for themselves but don't know how if they can conceive or fathom another way. They like us are struggling to find a way that suits actual needs.

If HAES had continued to be dominated by its original drive with fat peoples (therefore peoples) needs at its heart it could be helping to make a better contribution to the well being of everyone, showing what FA has to give everyone.

Making healthy choices

Found this video from America's surgeon general, Dr. Regina Benjamin fascinating.
It's very short so I tried to transcribe it verbatim;

Hello I'm Dr. Regina Benjamin United States surgeon general Two thirds of all adults and nearly one in three children are overweight or obese. As a result our nation has high rates of diabetes and other chronic illnesses. The good news is we can be healthy and fit at any size or any weight. As America's family doctor I want to change the national conversation from a negative one about obesity and illness to a positive conversation about being healthy and being fit. So let's start with making healthy choices. Eat nutritious foods exercise regularly and have fun doing it.

For such a short speech, it feels as if its in two parts that don't match. The first one being the disclaimer. The next is the hopeful bit she felt more at home with it, she got positively conspiratorial when she said "fun". Almost as if she was recommending some kind of subversion and was definitely more at home with that.

The clear disconnect comes after the set up of the US obesity/overweight stats; 2/3 of adults, 1 in 3 children, then the payoff "As a result our nation has high rates of diabetes and other chronic illnesses." That doesn't go with the following HAES message as it locates weight the issue rather firmly as that of weight not habits (lifestyle).

Her heart appears more in the latter than the former so it will be interesting to see if the other camp will be sidelined in time. It's a welcome change that someone so high up in the US government recommends fat people treating themselves as valuable now as is, rather than being in waiting room waiting for the slim train that has been cancelled to come in.

The selfish lack of consideration of fat people's reality has been indulged for way too long and only got going due to the meanness of those who are more interested in neat associations of fat v thin, which simply won't be without invasive social engineering.

That's a weird thing about the whole conflation of weight and healthy habits, ever since the slimming industry bolted health on to ballast their shaky empire of mythical attainable thinness its created a bit of a puzzle.

It boils down to what are the true effects of healthy eating. If it is supposed to be healthy and so is slimness this diet should make everyone slim, right? That logic is why the slimming industry thought they had died and gone to heaven.

Certainly plenty of people are fat on recommended type diets and thin on demonized ones. I say type because there is no one perfect diet, nutritionists tend to look at people's actual diets and pick them to pieces. They don't tend to draft in the real world examples of the type of diet they feel should be eaten.

First off it would be too prescriptive, like Weight Watchers before their "points" scheme which is why they invented it (I wonder if they'd still be in business without it).

This lack of a perfect healthy diet in action does suggests a certain lack of conviction in the premise as much as it points up the impracticality of a diet consciously structured by favoured nutrients. Which doesn't reflect how humans tend to eat, as a rule.

A lot of fat healthists have concluded that as healthy eating creates/preserves health and they eat healthily and remain fat, they must be fat and healthy. It's the conclusion of healthism itself that makes them feel this way. Healthy eating leads people to feel that they are healthy and a demonized diet to feel they are unhealthy.

I would love to get to the bottom of just how healthy, healthy eating and lifestyle really is, and just how much it is just an extension of an already good and protected existence where the demands on your body and mind do not lend themselves toward the demonized foods and you can tolerate the unpleasant feelings generated by exercise, because they are not joining a whole lifetime of stored ones.

Or whether eating fresh produce and gritting your teeth through exercise can mitigate the effects of your position in society. A lot of people are counting on this.

Maybe this change of direction at the top will help to pin down the full truth. That would be as much fun as Dr. Benjamin can be; on her days off.

Healthist neuroses

Interesting........... the way you notice the same things in different contexts and come to differing conclusions.

Bri ascribes the good/ bad fattie split to an overdeveloped (self) sabotage impulse. It's true that internalized fat hatred does often create an aftermath of oversensitivity which has and continues to derail fat acceptance in ways too numerous to mention. From my vantage point good/bad fatty is hardly one of those.

If you're aware of sensitivities, why would you write that off as straw? Is it me or doesn't this downgrading of ourselves haunt FA time and time again? Why do we find it so easy to palm off our own concerns, but pay extravagant attention to all sorts of nonsense from those seeking endless reassurance that fat acceptance doesn't hate thin people etc., and other nonsense?

I try to remember when judging an effect to see if the same thing shows up elsewhere and compare and contrast.

How many people do you know, slim and plump alike, that say things like "I know I eat x and don't exercise and that's bad/ makes me bad". "I want to be good but I just like the bad stuff" etc.,

When you accept not just that it is morally better to eat certain foods and immoral to eat others and so forth then you are likely to assign yourself goodness or badness according to what you eat or don't eat. That's become as much a part of the development of healthism as it is for weight loss dieting, for the similar reasons, to promote adherence.

It's that this is felt to be needed or indeed a good way to promote that adherence that is telling.

Funny that yet again those who label themselves bad fats-that is people who accept healthism, but either can't won't or don't practice it-are labelled 'neurotic'. In a sense they are healthists and therefore their neurosis is likely to be that of the healthist construct and also how it's been sold.

I don't judge myself by those standards for many reasons and I don't like the way it has become virtually the only model for expressing an interest in your own and others well being. I resent the way it's taken over and pushed out other notions and ideals.

That's pertinent to this whole situation because it's had the same effect on the development of HAES. There's something about the energy of healthist proselytizing, both to oneself and others that lends itself to this disrespect of boundaries and a blunted ability to see they're being crossed. Or take that seriously, it's the righteousness. When people push back instinctively against this, they are the ones that have to explain themselves to what cannot be wrong, ever.

As I see it fat acceptance-nay the world-needs something that starts with you and where and who you are. It is you. Because we all need to take care of ourselves, despite what we are lead to believe.

The trouble with healthism, is it stands there a bit like a great wall and you're supposed to make your way to it, regardless of the pain and trauma you must plow through in the endeavour, if you can even get going at all. You're supposed to feel really bad about of course. I'm as done with that kind of situation as I am with another example-dietary restriction that stupid ugly and futile.

If it's not working it's not working, I'm not going to sacrifice myself to make it look better anymore.

HAES was conceived to be similar, to retrieve mobility in those abandoned to their fate by the health system. It was ideal to be slowly developed into an open inclusive non-ableist therapeutic discipline that could enable anyone to revive any lost physical and mental rapport with their bodies and selves.

Understandably enough, that has been somewhat toppled by being invested with fitness culture. I suppose it's anxiety relief for those of us worried about our health and those fatties trying to prove we aren't lazy. That I can understand. But the needs of those who are ready to be "fit" should have had more importance and HAES kept separate with the focus being more on getting people to a state of equilibrium. They could then decide what route to go down re developing fitness, or not-if they want. Rather than signing up to it and being stuck in the same stasis they were before FA.

We could have a fat fitness culture and HAES to start from wherever you are, so no-one feels out of it or failing, because there is nothing to fail, there's only your individual route at your own speed, depending on your unique and individual challenges. Sometimes those are more mental than physical.

Those labelling themselves as bad fats need to stop but they are just pointing up the inaccessibility of healthism and it's blatant disregard for people who actually accept it as a good thing. HAES feels like it has become an extension of it that indolence disinterest has been imported lock stock with healthist ideals as a whole.

People have tried repeatedly to make these points but the triggering just goes back and forth one side to the other and it's written off with everyone is HAES!

Bri's certainly right to notice that part of our self (fat) hating legacy is a habit of low self esteem and self sabotage of a people who are so used to being wrong, that for many it feels uncomfortable to be anything else but wrong.

So we can all try to learn to take ourselves a little bit more seriously and not write off our reactions, even if they are shock, horror, gasp, neurotic; so what?

We're allowed to be both human and humane to 'good', 'bad' (and neither) fats alike.

Bad fat and all that

I agree with a lot of the sentiment expressed by tasha fierce, about how we often fall into the trap of justifying fatness on the grounds that we have healthful habits.

It's important to say that although I reject the healthist approach, I appreciate the fact that those in FA that are into it, have essentially asserted their truth. Fat people have different habits.

A while back I said that there are basically two types, those who are into healthism, those who aren't. Some are fat some aren't. Those fat people who are into healthism have more in common with thin people who are into it, ditto the others are more bon viveurs. They like to live their idea of living well.

So it's important that all types of experience are reflected in FA, I daresay, it's made connections with some to know that activity levels, diet's-as in what you eat- vary amongst fat people, as others. Rather than allowing people to hold on to cherished nonsense of fat people are not among us, there are no fat vegetarians/vegans/dieters, healthists etc.

Perhaps it's better to see certain approaches dominating as stepping stones, phases that need to be gone through in the process of living and learning. and now a point is being reached where the dominance of that approach or even the approach itself, has outlived it's usefulness in terms of being the lead, or seeming to be the only approach to putting FA out there.

I'd go further than those who call themselves bad fatties. The good/ bad fatty thing doesn't and has never made sense to me, because the latter, although purporting to reject the former, actually does it by shoring up the premise, that there is something good about eating the healthist way.

I actually don't feel that way, and my experiences with it have been a living education on exactly why I feel this way. Calling yourself a bad fatty is a bit like being an ex Christian, and describing yourself as a fornicator. If you're having sex outside marriage, technically, according to those dictates, you are. However, if you've rejected Christianity, why would you define yourself this way, as if it had any validity?

It's one thing to be amused by the idea, but that's not what this is, in order to call yourself a bad fatty, you need to believe that you can or should be a good fatty, so end up buying into that which judges you a bad fatty or thinny in the first place. Plenty of thin/ slim people feel the same, they say things like " I know I should eat x and not eat y, but y tastes so good!" Possibly followed with something like "I'll probably die next week of a heart attack and it'll serve me right!!!"

Bad fatty validates the underlying premise of healthism, more than it disagrees with it

If you do not wish to be judged as a bad fatty, think more about the construct itself, if you cannot let it go, because it seems right to you, then at least re-frame the way you see being in transition/ moving towards goodness.

The fat is/isn't 'healthy' thing

There are two main types of people in this, the healthists, and the rest of us who aren't. Some of those healthists are fat and some aren't. Some fat healthists are to be found within FA, some not. Some non healthists are also within and outside fat acceptance.

I will not stoop to calling myself a 'bad fattie' even in jest because it validates the healthist premise, if you validate it, live it. If you cannot/ will not, you either don't believe it or need to question your belief, either way, why define yourself in terms that you don't speak to you? I am not a 'bad fattie' because I don't romaticise the fact that I just don't believe in it, it's not applicable to me, mostly. It's like I wouldn't call myself a 'bad moralist' for not achieving the sanctified 'moral ideal' of thinness either.

Healthism in essence = A, B and C are 'healthful behaviours', if you do them that means, you are healthy. You are literally doing and creating health. I can see why it's attracts in this era of self actualisation.

At some point, a conjunction between diet believers trying to prop up their defunct credo switched to 'it's all about health' and healthists making thinness=health. They like to keep up with the latest health trends and dictates and the medical professions, doctors especially are hugely influential. This means that when the medical professions bought into the conflation of thinness with health- some say it was aimed at healthists or the 'worried well' of which they are a part- they went along with it.

Meanwhile fat healthists, who connected with the same healthy eating and exercise messages as everyone else, did A+B+C and liked it. They didn't become thin they remained fat, but they liked doing the behaviours and bought into the idea in it's original form-A+B+C = healthy.

The clash in short is A+B+C= healthy versus A+B+C= thin-healthy.

There are other definitions of health, the original medical one, the absence of disease. A lot of people feel that's too negative but it's hard to beat for making sense.

There is another one within medicine itself where if you have a chronic medical condition and doctors feel you are complying with their instructions and if your body is responding well, they'll call you healthy.

There's also the growth of the ideal of preventative medicine, which is represented by numbers. That is mainly blood pressure, cholesterol level, etc. These are said to be proven by medical studies to be linked with health outcomes, both good and ill at certain levels or numbers. There is conflicting evidence about this though.

If your numbers are said to be within the healthy ranges, then this is another way you can say you are healthy, although again, those who believe fatness is incompatible with health, dispute that this is a false when it comes to fat people who are a(nother) disease waiting to happen, thereby undermining the fundamental basis of these as indicators of health, as a whole.

I got the message too about what was defined as a healthful diet would =slimness and/therefore health. Health was like a big overlord telling me that the massive distance between me and it represented the true depths of my inner corruptness. There's me scrambling desperately flailing arms outstretched trying to get to 'Health-thin'. Couldn't manage it. Felt bad about it.

I could however state that I was healthy in the past medical sense of no apparent diseases, I saw this as an inheritance I was desperate not to 'squander' it due to my fatitude. I wasn't worried at all because I knew that no matter that I fell off the horse every day, every day I got back on and would tame the beast eventually by grinding down it's will.

Instead I ground down my ability to keep repeating the error.

It so happens that past the age of early childhood infections, I have had a pretty sound underlying physicality, though any possible complacency has been punctured by the endless 'obesity related' list and it's constant repetition. That has ended any sense of security that many haters wish ferverently to cling to. And the fact that I saw weight loss-that I didn't achieve- as part of my healthy quest.

The upshot of all this is I would never say, 'fat is healthy', because it's outside a meaningful understanding of health that refers to my understanding of it. It's refering to a position I don't operate from. It's not that I don't think there are things that tend to toward and against promoting health or more specifically well being, it's just that I don't feel it describes how I feel on any real level, mostly. My experiences have alienated me from it.

So I leave it to healthists-fat and thin- to slug this one out, they can relate.

Disagreement about healthism

Disagreement about the tenets of healthism is not just about its dogma of perfect diet. It's also about terms of reference. There isn't agreement about the definition of health-i.e. how healthy does anyone need to be over and above the needs of their existence, way of life, personal tastes and inclinations?

We know that if your food is short of necessary macro and/or micro nutrients, it's likely to undermine your health and cause disease in the near, medium and long term future. What we don't know is if you have a balance of those and enough to eat, that there's some optimum level of micro nutrients that can elevate you and your health to a higher plane. There is an element of mysticism about the healthist mentality which can be very uplifting and seductive, especially to a perfectionist mindset.

Healthism can see food in an almost spiritual way. It underplays, sometimes to the point of disregarding humans primary need, energy as if that is base and vulgar, to focus more on high faluting things like micro vitamins and minerals. This has helped to skewer our understanding of what the purpose of eating is. Which makes it rather regressive in nature. Eating is built around seeking enough energy, with energy dense foods at the core.

It's also not clear whether this extent of direction of diet itself causes imbalance in hunger and appetite and is itself unbalanced. Whether it short changes by default, i.e. the avoidance of calorie dense foods. Or whether the sources of certain nutrients it favours, lead to an overall imbalance by excluding other foods.

Too few people seem to follow it to the extremes, perhaps. Or maybe they're not the ones studied. It is very hard to quantify and classify the quality of a diet, over and above the basic requirements of say a meal featuring protein, high water veg, denser starchy veg with perhaps some fruit.

Good/ bad fatty

Some people believe in what's now referred to as healthy lifestyles. Others are sceptics.

Healthy living enthusiasts believe that a diet of whole grains, fibre, vegetables and fruits, with a bit of protein thrown in, will ensure optimum health.

Others have never lost the sense that what they what and like and enjoy is the only worthwhile criteria for eating.

Where healthy lifers, believe in exercising ones body.

Sceptics move according to their own diktats, as much as they can, they trust themselves to move for a purpose or for the pleasure of it.

Describing yourself as living a healthy lifestyle, is a little like calling yourself 'pro-life' or a 'pro sex feminist'. If you really were, you would naturally personify it and therefore wouldn't label yourself so self-consciously.

Whether people are fat or thin, they come to conclusions based on the people they are, not by their weight.

The above divide is just as much there outside FA as it is within. Fat people, in general and in FA are just like anyone else.

I'm not criticising Cree for raising the point, but I'm not quite sure why people expect fat people to be free of these kinds of opinions, we have all learned them equally, we are part of society, why would we be by necessity be immune?

I do know that healthy lifestyle ideals could be seen to contradict aspects of fat acceptance, undermine them even (or vice versa).

Those of us who are healthy lifestyle sceptics have more in common-on this and many points- with slim people who reject this way, than we do with people within FA who think it's all that. They are enthusiasts and the nature of what they believe tends to make it run amok.

Sometimes H/L does act as a Trojan horse for a lot of unresolved desire, it can serve to hide, and perpetuate all sorts of disordered thinking on food and eating, plus desire for weight loss.

However, it is described, perceived and prescribed as scientifically valid.

And as we've learned to our cost, that can go a hell of a long way.