How To Deal With Gaslighting - Ariel Leve

Ariel Leve speaks here about the instinctive survival tactics she used to survive an abusive gaslighting mother. She speaks of a woman who had no boundaries and could not control her moods.  How many times have I said that crusaders are totally out of control?

Some of what she says hits home hard.

"Everything is upside down. Reality is being cancelled, nothing means anything." 

She defines gaslighting as when someone manipulates you into questioning your own sanity. I'd add health to that-defined though that is by Munchausens-by-Proxy. In case that doesn't make sense to anyone. 'Obesity' is a largely meaningless construct now being used to pretend disease that doesn't exist. That is the features of the above disorder and no one has to accept this, unless they wish to enter into this fiction.

It wasn't just that my reality was cancelled, but my perceptions of reality were overwritten. and one of the most incidious things about gaslighting is the denial of reality. Being denied what you have seen with your own eyes and you know to be true. Being denied an experience that you have had and you know is real. 

And, something I've often felt,

For me, the erasure of the abuse was worse than the abuse.

Remember you Are not the one(s) with the problem. 

It can make you crazy, but you are not crazy. 

Ariel Leve

The lessons are;

1. Remain Defiant

Don't give up or compromise your experiences and/or what you know to be true. Don't try to meet the gaslighter halfway. If the gap between reality and their stories is wide. Let it be, stop trying to close or reconcile it by bending the truth. Women especially are rooted to a performance of the latter to an absurd degree. You are not Gandhi, give it up.

2. Recognise there will never be accountability

The miscreants concerned will never accept accountability for what they have done and what they are doing to you. Cultists could very easily begin to make amends by telling the truth and sticking with it. They chose not to. 

3.  Let Go of the Wish for Them to be Different

Stop trying to make the wrongdoer be different. That's not your responsibility-it will drain you dry and leave you hollow. Instead, change your reaction to and estimation of them [even if only on this matter].

4.  Develop a Healthy Detachment

Distance yourself from cultists. Learn that there are two worlds - reality and the world of the abuser. You have to make a choice. Don't try to enter the abuser's world assuming they've made a space for you there because they're using terms like; "science, treatment, medicine or health". They haven't.

The Accusation of Suicide and Suicide

Few should be judged solely by the worst of themselves and if this is the worst the now late Anthony Bourdain has done he couldn't be said to have been as bad as all that. By the accounts of many, he was kind generous and supportive to them.

Still, I feel its entirely fair to revisit this video which illustrates the weird chasm that's opened up between our more typical reaction to an apparent suicide and how accusations of suicide are thrown at fat people as a justification for saying that our purported self destruction means we deserve abuse and death.

In the past, it was uncomplicated. The focus was on the loss of a life and the meaning of that to those left behind.

 

Now one has to ask, which reaction to suicide is the real one? As usual, folks can't hear themselves. It is typical of the double consciousness surrounding weight. The extent to which we live in different lanes remains unacknowledged.

How then should one view Bourdain's end, if indeed he has committed actual suicide? [Honestly, is there anything that doesn't split into real and false in this area?] There can only be one way really.

It would be nice though if from now on people dropped this stupid "slow suicide" meme and started to listen to what they are actually saying to (some) people.

Crisis of Meaning

Addiction is the development of a physical dependence on various kinds of drugs, more typically opiate drugs. It happens in essence because establishing an outer supply of opiates tends to interfere with the level of production of opiate-like or opioid substances in our bodies.

The requisite sign of addiction is withdrawal-which is just the body in a state of opioid/pleasure chemical deficit before it is able to adjust the level of production back toward a normal range. When that occurs, the acute stage of withdrawal completes itself. 

Withdrawal is not a syndrome, it is the direct symptom of a body's physical dependence on an outer supply of opioids. "Post withdrawal" is injury from damage inflicted before and during addiction, that ends when those injuries heal sufficiently.

A syndrome by the way is a collection of related symptoms that have no recognised or definite source or cause. "Cravings" are the body craving restortion of normal levels of (pleasure) chemical function. 

Addiction is a bit like a process of going from a wholly inner supply, to less of that topped up by an outer supply. When you stop "topping" you enter withdrawal, 'recovery' is when the body goes back toward prior production levels. 

Some make a distinction between physical dependence and addiction, I don't per se.

Though there might have been a meaningful distinction once. There's a case for physical dependence from necessary use and addiction from non-necessary use of drugs. Because the former is likely to have its own challenges that aren't always the same as those who don't need to take medication for an original or underlying physical ailment.

The point of explaining this yet again is a feature of the current US opioid crisis is that people apparently didn't know opioids are inherently addicitve due to the nature of human biochemistry;

From 1996 to 2001, American drug giant Purdue Pharma held more than 40 national “pain management symposia” at picturesque locations, hosting thousands of American doctors, nurses and pharmacists. The healthcare professionals had been specially invited, whisked to the conferences to be drilled on promotional material about the firm’s new star drug, OxyContin, and recruited as advocates, the US government later documented.

Don't doubt similar game isn't being played out with the 'obesity' cult, for "pain management" read "weight management." This quack cult is hell bent on creating a drug and surgery crises in the plural, in fat people, if we are dumb enough to allow them to have their way, again.

A bulletin from the American Public Health Association in 2009, reviewing the rise of prescription opioids, is titled “The promotion and marketing of OxyContin: commercial triumph, public health tragedy”. The document also asserted that Purdue had played down the risks of addiction.

"Played down the risks of addiction", um-hum, like playing down the risks of "stomach reduction surgery" and various prescription drug-abuse. That sort of thing can only make an impact if people no longer get what's being talked about, in this case, addiction.  

Short Definition of Addiction:
Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors.

That's from the American Society of Addictive Medicine, playing the current trick of describing things in ways that obscures what is really being talked about. Does this definition help you to understand non-addictive opioid is chemically implausible? Do you understand it? Does it even make sense?

If I wanted to know why exactly people got stuck on OxyContin and the like, how would "primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry" help? Its agenda is concerned with selling addiction as a disease, rather than education. Note the same employ of phoney 'disease' in the area of weight.

This opioid crisis/crises has many factors, but ultimately a basic grasp of what addiction really is, without the more recent insistence on collapsing neural compulsions/ neuroses and any old undesired or troublesome habit into "addiction" would have enabled people to get a clearer view of dubious promise such as non-addictive opioids. 

 Democracy Now on Oxycontin with Christopher Glazek

Even the deepest desire for denial can fail under the surer gaze of knowing better.

Colluding with the Mindset of Paedophiles

I lot of things spring to mind from this, none of them have anything to do with diet taxes. The woman featured is called Trinity Wallace-Ellis;

Neglect and sexual abuse were common experiences at home and later in some foster homes, where she and her sisters were sent. “I learned early on that I was safer as the fat sister than one of the skinny ones,” she says. “They didn’t want the fat sister. It didn’t protect me in all instances but I think it protected me in a lot of instances.” 

I already made it clear that this sort of ideation was straight out of the mindset of paedophiles,

It's now emerged that new film Jeepers Creepers 3 originally featured a scene hinting at the sexual abuse between a 13-year-old runaway, played by 21-year-old actress Gabrielle Haugh, and her stepfather through an exchange which sees one character sympathise with her molester.
“Can you blame the step-dad, though?” one character can be heard saying. “I mean, look at her. The heart wants what it wants, am I right?” 

Why is it people can see there's something wrong with this in a film, but not being either put in the mind of someone who's experienced child sex abuse or treated as if it's their thinking?

Critics have pointed out the disturbing exchange having witnessed the scene in advanced screener copies, however, the scene has been subsequently removed from the public version.

Don't you think that if you call yourself a goddamned therapist that you ought to have the intelligence to help people identify the source of this this kind of thinking and process that? What is the big fixation with presenting this as their idea?

Here's a tip for the white coat professionals, counsellors and psychoanalysts;

Speaking about his abuse, actor Nathan Forrest Winters said of Salva: “He spent the better part of a year grooming me and my parents. Developing the trust. It was very calculated, and a long process, as it is with most paedophiles.”

Child rapists are invidious in their mental manipulations. Do not allow their victims to wander around spouting their polluted psyche, because all you care about is enforcing calorie restriction obsession.

The Beautiful Truth

I've had cause lately to consider again the difficulty of truth if you are a fat person. Whereas for other people telling the truth is mainly a question of reporting the facts as honestly as possible, the big, perhaps the biggest challenge of honesty for a fat person is to have the mettle to avoid telling the false truth dictated to you by others.

And to not be shamed by the avoidance of that.

I recognize that I may come across as a bit shifty in overly careful talk about fatness, weight etc., But I have to tame my vanity enough to press on regardless. I'm trying to reach for an elusive narrative of consciousness that's not only not available, it rarely appears except in glimpses.

I'm not sure I know what it would look like as a consistent force, as I've never knowingly come across a fat person who can speak about fatness unadulterated by the lifesapping falsehood that is the 'obesity narrative'.

Shaunta Grimes's piece is lovely, honest and everyday act of bravery in its way, but I feel the typical failure of nerve when it comes to claiming to be drunk on that which simply cannot make you drunk. It's a tribute to her skill as a writer that this doesn't deliver her tale into the usual pit of boredom waiting for the same old same. It doesn't break new ground available to a writer of her talent.

We always allow ourselves to submit to and be interrupted by others who are unworthy of such and are not fighting the same fight no matter what they assume. There comes a point when we have to ask ourselves what is our duty to the truth. How can any of us really complain when we decline to push ourselves beyond the trite handed to us merely because it means we connect through meanings that don't fit? If others hadn't done better than us, what would we have to crib and plunder?

Fat people need to take up the space of our own truth and stop waiting for permisson for that. No one will give it to us, I'm not even sure anyone can. So what if haters think our reaching is "useless" who are they to say what is useful to us or anyone else? Their talk is so dead and they don't even feel it. How would they know? They know nothing. 

We understand clothes that don't fit, why do we settle for worthless ideas that don't fit? The title is "Here's how I got fat" and it delivers on its promise to tell the same old story expected and praise is given, moving, honest, well done in using your voice to tell our version of what honesty is for you etc.,

Having most of your stomach removed is no resolution of any things that shouldn't need to be said. What is so difficult about acknowledging that? Why do the need to pretend whatever this isn't a different pathology, a more acceptable one? What is blocking that, is it vanity? Is it the need to be seen as good or healthy? If you are prepared to state you did damage to yourself with food, why aren't you able to say you damaged yourself to try and escape the trap set for all of us?

You rightly said;

I wasn’t required to live forever with the physical consequences of what I did to survive those mean years.

But it is not political consciousness that's trying to keep you stuck in what you call "physical consequences" its those waging a phony crusade. That's their trap. It's reminiscent of those who complain to activists that they want to lose weight. Activists did not create dieting. They did not promote its failed strategy as the only, the must be, the be all and end all.

Why can't we screen out those who would give praise for repeat their tired talk? Who have been happy to lead us and leave us to our fate. Haters didn't pull us through or pull us out, they've no right to regard at our own expense. None at all.

If you wish to frame your situation as substance abuse, at least impersonate many of the more admirable amongst them and their capacity to state boldly, "These are my options, they're shit, but them's the breaks", rather than cowering under them-because they're my options, they are righteous, they aren't.

They are what is deemed worthy of you. Authorities have endeavoured to leave fat with nothing but brutality and mutilation. It's not the best they could do. It's not guided by healing, its guided by the opposite of that.

Slim-Baiting

I've just started reading an article, "Why bad ideas refuse to die". It mentions a young black man-a rapper-who's caught on to someone peddling flat earth. Yes, flat earth. That seems less bothersome than it should given people in white coats go around trying to force "food addiction" as a viable conceit, because they feel entitled.

And yes, I know its referring to certain phenomena, so why not define, describe and name that it veraciously? Isn't it important enough?

The @bese construct has never really a debate. It was cast that way in a knowing attempt to hide its irrationality. It's fat people who keep indulging this pretense-helping to legitimize the uncredible. Why do we feel the need to do this?

Are we looking for slim people to break down and say, "It's a fair cop fatz, we was wrong"? Not seeing them scratch that itch, nor would it be the catharsis of our past imagining. That sort of liberation comes from within us and is in our power.

Have some compassion for slimz, they're out of their depth on this one. Its up to us, whether we like that or not.

I'm asking you for a peer-reviewed study showing that a typical fat person can become sustainably non-fat through deliberate weight-loss

Would it be exaggerating to say, anyone who truly believes anyone can reverse their weight permanently with calorie restriction is up there with the flat earthers? Mostly, I'd say not. It's like asking for proof that someone's born again in JC. It's a suspension of disbelief thing, outside the remit of science-always has been.

It's worth mentioning a fundamental tangle at the heart of all this.

"Weight loss" is entirely possible and Calorie restriction dieting doesn't work. Communiqués go full on cross purpose. One 'side' knows weight loss and reversal of weight is attainable-they're right. The other knows dieting doesn't work-they're right too.

The bottom line is weight loss is not dieting, it is the means of getting you to that destination. It is the wrong means, full stop.

Metabolic function is as plastic, as in the brain and nervous system. It is responsive, malleable, adjustable. It has to be just to fulfil its purpose. Those gatekeeping research are more interested in using fat people as hostages to get dictate the way everyone eats. "...the fight to improve the American diet."

I don't hear manipulating metabolic function in that, do you?

These people are obsessed with controlling what other people eat. Imagine reading a self proclaimed specialist in hepatic medicine's blog, only to find endless screeds about alcohol manufacturers and what ingredients/percentage proof their liquour is. 

It would score high on the WTH meter.

Though some actually seem to have some interest in how to make use of this area of human physiology, the replete disinterest public faces of the "obesity community" as Dr. Arya Sharma calls it have, still dominates as much as their food fixation.

Their lack of curiousity alone is as remarkable as their irrelevance to those who need or want to alter their functioning.

The length of Ampersand's question reflects the conflation of a perfectly reasonable aim-weight loss, that has been torpedoed by being conflated with the metabolically deranging calorie restriction.  "Deliberate weight loss" refers to cal res induced weight loss, but it could and should refer to the painless trouble free weight loss our bodies experience everyday as our bodies convert food into and use energy.

Change would be sustained by that which sustains fatness within a certain range as the overwhelming majority of fat bodies do now-self regulation. They key is a method that doesn't force the mechanics of that to fight off and correct calorie deficit or starvation. 

Reactions to his inquiry have ranged from the usual faith healing standard-that is, if a million people pray for remedy and it happens for one, then one is 100% proof, to the point of describing it as an unreasonable request,

I cannot help but feel this post is a quintessential example of an isolated demand of rigor. Very very few studies in the entirety of the social and medical sciences will fit the criteria he laid out because studies like this are very very hard to do. If this is evidence he requires to be convinced that dieting and exercise for long term weight loss works, then he’ll probably never be convinced because it seems highly unlikely such a study will ever exist, even if diet and weight loss in the long term do work.

Does that sound like someone in charge of themselves? Doesn't anyone feel anything at all about seeing people in this condition? At what point do we become culpable by our indulgence of them? Behaving as if they have a case, rather than giving them short shrift?

Instead of asking slim people the question we know the answer to, let's stop getting them to show themselves up and focus on taking positive action ourselves.

This is 'Obesity'

Sarai Walker's article in NYT tells us exactly what the 'obesity' construct is and is for.

I posted a link on Twitter to a 1969 interview with Jim Morrison, in which he said, “Fat is beautiful.” Minutes after posting the link, a friend responded angrily that being fat is unhealthy because it causes high blood pressure and other health problems. This response, I told the audience, is an example of what I call “Fat Derangement Syndrome,” where even people who consider themselves to be open-minded, critical thinkers become outraged if fat is spoken about in any positive way.

"Fat Derangement Syndrome" is 'obesity'. It's the applied vigiliante style, permanent chorus of disapproval, which is supposed to trigger feelings of unwellbeing in fat people. This can be pointed to as the expression of the pathology of 'obesity'/caused by 'obesity'.

Or what have you got? A lot of hysteria about unhealthy, and a lot of completely tuned out fat people going about their beeswax, being just as un/healthy as they are, no more no less? How easily can you make fool yourself with that?

The much hoped pathology that is the 'obesity' construct can only be made anything like a realistic pretense even for the desperate, with this kind of proactivity. If you really want to believe something, the urge is to act that out where you feel you can. To try and make it happen. Or else, why bother wanting it?

Unfortunately, Sarai Walker like many of the fat activist bent point blank refuse to countenance this, despite heavy prompting. 

During the audience question-and-answer period, people stood up, one after another, and made negative comments about weight.

You don't say.

I felt like a witch surrounded by torch-wielding villagers. It was clear that even for many urban sophisticates paying to attend a festival about difficult ideas, thinking about fat as anything but bad was borderline impossible.

Oh its possible alright, it just not desirable to these folk. If they're so sophisticated, why would this be anything but their decision? This whole rackety ob act wouldn't exist without serious interventions from the white coat mafia, true. However, no-one's stopping the keepers of all human intellect and compassion from seeing right through that. Basic critical thinking would do that.

No one's in a better position to dismantle it than they. If they'd have wanted, they could have saved us all from this by seeing it as beneath their dignity-which it is. The 'obesity' crusade has always been aimed straight at Walker's audience. It knows them, because it is them. It is how they think, especially about those of the lower orders.

Walker can't believe her audience doesn't recognize her. I'm one of you!

Fat activists, those who see themselves as white, middle/upper class educated intelligent etc., refuse to acknowledge that given no comebacks, they too can choose to feel liberated by bigotry. The implications on self identity are sharp but why is that any different for the rest of us?

How do you think I feel about Black people, especially self-declared militant activists, accepting the idea that Black people are lazy and stupid, as long as they're 'obese'? We are talking about their mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts who worked all hours for them and theirs.

I did not need to know it was this easy. But I'm not going to pretend that hasn't happened.

I can see, despite the assumption that Black people live to cry "racism" at every turn, the sheer fatigue with politics. How wonderful to be able to achieve radical change that's wholly internal? The power is yours.

Black or otherwise, fat people are imbued with the magic of totally existing in an ether untouched by the laws and mechanisms of society.

If I ignored all this and pretended its purely about don't know, it would be erasing and ignoring those feelings. Whilst I don't respect the craven submission to 'obesity' folklore. There is something deeply condescending about behaving as if they're under any real duress to feel this way. It's collusion pure and simple.

Something else;

Backstage, the moderator of the event asked if I was O.K. This wasn’t the first time someone on my tour had pulled me aside to ask that question. I said I was fine, but in the hotel that night, I crawled into bed, relieved that I no longer had to perform as a professional fatty. I wanted to go home and hide. I am ashamed of this response. I wrote a novel to give fat women a voice, but then became exhausted using mine.

That is the best description of "political correctness" I think I've ever read. How ironic that she thinks that's the source of her pain! Rather than her refusal to see people want her to feel bad, feel ill, so they can say-that is what we are talking about. So they can validate their assertions. That's how brittle and willfil the ob cult is. 

The real consideration is not to feel like you're fronting with an insouciant 'tude. It's to recognize the limits of identity. That you have to be able to be more important than whatever group you feel part of. That you can and must be capable of standing aloof from them. Knowing that they are wrong and you are right.

If the boot was on the other foot, wouldn't you want them to stand their ground against your wrongness? How many times have your mistakes been corrected by those who refused to submit to you[r identity]?

Inside Every (Desperate) Person is a Fat phobe Waiting for Release

Most people lead lives of quiet desperation. So it's hardly surprising that inside all of us is a cowardly bully or bigot (often both) waiting to be liberated. In this instance, by permission of the white coat mafia. From scientists and medics who hold our lives in their hands (only because many of them just won't let go). To the head docs who tell us what and how to think and about how we feel and think, along with how to interpret whatever's left in our minds.

When you stop either auto fat phobia or the fat hatred you have for others, it usually has numerous effects-which I'd like people to discover for themselves. But I would challenge anyone, fat to thin alike to simply stop hating fatness and/or fat people-the latter is so nonsensical when you think about it. Imagine "hating" slim people(?!) It's effectively misanthropy, which means it is also self hatred.

Really bite the bullet and root this out. Systematically.

It has been said by many that fat phobia does not signal self esteem. I'd be more direct and humbly suggest that it is often a marker of low mood or even depression. And that if you stop fat phobing, you will take strain off your mood. Bring back some lost energy and that is often key to neurosis of all kinds, depression and anxiety especially.

If you excise it as completely from your mind and its functions as you can, you'll feel better not simply about yourself, you'll feel better about everything. I'd avoid setting out to "love" fat. That is, positively fetishizing fat. That often brings its own problems. It can and does sit side by side, with a virtually unchecked loathing of fatness/fat/fat people.

Its important that you stick to getting rid of any ill feeling, any over-excitation about fatness, fat and people in any aspect. Think more of a kind of acquiring of a neutral stance. Concentrate on the aim of changing the way you react emotionally and mentally to fat. Quiet your nervous system right down when you think of it, see it or hear it mentioned.

Go further than you think you need to. Fat phobia can be peskily hard to spot, until you have gotten rid of a certain amount-when more hidden depths of prejudice, surface. Often after a gap or high point of reversal. That is probably true of a lot of most, if not all prejudice.

Fat phobia is a mental drag.

Fat phobia has costs.

Do the experiment on yourself and make up your own mind.

The Obesity Construct is Blasphemy is it not?

Anything and everything is prostituted in service of seeking to justify re-defining human beings as disease. And why this is the way to alter metabolic function to produce desired outcomes. Go figure.

Now I'm atheistic, but one thing I've wondered for a time is why god-botherers don't find the construct of @besity blasphemous, basically outraging against a sacred entity. I have to admit, I don't really care. It's more academic on my part, but I have to wonder whether this is another example of people who talk the talk and are even into and have an emotional attachment to their ideology/set of ideas.

But somehow don't actually think about, through or with them.

i.e. the old the death penalty for even heinous crimes is an abomination. The death penalty without trial for your metabolic function/not being able to tolerate a life of starvation? Fine! Or child welfare is my priority, let's brand children subhuman targets and encourage them to avoid bullying by starving themselves and so forth.

It's none too surprising then that some feel the need to try "@besity is against x holy books sanctity of the human body" etc.,

This is a weak effort I must say. It's clear that the culture of fitness is flagrantly idolatrous. Xtians and others I fancy believe they're made in the image of him upstairs. If they're disease.....well....need I say more?

I'm genuinely curious.

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. 

Is Loneliness a Disease?

An enduring enigma at the heart of the 'obesity' cult, including this notorious brainfart is any assertion that though there's a field supposedly dedicated to the study of it, people must become 'disease' in order to prompt what should be that field's whole reason for existing.

The real issue is simple, there's no sure, direct, predictable, way to halt and/or reverse the process of weight gain. That is all that is needed, that's most of what should have been the central vocation of "obesity science."

It's dodged this forever and it can either see how long it can drag that out, or get the hell on with it. 

This paper looks at loneliness and the potential effects of a mindful approach on what is said to be negative health correlates. It explores mindfulness meditation to see if it can palliate these effects. Wait though.

Has loneliness been declared (a) disease? 

According AMA docs that's the motor of seeking to improve people's health in accessible ways. Not the intentions of those involved in the field, or anything.

It's a small study starting from the basis that loneliness is deemed to provoke potentially serious negative health effects. Focusing on the elderly population who tend to be more vulnerable to social isolation for a variety of factors.

They concluded mindfulness- maintaining focus in your present experience, allowing your thoughts to flow calmly, without becoming emotionally entangled with them-not only reduces the chemical markers associated with the health risks they were interested in.

The signs from the results were that it not only promises to lessen those risk factor markers, it also can reduce people's feelings of isolation.

This raises a question about how we see loneliness. On the one hand we think of it as aloneness-so how could that be lessened from within? Unless that concerned training on how to make friends or something like that.

It brings to mind the old axiom that you can feel lonely in a crowd yet not so on your own. Suggesting more (potential) harm is done, not in being alone so much as the habitual quality of your internal state and your (habitual) reaction to that. Or how you feel on the inside. Being alone, leaves you with that.

This can easily become a continual vicious cycle of negativity can help to wear you(r body) out. I note this so easily because let's face it, that's the 'obesity' strategy. To create a permanent state of negative feeling so acute, that one will do anything to escape those feelings.  The agonies of semi-starvation and overexercising are supposed to seem more tolerable than that.

The process of starting this, gives you permission to stop polluting your mind.

If you're asking, how can you participate in something so seemingly fake? In short, its pretty much boiling frogs. The first (unseen) hook is you accept it is wrong to be fat. Things roll on from there. Ultimately, you feel unethical not to keep participating in this scenario-which is actually very real whilst you are. Trying to stop this is like trying to stop feeling bad about being unfaithful, if that's an absolute no no in your mind. It feels unethical.

Any damage this exhausting cycle inflicts can be put down to 'obesity'. Which is why 'obesity' wallahs hate HAES or anything that remotely reports the reality of the weight/mortality graph.

Mindfulness is in essence, learning about detachment. I'm sure many people done with the cult instinctively start with a form of mindfulness. They learn to try and disengage from the internal cycle of negativity-as well as the external. If they either know or discover to really step off it, that begins to fade and they'll realize underneath this is-"self love."

If it is deemed;

People suffering from chronic inflammatory conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and asthma - in which psychological stress plays a major role - may benefit from mindfulness meditation techniques,

Then why wouldn't the field and its touting of "minor inflammation" be falling over itself to see the effects of something that can potentially lessen that level of said inflammation/response? Where are the numerous studies devoted to seeing if freeing people from the debilitating 'obese' mindset cultivated over such a long time improves health?

Oh, have I just answered the question?!

Follow up studies are needed. This is sort of like a guide for directing more a more fundamental search for underlying pathways of reversing inflammation and inflammatory response. It would be fascinating to see if this effect could be zoomed in on, intensified, made more direct, predictable and controllable. Perhaps with specific techniques, who knows?

It's the kind of approach that puts people in the driving seat helping us bypass the very professionals, some of whom affect disdain for certain bodies, oh boo hoo. And plus, no wretched nagging about what you eat.

This is my idea of "increased access" people doing stuff we can for ourselves, leaving the rest to the professionals. Rather than always being centered on dragging people into a healthcare system that isn't able or doesn't necessarily want to accommodate them.

Because someone gives a damn about the suffering of others, we can all potentially benefit. All who are lonely/isolated could benefit from this approach, let alone those with inflammatory conditions of all kinds, including of course mental health problems. Yes, inflammation's a bit of a buzz term right now, but I do think there's something in this.

Over time, practise of mindfulness can lead to a different consciousness which can lead to a kind of partnership between professionals and lay, where the latter get to use the deep desire to "take responsibility" denied by a pill for every ill.  Which of course could have started with fat people and our unusually high level of commitment to such cost for such minimal returns. But whatever. 

This is what I mean by "obesity"quackery has cost us all opportunities to learn more and do more about ourselves. 

Not Tonight Irene

Fat people suffer as much from poor health as they do from poor image. They also die younger. My mother, always fat, died at 61. She suffered for years from carrying around an extra hundred pounds. She was intelligent, beautiful, loving, kind and industrious, but sadly I lost her too soon due to her being over weight. It is too bad we can't promote a healthier body along with a better image of our body.  ~ Irene

This is the kind of comment caught me unawares from the get go. Here's someone stating that their beloved mother (father/partner/ or other loved one) died of something, yet couldn't seem to care less that there was nothing available to prevent this.

You'd think that would be of primary concern. Instead we get the insipid: "...too bad we can't promote a healthier body along with a better image of our body" and the like. What?

How would "promotion" have reversed her mother's weight by 100lbs? Is this a product launch or a matter of life and death? Perhaps most puzzling of all, why do these people direct the dead hand of their minds at lay people, when it is scientists that produce science?

Legislators/politicians local and national are the ones who influence and decide the allocation of funding for said science, don't you think writing to them might start concentrating minds? Why would a group advocating for the valuing of fat people-so absent from their minds attack said advocacy?

Have you ever heard the like of this elsewhere? Because I most definitely haven't.

Even when you come across people whose relatives have traumatized them through their behaviour under the influence. They still talk with feelings of sadness, regret and love. Even if they ultimately felt they had to disconnect from the person, due to their behaviour.

I know abstinence is bunk, people's assertions that there ought to be more provision for it at least focuses on trying to help the person concerned.

Not people like Irene. Too often, they're curiously disinterested in direct assistance to their loved ones. Nor am I yet to see convincing show of grief;

My mom is slowly killing herself.  She won’t live to old age. How the fuck do you want me to feel?  And she’s not enjoying herself, either. Her joints hurt, she has breathing problems, she can’t find clothes in her size, medications don’t work properly at her weight, and when she needs a surgery she will be at a considerably higher risk of complications.  The FA movement would have me applaud her for this.  Well no.  Fuck that.  She’s my mom, and when she hurts herself she hurts me too.  You wouldn’t stand idly by while your friend committed suicide or spiraled into drug addiction, would you?”

That's exactly what these people do, do, stand idly by, that's what is so shocking about them. Does this person really think their use of "fuck" hides the absence of real emotion?  Her joints could be helped by changes the things going into her body. Her breathing might possibly be eased through exercises and her medications adjusted or other things tried.

I don't and wouldn't applaud the stasis of dieting or be damned. What for?

Why do they continue to draw attention to themselves? Presumably, they do not have a clue as to how they sound. I suspect that's partly down to the unnatural absence of response from fat people to anything fat haters say to us. This was due to the suppression of any remotely contrary feelings about dieting being an article of faith.

I'm sorry for the mother's suffering, but I'm most sorry of all that she has this unit for a child. What's amusing about this is clearly, this person has caught on that there is something profoundly wrong with how these people go on, using their often dead or dying (they say) relatives to concern troll. Or should we say, death troll? This is using the ill health/death of relatives, to tell fat people off for advocating self restoration, respect and care.

Do you feel he's gruff but with a heart of gold? I'm afraid I don't. Perhaps I've been too spoilt by hearing a lifetime of genuine expression of grief and sorrow for loved ones. It's not simply the absence of that, it's the lack of genuine feeling.

You'd have to be a bit if a brute, not to find his unconvincing straining for effect somewhat amusing. The fakeness and lack of humanity engendered by the 'obesity' crusade that seems to warp minds this way. Specifically, accepting the person is disease dehumanizes, not dehumanizing, I mean it removes the humanity from a person and the person who accepts it too.

To accept that, your critical faculties have to be switched off. And that must account for this out of tune reaction. There was controversy when the dsmv proposed enduring grief as a pathological condition to be treated with anti-depressants.

Here's a natural antidote. Get people to see their loved ones as self inflicted disease and voila, no grief. Maybe they could check out their brains to see what area's suppressed and come up with some way of replicating it for the illness of grief.

This is the outcome of avoidance of discomfort. Grief isn't nice, so you don't have to feel it, as long as you see people in the right way.

I was going to say that you cannot grieve a thing, but of course, you can. Come and see me the time when my computer locked and I couldn't use it! Looking up a way through, there was more honest show of grief in others experiencing the same fate, than any of these jokers.

One of the best things about landing on a site like Nurse Naomi's blog about her young daughter is to finally have the privilege of witnessing a person behaving as you'd expect under the circumstances.

Her daughter is a real person, not a cypher or a stick to try and beat someone else with.

She listens and relays what her daughter is experiencing. She describes Hana's feelings in subjective terms and her condition in objective terms. 

She can't sit and wait for science, she's out there researching and scouring the earth for possibilities, leads, anything that might help. Her entreaties are directed at scientists, obviously because they do the science. And she talks of saving Hana.

She seeks to garner attention for the plight of her daughter Hana and others, you know she could not sit idly by. 

And what doesn't she have time for-as far as I know? That's right, FA. Because we aren't the reason why the science in this area is so undeveloped. Hypothalamic obesity was apparently isolated in 1901.
 
Hana of course, has an actual condition. She's not just a person being defined as a condition so there's something to describe.

Trying to save the life of your loved ones with all your might is the least I'd expect you to feel moved to do, according to your abilities. Re-routing the course of metabolic function doesn't bring amateur to mind.

If the Irene's of this world made noise about the absence of any means to save their loved ones and aimed it at those with influence; politicians, medics, public healthists, scientists themselves, metabolic science would have become the worthwhile and important subject I've always suspected it is. That would help anyone reverse weight, whether triggered by tumours or not.

It would attract better minds, and they'd perhaps be an honest humane and progressive discourse, kicking into touch the debased hate-fest that passes for "debate" right now. People like Irene have had a part to play in allowing things to come to this and I can't for the life of me work out why.

So the question is, why do people like "Irene" not know how strange their behaviour is?

Children Need Wisdom not Mindwarps

An FA blog featured a submission about a children's book "Don't call me Fat!" The book itself is a newer tranche of 'obesity' propaganda assaults on fat children. On its face it pretends to play nice, but it polices both fat and slim children into their accepted roles. Instead of interrupting and overthrowing the 'obesity' discourse, making it clear that fat hate is the fault of fat haters, it seeks to justify it.

If that sounds harsh, try comparing it with the author's book on bullying, where it's made clear other people's bullying is down to them, not you;

A bully can make you feel like its your fault that they are picking on you, even though this isn’t true.

Too right. The book on fat says;

It doesn’t matter whether you are a child or an adult, weighing more than is healthy can stop you from doing fun things like running, jumping, swimming, and climbing as far and as fast as others.

That's the point where you say people expect this, but it's not up to them to tell you what your body can or can't do. You're allowed to find out. That's really a lot of the point of childhood and it can last a lifetime. Remember when, children=potential? It abruptly says at one point that there's no excuse for this;

Sometimes when you are overweight, people will try to make you feel bad about it or tease or bully you because you are not the same as them. Teasing or bullying people for how they look is mean and is never the right thing to do. 

This tired lip service isn't good enough. You need to break it down and state categorically that people are seeking to undermine you. To change your feelings of yourself to the precise 'obese' trope mentioned. And here's a way not to fall for it. i.e. Remember that your body is you and it is you that is living it, not anyone else. Not even your mum or dad.

It's the new thing, to mix some phoned in unconvincing stab at "sympathy." It gives the impression that fat phobia is as nice as the tone its impersonating. It should include that too, that people can bully whilst seeming to be nice. If you feel a bit confused after someone has spoken to you this way. You've probably just had an experience of it.

Its playing on the urge of people to see their abuse of fat children and adults as doing good, the other fat phobes who don't "sugarcoat" their vindictiveness are the bullies, not them. Remember, this is "a first introduction to...";

Anyone can be a bully. It could be a boy or a girl a person on their own or in a gang. It can even be an adult. A bully can pick on you and leave you out of games.

Indubitably. Back to the fat book;

It can make it hard to find clothes that feel comfortable. and it can make you feel as if you are very different from others and that you don’t fit in.

People feel self conscious about their size if it is greater than the norm, ask tall children-or anyone who was about that. See them slouching in embarrassment. The key is reassurance, not to stick the knife in.

I'm sure it helps that they aren't cast as a disease and relentlessly told that they'll never be able to gain control of limbs that long. That they'll never move them as fast as shorter limbed people. And how they feel so awful about that.

I think you'll find fat children feel as human as other children, until they're taught otherwise- ceaselessly branded obese this and obesity that.

Expect lots of lot's of lovely anklebiters earnestly regurgitating this kind of bollocks in the near future. Without wishing to overstate the point (moi?) this really is an abuse of their trust and intelligence before you even get to the effects on a fat child. This aggression is so hard to deal with. What is wrong with these people? Can they really be this incapable of controlling this urge?

What's more, this tripe is written by an alfalfa sprouting, quinoa exhausting eco-twit psychotherapist. When the mind police are on the case, its time to say eh-oh.

There's no need for the fat book if she can't do any better than this. If its too hard to see a living breathing child rather than 'obesity'. Then she should have just used her bully book and inserted references to fat/ness. Give fat children the bully book-the "how to use this book" part is especially instructive for parents of bullied children. It even gives a list of others on that subject.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Body Promotion

So the British Plus Size Awards have been accused of promoting 'obesity'? From what I can see, they'd be more readily accused of 'promoting' whiteness, yahwn.

What happened to the much proffered notion that 'obesity' is separate from the 'obese' person? I've seen that accusation more than once from other fat commentators, bravely critical of people's self-acceptance. People's unselfconscious assertion of their continued and real existence, fat self recognition/acceptance of one's own fatness. A big fat consciousness.

They state with no little contempt, that we pathetically can't separate "our obesity" from ourselves. What's their response to this accusation that firmly reveals the indivisibility of fatness and person? Can slimness be seperated from a slim person and thinness from a thin person? Why not? Slim is to thin, what chubby is to slim. And chubby is to fat what thinness is to slim.

Don't think I'm trying to gain their precious agreement, but I offer this for their consideration.We may be picking up on this rather than expressing an internal cri de coeur. We may actually be listening to other people, unlike they, who are listening to their own, "promotion of slimness" mirroring slimmer fat phobes "promotion of obesity" in order to promote, to themselves, the idea of slimness as some kind of identity, akin to the traditional gent/lady thing. 

Try to remember the 'obesity' isn't and has never been fat people's. It really has little to do with us. The routine unrelenting imposition of it on us, requires us to read it. And we are not as stupid as your acceptance of your own assignment [though you of course dump it on us] leads you to assume, can't you tell that difference?

What is with this idea of promoting 'obesity' anyhow? You have to grasp just how alien and odd the very notion of it is. It so caught me unawares that it took me a while to place it. The best I could do was that it's an inversion of the idea that thin bodies in the media compel "young girls" to starve themselves.

An idea that's always been so utterly unconvincing that my mind discounted it without bothering with it. Like if you insisted: "Scooby Doo's POTUS." Despite moi, the idea has great currency, especially within the usual cod-feminism we're usually exposed to.

Women want to be thin/remain slim for its currency. Whilst there is a context of relatively stark cost-benefit, ultimately, they're not forced by anyone. Indeed, they're supporting the system because they feel they can win at it. White middle/upper class women most of all.

You can see this from the feminist response to fat acceptance. Rather than seeing it as a potential other front to the liberation of female consciousness. They see it as competition, feel jealous along with highly contemptuous. Above all they wish to kill it, without seeming to. They neither give a shit about the effect on fat women, or themselves.

That simply isn't convincingly about pure coercion.

If they were truly feminist and wanted out of this contrived marketplace, they'd feel more like myself. Yes, I realise how that sounds, but lack of eloquence etc., I basically feel, if women want to be thin/slim, let's get involved in the science/research/thought in how to bring that about and find the best possible way. Because we're freaking worth it. And this is about the desire to be slim right?

Ultimately I respect that extent of desire, and I don't care how 'trivial' that does or doesn't sound. It's not in and of itself harmful. And it just so happens that this leads to other things that definitely aren't trivial. It leads to 'nice'.

Women could have been in the forefront of this, propelled by our own desires, rather than majoring in being imprisoned in the shame of not being nice, important seeming person's, to make up for the trivialization of women. The truth is though that women could have and could still escape this, but prefer instead to play the game. Yes, I'm saying it.

That's why they don't care about the effectiveness of what we use to slim down any more than the ahem, patriarchy. 

Those who feel like winners, who feel like they can want to play-to win. And they'd rather win through privilege, position, and contrived scarcity, than find a way for everyone to access what they want, if they want it. If slimness was available at will, it would be something else with them. Otherwise why support class?

So bodies have to carry the can, so "we" don't have to discuss anything remotely uncomfortable. Whilst despising that about ourselves and shouting it at others, in this case fat people and our purportedly unique lack of "personal responsibility."

Which brings me to the way this weird charge is responded to, the now rote-like: "Fat people aren't necessarily unhealthy." "Fat people don't all get that way by sitting and eating x,y,z." You whaaa?

It's like watching two sets of dancers perform their own mutual idiom, one that makes little sense to me.

No Death Penalty for Being Fat

No sooner did I write about the spectacle of a fat person losing weight, serving as inspo-porn for shamelessly empty-headed, does more construct-related grotesequerie rear its maggoty head.

diet or die

How about neither? Though one of them is guaranteed at some point or another, presenting them as two options together like that, I say no thanks to imposture. Even taking account of the sewer dwelling standards of 'obesity' bollocks, surely, surely this kind of taunting goes too far?

Apparently not. Its like an Invasion of the Brain Snatchers, sleep walking sickness. When it comes to 'obesity' the lights are on but people are switched off.

Nor is this any kind of warning. It's a direct threat. And to some, a promise. 

Again, I must point to this suppurating enigma at the heart of the crusade. Why insist weight must "prevented"/maintained or shifted via calorie manipulation rather than reversal/advance of the process (or processes) that led the body to attaining its size?

Why this route and this route alone?

What's so special, so sacred about it? The only other thing there must only be one thing of is god. Are you looking for a god bothering placeholder to believe in? Do you need a sense of certainty you feel is missing in your life? Do you want to return to a golden age of about 30 years ago? Or do you feel the need to unite with your fellow man on something you can all agree on? Why don't you buy something or get a real religion?

Fat people aren't yours. We aren't like a real life puppet show you can feel the frisson of excitement of staring into our eyes to see your handiwork register. We aren't your project.

There are reams and reams of every known product or service in an economy of any sophistication. Virtual duplication where things of the same kind differ barely, if at all. Anything to express choice even when its somewhat illusory. That's advertised as the shining path desire expresses itself through.

Can't find what you "want" because of the absence of some microscopic must-have?

Someone with a commercial interest will run around arms flapping like that really matters. Summon the best minds available on it. Inevitably someone comes up with something.... 

But the notion, that maybe there could possibly be another way of altering body composition and that is sacrilege. Entitled, spoilt, just for once, take responsibility, one strike and you're out.

You can see the displacement.

Because this of all places is really the place to draw the line. Whilst you put pressure on people to save you, healthcare, the earth, whatever. Consumer society is really tussling with it's own excesses. It just doesn't want to face that. Doesn't want the party to stop. That surfaces where no social graces are extended though. And so will remain until people face their own feelings about their own behaviour.

Like millions of others, I dieted, not because it made sense for most of the time I was doing it. I restricted because it was the only option to fulfill my stubborn aim. If I'd had an actual way, a better option or options I would have used those instead. Dieting only exists because there's nothing else and nothing coming. It is so shit that it needs to be the only game in town.

But the imposition of it being the only way has grown around the need many have for the idea of one way or the highway. Not the other way around.

It's not just that proto-anorexia is the seen as the way, the truth and the light, the saviour of all mankind, if not civilization as we know it. It's that its patiently such a useless, ugly mess. Everyone dreads and detests it. Contrary to the slimming related psycho-drivel, that's physiologically, not psychologically based.

Yes, I do know that mind is brain and brain is just a body part. I'm saying directly that this worldwide aversion is not a mental decision, it is the body's reaction sent to the mind to then be voiced.

In fact, our conscious minds seem rather susceptible to the merest suggestion of dietary restriction. Fasting, notions of clean eating, cleansing anorexia etc.,  is actually rather attractive to our minds.

Thin people are able to be the most vocal about this visceral disdain for obvious reasons. The centrality of energy to our existence makes our bodies recoil from being cut off from what sustains existence, for no good reason. 

Yet this is the way decided upon, no matter the upheaval, the invasiveness, the wastefulness, the,  jealousy, resentment, hate, disorder, the collateral damage and the continued failure this generates.

I'd be lying if I said I cared overly right this minute. All I know is this makes it clear that "losing weight" isn't the object.  It's about, this, the way it is now and keeping it that way for as long as possible.

This mess in and of itself is fulfilling a function to those invested in it. 

That's freakish and truly embarrassing so, the same old excuses come thick (yes) and fast. 

It's about morality, personal responsibility. Why then wouldn't say the medical profession object to treating genocidal dictators, serial killers, child molesters first? People can be cynical about lawyers, but they regularly air the possibility of successfully defending the potentially guilty and convicting the potentially innocent.

Imagine the potential qualms about saving the health, the life of someone who has or would go on to kill or use that health to hurt and damage others?

D'you not think they might start with them before they got to mere fatness? What better way to impose a non-judicial death penalty than by letting them die from whatever bodily process medics can leave to just keep going where it may.

Oh what's the matter, is that barbaric? Are you against capital punishment? But its just capital for fat people isn't it?

One of the women in the above links, Jennifer Bodek had a brother die when she was 15, followed her mother at 18. Do people need to die because of what may be have been triggered by grief? And no, that's not a cue to turn hate into pity.

And what about weight that's been triggered partly or wholly by crimes committed against their bodies? They are to be ultimately accountable in a way those who committed crimes against them will not? Is that the morality being referred to?

Then there's the towering: "Fat people are ugly."

Have you seen disease in action? Plagues, pustulence, body disrupting bacteria? It's not pretty. The subtle: "Fat people smell." Medical professionals examine folks piss and shit, tend to suppurating wounds, pus filled lumps, encounter necrotic stench. 

Never remotely convincing. A lazy pisspoor effort all round. You get an F.....for fail.

Nor is it the case that there are no leads. It doesn't surprise me that adjusting something like insulin levels can not only undermine excess hunger triggering, but can also increase the body's use of energy.

You know they can block the onset of precious puberty?

How can that be oh so much harder than at the very least stalling adipogenesis for those people who are just relentlessly and aggressively gaining? Is fatty tissue acquisition really more complex than changing shape, internal organs, gaining actual parts and features you didn't have before and so forth?

Intractable depression is a metabolic problem, so being able to adjust it has the potential to be a treatment pathway for various neurosis as well as heart disease which is connected to depression and anxiety disorders. And no, not because depression makes you lazy.

My guess is that if your depression seriously abates due to diet and exercise, you didn't have it. It's effectively self diagnosed in the main. 

Even anorexia, in my view, should be reversed rather than making anorexics impersonate hyperphagia, that in its way is a cruel and unnecessary shock to their state of mind. Forcing them to be the battleground for their neurosis and their will.

And the two are intertwined, reversal and advance of weight have the same basis. Denial of alternatives to reversing weight has meant the death penalty for other than fat people.

And what about that? Wasn't support for it supposed to be unspeakably primitive and bigoted? I always wondered whether support for that-once unashamedly rock solid- ebbed through shaming or the progress of rational argument-which are what again? It's wrong for the state to kill etc.,

It's odd to see so many of those quick to issue a death penalty for being fat, are the same vociferous shamers of anyone supporting it for the most heinous of crimes. I can understand not recognising the form of something in another context, we all have that in some way or another-but with something so supposedly heartfelt, you'd think some part of the mind would recognize this intellectual faux pas.

Begs the question, does there always have to be something a person can do-or in this case be-that means they deserve to forfeit their life? And if that isn't the most unspeakable things, does that impulse inevitably drift elsewhere? In this case, merely an unpoliced area? Literally, fatness has become a criminal justice issue, without either criminality or justice. 

Some kind of thwarted urge to punish the guilty is at work here. Yet it is those same minds that felt the urge to stymie that in the first place.What gives"anti-death penalty" advocates? Did you know your deep ethic beliefs were shallow and that really, you're just a person who believes what's fashionable amongst your class?

That you're really moved according to what is and isn't shameful to those of your class who can really think (or dominate). Do you truly believe in anything at all? Do any of us? Or is it a particular state of being?

No more do evil acts decide the imposition of the ultimate penalty, but merely what's unguarded. And you wonder why people often default to the on the defensive even when they're in the wrong? Who can blame them? When a simple and consistent mea culpa can bring you the most capital of punishments?

I cannot support the DP, apart from directly, there's the inevitable race/class bias. Even I though I have had cause to wonder whether my objection is based ultimately on morality or squeamishness.

But if I was to change my mind, it would not be mere slimness that inspired a change, that's for sure.

No death penalty for being fat.

*Terri Smith

The Obese Entry Point

For a crusade trading so long on pointing out indolence, the 'obesity' crusade is remarkably fond of re-cycling it's old tat. Calorie restriction dieting, lifestyle change/choice, lifestyle/weight management. Exercise, activity, active lifestyle, health, all referring to the same.

At least there, bothering to alter terms. Probably because the false consciousness was being rumbled. 

Not yet with a current favourite, invoking terrorism.

"Obesity is a bigger cost for Britain than war and terror." 20 November 2014 

Really? That's funny because;

"Obesity more dangerous than terrorism: experts. The Age- 25 February 2008

"Obesity, bigger threat than terrorism?" CBS- 1 March 2006

The guardian itself; [US] "Obesity epidemic, bigger threat than terrorism?" 3 March 2006

Now this terrible scourge....................... of hackdrivel has caught up with poor old Blighty. 'Twas inevitable. There's been a lumbering up to this one as crude as the bluntest filled-with-visceral-horror stereotype of a fat person on the move.

Most of the above is attributed to one Richard Carmona, an ex-US surgeon general. He exited his post on 31 July 2007. All this was so compelling that it took a while for the press to get excited. Perhaps they knew b/s when they smelt it?

In the end though, the press give the public co-ordinated sockpuppets who make approving noises whenever this propaganda appears what they want-traffic and all that. [I'm increasingly suspicious of BTL comments on these adipocalypse puff pieces.]

So what are we to make of this report excuse for passing the constipated matter that is this torrid bumpf? I'm still deciding whether its worth wading through a 2MB pdf re-hash that I'm guessing isn't dominated by graphics.

It says it has evidence for 44 interventions, into the lives of people out of 70 something they considered *gulp*, being acceptable. Eurgh.When a person has to do that many things to do something your body does automatically, you know it's about the approach, the intervention/s. 

Self named a "discussion paper", it majors on the usual fat people as other. A cost burden- though by that same posit, slim people could be deemed other and a cost to fat/ter people.

Not right now though, the establishment is leading this "discussion" [euphemism for not one]. And though the evidence is that men in many countries, men tend to have a more uniform spread of weight across class, than women, [though we're continually told they're making inroads.]

This adds up to slimness as default human. What do all these f-a-t establishment figures think whilst going along with this? Do they think they aren't fat? Is their fatness somehow obviated by wealth/influence? Does the old saying "You can never be to rich or too thin" need a re-work to something like "You can never truly be an 'obese' if you're rich?"/ "The 'obese' mask cannot rest on the face of a rich man?"

A lot of the powers that be and their cronies are receiving more and more money for this old rope.  'obese' is really just an entry point for other things. Consisting increasingly in sticking its nose in your beeswax, ordering you around, telling you exactly how to live and what to do with your free time. What am I talking about "free time" do you think you have any?

Time belongs to the man! What would Einstein say?

Invasive lifestyle management, mental re-adjustment-to sustain anorexic behaviours, finally admitted to require jettisoning the mental drain that was the 'obese' persona imposed on fat people. "We're all be 'obese' by the year 20 whatever" now reveals a new undercurrent of meaning. Wishful thinking.

When people are 'obese' they can lose their sense of self. They will take the kind of orders they otherwise wouldn't dream of. If you're goal was power, would you be "incentivized" to turn society's weight around? 'Obeses' are ideal citizenry, trusting, docile, obedient-grateful.

It's funny isn't it? We went along with we must become slim. Slim people went along with being part of enforcing this. And now we may all go down together tethered to this boat. 

Pills, anti-seizure meds, operations to remove stomachs. Assessing, controlling people's lives to a tee from cradle to grave, with the threat of this or death penalty. By the time people see through this, goodness knows how much they'll have made away with. Or what will be left of our sense of self or freedom or even healthcare.

PTB are like petty criminals, opportunist to a fault.

Now when you hear "obesity costs", you know you're hearing the kind of cash they intend to drain out of healthcare in order to "save" healthcare expenditure or even whole systems. The NHS is having trouble not because of political re-arranging with every change of government, or the inflexible practise of a stiff medical hierarchy, but because too many of us are ovah-whait;

The UK spends less than £638m a year on obesity prevention programmes – about 1% of the social cost, the study finds.

That much? I wonder what on? Certainly not to find out ways of say blocking people's bodies from scaling whatever highest heights they happen to be triggered into. Or simply trying to stabilise people's weight, rather than operate and remove their organs, under the ransom of continued gain and/or actual health problems.

Despite there already being more leads than many imagine. Its like any "sin", the lack of answer is not a reading of the state of our knowledge, it's rough justice for the "sinners."

As I always said, there is no objective evidence that this particular crusade is that invested in reducing people's weight. It's more into setting up the idea that your life is not your own. Starting with casting bodies as disease and de-animating fat people, defining us as non-sentient fat suits.

Whether this ownership comes through religion, politics or healthcare? Who cares? The same classes run them all-till they lose power. Fat people are simply a current conduit for this kind of impulse.

So, we ought to be pissing away more resources even more uselessly down the drain? And the people like these report writers, medical professionals, nutritionists, psychiatrists, social workers everyone's out for a bit of this, can get paid to tell us to do what we've already done under our own initiative, in the guise "personal responsibility."

 Now laughable including taking pills and being operated on to reduce the function of your functioning body. Since when is the surgery arm of the medical machine "personal"?

Despite no evidence of dead fat bodies littering the streets, nor even of life expectancy regressing a la their ceaseless so-called predictions.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

My first response when I heard CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) was finally being waved around in conjunction with "weight management" was this should be good. Won't this expose the practice of turning of fat people's mind against themselves? [The 'obesity' construct starts its mindwarping with "child obesity" mess.]

Given the purpose of fat phobia has been to make being fat feel so bad that this unease either produces dis-ease or feels like it. The use of CBT and the like would surely expose that by turning it around? The theory behind this to provide explanation as to why diet's fail. Fat people's fatty tristesse. Why're ya sad fatso? Becasuse of my fat gut *sob.* Why d'ya have a fat gut? Because I'm sad. Neat isn't it? So, if fat people's a-hem.... mental health is improved-diets will stop failing.

Don't whatever you do ask how this affects metabolic function, after all that would technically be a scientific breakthrough.  It's the usual 'obesity' cult improvisation. They study afterward. Hey that reverses the clinical trial pathway.

I wonder if anyone's been given an award for this innovation?

Putting it bluntly, the kind of things CBT exists to combat were the techniques employed surreptitiously, to turn 'obesity' into a draining imposture. Goes something like this;

"Negative" Behaviour Cycle

Instead of the "everyone doesn't like me" it's you are disease, not a disease, the disease. That tends to produce "distortions", i.e it sets up a negative mindset. You can learn to interrupt and challenge this process, difficult though that can be (to the point where others define this kind of pattern as "illness.")

Buuuut, when the definition of you is producing it, that can become a life sentence until that [definition] is removed. 

Less sophisticated seeming societies would refer to this kind of shit as spell casting, bad magic etc., Basically through a set of culturally relevant mindwarps, you get people to mess themselves up, then claim that resultant badness/evil i.e. 'obesity' or less formally, "fat logic" is emanating from within them. Technically, a lawyer might argue that's not wholly incorrect [yes that's a double negative, enjoy.] Often the "treatments"required to expel this malevolence are quite vigourous, shall we say.

Anyway, let's see, here are ten cognitive distortions- negative expectations and beliefs that dominate your overall perceptions. How many of them will seem familiar?

1. Mental Filter- Sole focus on the worst possibilities and aspects of a situation filtering out any positives, i.e. the "obesity"construct.

2. Disqualifying the positive- Explains itself really. Any positives don't count.

3. All or Nothing Thinking-Things are either one thing or t'other, slim people are good fat people are bad, any deviation is "denial."

4. Overgeneralization-One example is universal. i.e. One person losing any amount of weight for any length of time, makes fatness "preventable."

5. Jumping to Conclusions- Events cue your pre-formed belief. Fat people are eating disordered. So fat people being enthusiastic about food signals, this eating disorder or the current craze "food addiction."

6. Catastrophization-Maximize negativity, i.e. An observation that either end of the spectrum of any trait, height, weight etc., has higher overall mortality than in between, becomes: Fat kills!!!!

7. Should's and Ought's- Please, you should be slim, you ought be on a diet. You should do whatever you're told, diet's ought to work. 


8. Personalization- Feeling to blame for what is partially or wholly outside your control. Fat people's over-responsibility feeling being fat is our fault and so's the failure of dieting, mind you, we're told that. [Also associated with those who have to look after adults from a young age.]

9. Emotional Reasoning- This is a doozy, basically the idea that because you feel something, it must be so, i.e. because others have cultivated excruciating discomfort about fatness, it's just got to be baaaad.

10. Labelling- Defining yourself, rather than the quality or nature of actions/circumstances/occasions.

And that's just ten of them. Don't hold your breath for this to be mentioned or any contrition or reversal of the 'obesity' cult mindwarp to be a direct out in the open target for the alleviation/ reversal of mental and physical health issues [yes I said physical]. Otherwise known as recovery.

What seems to be happening instead is that is deemed your neuroses. I'm not kidding. The constant panic mode insisted on by 'obesity' alarmist rhetoric, plus things like your nervousness through the aftermath of a constant threat of famine and, exorting yourself to diet and feeling angry with yourself for being fat. Is just the mismanagement of your mind.

Well, technically, that's not entirely false either. You did, but it doesn't say you felt morally obligated to go along with it.

This was wholly supported and advanced by "our betters." And they don't have the cojones to state that openly. Their courage is solely in the area of tearing up fat people pompously. Or now latterly dripping us with oleaginous pity, ((((shudder)))).

Luckily, there are some techniques that purportedly change the content of these to quite a degree to reverse the effect, as fatsphere has instinctively been doing by challenging received opinion. And connecting with our own real experience as human beings.

Or "obesity denial"/"fat logic" as our detractors should have it. 

Embodiment Switch

Reblog, with edits!

The 'obesity' construct and the demand to be slim forces a fat person to disassociate and become somewhat detached from your own body-i.e. it's not real, it's temporary. And bond with a [slim] version of it that doesn't exist as the real one. We know this.

Following instructions from outside yourself-because your own thoughts are making you fat or what a men's diet club forum calls "fat logic"- a consequence of this unnatural situation is the internal balance of being grounded in yourself goes off.

The general norm is to set standards of behaviour and reaction rooted in the way you are generally treated and expect to be treated. That helps to set an internal standard by which we judge how others ought to be treated. What they should have to put up with. 'Obesity' alters that. Our internal standard becomes the treatment fat people accept for themselves. We couldn't possibly use that as a standard to judge others by.

Removed from a fat context-it would disturb, become sinister and unhinged, often psychopathic in tone. You get used to it, yet you know it. In abstract, it doesn't necessarily seem bad. It would though to judge slim people that way and would to me if I were to judge slim people by that standard too. So we know it is.

We instinctively get used to applying expectations born of how slim people are treated to judge situations and people. This becomes the automatic human standard, one we apply to ourselves too, and yet not.

I suppose the distinction is a little like the way you treat visitors as opposed to the way you treat your family.  I used to say a lot when I first got into FA that fat people have no double consciousness. WRONG. This is sort of one, though its nothing like as profound as that of a Black person or even a female double consciousness. It's more a mental switch than a consciousness.The fact that I overlooked it though, shows how ingrained and unnoticed it is.

The problem comes when we stop participating in the 'obesity' cult. Stop rejecting our own bodies and selves as somehow temporary or unreal. Not immediately but gradually, nature begins to reassert itself as we become (re-)grounded in ourselves. Our minds start to normalize, judgement grounded in our own experience and the standards we've inevitably adapted to.

This causes immediate problems. Cries of not grasping how slim people can have body issues etc., arise. That's not the case. It's more some of these problems which previously loomed as large to us as to them, begin to need a microscope. Because the place of judging them has shifted from an internalized form of their own, to a further distance away from there

Working out acceptable expectations can get interesting. We carry on using to the human [slim] standard, but some of our necessarily blasé attitudes born of facing the most outrageous nastiness can start to bleed into that.

I have this problem big time.

Going back and forth between the chasm that is how we have to think of slim people and how we have to think of ourselves becomes more and more, meaningless, boring, even irritating. It's a standard no longer nourished inside you as it was. And let's face it society has this divide too, in frustratingly plain sight. Which is causing its own issues. I've always wondered why people think shitting on a large minority of the population isn't a threat to democracy, in the sense that people get used to that treatment undermining the ability to perceive infractions.

I know that I can grasp far more of injustice perpetrated on others, than I could before. That is a big shock and I wonder if it's part of the suspicion the left has about fat people as a group.

This pre-post mental aspect of re-embodiment, has always caused a divide amongst fat people, especially the self hating kind, but also amongst many who do get it. It occurrence, degree and how one incorporates its strands are unpredictable and don't match ones commitment to self-assertion.

To those people as much as slim people, it can seem like fat people are being angry or even vengeful. Alas, it rarely occurs that fat people might have a reason for feeling anything that deviates from the 'obese' script that isn't malevolent. It's as if there's as much of a script for fat people's unexpected actions as there are for what's expected of us, i.e. imperfect eating and exercising.

I think the definition of people as disease pathology creates that. Priming minds to expect wrong doing. So the well is often immediately poisoned with these expectations, in lieu of more just explanations. How to explain these things? It never occurred for one second that this would happen, until it did to me.