It's unacceptable to say that a fat person can eat little compared to saying a slim person can eat a lot. But one rarely referred to taboo is that one can have an irresistible compulsion to eat, but not enjoy eating.
Again, there's little problem with saying that one can have a sexual compulsion-that is an overwhelming desire for sex, or to keep getting sexual relief-orgasm. Seeing as some seem to doubt sexual compulsion.
This experience is far more prevalent than one might think. For example those who say they "Hurt themselves with food." Seem at least in part to be relaying an irrepressible drive to eat without pleasure.
I had no idea this was so until I let it slip out. The reaction from one girl was so hysterical that I felt need to withdraw it so she'd calm down. Then much later on, I remember discussing this again, after preambling it with that very incident.
As if the word irony had no been invented, a similar thing happened and I was accused of not knowing what I was talking about. Because what I said didn't match the wrong descriptions of ignorant disinterested people, who call the ED shots.
The hot button seems to be food=pleasure. Anything else is somehow unacceptable. Yet my experience is that the pleasure of eating is generated by the correct workings of the mechanics used for eating and digestion.
If your body is out of song then it either isn't generated or felt.
What's even more intriguing is the issue of control.
It's presumed that ED's mirror each other. That they have the same issues and themes despite different context, behaviours and outcomes.
One thing that's most associated with anorexia is control. This is probably due to the worship and fetishization of anorexic behaviour as the only route to inducing deliberate weight loss. Hyperphagic disorder and anything associated with it, is seen as the opposite, out of control, though there are sometimes attempts to press it into the AN mould i.e. fatness is first defined as an ED, which it isn't, then described as trying to gain control by filling a void of despair, like anorexia.
But when it comes to genuinely having a hyperphagic disorder, I'd say the control bit is more likely to be showing through any insistence that one either eats purely out of elective conscious choice, for pleasure, or to "hurt" oneself.
Ask yourself how many times you hear a hyperphagic say anything but.
Showing posts with label inferiority complex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inferiority complex. Show all posts
Thursday, 15 January 2015
Friday, 8 August 2014
Stuck on Repeat
Imagine walking purposefully to a meeting, when someone leaps out and starts barracking you. "You look like shit, you are worthless, stupid, you don't know what you're doing or who you are. I do, I know everything about you...." Etc.,
You continue on, in any state from bemusement to alarm. Then you're waylaid by the charming Shiloh Marie, informing you that by this, you'd not deigned to acknowledge their views and had decided they weren't "valid."
I think you'd be a little surprised. Especially if you'd spent your life doing nothing but acknowledge these 'views' to the detriment of everything. Your own thoughts, feelings and above all, an acknowledgement of yourself.
What's more, the value of this approach to those who demanded it, is eloquently shown by their denial and erasure of it.
Assuming that because someone starts randomnly talking at you, that they are talking to you and about you and that this must have something to do with you, betrays an overdeveloped sense of responsibility for what's going on in other people's heads.
If fat's a "feminist issue", this is where it starts. It's not a woman's duty to soothe men's anger like that of a toddler having an epic tantrum. Nor even with begging the feminist slimstream to stop colluding with this.
Fat phobes don't have a legitimate point of view and that is their decision, not that of FA's. What they want is for fat people to do exactly what we've already done. Over and over again. Whilst they continue to deny it, because it hasn't and doesn't work.
The slimming industry came to the UK in the 1960's. We're talking a good half century of serious dieting culture. And I'd say nearly forty years of this weird scientifically/medically ballasted loathing. No matter what you think, no matter how it seems, there has only ever really been one view.
The instinct seems to be that because people tend to counterbalance any views that may or seem to go against them, by naturally giving good account of themselves, that this must have happened withfat people. It barely has.
Fat people were as committed to this more than anyone else. Even people burned out by dieting still carried on assuming their bodies and/or they were bad and/or wrong.
There was an overall tunnel vision that losing weight must be done and it must be done via weight loss dieting, shared by fat to thin alike. It was the way weight loss was sold. As scientific fact that if you take in fewer calories than you use, you'll use up stored fat and that will be that.
This didn't not simply feel duty or obligation, as a burning desire for ethical absolution. We felt the sting of being in a state of sin on a moment by moment basis.
We were silenced by the collective hoodoo surrounding calorie restriction. Like all quackery, it relies on the way you act and (supposedly) think. When efficacy can't deliver on the hopes invested in it, an atmosphere of superstition flourishes. We came under pressure to be positive at all times, our body's natural reactions to the imposition of famine became the sign of our internal corruptness-not corruption, corruptness.
It must be repressed, lest we ward off success by a show of reluctance or bad attitude.
That would be pointed to as the source of dieting's almost inevitable failure. No failure was allowed, ergo press repeat, forever.
We learned not to complain about anything as that was this was thrown in our faces as proof of; lazy, greedy, reluctant, not complying, failing. In that silence calorie restriction went unquestioned to an almost unprecedented degree. The idea of god was more countered than the idea that fat people should be slim by dieting or trying to at all times.
An incredibly heightened anxiety around being called out as fat to develop. It reached astounding levels. It wasn't so much the power of the word, but of being called out and cornered stripped of any defense or neutral explanation.
Walking on eggshells, trying to be ultra pleasant, all things to all people. Avoiding confrontation, in the hopes that this bomb would not be detonated. It was soul tiring. The tension that was in my body. I was like an Egyptian mummy.
I'm saying this to remind everyone that all this went hand in hand with the so called 'obesity' crisis/crusade, whatever you wish to call it. So how could it possibly reverse or prevent it?
In the end, given we're as assorted a group as any, we exhausted this line. Don't forget that your local council can't get people to stop dropping litter. We're talking here about fighting part of our will to exist.
That is what fat phobes want us to go back to. Any thing they say is a cover for that. But don't take my word for it.
Not only is that as undesirable as it is untenable. History is denied by them. Those invested in this cannot take responsibility for their reign of error, choosing instead to blame the results on us despite following instructions. They cannot do anything else, given they cannot accept reality.
That makes it even less an option. If we're going to get the blame and be denied the efforts we've made, then we must responsibility for ourselves, whether we anyone likes that or not.
I get that Shiloh Marie was trying to set out what she said are the ideas involved in the fat acceptance debate. What I don't understand is why someone as educated as herself cannot recognize such an absence of ideas.
Or even why she thinks health is a debate at all. It's about making people healthier, not dehumanizing and attacking them. And even if there is a debate, why does she assume it would be between FA and a fat haters diet club?
As far as I'm concerned, they've never been the issue. That has always been fat people's mental and physical recovery from the damage this has done. As well as learning to plot our own course divested of its baggage.
She's not the only one who keeps making this error. It's good FA's are catching on to just how intellectually barren fat phobes are, by actually trying to reason with them. And its been every bit as nerve shredding for them, as she found the whole process.
I felt for the way she's been mistrusted. Others like myself have endured far, far, worse, believe me. A lot of that is down to the lack of respect fat people have in themselves. That's what a lifetime of pathologization does to your internal view of yourself and other fat people and most don't even notice it.
Along with other more serious prejudices. Fat people could have been a force for tackling those. Instead, they prefer to turn themselves to nothing making a lot of noise.
FA is not an echo chamber. We can agree on very little. I can't even get people to acknowledge that dieting isn't the whole of weight loss. Or even to question whether there is any real desire for fat people to become slim, or if its really about us continuing to diet and rebound, tied to that treadmill.
We are so used to societies fighting useless phoney wars that perhaps we think, this is just another one of those. I wonder. Seems to me that its prefaced an approach, which realising rightist patrician religion has lost ground, seeks to use science in its stead as a route to bypassing critical faculties in order to micromanage people's lives.
It's working. It's it amusing to hear leftist and liberals talk "personal responsibility" in that brain dead way. Failing to see that 'obesity' epotimizes why that approach is hollow. In the time that cancer has gone from unspeakable, to death sentence to in some cases short term or chronic ailment. Ditto AIDS. This faux disease has achieved nothing.
It can't even manage to get rich countries to feed their children properly, something stopped after not before it!
The real problems lie with fat people. Trying to debate with hate has become a way of avoiding facing up to just how little we trust ourselves and how little we are trusted by others. Who have no reason for this beyond the pathologization of fatness.
It all becomes the body as an opinion or set of views. The bodies of fat phobes, always having been deferred to, are deemed logical, no matter what they say. That's what is being read here. An idea of what certain male bodies stand for. Women we know are irrational, emotive, illogical, unscientific. That comes along with the wrongness of fatness.
The meaning of what people say is in the value of what they stand for. What they say matters no, because the meaning is projected onto them. It is as objectifying and dehumanizing for fat phobes as anyone. No matter what they say, they are never really heard properly either. They are made to look better than they are.
Fat people have a big problem with realising they are right and fat phobes are wrong. They're too used to being cast as totally wrong. It's almost intolerable for many fat people to accept they're right. It's just too far from formative experience.
So they look for ways in which their detractors are right, regardless.
I can't say this effort was as useless as I'd assumed it would be. I was wrong on that score. I'd put that down to the qualities of Shiloh Marie which she wasted on a bunch of mind numbed boneheads.
It would have been better to examine the official, "obesity science" /medical doctor endorsed view and fat acceptance instead.
These jokers are just their puppets....at best.
You continue on, in any state from bemusement to alarm. Then you're waylaid by the charming Shiloh Marie, informing you that by this, you'd not deigned to acknowledge their views and had decided they weren't "valid."
I think you'd be a little surprised. Especially if you'd spent your life doing nothing but acknowledge these 'views' to the detriment of everything. Your own thoughts, feelings and above all, an acknowledgement of yourself.
What's more, the value of this approach to those who demanded it, is eloquently shown by their denial and erasure of it.
Assuming that because someone starts randomnly talking at you, that they are talking to you and about you and that this must have something to do with you, betrays an overdeveloped sense of responsibility for what's going on in other people's heads.
If fat's a "feminist issue", this is where it starts. It's not a woman's duty to soothe men's anger like that of a toddler having an epic tantrum. Nor even with begging the feminist slimstream to stop colluding with this.
Fat phobes don't have a legitimate point of view and that is their decision, not that of FA's. What they want is for fat people to do exactly what we've already done. Over and over again. Whilst they continue to deny it, because it hasn't and doesn't work.
The slimming industry came to the UK in the 1960's. We're talking a good half century of serious dieting culture. And I'd say nearly forty years of this weird scientifically/medically ballasted loathing. No matter what you think, no matter how it seems, there has only ever really been one view.
The instinct seems to be that because people tend to counterbalance any views that may or seem to go against them, by naturally giving good account of themselves, that this must have happened withfat people. It barely has.
Fat people were as committed to this more than anyone else. Even people burned out by dieting still carried on assuming their bodies and/or they were bad and/or wrong.
There was an overall tunnel vision that losing weight must be done and it must be done via weight loss dieting, shared by fat to thin alike. It was the way weight loss was sold. As scientific fact that if you take in fewer calories than you use, you'll use up stored fat and that will be that.
This didn't not simply feel duty or obligation, as a burning desire for ethical absolution. We felt the sting of being in a state of sin on a moment by moment basis.
We were silenced by the collective hoodoo surrounding calorie restriction. Like all quackery, it relies on the way you act and (supposedly) think. When efficacy can't deliver on the hopes invested in it, an atmosphere of superstition flourishes. We came under pressure to be positive at all times, our body's natural reactions to the imposition of famine became the sign of our internal corruptness-not corruption, corruptness.
It must be repressed, lest we ward off success by a show of reluctance or bad attitude.
That would be pointed to as the source of dieting's almost inevitable failure. No failure was allowed, ergo press repeat, forever.
We learned not to complain about anything as that was this was thrown in our faces as proof of; lazy, greedy, reluctant, not complying, failing. In that silence calorie restriction went unquestioned to an almost unprecedented degree. The idea of god was more countered than the idea that fat people should be slim by dieting or trying to at all times.
An incredibly heightened anxiety around being called out as fat to develop. It reached astounding levels. It wasn't so much the power of the word, but of being called out and cornered stripped of any defense or neutral explanation.
Walking on eggshells, trying to be ultra pleasant, all things to all people. Avoiding confrontation, in the hopes that this bomb would not be detonated. It was soul tiring. The tension that was in my body. I was like an Egyptian mummy.
I'm saying this to remind everyone that all this went hand in hand with the so called 'obesity' crisis/crusade, whatever you wish to call it. So how could it possibly reverse or prevent it?
In the end, given we're as assorted a group as any, we exhausted this line. Don't forget that your local council can't get people to stop dropping litter. We're talking here about fighting part of our will to exist.
That is what fat phobes want us to go back to. Any thing they say is a cover for that. But don't take my word for it.
Not only is that as undesirable as it is untenable. History is denied by them. Those invested in this cannot take responsibility for their reign of error, choosing instead to blame the results on us despite following instructions. They cannot do anything else, given they cannot accept reality.
That makes it even less an option. If we're going to get the blame and be denied the efforts we've made, then we must responsibility for ourselves, whether we anyone likes that or not.
I get that Shiloh Marie was trying to set out what she said are the ideas involved in the fat acceptance debate. What I don't understand is why someone as educated as herself cannot recognize such an absence of ideas.
Or even why she thinks health is a debate at all. It's about making people healthier, not dehumanizing and attacking them. And even if there is a debate, why does she assume it would be between FA and a fat haters diet club?
As far as I'm concerned, they've never been the issue. That has always been fat people's mental and physical recovery from the damage this has done. As well as learning to plot our own course divested of its baggage.
She's not the only one who keeps making this error. It's good FA's are catching on to just how intellectually barren fat phobes are, by actually trying to reason with them. And its been every bit as nerve shredding for them, as she found the whole process.
I felt for the way she's been mistrusted. Others like myself have endured far, far, worse, believe me. A lot of that is down to the lack of respect fat people have in themselves. That's what a lifetime of pathologization does to your internal view of yourself and other fat people and most don't even notice it.
Along with other more serious prejudices. Fat people could have been a force for tackling those. Instead, they prefer to turn themselves to nothing making a lot of noise.
FA is not an echo chamber. We can agree on very little. I can't even get people to acknowledge that dieting isn't the whole of weight loss. Or even to question whether there is any real desire for fat people to become slim, or if its really about us continuing to diet and rebound, tied to that treadmill.
We are so used to societies fighting useless phoney wars that perhaps we think, this is just another one of those. I wonder. Seems to me that its prefaced an approach, which realising rightist patrician religion has lost ground, seeks to use science in its stead as a route to bypassing critical faculties in order to micromanage people's lives.
It's working. It's it amusing to hear leftist and liberals talk "personal responsibility" in that brain dead way. Failing to see that 'obesity' epotimizes why that approach is hollow. In the time that cancer has gone from unspeakable, to death sentence to in some cases short term or chronic ailment. Ditto AIDS. This faux disease has achieved nothing.
It can't even manage to get rich countries to feed their children properly, something stopped after not before it!
The real problems lie with fat people. Trying to debate with hate has become a way of avoiding facing up to just how little we trust ourselves and how little we are trusted by others. Who have no reason for this beyond the pathologization of fatness.
It all becomes the body as an opinion or set of views. The bodies of fat phobes, always having been deferred to, are deemed logical, no matter what they say. That's what is being read here. An idea of what certain male bodies stand for. Women we know are irrational, emotive, illogical, unscientific. That comes along with the wrongness of fatness.
The meaning of what people say is in the value of what they stand for. What they say matters no, because the meaning is projected onto them. It is as objectifying and dehumanizing for fat phobes as anyone. No matter what they say, they are never really heard properly either. They are made to look better than they are.
Fat people have a big problem with realising they are right and fat phobes are wrong. They're too used to being cast as totally wrong. It's almost intolerable for many fat people to accept they're right. It's just too far from formative experience.
So they look for ways in which their detractors are right, regardless.
I can't say this effort was as useless as I'd assumed it would be. I was wrong on that score. I'd put that down to the qualities of Shiloh Marie which she wasted on a bunch of mind numbed boneheads.
It would have been better to examine the official, "obesity science" /medical doctor endorsed view and fat acceptance instead.
These jokers are just their puppets....at best.
Sunday, 5 January 2014
Fatphobic Helmet
Fat suit wearing by slimmer people is quite awkward for fatter people. It explains exactly the meaning invested in the 'obesity' construct. That to a slim(mer) person, being fat(ter) is like wearing an adipose suit of disease.
Rather like in torrid soap operas when a character refers to the community's malevolent nemesis as- being like a cancer. Don't let anyone kid on that this merits offense. Nor even that anyone could be so frigid with entitlement, that they cannot cope unless they insist everybody is like them, underneath.
The real offense is that this foolishness can be imposed on others by those who have the influence and kudos to do so. That show their gratitude for the privilege of being paid to pursue knowledge by using research as a route to bypass people'sself awareness critical faculties.
And no, none of this is made better by substituting 'bariatric' for 'obese' or especially 'fat'. (There is nothing wrong with being fat that hasn't been made wrong by this tedious self absorption.) The issue is not the wording, its the solipsistic defining of bodies that aren't like your own as disease that's the problem.
Underlying premise.
Peterborough hospital treats all comers, including those at the top of the weight spectrum. In the past, several staff have injured themselves trying to manoeuvre patients around. This is negligence on the part of their employers-who are supposed to ensure safe working conditions-is being rectified by using a £1,000 fat suit to help staff to practice safe handling/lifting. In the course of this, they've apparently learnt to empathize.
Repeat. Unlearning default arseholery is not 'compassion' or even 'empathy' is you emerging out a state of foolishness. If I keep stepping on your foot, I'm at fault. Getting off your foot is no kudos to me.
It's the norm not to be on your foot. It's the norm of hospital staff, or should be, to look after their patients. Whether professional or not, that requires you to become aware of their needs and be attentive to their requirements.
Having said that, I'm glad that this is happening, because it will hopefully be the beginning of movement towards finally usurping the mostly moribund non-science that is 'obesity', call it "bariatrics" if you wish but I warn you baria-trick. We tend to hear all about the great discoveries of medicine, but what can be neglected is medical progress is like a necklace with a pattern of small beads with intermittent large ones-the latter being the important discoveries. The smaller beads are made up of the information gleaned from caring for people, properly.
Caring for a person or group means you get to know and understand something of the workings of their condition or state of being, through catering to them. Courtesy and respect enables a better quality of communication and therefore insight. This is one of the many reasons "obesity science/medicine" has made little discernible progress in the last 3 or 4 decades is this carelessness. Willful ignorance likes to stop where it is.
You cannot tell what information with be key and what will be by the by. Often the things assumed to be important fall into the latter rather category. It is the small but sometimes significant beads of knowledge learned from patterns that emerge from the observation and thought that goes into looking after people, that is the basis of tomorrow's advance.
But rather than just something for the staff, I think the patients need something. A fatphobic helmet. This heretofore undiscovered thing, when put on, would manipulate brainwaves, plunging the wearer into the mindset of the typical ignorant slim fat phobe (self hating fatz just follow their thinking like obedient pets).
Only when fat people of all sizes get to hear just how messed up, bigoted, idiotic and willfully obtuse the noisier element of this faction are will they finally gain insight enough to stop feeling and acting remotely inferior to them.
That would hopefully finish off all pandering, which keeps their derangement hogging (yes) any discourse on weight. Enabling fat people to start addressing their remarks to the quieter and more thoughtful people.
I sense they're waiting.
Rather like in torrid soap operas when a character refers to the community's malevolent nemesis as- being like a cancer. Don't let anyone kid on that this merits offense. Nor even that anyone could be so frigid with entitlement, that they cannot cope unless they insist everybody is like them, underneath.
The real offense is that this foolishness can be imposed on others by those who have the influence and kudos to do so. That show their gratitude for the privilege of being paid to pursue knowledge by using research as a route to bypass people's
And no, none of this is made better by substituting 'bariatric' for 'obese' or especially 'fat'. (There is nothing wrong with being fat that hasn't been made wrong by this tedious self absorption.) The issue is not the wording, its the solipsistic defining of bodies that aren't like your own as disease that's the problem.
Underlying premise.
Peterborough hospital treats all comers, including those at the top of the weight spectrum. In the past, several staff have injured themselves trying to manoeuvre patients around. This is negligence on the part of their employers-who are supposed to ensure safe working conditions-is being rectified by using a £1,000 fat suit to help staff to practice safe handling/lifting. In the course of this, they've apparently learnt to empathize.
Repeat. Unlearning default arseholery is not 'compassion' or even 'empathy' is you emerging out a state of foolishness. If I keep stepping on your foot, I'm at fault. Getting off your foot is no kudos to me.
It's the norm not to be on your foot. It's the norm of hospital staff, or should be, to look after their patients. Whether professional or not, that requires you to become aware of their needs and be attentive to their requirements.
Having said that, I'm glad that this is happening, because it will hopefully be the beginning of movement towards finally usurping the mostly moribund non-science that is 'obesity', call it "bariatrics" if you wish but I warn you baria-trick. We tend to hear all about the great discoveries of medicine, but what can be neglected is medical progress is like a necklace with a pattern of small beads with intermittent large ones-the latter being the important discoveries. The smaller beads are made up of the information gleaned from caring for people, properly.
Caring for a person or group means you get to know and understand something of the workings of their condition or state of being, through catering to them. Courtesy and respect enables a better quality of communication and therefore insight. This is one of the many reasons "obesity science/medicine" has made little discernible progress in the last 3 or 4 decades is this carelessness. Willful ignorance likes to stop where it is.
You cannot tell what information with be key and what will be by the by. Often the things assumed to be important fall into the latter rather category. It is the small but sometimes significant beads of knowledge learned from patterns that emerge from the observation and thought that goes into looking after people, that is the basis of tomorrow's advance.
But rather than just something for the staff, I think the patients need something. A fatphobic helmet. This heretofore undiscovered thing, when put on, would manipulate brainwaves, plunging the wearer into the mindset of the typical ignorant slim fat phobe (self hating fatz just follow their thinking like obedient pets).
Only when fat people of all sizes get to hear just how messed up, bigoted, idiotic and willfully obtuse the noisier element of this faction are will they finally gain insight enough to stop feeling and acting remotely inferior to them.
That would hopefully finish off all pandering, which keeps their derangement hogging (yes) any discourse on weight. Enabling fat people to start addressing their remarks to the quieter and more thoughtful people.
I sense they're waiting.
Friday, 3 January 2014
Responses are defined by the terms of engagement
Here's a post complaining about lack of niceness forcing the author to abandon her deeply held belief in HAES-or fat people improving their health from where they are. I've never gotten used to the idea that this requires a mighty acronym.
It's a kind of complaint that usually sounds off-kilter, given people like this think nothing of telling fatz to piss away their whole lives in search of thinness through unlikely means; as if that's nothing. In contrast they're rather precious about their own fee fees. Some contact with someone they deem not nice and its over. They should try the "niceness" of a life being beaten up, inside and out, by weight loss diet fail.
The post links to another by the blogger himself tauntingly entitled; "Why HAES may never go mainstream." That being posed as the ultimate test of what's worthwhile is very revealling. The shame is fat people don't appear, popular. Again, the only real thing in this world. To shamelessly crash Godwin's; Hitler was elected the first time. Amusingly, he comments on "obesity research";
And as fat people are defined as intrinsically pathological, it makes sense that this must be all theirs.
People already know 'obesity' is BS, well, their minds have worked it out. Just because you suspend your moral and critical faculties, doesn't mean you stop them functioning. It's just BS they want to get on board with at all costs. Dealing with this can be hard work, these people have gained an insight into that and they assume that is down to fat people or those that support them.
Rather than what they're up against.
To set a better standard, you'd have to ignore 'obesity' all together. I've always been in favour of that. 'Obesity' is held up to so little sustained critical scrutiny and HAES or any kind of fat acceptance is rarely anything but. But then, ('obesity') shouldn't need to be of course as it should be pursuing facts in the first place. It should be leading the pursuit for health at every size.
It's a kind of complaint that usually sounds off-kilter, given people like this think nothing of telling fatz to piss away their whole lives in search of thinness through unlikely means; as if that's nothing. In contrast they're rather precious about their own fee fees. Some contact with someone they deem not nice and its over. They should try the "niceness" of a life being beaten up, inside and out, by weight loss diet fail.
The post links to another by the blogger himself tauntingly entitled; "Why HAES may never go mainstream." That being posed as the ultimate test of what's worthwhile is very revealling. The shame is fat people don't appear, popular. Again, the only real thing in this world. To shamelessly crash Godwin's; Hitler was elected the first time. Amusingly, he comments on "obesity research";
Fighting misinformation with misinformation, relevant omissions with relevant omissions, and logical fallacies with logical fallacies, is not the way to accredit your movement,Get that! "Misinformation....... relevant omissions.....logical fallacies", indeed. This is what we should of heard from med profs long ago. So, appearing to do the same is not enough to acquire the holy grail of mainstream acceptance. Even though that's clearly worked for 'obesity'!
and if HAES has any hope of actually penetrating mainstream medicine, something I would dearly love to see happen, they're going to need to hold themselves up to at least the same, if not a higher level of scrutiny to which they hold others.Yes, without the halo effect of slimness-what some refer to as "thin privilege", its own standard reflected in the response to it, looks reprehensible. Answering 'obesity' means taking it on its own often senseless terms plus devil's horns means its standards will be reflected and played up in your responses to it. What these people are complaining about is the scent of that hanging over fat people.
And as fat people are defined as intrinsically pathological, it makes sense that this must be all theirs.
People already know 'obesity' is BS, well, their minds have worked it out. Just because you suspend your moral and critical faculties, doesn't mean you stop them functioning. It's just BS they want to get on board with at all costs. Dealing with this can be hard work, these people have gained an insight into that and they assume that is down to fat people or those that support them.
Rather than what they're up against.
To set a better standard, you'd have to ignore 'obesity' all together. I've always been in favour of that. 'Obesity' is held up to so little sustained critical scrutiny and HAES or any kind of fat acceptance is rarely anything but. But then, ('obesity') shouldn't need to be of course as it should be pursuing facts in the first place. It should be leading the pursuit for health at every size.
Tuesday, 19 November 2013
A Grip on your Heart
There's a saying, the best way to create a bully is to bully someone. Equally, the best way to learn to be victimized, is to bully others yourself. Watching them for the signs of your impact of your actions on them, unwittingly trains that aspect of your own consciousness. You become ripe for someone else to exploit that in you.
The reverse of that is also true. Defending others from bullying trains your own defences.
You'd be surprised at how effective that can be. Seems, fighting back is more effective, from being in the ring for others. Defending others exercises your own defences.
It's harder from a standing start, let alone being wrong-footed by a sharp change of direction. The reason why I was so ready for FA, was not because of self absorption, in some ways, I wish! It was because a lot of the themes I speak of, I had witnessed in others before 'obesity' reached it's current pitch of impacted almost banal disdain.
Whether through race, sex and class. A lot of the consequences of its themes were not wholly unfamiliar.
Even on a lesser more simplistic level. I'd noticed the way others on the medical shit list, i.e. drug addicts were pathologized. Then had many of their thinking, reactions and behaviours, pointed out as evidence of their innate pathology. Yet, a lot of this turned out to be just them displaying the human nature that's in all of us.
Sound familiar?
I noted the overwhelming defensiveness of "normalcy" which increasingly seems a construct born of the kind of big tent conglomeration of factions you see in political parties. What's surprising is its viciousness. Being "normal" is seen as boring and everyday. Underneath that, it reveals itself to have a vicious and visceral thuggishness, violence generating, constantly on the prowl for potential threats of revelation of its not quite so natural as all that -ness. Many artists have explored that in books and films.
I'm sorry, I drifting a bit into the purple.
People are slowly beginning to wake up to the implications of 'obesity' or, defining being human as a disease state, whether they realise that or not. It's a cliche that the way unchecked power can manage to get one over on people, is to start with those who are seen as worthless and deserving of any old treatment.
One of the many downsides of creating excessive and unnecessary social hierarchies is that authority's bad behaviour cannot be so easily seen, let alone assessed until it gets to those who's value is taken more for granted. At that point, much time has been lost-if it isn't too late. Even then, the ability to return fire has been stifled, if not stymied.
The American Heart Association just published new set of guidelines for defining risks of heart disease.
After another group of medicos defined humanness above BMI 30 as disease. The AHA are now staking their claim to interfere in people's lives on the pretext of prevention. As fat activist types have repeatedly tried to point out, heart disease as "obesity related" is disingenuous. This is where 'obesity', heart disease collide.
Apparently, hyping up risk to brand people as sick, in order to gain a control over their lives, thoughts actions and behaviours, is somehow a bad thing. Imagine that! It isn't when its people you don't care for. It's increasingly clear that between the grotesquely indulgent hate-fest that's been going on, no real discussion has been had about some of its more major themes;
We shall see.
This is happening in America, so I should feel removed by distance. But it's not that simple. These kinds of decisions creep elsewhere, insidiously. The places where discussion usually happens are still stuck deep in the cult of anorexia worship and 'obesity' quackery of the crudest kind. Little to no worthwhile discussion of this has been able to happen. No deviance from the 'obesity' construct and its trail of false or inflated pathologies is permitted or able to occur in terms of where people are psychologically.
Which means that this sort of thing flows into that.
I am feeling tired of this shit right now. It don't think I've ever experienced a situation that's so easy to grasp, so easy to stop from getting out of hand, where it has been made almost impossible-artificially so-to get people to consider the implications of the direction this is all taking.
Right now, I just don't care. I feel, to heck with it and everyone concerned.
The reverse of that is also true. Defending others from bullying trains your own defences.
You'd be surprised at how effective that can be. Seems, fighting back is more effective, from being in the ring for others. Defending others exercises your own defences.
It's harder from a standing start, let alone being wrong-footed by a sharp change of direction. The reason why I was so ready for FA, was not because of self absorption, in some ways, I wish! It was because a lot of the themes I speak of, I had witnessed in others before 'obesity' reached it's current pitch of impacted almost banal disdain.
Whether through race, sex and class. A lot of the consequences of its themes were not wholly unfamiliar.
Even on a lesser more simplistic level. I'd noticed the way others on the medical shit list, i.e. drug addicts were pathologized. Then had many of their thinking, reactions and behaviours, pointed out as evidence of their innate pathology. Yet, a lot of this turned out to be just them displaying the human nature that's in all of us.
Sound familiar?
I noted the overwhelming defensiveness of "normalcy" which increasingly seems a construct born of the kind of big tent conglomeration of factions you see in political parties. What's surprising is its viciousness. Being "normal" is seen as boring and everyday. Underneath that, it reveals itself to have a vicious and visceral thuggishness, violence generating, constantly on the prowl for potential threats of revelation of its not quite so natural as all that -ness. Many artists have explored that in books and films.
I'm sorry, I drifting a bit into the purple.
People are slowly beginning to wake up to the implications of 'obesity' or, defining being human as a disease state, whether they realise that or not. It's a cliche that the way unchecked power can manage to get one over on people, is to start with those who are seen as worthless and deserving of any old treatment.
One of the many downsides of creating excessive and unnecessary social hierarchies is that authority's bad behaviour cannot be so easily seen, let alone assessed until it gets to those who's value is taken more for granted. At that point, much time has been lost-if it isn't too late. Even then, the ability to return fire has been stifled, if not stymied.
The American Heart Association just published new set of guidelines for defining risks of heart disease.
After another group of medicos defined humanness above BMI 30 as disease. The AHA are now staking their claim to interfere in people's lives on the pretext of prevention. As fat activist types have repeatedly tried to point out, heart disease as "obesity related" is disingenuous. This is where 'obesity', heart disease collide.
Apparently, hyping up risk to brand people as sick, in order to gain a control over their lives, thoughts actions and behaviours, is somehow a bad thing. Imagine that! It isn't when its people you don't care for. It's increasingly clear that between the grotesquely indulgent hate-fest that's been going on, no real discussion has been had about some of its more major themes;
- Using health dangers, realistic or contrived to gain a hold over people's lives in a way that is as invasive as any devout religion.
- The seeming irrelevance of basic notions of medical consent
- Reckless hyping of health risk, use of panic to unseat people's ability to engage with information on a rational basis. iow, getting people to act from a place of fear rather than reason. [Often by trading and manipulating deepest fears].
- The undermining of the promise to "Above all do no harm."
- The ability of science and medical professions to bypass public accountability and eschew consultation
- Turning the process of being human, from biology to behaviour into disease processes
- The increasing blurring of sanity with insanity, health with ill health
- The use of the physical/physiological to define character, morals behaviour and thinking
- Framing illness and disability as individual choice and as cost
- The reintroduction of sickness as the wages of sin/incorrect behaviour etc.,
- Turning human behaviour into something that can or should be dictated to by med professionals
- Infantalizing adults with the irresponsible bandying around of the mis-used terms such as 'addiction', 'illness' 'disease'.
- Pathologization of childhood and children through this
- The irrelevance of privacy, from employers, society in general as well as other professionals
- The promotion of disordered eating and eating disorders, mutilation, drug dependence.
- Being judged in a legally binding manner outside the aegis of jurisprudence, therefore the absence of access to professional, expert defence
- The taxing and potential impoverishment of you on said basis
- The pathologization of human basic needs, food, eating, and so on.
- Depoliticization of inequities and social pressures. Re-framing societal hierarchies as individual concerns i.e. things out of ones control, being defined as within ones control and the responsibility of those on the receiving end.
We shall see.
This is happening in America, so I should feel removed by distance. But it's not that simple. These kinds of decisions creep elsewhere, insidiously. The places where discussion usually happens are still stuck deep in the cult of anorexia worship and 'obesity' quackery of the crudest kind. Little to no worthwhile discussion of this has been able to happen. No deviance from the 'obesity' construct and its trail of false or inflated pathologies is permitted or able to occur in terms of where people are psychologically.
Which means that this sort of thing flows into that.
I am feeling tired of this shit right now. It don't think I've ever experienced a situation that's so easy to grasp, so easy to stop from getting out of hand, where it has been made almost impossible-artificially so-to get people to consider the implications of the direction this is all taking.
Right now, I just don't care. I feel, to heck with it and everyone concerned.
Thursday, 10 October 2013
Fat foolishness in the media
Roll up, roll up people. There's another instance of fat people being idiotic abject sell-outs in the mejah.
If there's one thing I can't stand it's purveyors of this kind of foolishness. It is disgusting and abject. Trust me, if every group under any pressure gave way like these idiots, we'd know far less about what it means to be human.
All of us.
It is forgotten by these folk that not everyone is in as privileged a position as themselves, so their wretched po-faced arse licking is also a missed opportunity. Not to agree with me, but to be a human being whilst fat.
Tedious fat masochism of this sort is partly responsible for the regressive assault the 'obesity' cult has visited on fat people, by refusing to hold its quackmeisters to any account at all. Putting them on a pedestal by making fat people responsible for everything and everyone, including human biological design.
Many self hating fat dupes continue to insist that not behaving like a quisling house negro is a threat to getting science of any real value out of 'obesity'. When actually, the crusade has acutely derailed that.
Does anyone think pretending people are disease is science?
Even bitter ex-smoking fool Callahan admitted (hey, I can throw that word about too) that 'obese' was harder to deal with than real genuine serious disease. Something that should have woken everyone up. No doubt that's because those studying real diseases are pursuing real science. So they get real advances.
They'd not be able to get away with the reprehensible pantomime of fakery and flannel that useless "obesity research" has recently been cloaking itself in. Because a) people would notice and call them on it, because b) people value the genuine and dramatic loss of life that would be abetted by such quackery.
The wretched farce that is 'obesity' has achieving precious little for those who are in genuine need of relief-whatever their reasons. I stumbled over the cure for my own disorder which was if not created, certainly ramped up to quite intolerable proportions. The irrelevance of "obesity research" in this cannot be overstated.
I don't doubt for one second that I'm not alone in that.
Taking the kind of masochistic abjection that comes out of being discredited, having to believe in something that doesn't work, for granted has enabled them to stay worthless to those who really require genuine effort to be put in.
The "Eat as much as you want and remain slim" clickbait-which is just most thinz and slimz life right now- despite many of their somewhat deluded bullshitting- is a silly headline, borne of the messed up 'obesity' farrago.
Basically, its a report on an avenue for getting bodies to use rather than store energy.
Turns out to be the fifty millionth incarnation of brown fat.
How's finding out about how to replicate this immoral? It's a perfectly natural effect, the body will do it itself! As I've been saying for years, find out how metabolism works and use that to get the results you want. If you don't, how will progress be made?
This is so dumb. So utterly pointlessly abject and grovelling. This grotesque anti-intellectualist, faux moralising of those who reject religion without realizing that they still need its basic purpose is indulgent. Only the bourgeois classes could get away with flouting such utter stupidity.
It's also part of what makes fat people hate themselves and why we can be easy for others to have ill will toward.
No matter what fat phobes say, they know we are just as good as they are. Hence their repeated celebratory comparisons with us. If you feel someone is so beneath you, why would you be so inclined? Moreover, why would any such comparison be a cause for victory?
It's underwhelming when this extent of grovelling, refusing to stand up to any bullying at all, no matter the cost to the person. Refusing to defend ones honour at all is upsetting to others. It reminds them they could be put in that position too-see smokers. And they don't like that feeling at all. That's why they cheered that boy who opened up a can of whup-ass on a smaller bully.
They want to know they'd fight back to in the similar circumstances.
When we don't, even though we are yielding to them, it makes them feel they might be so defeated too. Then they lash out, trying to put as much distance between themselves and us.
Anything to do with using rather than storing fat has potential applications to type 2 diabetes, fatty liver and treatment of other metabolic disorder, such as PCOS. It is well needed. The current treatments on offer aren't nearly good enough.
Is that to be halted because of fat fools in the media, still down on their knees in arse lick bullies mode?
For goodness sake, get up.
Jay you are a man of no little charm and wit. Get a grip on yourself because NGAD.
Except perhaps those you're trying to impress and they're really not worth it.
If there's one thing I can't stand it's purveyors of this kind of foolishness. It is disgusting and abject. Trust me, if every group under any pressure gave way like these idiots, we'd know far less about what it means to be human.
All of us.
It is forgotten by these folk that not everyone is in as privileged a position as themselves, so their wretched po-faced arse licking is also a missed opportunity. Not to agree with me, but to be a human being whilst fat.
Tedious fat masochism of this sort is partly responsible for the regressive assault the 'obesity' cult has visited on fat people, by refusing to hold its quackmeisters to any account at all. Putting them on a pedestal by making fat people responsible for everything and everyone, including human biological design.
Many self hating fat dupes continue to insist that not behaving like a quisling house negro is a threat to getting science of any real value out of 'obesity'. When actually, the crusade has acutely derailed that.
Does anyone think pretending people are disease is science?
Even bitter ex-smoking fool Callahan admitted (hey, I can throw that word about too) that 'obese' was harder to deal with than real genuine serious disease. Something that should have woken everyone up. No doubt that's because those studying real diseases are pursuing real science. So they get real advances.
They'd not be able to get away with the reprehensible pantomime of fakery and flannel that useless "obesity research" has recently been cloaking itself in. Because a) people would notice and call them on it, because b) people value the genuine and dramatic loss of life that would be abetted by such quackery.
The wretched farce that is 'obesity' has achieving precious little for those who are in genuine need of relief-whatever their reasons. I stumbled over the cure for my own disorder which was if not created, certainly ramped up to quite intolerable proportions. The irrelevance of "obesity research" in this cannot be overstated.
I don't doubt for one second that I'm not alone in that.
Taking the kind of masochistic abjection that comes out of being discredited, having to believe in something that doesn't work, for granted has enabled them to stay worthless to those who really require genuine effort to be put in.
The "Eat as much as you want and remain slim" clickbait-which is just most thinz and slimz life right now- despite many of their somewhat deluded bullshitting- is a silly headline, borne of the messed up 'obesity' farrago.
Basically, its a report on an avenue for getting bodies to use rather than store energy.
Researchers noted the mice minus the gene ate less in comparison, moved around more and displayed other health benefits including smaller fat cells and better insulin sensitivity.It refers to a gene called perililipin-2 which it is claimed regulates the storage of fat. Blocking it has said to have reduced fat storage in mice.
Turns out to be the fifty millionth incarnation of brown fat.
The genetically-altered mice produced more brown fat cells which, unlike typical white fat cells, have the ability to burn calories.We are all born with this type of fat, dotted around our bodies in small amounts. In most it fades away somewhat, for some relatively early on. Apparently, this is responsible for a lot of sudden weight gain after a lifetime of slimness type phenomena.
How's finding out about how to replicate this immoral? It's a perfectly natural effect, the body will do it itself! As I've been saying for years, find out how metabolism works and use that to get the results you want. If you don't, how will progress be made?
This is so dumb. So utterly pointlessly abject and grovelling. This grotesque anti-intellectualist, faux moralising of those who reject religion without realizing that they still need its basic purpose is indulgent. Only the bourgeois classes could get away with flouting such utter stupidity.
It's also part of what makes fat people hate themselves and why we can be easy for others to have ill will toward.
No matter what fat phobes say, they know we are just as good as they are. Hence their repeated celebratory comparisons with us. If you feel someone is so beneath you, why would you be so inclined? Moreover, why would any such comparison be a cause for victory?
It's underwhelming when this extent of grovelling, refusing to stand up to any bullying at all, no matter the cost to the person. Refusing to defend ones honour at all is upsetting to others. It reminds them they could be put in that position too-see smokers. And they don't like that feeling at all. That's why they cheered that boy who opened up a can of whup-ass on a smaller bully.
They want to know they'd fight back to in the similar circumstances.
When we don't, even though we are yielding to them, it makes them feel they might be so defeated too. Then they lash out, trying to put as much distance between themselves and us.
Anything to do with using rather than storing fat has potential applications to type 2 diabetes, fatty liver and treatment of other metabolic disorder, such as PCOS. It is well needed. The current treatments on offer aren't nearly good enough.
Is that to be halted because of fat fools in the media, still down on their knees in arse lick bullies mode?
For goodness sake, get up.
Jay you are a man of no little charm and wit. Get a grip on yourself because NGAD.
Except perhaps those you're trying to impress and they're really not worth it.
Tuesday, 24 September 2013
Adjective does not necessarily = noun
Disabling, does not =disability. The adjective does
not automatically become a noun.
For example, being poor could be seen as disabling, that's not enough to make it a disability. If you are going to use the economic system to decide this, don't complain about encroachment. Mental illness can become hugely disabling, to the point of almost being like the loss of a person.
But not all mental difficulty, neurosis, depression, anxiety, OCD is equally acute. A lot of it is situational. Dependent on adapting to your particular set of circumstances. Sometimes at particular periods of your life.
A dilemma, problem, conundrum or undesired effect, unsolved does not = a disease. Lack of solution, resolution does not mean an effect is a disease either.
So alcoholism and addiction are not diseases merely because no one has the means of predictably reversing them. Even when people's systems implode and they are held firmly in its grip, what your seeing is process, yes, it is like an illness, the person is likely to get very unwell. Again, calling that disease is an affectation.
Ditto imperfection, perceived or real.
Nor is drug dependence from your doctor any different or better morally speaking than addiction/dependence from an illegal source. The only differences are you don't break the law or get high on prescription (or aren't supposed to). Doesn't mean you are not an addict.
Nor is all shame about addiction 'ableism'. As with a lot of feelings of shame, it's root is in our sense of autonomy.
Saying, I have x neurosis i.e. anxiety and I take meds for it makes you a drug dependent, because no one should need medication to do things like calm down unless they've been through some seriously frightening conditions.
That doesn't make anyone a bad person, but it does mean they should be aware that this may play with their pride.
There's nothing wrong with deciding screw it, I can't deal with this right now, I'll take the pills, even if that =20 years. Because sometimes life is like that. The problem is when our vanity makes us invent, demand or go along with bullshit story-boarding of a poor me variety to try and cover up or turn off those feelings.
Everyone bar none is showing their disgust for that particular habit, yes that includes those going in for it most noisily. What everyone's shouting at fat people reveals this starkly. The constant whining to fat people about "excuses" for instance is typical of letting this cat out of the bag. Insisting on these cover stories is the yielding to feelings of shame, not progressive categorisation and yielding to shame makes it your master. Increasing it deep down, whilst on the surface seeming to do the opposite.
iow, people's vanity is satisfied by claiming illness/disability/disease or whatever, but underneath that, they have shown they're ashamed to be dealing with it this way. That shame gets worse even through the relief of a little protection from the glare of scrutiny.
More importantly, it's not working. If it was people would not continually seek to re-connect with the feeling that this is a shameful falsehood, through fat people. That is their brain telling them they cannot outwit themselves this way.
It's not about any bootstrap bullshit, it's more that the urge to coin these things in these ways, is unexpectedly suppressive. That's why its coming up like this.
Instead of processing it and coming to terms with it not being the ideal solution, you've just suppressed that feeling and insisted nothing to see.
That would have been fine if folks could keep sch-tum. But as we see, they cannot.
For example, being poor could be seen as disabling, that's not enough to make it a disability. If you are going to use the economic system to decide this, don't complain about encroachment. Mental illness can become hugely disabling, to the point of almost being like the loss of a person.
But not all mental difficulty, neurosis, depression, anxiety, OCD is equally acute. A lot of it is situational. Dependent on adapting to your particular set of circumstances. Sometimes at particular periods of your life.
A dilemma, problem, conundrum or undesired effect, unsolved does not = a disease. Lack of solution, resolution does not mean an effect is a disease either.
So alcoholism and addiction are not diseases merely because no one has the means of predictably reversing them. Even when people's systems implode and they are held firmly in its grip, what your seeing is process, yes, it is like an illness, the person is likely to get very unwell. Again, calling that disease is an affectation.
Ditto imperfection, perceived or real.
Nor is drug dependence from your doctor any different or better morally speaking than addiction/dependence from an illegal source. The only differences are you don't break the law or get high on prescription (or aren't supposed to). Doesn't mean you are not an addict.
Nor is all shame about addiction 'ableism'. As with a lot of feelings of shame, it's root is in our sense of autonomy.
Saying, I have x neurosis i.e. anxiety and I take meds for it makes you a drug dependent, because no one should need medication to do things like calm down unless they've been through some seriously frightening conditions.
That doesn't make anyone a bad person, but it does mean they should be aware that this may play with their pride.
There's nothing wrong with deciding screw it, I can't deal with this right now, I'll take the pills, even if that =20 years. Because sometimes life is like that. The problem is when our vanity makes us invent, demand or go along with bullshit story-boarding of a poor me variety to try and cover up or turn off those feelings.
Everyone bar none is showing their disgust for that particular habit, yes that includes those going in for it most noisily. What everyone's shouting at fat people reveals this starkly. The constant whining to fat people about "excuses" for instance is typical of letting this cat out of the bag. Insisting on these cover stories is the yielding to feelings of shame, not progressive categorisation and yielding to shame makes it your master. Increasing it deep down, whilst on the surface seeming to do the opposite.
iow, people's vanity is satisfied by claiming illness/disability/disease or whatever, but underneath that, they have shown they're ashamed to be dealing with it this way. That shame gets worse even through the relief of a little protection from the glare of scrutiny.
More importantly, it's not working. If it was people would not continually seek to re-connect with the feeling that this is a shameful falsehood, through fat people. That is their brain telling them they cannot outwit themselves this way.
It's not about any bootstrap bullshit, it's more that the urge to coin these things in these ways, is unexpectedly suppressive. That's why its coming up like this.
Instead of processing it and coming to terms with it not being the ideal solution, you've just suppressed that feeling and insisted nothing to see.
That would have been fine if folks could keep sch-tum. But as we see, they cannot.
Saturday, 31 August 2013
"Nobody wants to be fat"
There's a lot of this little meme going around right now and it needs to be lanced like the sneaky little boil it is. If I'm correct, it flows from similar in conjunction with gay people. i.e. "Why would anyone choose to be gay [in light of homophobia]."
It's one of those observations that very quickly becomes an unsavoury trojan for expressing profound loathing.
We get the truth of human cowardice. Yet, equally that is countered by courage, isn't it? If not, little if any human progress could occur. So much of it has required some one or people, usually outnumbered at least at first, to defy overweening hegemony.
This repeated chant has rankled for a while, souring the conversation about sexuality. Helping to posit gay people as objects (yes) of pity.
Now this rancid turd is being carelessly applied to fatness. Virtually everyone I've heard saying it lately hasn't been fat. The endless basting in the butter substitute of the superiority of slim is getting old. It never gets sufficiently into the meat though does it?
Okay, enough of that.
More than the one-sided premise, this sentiment misses the point, about fatness anyway.
It would not occur to people to most people to choose to be fat. Because contrary to the reams of BS written and spoken about it-there is no obvious reason to be fat. Why would you choose something that occurs not via your conscious mind, but as an adjustment your body makes to a mix of your internal and external environment?
Even gainers bodies have to co-operate with their intent. They have to have the capacity to gain and maintain. The tolerance to push themselves through barriers of boredom, discomfort if not outright pain at times.
I can only relate through my experience of trying to diet the other way.
Social stigma is not 'proof' lack of choice. If people's need is important enough, it will out. I don't go along with the implicit ideology. That we are motivated solely or even most importantly by opprobrium or lack of it. That we have no needs, wishes dreams of our own and act solely on the basis of the avoidance of hurt.
If avoiding unhappiness is such an exemplary motivation, why did I and millions of others willingly though unwittingly sink into a mire of self hatred? Endless declarations of my senseless greed and indolence, didn't make me happy. Trying to short change my appetite especially and hunger didn't either. Nor did the constant sense of failure and trying to make up for the fault of being fat.
I noticed that I reached the point years ago where the idea of happiness doesn't particularly inspire me as I've spent so much time being unhappy.
I don't say that in any princess tiny tears way. Happiness is pretty easy. It doesn't actually require a predicate. If I put my mind to it. I can be ecstatic today. It might take 50 mental steps from here, but so what? I learned 'discipline' enough whilst experiencing the repeated failure of based-on-science. It's not that hard.
The point to note about fatness is it is spontaneous. It's a product of the body's mechanics happening outside conscious awareness and not directly under its control or direction. And that needs to be understood, whether people like it or not. It must be gotten over, that elective free will, though important is not the only the sole controller of us/our bodies. That needs to be fully understood, without kicking off any hysteria, temper tantrums or denial.
Given fatness is mostly associated with a lesser suicide rate, even at times in the face of greater suicidal ideation, seems a good reason to choose being fat. A sense of physical presence and power's another. A greater sense of emotional stability.
A gemütlichkeit physicality, sensuality. There are are as good reasons to want to be fat as to want to be slim.
Fat is one of the great survival instincts. It's about surviving relentless battering, an unforgiving grind. I don't feel like cheapening this exposition of the will to prevail with some tawdry-historically speaking-five minute hate campaign.
I dreamt of being slim. Yearned to bring it about with all my heart. That was wholly genuine, I'd never deny that. But it was also very much my duty. Like, not being a "slag". It was thoroughly contrived, faux tho' real as they say. Like building muscles, you go to the gym regularly, lift your weights.
And you get muscled. That's real. If you stop, that lessens.
Wanting to be slim was a bit like that. It was something you just lifted up and down, up and down, in your mind. Never did you stop re-enforcing it, working it, enhancing it, till yeah, it was totally natural. Unimaginable that one could reasonably feel anything else. Usually, we call that self control.
Willpower.
And when you stopped, though not immediately, you began to forgot the feeling. Then why you wanted to be slim. Then what it felt like inside to want to be slim. I don't object to the idea of it, just that its something other than it was, with its themes of wanting to be seen to be a good person.
Weight is ultimately pretty, meaningless over and above the meanings we choose to give it. At least, it's meanings are obscured.
I'd say its slim pickings on the self esteem front. If something has to be maintained with serious browbeating and threats, that's hardly a compliment to it.
It's one of those observations that very quickly becomes an unsavoury trojan for expressing profound loathing.
We get the truth of human cowardice. Yet, equally that is countered by courage, isn't it? If not, little if any human progress could occur. So much of it has required some one or people, usually outnumbered at least at first, to defy overweening hegemony.
This repeated chant has rankled for a while, souring the conversation about sexuality. Helping to posit gay people as objects (yes) of pity.
Now this rancid turd is being carelessly applied to fatness. Virtually everyone I've heard saying it lately hasn't been fat. The endless basting in the butter substitute of the superiority of slim is getting old. It never gets sufficiently into the meat though does it?
Okay, enough of that.
More than the one-sided premise, this sentiment misses the point, about fatness anyway.
It would not occur to people to most people to choose to be fat. Because contrary to the reams of BS written and spoken about it-there is no obvious reason to be fat. Why would you choose something that occurs not via your conscious mind, but as an adjustment your body makes to a mix of your internal and external environment?
Even gainers bodies have to co-operate with their intent. They have to have the capacity to gain and maintain. The tolerance to push themselves through barriers of boredom, discomfort if not outright pain at times.
I can only relate through my experience of trying to diet the other way.
Social stigma is not 'proof' lack of choice. If people's need is important enough, it will out. I don't go along with the implicit ideology. That we are motivated solely or even most importantly by opprobrium or lack of it. That we have no needs, wishes dreams of our own and act solely on the basis of the avoidance of hurt.
If avoiding unhappiness is such an exemplary motivation, why did I and millions of others willingly though unwittingly sink into a mire of self hatred? Endless declarations of my senseless greed and indolence, didn't make me happy. Trying to short change my appetite especially and hunger didn't either. Nor did the constant sense of failure and trying to make up for the fault of being fat.
I noticed that I reached the point years ago where the idea of happiness doesn't particularly inspire me as I've spent so much time being unhappy.
I don't say that in any princess tiny tears way. Happiness is pretty easy. It doesn't actually require a predicate. If I put my mind to it. I can be ecstatic today. It might take 50 mental steps from here, but so what? I learned 'discipline' enough whilst experiencing the repeated failure of based-on-science. It's not that hard.
The point to note about fatness is it is spontaneous. It's a product of the body's mechanics happening outside conscious awareness and not directly under its control or direction. And that needs to be understood, whether people like it or not. It must be gotten over, that elective free will, though important is not the only the sole controller of us/our bodies. That needs to be fully understood, without kicking off any hysteria, temper tantrums or denial.
Given fatness is mostly associated with a lesser suicide rate, even at times in the face of greater suicidal ideation, seems a good reason to choose being fat. A sense of physical presence and power's another. A greater sense of emotional stability.
A gemütlichkeit physicality, sensuality. There are are as good reasons to want to be fat as to want to be slim.
Fat is one of the great survival instincts. It's about surviving relentless battering, an unforgiving grind. I don't feel like cheapening this exposition of the will to prevail with some tawdry-historically speaking-five minute hate campaign.
I dreamt of being slim. Yearned to bring it about with all my heart. That was wholly genuine, I'd never deny that. But it was also very much my duty. Like, not being a "slag". It was thoroughly contrived, faux tho' real as they say. Like building muscles, you go to the gym regularly, lift your weights.
And you get muscled. That's real. If you stop, that lessens.
Wanting to be slim was a bit like that. It was something you just lifted up and down, up and down, in your mind. Never did you stop re-enforcing it, working it, enhancing it, till yeah, it was totally natural. Unimaginable that one could reasonably feel anything else. Usually, we call that self control.
Willpower.
And when you stopped, though not immediately, you began to forgot the feeling. Then why you wanted to be slim. Then what it felt like inside to want to be slim. I don't object to the idea of it, just that its something other than it was, with its themes of wanting to be seen to be a good person.
Weight is ultimately pretty, meaningless over and above the meanings we choose to give it. At least, it's meanings are obscured.
I'd say its slim pickings on the self esteem front. If something has to be maintained with serious browbeating and threats, that's hardly a compliment to it.
Friday, 30 August 2013
Conscious
Fat people cannot come out, they're never in. A shift in consciousness is fat people's real challenge.
Reading such clarity from others experience healthist quack crusades, consistently seem more capable of articulating these kinds of thoughts. He starts off the intro "Autism: disease, disorder or difference?"
This reminds me yet again of the unique capacity of the way fatness is treated to rob fat people of the ability to articulate the issues at stake. This is not a comment on the abilities of those who come under an FA banner or of that type of thinking.
It is the lack of something I mentioned before, what W.E.B DuBois called, double consciousness. From The souls of Black Folk;
Both he and DuBois in their separate ways, noted that when the so called "universal truths" of a society do not apply to them, they are forced in working out their rules of survival, to develop a consciousness other than that formed by rules that not only don't serve them, but do not allow them to survive at all. Usually whilst having to pay a certain amount of tribute, lip service and gesture towards the 'universal consciousness'.
It is remarkable that something as comparatively trivial and recent as the current crusade against fatness, which is at most a post WW2 thing. That it has already created the need for a double consciousness amongst fat people.
Trouble is, fat people seem to be least aware of it. I include numerous fat activists. Of the mainstream variety anyway.
There are a few reasons why this has occurred. The extent to which we believe in and defer to scientists or anything connected to science. To the extent that we suspend more disbelief about it still, than anything else, up to and including religion.
The unquestioned nature of obesity and its crusade. The extent of which is unprecedented in my awareness. In the case of far more marginalized and attacked groups, there's a range and depth of awareness about the situation I've found to be typically absent from fat people as a rule.
And no, I'm not simply talking about poor old fatz who think they deserve this treatment. I'm talking about the widespread inability, still to perceive oneself as an agent upon which something has occurred that is separate from oneself.
Of being what DuBois called the 'observed' a lot of fat people do not realize they are the objects of the subject. There is no separation between the general fat hate and how most fat people perceive themselves.
Another way of putting that is, imagine you took a random group of slimz insisting they're now to defined themselves as failed to be fat. As less than. Even if they succumbed mentally, do you think inside they'd retain the understanding that they were being imposed on? And that internalizing this didn't mean this was just the thoughts in their heads?
For a time at least.
It's not self hate or low self esteem, everyone has that. It's the lack of double consciousness that impedes fat people's ability on the whole, to match the clarity of understanding of people like Michael Fitzpatrick.
He has been allowed to retain his the sense of self. His separateness from the dictates of others. We haven't. Ours has been lost because of the kudos of those who defined us.
And the extent of willing hegemony of loved ones and foes alike.
It isn't about separation or separateness, on the contrary, it's in order to achieve normality! Seeing oneself through the eyes of others, without being aware of it, partially or fully, is markedly abnormal.
In a bad way.
the crusade against......risks dehumanizing and stigmatizing those who are identified as....and their families.From Michael Fitzpatrick's book on Autism.
Reading such clarity from others experience healthist quack crusades, consistently seem more capable of articulating these kinds of thoughts. He starts off the intro "Autism: disease, disorder or difference?"
This reminds me yet again of the unique capacity of the way fatness is treated to rob fat people of the ability to articulate the issues at stake. This is not a comment on the abilities of those who come under an FA banner or of that type of thinking.
It is the lack of something I mentioned before, what W.E.B DuBois called, double consciousness. From The souls of Black Folk;
It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”.It is an observation that has a long lineage of parallel intellectual input. It's origins are said to lie with Hegel. Noted Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci mentioned it in conjunction with working class people. Though apparently, he referred to it as "dual perspective", extending from a perspective contained in The Prince.
Both he and DuBois in their separate ways, noted that when the so called "universal truths" of a society do not apply to them, they are forced in working out their rules of survival, to develop a consciousness other than that formed by rules that not only don't serve them, but do not allow them to survive at all. Usually whilst having to pay a certain amount of tribute, lip service and gesture towards the 'universal consciousness'.
It is remarkable that something as comparatively trivial and recent as the current crusade against fatness, which is at most a post WW2 thing. That it has already created the need for a double consciousness amongst fat people.
Trouble is, fat people seem to be least aware of it. I include numerous fat activists. Of the mainstream variety anyway.
There are a few reasons why this has occurred. The extent to which we believe in and defer to scientists or anything connected to science. To the extent that we suspend more disbelief about it still, than anything else, up to and including religion.
The unquestioned nature of obesity and its crusade. The extent of which is unprecedented in my awareness. In the case of far more marginalized and attacked groups, there's a range and depth of awareness about the situation I've found to be typically absent from fat people as a rule.
And no, I'm not simply talking about poor old fatz who think they deserve this treatment. I'm talking about the widespread inability, still to perceive oneself as an agent upon which something has occurred that is separate from oneself.
Of being what DuBois called the 'observed' a lot of fat people do not realize they are the objects of the subject. There is no separation between the general fat hate and how most fat people perceive themselves.
Another way of putting that is, imagine you took a random group of slimz insisting they're now to defined themselves as failed to be fat. As less than. Even if they succumbed mentally, do you think inside they'd retain the understanding that they were being imposed on? And that internalizing this didn't mean this was just the thoughts in their heads?
For a time at least.
It's not self hate or low self esteem, everyone has that. It's the lack of double consciousness that impedes fat people's ability on the whole, to match the clarity of understanding of people like Michael Fitzpatrick.
He has been allowed to retain his the sense of self. His separateness from the dictates of others. We haven't. Ours has been lost because of the kudos of those who defined us.
And the extent of willing hegemony of loved ones and foes alike.
It isn't about separation or separateness, on the contrary, it's in order to achieve normality! Seeing oneself through the eyes of others, without being aware of it, partially or fully, is markedly abnormal.
In a bad way.
Saturday, 6 July 2013
The queerness of fatness is still outside slimness
Some do need to reverse whatever underlying factors can accompany fattening (or indeed slimming).
Altering metabolic function also has the capacity to affect, relieve and shift mental and physical health in general, regardless of its effects-either way-on size.
The crusade's injustice isn't just pathologizing of humanness, it's the denial of potential routes of healing, preferably out of the hands of the professionals.
That's hardly like sexual orientation.
For "obesity related" read, human related. If weight causes health problems, then all weight causes the health problems anyone at that weight has. All weights get the same health problems, though perhaps in slightly different proportions, in the main. If fat people create this so do all humans. And that would make us all equally "guilty." Recrimination needless.
It's the shifting of all this onto fat people. The lack of this being extended to others shows this is deliberately and selectively punitive. Scapegoating of fat people for human frailty is at issue. The demands of gay people and fat people are rather different. We're under attack by the new order of medicine which is surreptitiously occupying the space being vacated, at least for some, by religion. In a way it's a hangover from the past, passing a potential foretelling of the future.
For the secular left of centre especially, but this influence is everywhere. It's a modern concern. Fat people are slowly taking the place of gay people and others who are marginalized, demonized and/or pathologized in the collective mindset.
When something's seen to be good about being human, indeed, humanity itself, it's increasingly perceived through slim people. And when something's seen to be bad about being human, it's perceived through fat people. Sexual orientation wouldn't have any reason to stop anyone getting caught up in that.
To be fair, how many heterosexual fatz have not lost any sleep over what gay people have had go through and are still going through? Have fat hetero's been particularly prominent or disproportionate in assisting gay people?
There's a stereotype of fat bible thumping conservatives with virulent homophobia. Though this may or may not be unfair. Is fat acceptance going to call them off?
I don't say anyone's (obviously) throwing fat people out. Just um, know your place. The one assigned to you by the crusade. Fatness may well be undermining the value of fat people's advocacy in this way.
I'm also wondering how much of a vehicle queerness is for recovering a sense of fat people's autonomy. Fatness is too often overrun and submerged by slim people's confident assertion of the value of and sense of themselves. They tend to get very defensive about this, when fat people are perceived to be trying to re-gain ours. I find wherever slim people dominate, fat people's delicate attempts to restore or even acquire the same tends to falter and become distorted to mean different things.
It's a shame because it would be great if there was some corner for an outside perspective. I don't wish to be discouraging. I welcome Anna Mollow's voice.
But a hostile erasing dominance and policing by slimz is not an atmosphere's conducive to fat people's restoration and re-centering of their sense of autonomy.
I should point out though to those who responded to the article, a polite no to the proposition would have sufficed. And yes, I'm aware that a lot of the haters responding to the piece weren't gay people.
Regardless of sexuality though, slimz need to grasp that disregarding personal testimony as intrinsically valuable, invalidates their own. Don't expect to keep telling other people, they don't know their own lives and take for granted that you'll be taken to know your own. Your credibility is the same as fat people's and vice versa.
And seriously, you can get away with this divide for a time, but why would anyone presume that precedent will catch (back) up with you? No? That's not anything to do with the absolute overwhelming credibility of your personal testimony is it? You really feel the realness of that, in your heart, in your marrow, in your very soul, don't you?
Take a seat..............
Altering metabolic function also has the capacity to affect, relieve and shift mental and physical health in general, regardless of its effects-either way-on size.
The crusade's injustice isn't just pathologizing of humanness, it's the denial of potential routes of healing, preferably out of the hands of the professionals.
That's hardly like sexual orientation.
For "obesity related" read, human related. If weight causes health problems, then all weight causes the health problems anyone at that weight has. All weights get the same health problems, though perhaps in slightly different proportions, in the main. If fat people create this so do all humans. And that would make us all equally "guilty." Recrimination needless.
It's the shifting of all this onto fat people. The lack of this being extended to others shows this is deliberately and selectively punitive. Scapegoating of fat people for human frailty is at issue. The demands of gay people and fat people are rather different. We're under attack by the new order of medicine which is surreptitiously occupying the space being vacated, at least for some, by religion. In a way it's a hangover from the past, passing a potential foretelling of the future.
For the secular left of centre especially, but this influence is everywhere. It's a modern concern. Fat people are slowly taking the place of gay people and others who are marginalized, demonized and/or pathologized in the collective mindset.
I am a thin woman, and my partner is fat. In the seven years I’ve loved her, I’ve been struck by a contrast: While many on the left have fought for equality for LGBTQ people, fat people are experiencing more stigmatization. This trend is puzzling, because anti-fat and anti-queer oppression are so similar.I wouldn't say it's puzzling that gay people should feel the urge to try and download what's being perpetrated on them, onto fat people. Everyone else is trying it. Feminists offload misogyny onto fat women. Black people offload racism, onto Black fat people. Progressives and the bourgeoisie offload classism onto fat people. Working class people offload the prejudice against them, onto working class fatz and on it goes.
When something's seen to be good about being human, indeed, humanity itself, it's increasingly perceived through slim people. And when something's seen to be bad about being human, it's perceived through fat people. Sexual orientation wouldn't have any reason to stop anyone getting caught up in that.
To be fair, how many heterosexual fatz have not lost any sleep over what gay people have had go through and are still going through? Have fat hetero's been particularly prominent or disproportionate in assisting gay people?
There's a stereotype of fat bible thumping conservatives with virulent homophobia. Though this may or may not be unfair. Is fat acceptance going to call them off?
As queers, we’ve long been told there’s something wrong and disgusting about who we are; fatphobia may seem to save us from that pain by giving us a way to say that someone else is those things. But at what cost? Do we want a feminist queer movement that is lean, mean, and free of fat folks? Or do we want a movement for everyone?Well if humanity is located primarily in slim people then a spoiled identity might become a tad irrelevant, possibly even harmful. It would seem harder for fat people to visually put across humanity when they represent that being undermined. Certain types of advocacy deal in total process, including image.
I don't say anyone's (obviously) throwing fat people out. Just um, know your place. The one assigned to you by the crusade. Fatness may well be undermining the value of fat people's advocacy in this way.
I'm also wondering how much of a vehicle queerness is for recovering a sense of fat people's autonomy. Fatness is too often overrun and submerged by slim people's confident assertion of the value of and sense of themselves. They tend to get very defensive about this, when fat people are perceived to be trying to re-gain ours. I find wherever slim people dominate, fat people's delicate attempts to restore or even acquire the same tends to falter and become distorted to mean different things.
It's a shame because it would be great if there was some corner for an outside perspective. I don't wish to be discouraging. I welcome Anna Mollow's voice.
But a hostile erasing dominance and policing by slimz is not an atmosphere's conducive to fat people's restoration and re-centering of their sense of autonomy.
I should point out though to those who responded to the article, a polite no to the proposition would have sufficed. And yes, I'm aware that a lot of the haters responding to the piece weren't gay people.
Regardless of sexuality though, slimz need to grasp that disregarding personal testimony as intrinsically valuable, invalidates their own. Don't expect to keep telling other people, they don't know their own lives and take for granted that you'll be taken to know your own. Your credibility is the same as fat people's and vice versa.
And seriously, you can get away with this divide for a time, but why would anyone presume that precedent will catch (back) up with you? No? That's not anything to do with the absolute overwhelming credibility of your personal testimony is it? You really feel the realness of that, in your heart, in your marrow, in your very soul, don't you?
Take a seat..............
Thursday, 4 July 2013
Reblog: Food cannot be an Addiction
You cannot be "addicted" to what is necessary to your survival.
What addiction really is
Your body makes certain chemicals to-amongst other things- help animate you physically and mentally; an example of these is endogenous opiates.
If you take in a version of these artificially, i.e. use drugs from the opiate family; cocaine, crack, heroin. Your body reduces its internal production of these chemicals-in order to prevent your body overdosing. After your system has used up these drugs, your body restores its own production back to normal or near normal levels. The gap between this happening is what users refer to as "coming down". That down period indicates some of why the body makes these chemicals.
Addiction happens when your body doesn't or cannot quite restore its level of production back to normal. It is then under-functioning. This makes people dependent on the artificial supply to support their flagging system. It's the point when users say, they take drugs not to get high, but just tofeel normal." This can happen because the mechanism is sensitive (to being depressed) or inflexible in some people. Or it can be worn out through repeated intake of drugs.
Things required for a substance to be addictive
An intoxicant.
That means a substance that has the capacity to literally, poison and/or end your body's ability to continue functioning. It is the body's attempt to avoid destruction or death that is the basis of addiction. You cannot be addicted to anything that cannot poison or overwhelming your body's ability to function.
The substance makes you "high."
This refers to extreme mood elevation (not mere relief of urge or pleasant feelings). Changes in perception can occur; i.e. seeing things that aren't there, not seeing things that are there (hallucination) and so on.
Addictive substances, disassemble your functioning, i.e. you become physically and mentally uncoordinated.
Getting high is a by product of the intoxication process. It's literally the early stages of poisoning that's messing you up. This is an objective state. It can be observed by others. It does not need to be "discovered" through brain scans or misinterpretation of the workings of the nervous system.
As has been clearly demonstrated by the AMA's recent decision. Many people no longer use words for their meaning, but for their associations.
Addiction, in the minds of the ignorant- often those who stigmatize drug addicts-is associated with being out of control, not being able to stop some habit or other. So whenever they have a troublesome issue they think, "addiction". When in reality, genuine addiction is an issue of function.
The self dramatizing attempt to appropriate misunderstanding of drug addicts experience must stop. Addicts have already been put through enough; sacrificed by society, marginalized, hounded, demonized and pathologized. Their habit put into the hands of criminals in order to mash them up, acting as discouragement for others.
Anyone who wishes to describe their issues with food is welcome to do so accurately and put the effort in to understand and explain to others what they're going through. They also need to stop ignoring the fact that everyone eats.
We all get hungry, have appetites and eat. They do not own food, nor have the right to distort or pathologize it to gain what they feel is sufficient recognition for their pains. If they cannot do that by describing their experience as is. Then they have to question whether their feelings match that reality.
Their reprehensible linking of a natural self nurturing act to pathology, forgets this will condemn children for the first time to grow up perceiving self maintenance as an act of dependence. Rather like thinking of sex as a shameful act. The culture of anorexia as 'cure' for fatness is already lowering the onset of anorexia almost to toddlerhood, are we going to bookend this debacle with another disaster at the other end? We owe them more than that.
An excess of appetite and /or hunger is usually more along the lines of an obsessive compulsive disorder;
Obsessive compulsions and neuroses of any kind demand re-balancing of your overall nervous system not abstinence (which doesn't actually cure the cause of addiction. It deals with the symptom-drug use).
With obsessive compulsion- an essentially benign instinct has gotten to a way higher setting. You don't need to rid yourself of it totally, but to get it back into balance. If you have this problem you need to look at balancing your system as a whole. [I'm not recommending that particular book it is just an example of the overall approach. Seek out a version that speaks to you.]
Calm yourself and your system down as a whole. Some have found meditation helps to start that process. Stick with it as it can take a while. Stop any habits of self hatred or putting yourself down. A lot of people with this problem have a habit of taking disappointment in on themselves in order not to show aggression. This can act as a depressant on your system which then seeks additional energy to keep you from sinking into mental illness. It requires you to change the way you see yourself. To learn to trust yourself and your emotions.
What addiction really is
Your body makes certain chemicals to-amongst other things- help animate you physically and mentally; an example of these is endogenous opiates.
If you take in a version of these artificially, i.e. use drugs from the opiate family; cocaine, crack, heroin. Your body reduces its internal production of these chemicals-in order to prevent your body overdosing. After your system has used up these drugs, your body restores its own production back to normal or near normal levels. The gap between this happening is what users refer to as "coming down". That down period indicates some of why the body makes these chemicals.
Addiction happens when your body doesn't or cannot quite restore its level of production back to normal. It is then under-functioning. This makes people dependent on the artificial supply to support their flagging system. It's the point when users say, they take drugs not to get high, but just tofeel normal." This can happen because the mechanism is sensitive (to being depressed) or inflexible in some people. Or it can be worn out through repeated intake of drugs.
Things required for a substance to be addictive
An intoxicant.
That means a substance that has the capacity to literally, poison and/or end your body's ability to continue functioning. It is the body's attempt to avoid destruction or death that is the basis of addiction. You cannot be addicted to anything that cannot poison or overwhelming your body's ability to function.
The substance makes you "high."
This refers to extreme mood elevation (not mere relief of urge or pleasant feelings). Changes in perception can occur; i.e. seeing things that aren't there, not seeing things that are there (hallucination) and so on.
Addictive substances, disassemble your functioning, i.e. you become physically and mentally uncoordinated.
Getting high is a by product of the intoxication process. It's literally the early stages of poisoning that's messing you up. This is an objective state. It can be observed by others. It does not need to be "discovered" through brain scans or misinterpretation of the workings of the nervous system.
As has been clearly demonstrated by the AMA's recent decision. Many people no longer use words for their meaning, but for their associations.
Addiction, in the minds of the ignorant- often those who stigmatize drug addicts-is associated with being out of control, not being able to stop some habit or other. So whenever they have a troublesome issue they think, "addiction". When in reality, genuine addiction is an issue of function.
The self dramatizing attempt to appropriate misunderstanding of drug addicts experience must stop. Addicts have already been put through enough; sacrificed by society, marginalized, hounded, demonized and pathologized. Their habit put into the hands of criminals in order to mash them up, acting as discouragement for others.
Anyone who wishes to describe their issues with food is welcome to do so accurately and put the effort in to understand and explain to others what they're going through. They also need to stop ignoring the fact that everyone eats.
We all get hungry, have appetites and eat. They do not own food, nor have the right to distort or pathologize it to gain what they feel is sufficient recognition for their pains. If they cannot do that by describing their experience as is. Then they have to question whether their feelings match that reality.
Their reprehensible linking of a natural self nurturing act to pathology, forgets this will condemn children for the first time to grow up perceiving self maintenance as an act of dependence. Rather like thinking of sex as a shameful act. The culture of anorexia as 'cure' for fatness is already lowering the onset of anorexia almost to toddlerhood, are we going to bookend this debacle with another disaster at the other end? We owe them more than that.
An excess of appetite and /or hunger is usually more along the lines of an obsessive compulsive disorder;
Don't get pleasure when performing the behaviors or rituals, but get brief relief from the anxiety the thoughts causeEating relieves the extreme build up of pressure coming from your (overwrought) hunger and appetite mechanisms. This is not getting high. Though experiences and interpretations may differ, I doubt getting high or drunk on cake would have gone unnoticed.
Obsessive compulsions and neuroses of any kind demand re-balancing of your overall nervous system not abstinence (which doesn't actually cure the cause of addiction. It deals with the symptom-drug use).
With obsessive compulsion- an essentially benign instinct has gotten to a way higher setting. You don't need to rid yourself of it totally, but to get it back into balance. If you have this problem you need to look at balancing your system as a whole. [I'm not recommending that particular book it is just an example of the overall approach. Seek out a version that speaks to you.]
Calm yourself and your system down as a whole. Some have found meditation helps to start that process. Stick with it as it can take a while. Stop any habits of self hatred or putting yourself down. A lot of people with this problem have a habit of taking disappointment in on themselves in order not to show aggression. This can act as a depressant on your system which then seeks additional energy to keep you from sinking into mental illness. It requires you to change the way you see yourself. To learn to trust yourself and your emotions.
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
immateriality
I used to say fat people were defined on paper. Written in hostility, by others. We have been turned into an idea of a person, that replicates. An epidemic.
Often this is deemed dehumanization. Dehumanized, what do we mean by that? Less than, below human, sub-human?
The reaction to us in meat space and even on-line is often one of pronounced over sensitization. The contrast between the definition that has taken root, which is an idea (not a person or being). Versus an idea-come to life.
The shock of this.
An idea come to life is shocking. Life where there shouldn't be appals. A computer that thinks for itself. The robot with it's own consciousness that take over and enslave mankind. It disturbs our idea of inanimate. Of a consciousness that by definition doesn't exist, that is immaterial.
The root of the idea of fat people as disease is in people's minds. As an idea, we may become immaterial. But the idea of us, the ideas about us.... come to life............unnerves.
Often this is deemed dehumanization. Dehumanized, what do we mean by that? Less than, below human, sub-human?
The reaction to us in meat space and even on-line is often one of pronounced over sensitization. The contrast between the definition that has taken root, which is an idea (not a person or being). Versus an idea-come to life.
The shock of this.
An idea come to life is shocking. Life where there shouldn't be appals. A computer that thinks for itself. The robot with it's own consciousness that take over and enslave mankind. It disturbs our idea of inanimate. Of a consciousness that by definition doesn't exist, that is immaterial.
The root of the idea of fat people as disease is in people's minds. As an idea, we may become immaterial. But the idea of us, the ideas about us.... come to life............unnerves.
Wednesday, 5 June 2013
Predatory Fast Food
I feel strangely out of my depth in these kinds of conversations. Horror of horrors, I have to rely on the crapulent prism of torrid food neurosis, to give a picture of the food situation in the US. I must say, that's no place to be.
I can't relate to the narrative. I feel there are things missing from it. My experience differs and I'm not American. I know there are food deserts, I just don't feel that's the whole of it.
No matter what, I always try to understand why people are saying things the way they are, because that can sometimes tell you most of all.
Personally, I never felt the fast food industry should be able to shape children's minds. I was always unsure about things like fast food in children's hospitals and vending machines in schools. I just don't need any wackdoodle theories about mad scientists creating addictifying foods to enslave humankind.
Like drug dealers.
Nor do I recall, anyone asking me, or any other fat people about the spread of fast food. It wasn't up to us. I'm not declaring innocence here. There has never been a point where I've felt other people really wanted to halt this, especially, not in low income areas anyhow.
Slimness has become an identity, a construct and part of that is the presumption that merely by existing, you are doing lots to create your size, like your own personal godette.
This means a lot of slim people are disassociated from the reality of fatness. Which is that it is a spontaneous adaptation of your body that is usually not directed by your conscious mind. The upshot is, your body can blip and slip back and forth with making the sort of effort a lot of fat people don't even see as effort. Trained as we are to discount it.
But if your body enters a decisive shift, "discipline" real or imagined means surprisingly little. Though people might have made some noise about the spread of convenience foods, it nowhere near reflected their obesitee hysterics. And in the main people have been rather receptive to fast food and welcomed its advance, especially if they didn't feel weight was an issue for them.
And frankly, I really wish the current narrative on food, didn't make that seem like some kind of misdemeanour. Most people see something in this food. Everywhere, around the world, it sells. People newly arrived from every culture on the globe get a taste for it, the same as everyone else. In a way, it's become a communal experience. To the extent that being denied it feels like being left out.
There's something universal in its appeal. Why create shame around that?
I'm sure that's some of the reason why people allow their children to go. How many times can a parent say no? I'm not sure if I've heard this or not, but there are influential people in any particular group and if they're sold on it, that often influences others.
There's no doubt that many food industry indulgences fall in with typical senseless profiteering that only counts the cost of the bottom line, ending up by consuming itself. It's hard to see how not eating the crappier offerings of the food industry isn't the best way of bringing them to heel.
When you go to other countries, you'll find certain processed products taste better. The manufacturers know folks wouldn't buy any old shite. It seems due to the peculiar taste buds of the certain countries which generate a lot of this blaming and hysteria. Both the taste fail and the lack of proportion about these foods are intimately related.
When some companies reduce the laughable amounts of sugar and salt they pad their products with, people rarely seem to notice or bother.
And the idea that fat people are blaming fast food for their fatness? Firstly only those who feel fatness is blameworthy can blame anyone or anything. One can be curious about the interaction between our lives and the size of our bodies outside 'blame'. Second of all, the overwhelming majority of fat people blame themselves and always have done. And it's about time that was fully acknowledged.
The glib insistence that poor people are fat and it's attendant "not knowing about nutrition" has also obscured things. Recap on the streets of London whenever your out late, it's remarkable how the youths and kids you see are almost always slim if not thin.
Often they're raised in the way all kids used to be, let out all day, except; a) they're out later-to varying degrees. And b) the context has changed. As other children have gone indoors, the mix is different and the streets in general more edgy, a side effect of car ownership. That's now seen as bad parenting of course.
The most widespread plumpness/fatness, doesn't fit the typical class stratas. It's more certain sectors of the more stolid/aspirant working class plus struggling lower middle class people. The kinds of backgrounds people like Jennifer Hudson, Regina Benjamin, Adele and Kate Winslett grew up in.
They seem to be plumper than other working class folks, who sometimes show a different mentality. A more free range one. Yet no one points out that it seems rather successful at producing slimmer kids. Including all the way to actual erm, clashes with authority.
If you think I'm making a crude point about criminality and slimness, nah, that would be the 'obesity' crusade's way of doing things. I'm saying aims, ambitions- attitudes may well tell on our bodies, just not in the simplistic ways certain weight ideologues want them to. Our internal and external lives are bound to tell on our metabolic function in some way, we are maintained through our metabolic function. The basics of which are building up and destruction of cells.
Many of whom have proven they can't even define food properly. "Non nutritive food" and "empty calories" being of the more mind numbing examples of this. You don't need to 'know nutrition' to prepare or have balanced diet. Familiarity with things that grow from the earth, land and sea and how to prepare them will do.
I was beginning to wonder recently whether there's a certain amount of time-generationally speaking- where if you lose touch with growing food, the desire to eat it erodes. Certainly one of the best ways to get children to try produce is not by turning that into a dutiful chore, but to teach them to grow and prepare it. Another thing that was taken out of schools.
This is why I still can't raise much enthusiasm for food campaigns. My heart has taken a pounding having watched all of this unfold. Things that were let go because certain children especially were not deemed valuable enough to warrant it. The effects on people's skills were inevitable, that made no difference. So hearing people get all outraged because of weight, makes me feel oddly distanced.
Most of this happened after the 'obesity' noise started.
Even if people could be bothered to give a damn how could they get to the point of action when, it was all about weight and that's down to the individual right? If all these-and more had been been kept- the situation in terms of healthy eating would be so much better. The mental health of children would be too, given the palliative and I believe spiritual development of children running free, having lives that aren't micro managed by adults.
I don't wish to romanticise, there were problems with things like bullying, accidents and dodgy adults. People detested the rather primitive PE that forced them run miles in the cold. That definitely contributed to a deep desire among many parents to spare their children the indignities they'd suffered. So why isn't that mentioned?
Some of that applies in the US, some of it doesn't given the fears about safety and the size and scale of the country.
But culture changes and things could have been improved. Child slimming efforts are no replacement for all this.
In the US, the poverty=fast food has never quite convinced. I cannot completely discount it, because I cannot get enough of a sense of what's going on. There's something missing from the puzzle and I can't work out what that is. A low income mainly puts pressure on variety. Over quite a short period that can make a difference, let alone year after year.
I feel like Black People in the US ate/eat similarly to Black people in other Diasporas. The change seems to have been more recent, like in the last two or three generations especially. And that overlaps with the most chronic soul grinding hunger for many.
It's hard to see how the current attractions of fast food are not somewhat bound up with the collective memory of that. As well as things like the joy of being served. The relief of not having to arrange a meal yourself after a hard days work. Or even, when you have nothing. It can make you feel better able to stay more relaxed if you don't have to worry about meals. Things like this are important.
I wish people were able to speak about things like this if that is part of the mix. I'm not discounting the power of suggestion, through advertising. Especially the bombardment in the US. We are quite often quite suggestible when it comes to food, adults too. But, it would be nice if Black people-fat and slim, were allowed to have a discussion that wasn't an attack on them. To be imperfect without it seeming just incompetence, neglectful or self abusive.
That we recognise we are marked by circumstance, that put paid to the best of intentions. That perhaps this is a learning opportunity for us all. That blood 'obesity' crusade is not conducive to honest exploration of behaviour for anyone and that gets on my nerves.
I can't relate to the narrative. I feel there are things missing from it. My experience differs and I'm not American. I know there are food deserts, I just don't feel that's the whole of it.
No matter what, I always try to understand why people are saying things the way they are, because that can sometimes tell you most of all.
Personally, I never felt the fast food industry should be able to shape children's minds. I was always unsure about things like fast food in children's hospitals and vending machines in schools. I just don't need any wackdoodle theories about mad scientists creating addictifying foods to enslave humankind.
Like drug dealers.
Nor do I recall, anyone asking me, or any other fat people about the spread of fast food. It wasn't up to us. I'm not declaring innocence here. There has never been a point where I've felt other people really wanted to halt this, especially, not in low income areas anyhow.
Slimness has become an identity, a construct and part of that is the presumption that merely by existing, you are doing lots to create your size, like your own personal godette.
This means a lot of slim people are disassociated from the reality of fatness. Which is that it is a spontaneous adaptation of your body that is usually not directed by your conscious mind. The upshot is, your body can blip and slip back and forth with making the sort of effort a lot of fat people don't even see as effort. Trained as we are to discount it.
But if your body enters a decisive shift, "discipline" real or imagined means surprisingly little. Though people might have made some noise about the spread of convenience foods, it nowhere near reflected their obesitee hysterics. And in the main people have been rather receptive to fast food and welcomed its advance, especially if they didn't feel weight was an issue for them.
And frankly, I really wish the current narrative on food, didn't make that seem like some kind of misdemeanour. Most people see something in this food. Everywhere, around the world, it sells. People newly arrived from every culture on the globe get a taste for it, the same as everyone else. In a way, it's become a communal experience. To the extent that being denied it feels like being left out.
There's something universal in its appeal. Why create shame around that?
I'm sure that's some of the reason why people allow their children to go. How many times can a parent say no? I'm not sure if I've heard this or not, but there are influential people in any particular group and if they're sold on it, that often influences others.
There's no doubt that many food industry indulgences fall in with typical senseless profiteering that only counts the cost of the bottom line, ending up by consuming itself. It's hard to see how not eating the crappier offerings of the food industry isn't the best way of bringing them to heel.
When you go to other countries, you'll find certain processed products taste better. The manufacturers know folks wouldn't buy any old shite. It seems due to the peculiar taste buds of the certain countries which generate a lot of this blaming and hysteria. Both the taste fail and the lack of proportion about these foods are intimately related.
When some companies reduce the laughable amounts of sugar and salt they pad their products with, people rarely seem to notice or bother.
And the idea that fat people are blaming fast food for their fatness? Firstly only those who feel fatness is blameworthy can blame anyone or anything. One can be curious about the interaction between our lives and the size of our bodies outside 'blame'. Second of all, the overwhelming majority of fat people blame themselves and always have done. And it's about time that was fully acknowledged.
The glib insistence that poor people are fat and it's attendant "not knowing about nutrition" has also obscured things. Recap on the streets of London whenever your out late, it's remarkable how the youths and kids you see are almost always slim if not thin.
Often they're raised in the way all kids used to be, let out all day, except; a) they're out later-to varying degrees. And b) the context has changed. As other children have gone indoors, the mix is different and the streets in general more edgy, a side effect of car ownership. That's now seen as bad parenting of course.
The most widespread plumpness/fatness, doesn't fit the typical class stratas. It's more certain sectors of the more stolid/aspirant working class plus struggling lower middle class people. The kinds of backgrounds people like Jennifer Hudson, Regina Benjamin, Adele and Kate Winslett grew up in.
They seem to be plumper than other working class folks, who sometimes show a different mentality. A more free range one. Yet no one points out that it seems rather successful at producing slimmer kids. Including all the way to actual erm, clashes with authority.
If you think I'm making a crude point about criminality and slimness, nah, that would be the 'obesity' crusade's way of doing things. I'm saying aims, ambitions- attitudes may well tell on our bodies, just not in the simplistic ways certain weight ideologues want them to. Our internal and external lives are bound to tell on our metabolic function in some way, we are maintained through our metabolic function. The basics of which are building up and destruction of cells.
Middle income people are the most overweight and eat fast food more regularly than anyone else. In contrast, 80 percent of those with low incomes cook at home at least five times a week.This tally's with my experience and many around me. I was brought up by a mother who cooked mostly from scratch. The weekends were often given over to cooking. She did shift work too. It dishonours her efforts when people including some in FA blather senselessly about poor ole po' folks who don't know nutrition like middle class folks.
Many of whom have proven they can't even define food properly. "Non nutritive food" and "empty calories" being of the more mind numbing examples of this. You don't need to 'know nutrition' to prepare or have balanced diet. Familiarity with things that grow from the earth, land and sea and how to prepare them will do.
I was beginning to wonder recently whether there's a certain amount of time-generationally speaking- where if you lose touch with growing food, the desire to eat it erodes. Certainly one of the best ways to get children to try produce is not by turning that into a dutiful chore, but to teach them to grow and prepare it. Another thing that was taken out of schools.
This is why I still can't raise much enthusiasm for food campaigns. My heart has taken a pounding having watched all of this unfold. Things that were let go because certain children especially were not deemed valuable enough to warrant it. The effects on people's skills were inevitable, that made no difference. So hearing people get all outraged because of weight, makes me feel oddly distanced.
Most of this happened after the 'obesity' noise started.
Even if people could be bothered to give a damn how could they get to the point of action when, it was all about weight and that's down to the individual right? If all these-and more had been been kept- the situation in terms of healthy eating would be so much better. The mental health of children would be too, given the palliative and I believe spiritual development of children running free, having lives that aren't micro managed by adults.
I don't wish to romanticise, there were problems with things like bullying, accidents and dodgy adults. People detested the rather primitive PE that forced them run miles in the cold. That definitely contributed to a deep desire among many parents to spare their children the indignities they'd suffered. So why isn't that mentioned?
Some of that applies in the US, some of it doesn't given the fears about safety and the size and scale of the country.
But culture changes and things could have been improved. Child slimming efforts are no replacement for all this.
In the US, the poverty=fast food has never quite convinced. I cannot completely discount it, because I cannot get enough of a sense of what's going on. There's something missing from the puzzle and I can't work out what that is. A low income mainly puts pressure on variety. Over quite a short period that can make a difference, let alone year after year.
I feel like Black People in the US ate/eat similarly to Black people in other Diasporas. The change seems to have been more recent, like in the last two or three generations especially. And that overlaps with the most chronic soul grinding hunger for many.
It's hard to see how the current attractions of fast food are not somewhat bound up with the collective memory of that. As well as things like the joy of being served. The relief of not having to arrange a meal yourself after a hard days work. Or even, when you have nothing. It can make you feel better able to stay more relaxed if you don't have to worry about meals. Things like this are important.
I wish people were able to speak about things like this if that is part of the mix. I'm not discounting the power of suggestion, through advertising. Especially the bombardment in the US. We are quite often quite suggestible when it comes to food, adults too. But, it would be nice if Black people-fat and slim, were allowed to have a discussion that wasn't an attack on them. To be imperfect without it seeming just incompetence, neglectful or self abusive.
That we recognise we are marked by circumstance, that put paid to the best of intentions. That perhaps this is a learning opportunity for us all. That blood 'obesity' crusade is not conducive to honest exploration of behaviour for anyone and that gets on my nerves.
Tuesday, 2 April 2013
Other People's Misery
Here's a fascinating readers answer another readers query. A man is asking why his wife likes TV programmes featuring the hard life and times of others so much.
Seriously, WGAD? Except to say, at least the wife finds succour for this need in fiction, rather than fictionalizing the lives of real people.
The responses seem to alight on the way the misery crusade is fulfilling a similar need, based it seems mainly on "I may be [insert failing or shame] but at least I'm not like that". At the risk of seeming priggish, is that really much of a comfort? The looking down on others who are probably no worse than you is kind of telling though and not in a good way.
It does help explain the attraction of the 'obesity' saga.
The general sniffiness about the fiction some deem so utterly beneath them points to something long noted about why people have bought into this crusade. The way a certain mindset has gotten way ahead of it's own psychology. It defines itself as wholly rational at heart-whether that's actually a balanced way for humans to be doesn't seem to occur.
Due to this, it cannot find a way of expressing it's perfectly ordinary irrationality seeking instead to bend it into the appearance of its own precious self definition. Cloaking various bad logic and fantasy in terms it sees as epitomizing rationalism.
Seriously, WGAD? Except to say, at least the wife finds succour for this need in fiction, rather than fictionalizing the lives of real people.
The responses seem to alight on the way the misery crusade is fulfilling a similar need, based it seems mainly on "I may be [insert failing or shame] but at least I'm not like that". At the risk of seeming priggish, is that really much of a comfort? The looking down on others who are probably no worse than you is kind of telling though and not in a good way.
It does help explain the attraction of the 'obesity' saga.
The general sniffiness about the fiction some deem so utterly beneath them points to something long noted about why people have bought into this crusade. The way a certain mindset has gotten way ahead of it's own psychology. It defines itself as wholly rational at heart-whether that's actually a balanced way for humans to be doesn't seem to occur.
Due to this, it cannot find a way of expressing it's perfectly ordinary irrationality seeking instead to bend it into the appearance of its own precious self definition. Cloaking various bad logic and fantasy in terms it sees as epitomizing rationalism.
Monday, 8 October 2012
Puny Accusation
I still remember when I first started commenting on the internet. I was on a certain leftist blog. Having one of my sadly numerous desolate sub-conversations with a smug middle class man. During which, he asserted laziness was a character flaw.
I responded that I did not view it this way.
End of conversation.
Apparently, if I was too out of it not to know the profound truth he uttered, when I heard it. We could hardly continue our futile 'exchange'.
This part of the internet has been strange for me. I expected to find connection with like minds. It has not been so-for varying reasons-in the main.
So I was glad to see someone else knows this.
Laziness, that great cloud stalking fat people under the puny caricature of 'obese', is itself a lazy accusation. In whomever this quality is found, it is usually some kind of mental protest. Sometimes its the early stages of a kind of melancholia, or even depression.
We can see a form of it manifesting in the rigid adherence to the calorie/expenditure model as the be all and end all of weight regulation. It's devotees want it to be it, hence they lack an overwhelming drive to go on and fill in the gaps.
Expectation is the key to this form of indolence. They feel it has already been done, when in fact, it hasn't.
Communication didn't have to be this hard. Some just want it to be.
I responded that I did not view it this way.
End of conversation.
Apparently, if I was too out of it not to know the profound truth he uttered, when I heard it. We could hardly continue our futile 'exchange'.
This part of the internet has been strange for me. I expected to find connection with like minds. It has not been so-for varying reasons-in the main.
So I was glad to see someone else knows this.
Laziness, that great cloud stalking fat people under the puny caricature of 'obese', is itself a lazy accusation. In whomever this quality is found, it is usually some kind of mental protest. Sometimes its the early stages of a kind of melancholia, or even depression.
We can see a form of it manifesting in the rigid adherence to the calorie/expenditure model as the be all and end all of weight regulation. It's devotees want it to be it, hence they lack an overwhelming drive to go on and fill in the gaps.
Expectation is the key to this form of indolence. They feel it has already been done, when in fact, it hasn't.
Communication didn't have to be this hard. Some just want it to be.
Monday, 1 October 2012
Identity
To quote the witty clever Marianne Elliot-Said aka Poly Styrene (check out the full lyrics -scroll down to "identity"T/W for mention of extreme self harm/suicide);
I was taken aback when I started to hear people say, fat is an identity. I can't say I felt it. To me being fat doesn't really mean diddly in essence, that's the point. It has been defined and distorted by those who want their weight to define them.
Fatness has been defined as an extension of that, in service to them-by them and their needs, contrived and otherwise. Ironically, I'd discovered just how meaningless slimness was to me when I diverted from my duty to play the 'obese' role.
After a while, I couldn't actually remember what I was supposed to be slim for. It's like the emotional memory had gone.
This is one of the few occasions when perhaps sidelining thinness or slimness would not be apt. Always when it comes to repression of others, is the repression of oneself. The drive is subconscious.
When the receptacles for this stop playing their assigned role, the dominant ones can be the ones who may find themselves a bit lost.
The underlying mystery is why the desire for this extent of assertion in the first place? What makes certain groups so aggressive in their need for this? Do you find that as unnerving to contemplate as I do?
The peculiar thing about slim, perhaps really thin people is they have spontaneously, without to my knowledge any meetings or conferences to have decided they must issue forth this collective identity.
That it is inherently superior to fatness. Why would it be so necessary to prove? Why so fraught if its that obvious?
A small chapter of the fattening of society as a whole is told through the story of vanity sizing.
This feeling once coagulated around size 10 for a few generations. It had a meaningful cultural resonance, possibly until women's shape started to change (thicker waist). It was not so much about slimness that was a given. It was the size women were supposed to be.
Anything greater, unless you were tall or "pleasingly plump" was, well a bit awkward. Going up to unspeakable in the 'plus' or fat sizes.
That is why it is such a cheek that some people even manage to try laying this at the door for vanity of fat people. They barely bothered to make clothes for fat people, why would they wish to obscure how fat we were?
Perhaps as the fattening has now reached a critical mass (sorry, couldn't resist) the vanity has moved to fatter people, who used to be slim.
And perhaps in many of their minds, still are.
What is fascinating about this erm, psycho-sociology, is fat people simply do not care nearly as much. In that sense, it's not so much that we don't identify a fat group and being grouped in it. In our desperation to be reassigned, we were blocked from bonding properly with our own bodies, en masse.
We were taught to see them as temporary. Only time and the failure of the experiment has forced reality to be acknowledged, finally.
We neither have the drive, nor don't own the idea of what fat/ness is or is supposed to be.
That has been given to us. We are literally a figment of slimmer people's imagination. Funnily enough, it is slim people who recognize themselves-and we too-as individuals above all else and fat people are seen and still too often see ourselves as many people, with one psyche.
I don't mean what Americans call a "hive mind" I mean, our default is as one archetype. The closest that comes to mind is the way White People are always individuals, yet recognizably a group or tribe it is Black People who seem to merge. Especially to non Black People.
I still remember witnessing a discussion where a White Person expressed the sentiment that, it was frustrating when Black People did not agree.
Annoying though it was, I knew what the person meant, scary isn't it? At the same time, I marvelled at how it simply could not be applied to White People.
"Identity is the crisis can't you see?"
I was taken aback when I started to hear people say, fat is an identity. I can't say I felt it. To me being fat doesn't really mean diddly in essence, that's the point. It has been defined and distorted by those who want their weight to define them.
Fatness has been defined as an extension of that, in service to them-by them and their needs, contrived and otherwise. Ironically, I'd discovered just how meaningless slimness was to me when I diverted from my duty to play the 'obese' role.
After a while, I couldn't actually remember what I was supposed to be slim for. It's like the emotional memory had gone.
This is one of the few occasions when perhaps sidelining thinness or slimness would not be apt. Always when it comes to repression of others, is the repression of oneself. The drive is subconscious.
When the receptacles for this stop playing their assigned role, the dominant ones can be the ones who may find themselves a bit lost.
The underlying mystery is why the desire for this extent of assertion in the first place? What makes certain groups so aggressive in their need for this? Do you find that as unnerving to contemplate as I do?
The peculiar thing about slim, perhaps really thin people is they have spontaneously, without to my knowledge any meetings or conferences to have decided they must issue forth this collective identity.
That it is inherently superior to fatness. Why would it be so necessary to prove? Why so fraught if its that obvious?
A small chapter of the fattening of society as a whole is told through the story of vanity sizing.
“So many women tie their self-esteem to the size on the tag.”For "so many" read, slim women. These women have been reported to have stopped buying clothes on occasion when they can no longer fit into the size they feel best befits their identity.That they feel they are.
This feeling once coagulated around size 10 for a few generations. It had a meaningful cultural resonance, possibly until women's shape started to change (thicker waist). It was not so much about slimness that was a given. It was the size women were supposed to be.
Anything greater, unless you were tall or "pleasingly plump" was, well a bit awkward. Going up to unspeakable in the 'plus' or fat sizes.
That is why it is such a cheek that some people even manage to try laying this at the door for vanity of fat people. They barely bothered to make clothes for fat people, why would they wish to obscure how fat we were?
Perhaps as the fattening has now reached a critical mass (sorry, couldn't resist) the vanity has moved to fatter people, who used to be slim.
And perhaps in many of their minds, still are.
What is fascinating about this erm, psycho-sociology, is fat people simply do not care nearly as much. In that sense, it's not so much that we don't identify a fat group and being grouped in it. In our desperation to be reassigned, we were blocked from bonding properly with our own bodies, en masse.
We were taught to see them as temporary. Only time and the failure of the experiment has forced reality to be acknowledged, finally.
We neither have the drive, nor don't own the idea of what fat/ness is or is supposed to be.
That has been given to us. We are literally a figment of slimmer people's imagination. Funnily enough, it is slim people who recognize themselves-and we too-as individuals above all else and fat people are seen and still too often see ourselves as many people, with one psyche.
I don't mean what Americans call a "hive mind" I mean, our default is as one archetype. The closest that comes to mind is the way White People are always individuals, yet recognizably a group or tribe it is Black People who seem to merge. Especially to non Black People.
I still remember witnessing a discussion where a White Person expressed the sentiment that, it was frustrating when Black People did not agree.
Annoying though it was, I knew what the person meant, scary isn't it? At the same time, I marvelled at how it simply could not be applied to White People.
Wednesday, 25 July 2012
RUDE
As the fat hating consciousness was gaining momentum, we were expected to return fire. We never really were able to, not from a fatcentric point of view, though we might have squirmed desperately trying to "answer" the rhetorical guilty verdict this is, "Why're ya fat?"
At some point instead of making sorties then tensing up waiting for the expected explosive reaction, there was a taking for granted that no more than an ineffectual squeak at best, would come forth.
That shift of energy, like when the fight goes out of something wild and it is tamed, was fat people permanently relocated to the backfoot.
Things proceeded from there. No matter how angry, forceful nay formidable a fat person was in general, barely were they or anyone else able to surmount that deadened sense of being overrun and cornered.
Now that we've realize our part in that and are ready to do what it takes to advance again to re-gain our own selves; we seem to some to be rather rude. By that I'm not referring to the quality of response according, to character mood or mode of expression and so forth.
I mean merely saying anything that isn't defenselessness so palpable that it leaves a scent.
The rudest of all is to simply respond, converse, debate, argue whatever, as if you know you have some idea of what you are talking about. Without any apologia, or countless reference to how well meaning you know disingenuous irrational hatred is.
At some point instead of making sorties then tensing up waiting for the expected explosive reaction, there was a taking for granted that no more than an ineffectual squeak at best, would come forth.
That shift of energy, like when the fight goes out of something wild and it is tamed, was fat people permanently relocated to the backfoot.
Things proceeded from there. No matter how angry, forceful nay formidable a fat person was in general, barely were they or anyone else able to surmount that deadened sense of being overrun and cornered.
Now that we've realize our part in that and are ready to do what it takes to advance again to re-gain our own selves; we seem to some to be rather rude. By that I'm not referring to the quality of response according, to character mood or mode of expression and so forth.
I mean merely saying anything that isn't defenselessness so palpable that it leaves a scent.
The rudest of all is to simply respond, converse, debate, argue whatever, as if you know you have some idea of what you are talking about. Without any apologia, or countless reference to how well meaning you know disingenuous irrational hatred is.
Thursday, 12 July 2012
Low Self-Esteem
The former has shaped the discourse on LSE as it's not so much a low estimation of yourself. It therefore tends to defend itself; return fire, self advocate, object, protest. It makes a noise discussing its situation instructing everyone as to how sympathetic everyone should be too its desperate travails and such.
This isn't the kind fat people have.
It matches what's coming at you.
I keep trying to say this is what fat acceptance is about for me, not fatness so much seeing through societal and authority's approval to finally smell its rotten stench and recoil from it.
Self esteem in fat people is maintained by the other aspects of our humanness, in the main, fatness is a drain on that.
Hence the decision to learn to accept oneself not only as fat but as fully sentient and able to comment on one's own experience is a step before the usual self advocacy. I don't think many people seem to get that. They presume because fat people are protesting we must have the self aware kind of battered esteem.
Based on the usual bottom feeding standard assigned to us, where anything more is magnified and reverberates overwhelming the senses.
I have always found this intensely annoying. A reflection of the much beloved assertion that fat people are so grotesquely biased in our own favour, that we can be dismissed outright.
And for goodness sake, why can't people tell what self esteem is when fat people come into view? That's all it takes to reverse perception?
Pish and piffle.
My irritation is not helped by the fact that there is often this concerted impulse amongst many slimz instinctive no doubt, to rigidly set in stone this ultimately intolerable fat standard beside the normal human i.e. slim one as if they're the same.
It feels suffocating, like we're being locked into this like beetles set in amber, it treats us as if we don't know what the human standard is. As if we aren't even here and that's the key to this type of LSE. It erases and takes you out of the game, even though you are still there, you fade.
This error turns up in assumptions about winning round allies. That they are draw to how hurt you are. So show them that and your away. I've always been shocked by that but found it difficult to say why.
They everyone, including social justice devotees are draw by what tends to be missing from fat people as a collective; self possession. A line drawn in the sand that this is as far as we are going with this.
The absence of embodiment people seek is what seems to prod a lot of hatred and loathing of fat people. Or any people frankly, it brings out the bully in virtually all of us.
If you abandon and flee from part of your own self in disgust, others are likely to take their cue from that. Even nice compassionate people will tend to turn away. I guess we all have limits on when LSE just becomes too off putting and we passed that point.
That is why fat people's talk of body acceptance and self love is so important, especially those who come from a milieu where being fat is unspeakably coarse and low class. It has to happen in some form or fat people are not fit to even get to the point where we can demand anything.
In the why oh why talk, some say fat activists were too radical before, or not enough. My feeling is the former conclusion is not right. Due to the extreme nature of the 'obese' construct, a mix of iatrogenic quackery, a neurosis inducing personality disorder posing as diagnosis. Its leaves nothing for anyone aware of their own self possession to compromise on.
It forces you to be "radical" unless other things supporting your sense of self obscure the extent to which fatness as been occupied by everyone else.
How can you be moderately non-sentient? Halfway an outer controlled puppet? Half disease half person?
The thing that discombobulates is the hopeless normalization of this grotesque fiction. To some people, that makes it reasonable by definition, the mainstream is always moderate. And those correcting it, radical.
The setting of fat people always wrong, because we always are if you notice, equals fat people must be doing activism in a bad way. We must not be sufficiently amenable which is obviously nonsense; but we are talking ingrained emotion.
It's a mistake we need to stop making.
I used to think self esteem was the real issue, now I think its the ability to believe in ourselves, I don't mean credulity I mean the ability to believe that we can contribute to defining the human experience as fat people.
Monday, 30 April 2012
You rule/r?
"Overweight" is too busy being a shockingly open state of impacted self absorption to be much of an insult. "Compared to me, you are too much, you are over" For your information, we weren't.
The other side of that is "[Compared to me] you aren't fat", ditto, I mean, were we?
There's also "Oooh, you're so dinky, so small, oh you are itty bitty!" so on so vomit inducing, as if it's a compliment to be belittled, as if being small/er somehow equals insignificant or insufficient in some way.
People who, for want of a better word, essentialize size seeing others, not as entities in their own right with their own internal and external laws, but how you are in comparison to the big I am, shows again that the the 'obesity' crusade mentality operates on a shared basis of thought of the mainstream bourgie/ pseudo bourgie mindset.
The solipsism trammelled into the former has not been interrupted, rather it's become the model for everyone. Or was until some of us started-again- to opt out.
Fat hating thinz haven't been "brainwashed" they're just acting natural and haven't been interrupted but indulged. We probably all start off seeing other people this way, some of us get over it.
Like when we were brand new and presumed everyone's family functioned just like our own and were shocked to realise that other families behave totally differently; what? Those fatz who see themselves as the yardstick for everyBODY have the same mindset as the over-indulged thinz. They haven't been interrupted much either, but for different reasons.
They're all what about the truly fat? Well what about them? They don't actually get to decide who is and isn't fat, when that is already clear. When I see someone else, I don't compare them to myself, I see them in their own right. If they're 60lbs less than me but I can see are robust and sparkly eyed, I wouldn't dream of patronizing them with how dinky they are compared to me, because I don't, what for?
There's no point when you're done with playing disease or seeing yourself as "overweight".
The other side of that is "[Compared to me] you aren't fat", ditto, I mean, were we?
There's also "Oooh, you're so dinky, so small, oh you are itty bitty!" so on so vomit inducing, as if it's a compliment to be belittled, as if being small/er somehow equals insignificant or insufficient in some way.
People who, for want of a better word, essentialize size seeing others, not as entities in their own right with their own internal and external laws, but how you are in comparison to the big I am, shows again that the the 'obesity' crusade mentality operates on a shared basis of thought of the mainstream bourgie/ pseudo bourgie mindset.
The solipsism trammelled into the former has not been interrupted, rather it's become the model for everyone. Or was until some of us started-again- to opt out.
Fat hating thinz haven't been "brainwashed" they're just acting natural and haven't been interrupted but indulged. We probably all start off seeing other people this way, some of us get over it.
Like when we were brand new and presumed everyone's family functioned just like our own and were shocked to realise that other families behave totally differently; what? Those fatz who see themselves as the yardstick for everyBODY have the same mindset as the over-indulged thinz. They haven't been interrupted much either, but for different reasons.
They're all what about the truly fat? Well what about them? They don't actually get to decide who is and isn't fat, when that is already clear. When I see someone else, I don't compare them to myself, I see them in their own right. If they're 60lbs less than me but I can see are robust and sparkly eyed, I wouldn't dream of patronizing them with how dinky they are compared to me, because I don't, what for?
There's no point when you're done with playing disease or seeing yourself as "overweight".
Monday, 20 February 2012
Thinsplaining
A couple of years ago (or so) "Mansplainer" was named word of the year. It's basis is the inability to believe in a full or whole female intelligence.
Speaking from that conviction becomes mansplaining-it can come from women as those of us fatz know to our cost. Though sometimes mis-applied, it's not just condescension, or telling you stuff you already know, but that's just product. It's the genesis that makes it more distinct. A person can assume you are incapable because of assumptions about who you are and what that represents in their mind, but may not be mansplaining.
They can be corrected, even if its slow, becuase they can hear what you are saying.
The thing about m/s is its convinced. This scrambles and erases the capacity to discern anything which contradicts that conviction and this causes the changes in the mansplainers brain function.
I am not kidding.
It's so odd, I think it ought to be studied by cognitive psychologists because there's something of the hypnotic phenomena about it.
Something to remember is that mansplainers are often oblivious. Often totally unaware or disconnected from this conviction and therefore may see themselves as supportive of women.
For example; a male collects a way or ways of seeing himself that overburden his self esteem. Perhaps unbeknownst to him, his mind surreptitiously uses the construct of male supremacy to shore up his mental viability.
Thus limiting his ability to unpick his sexism, without the threat of mental collapse. All probably out of his mindframe. Not least because he has the impression that he has a strong mind that can deal with these "faults" with equilibrium.
The effect on the brain can be quite startling, they hear you, but they can't hear you. A strong filtering keeps out what you are saying. It's not so much that you can't get through, it's that it becomes utterly distorted to the point where you are in a permanent open mouthed state and their "interpretation" of what you just said.
I'm talking beyond the creative differences in individual points of view, I'm talking about not recognising their report of what you are saying.
At times, you can see their every mental twist and turn not just because they don't get it and you do, but because they don't believe you can understand anything they don't, so are acting out that falsehood and dropping themselves in it.
Because it's all the way, that in the end doesn't matter, you leave them as you found them.
I've been turning this over in the back of my mind for a few days, when I read a post about the term. It suggested a woman telling a househusband parent, how to do some chore that he already knows could be called "womansplaining".
When really that's condescension, in this case sexist. It's based on expectations of assigned roles, not the tuning out of a person's intelligence to match your insistence. IOW. the woman believes men must be novices at childcare, they don't believe men aren't intellectually capable of it.
Variants have appeared becuase of that factor, "whitesplaining" obviously and believe me, that is the default state of many. Then there's of course, "thinsplaining". The weird thing about that is the belief is not that fat people are less intelligent than slimz, its that fatz know nothing at all, about themselves. It's a peculiar combination of low/no expectation and 'splaining.
So virtually everyone talking about fatness is a thinsplainer virtually all the time.
The term 'obesity' is created from this essentially subhuman double whammy. Once anyone is talking to you from there, they often become so mentally dysfunctional that it is a waste of time talking to them. If you're quick you can feel them sailing far away as this conveyance of the elective disconnect and disassociation of this construct manifest.
Even if it wasn't unnerving, it is boring beyond words. Boredom is a weapon of war, believe it.
You're expected to enter a remedial mindset for their unspeakable questions of the "How do you exist?" "How are you human" variety and you can get no further sense out of them, yet aren't allowed to be understandably infuriated.
You have to pretend they are talking sense and are your equal, when they felt it was a good use of their minds, to no longer be so.
Even mansplainers, as tiresome as they are believe women are conscious, just less intelligent than men as a group. Whereas to this, 'obesity' no intelligence at all, no consciousness of self, no inner direction. Yet they know this isn't true because they seek always to browbeat that very sentience into the admission that it doesn't exist.
It's like me saying men know nothing about being men and I know everything specifically because I'm not a man and have read studies about men. When men speak, I dismiss them completely as "biased". Even though everything I say about men, reads as a complement to women and therefore myself and is largely disorted to the point of inaccuracy.
Speaking from that conviction becomes mansplaining-it can come from women as those of us fatz know to our cost. Though sometimes mis-applied, it's not just condescension, or telling you stuff you already know, but that's just product. It's the genesis that makes it more distinct. A person can assume you are incapable because of assumptions about who you are and what that represents in their mind, but may not be mansplaining.
They can be corrected, even if its slow, becuase they can hear what you are saying.
The thing about m/s is its convinced. This scrambles and erases the capacity to discern anything which contradicts that conviction and this causes the changes in the mansplainers brain function.
I am not kidding.
It's so odd, I think it ought to be studied by cognitive psychologists because there's something of the hypnotic phenomena about it.
Something to remember is that mansplainers are often oblivious. Often totally unaware or disconnected from this conviction and therefore may see themselves as supportive of women.
For example; a male collects a way or ways of seeing himself that overburden his self esteem. Perhaps unbeknownst to him, his mind surreptitiously uses the construct of male supremacy to shore up his mental viability.
Thus limiting his ability to unpick his sexism, without the threat of mental collapse. All probably out of his mindframe. Not least because he has the impression that he has a strong mind that can deal with these "faults" with equilibrium.
The effect on the brain can be quite startling, they hear you, but they can't hear you. A strong filtering keeps out what you are saying. It's not so much that you can't get through, it's that it becomes utterly distorted to the point where you are in a permanent open mouthed state and their "interpretation" of what you just said.
I'm talking beyond the creative differences in individual points of view, I'm talking about not recognising their report of what you are saying.
At times, you can see their every mental twist and turn not just because they don't get it and you do, but because they don't believe you can understand anything they don't, so are acting out that falsehood and dropping themselves in it.
Because it's all the way, that in the end doesn't matter, you leave them as you found them.
I've been turning this over in the back of my mind for a few days, when I read a post about the term. It suggested a woman telling a househusband parent, how to do some chore that he already knows could be called "womansplaining".
When really that's condescension, in this case sexist. It's based on expectations of assigned roles, not the tuning out of a person's intelligence to match your insistence. IOW. the woman believes men must be novices at childcare, they don't believe men aren't intellectually capable of it.
Variants have appeared becuase of that factor, "whitesplaining" obviously and believe me, that is the default state of many. Then there's of course, "thinsplaining". The weird thing about that is the belief is not that fat people are less intelligent than slimz, its that fatz know nothing at all, about themselves. It's a peculiar combination of low/no expectation and 'splaining.
So virtually everyone talking about fatness is a thinsplainer virtually all the time.
The term 'obesity' is created from this essentially subhuman double whammy. Once anyone is talking to you from there, they often become so mentally dysfunctional that it is a waste of time talking to them. If you're quick you can feel them sailing far away as this conveyance of the elective disconnect and disassociation of this construct manifest.
Even if it wasn't unnerving, it is boring beyond words. Boredom is a weapon of war, believe it.
You're expected to enter a remedial mindset for their unspeakable questions of the "How do you exist?" "How are you human" variety and you can get no further sense out of them, yet aren't allowed to be understandably infuriated.
You have to pretend they are talking sense and are your equal, when they felt it was a good use of their minds, to no longer be so.
Even mansplainers, as tiresome as they are believe women are conscious, just less intelligent than men as a group. Whereas to this, 'obesity' no intelligence at all, no consciousness of self, no inner direction. Yet they know this isn't true because they seek always to browbeat that very sentience into the admission that it doesn't exist.
It's like me saying men know nothing about being men and I know everything specifically because I'm not a man and have read studies about men. When men speak, I dismiss them completely as "biased". Even though everything I say about men, reads as a complement to women and therefore myself and is largely disorted to the point of inaccuracy.
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