Do Meditate

I see from Ragen that Deepak Chopra is recommending meditation in support of starving yourself. Calorie restrictionists cannot accept directly that their 'weight loss' is through starvation. They do when people complain about the 'obesity' cult potentially encouraging anorexia-"We have an obesity crisis!!!" is the oft said comeback.

They admit it when they tell you the liberation of Auschwitz revealed a picture of successful dieting, or something to that effect. Dieting is not "based on physics" it's based on starvation inducing weight loss.

'Obesity' wallahs induce you to starve by constant negative and abusive pressure, both internal and external. However, this lowers resistance to any adverse experience, like self inflicted starvation, even further.

They could get away with this nasty game before because fat people accepted this. Experience schooled us in the flaws of this deranged contradictory approach, so diet/'obesity' wallahs feel forced to admit that their lifestyle anorexia prescription requires as much self esteem and healthy robust mental health as possible, to cushion you from the physiological and psychological distress of denying your body the energy it needs to function. 

The even deeper conundrum is of course, robust mental health and self esteem mitigates against abusing yourself in the first place. Given this is suicidal.

You could call that the weight-loss diet paradox.

So I say please do take up meditation if you can. It doesn't suit everyone. You can meditate in a lying or sitting position-the latter is better so you don't drift off. If you wish to do the former, try keeping your legs bent at the knee with your feet flat-on whatever you're laying on, to stop yourself drifting off.

You can do a walking/ in motion meditation, where you say, maintain constant focus on one aspect of your walking action i.e. concentrate on your foot striking the ground. Or you can scan your body for tension and focus on adjusting your body until it is relieved, over time this practise can improve your gait and movement.

You can also learn to focus on moving with maximum ease or flow.

I've told already how meditation inadvertently resolved my hyperphagia/hyperhunger, which had been been made intractable by 2 decades of trying to restrict calories. It did this because after a time, the release of nervous tension that it induces became systemic. It was wholly unexpected.

That is, meditation first releases the tension in your muscles and nervous system, which then starts to reassert itself after a session, as you go about your business [due to that requiring use of the nervous system]. It's a lot like when someone corrects your posture as you stand still, as soon as move, your posture goes back to your normal bad posture/mis-use reasserts itself.

Only with regular patient practise does correction become your (body's) default.

I don't even care if people try it to sustain dieting. It's the right way around to deal with any issues, soften them, reduce their power or remove them, rather than keep them in play and then force pathologies on yourself as "treatment".

That 'obesity' wallahs are now bringing out more and more palliatives reveals just how far they set fat people up for failure and how careless and reckless they were with our health and well being. It's also quite amusing that virtually no "alternative" practitioners have manage to get beyond weight loss dieting.

Proving they are not really the alternative to more conventional medicine. The body's capacity for self healing, repair and restoration is. The body can right its impulses and urges better than pharmaceuticals, if given the chance and the right ways and means.

The use of our conscious focus to alter our body's function is a true alternative. What one brilliant humane doctor referred to as the "doctor within".  He also pointed out that was the one the medical hierarchy wants to stop. I've had little doubt that this is some element of why medics don't really want to "solve obesity" as they pretend and are desperate to drag us all down "lifestyle" alley.

The more you meditate, the more your consciousness is released from other people's impositions of [self ] loathing, the less likely you are to wish to starve or otherwise abuse yourself. The pressure on you and the tension in you affects your taste buds, appetite and hunger. You may well find what you eat changes, that you wish to eat less without any conscious effort. Which is why you shouldn't really meditate to support starvation.

Don't put any expectations or demands on it. Just go on an adventure with it.

Use meditation to unlearn being on trial by fat phobia every moment of your existence. Use meditation to unravel your practise of fat hatred and recover your subjectivity, your mind even. Use meditation to get over the idea that being slim is an achievement. Use meditation to experience your body, without the baggage of fat hate. Which of course not only enables you to appreciate what a wonderful eco-system it is.

It also enables you to experience your existence without a fat phobic tape loop playing constantly. To experience this frequently, is to realise that you only want to get out of "this body" because of that fat phobic tape loop.

Which is the whole purpose of the 'obesity' construct and fat hatred.

Excuses, excuses.........

I used to think an excuse was simply an attempt to justify bad behaviour. So the dissonance of being told things along the theme of; "Fat people always have excuses" never goes. When it comes to being fat,  I don't see there being anything to excuse.

Like virtually all fat people, when I assumed I had something to excuse, I didn't. I said continuously, to myself and anyone who would listen, "Mea Culpa." I am to blame. Now I know that was incorrect, there's nothing to mitigate, nothing to defend. The accusation is myth and nonsense.

What I notice to this day is people accept remaining in the position of having something to excuse. FA just seems to mean, better, more scienterrific "excuses."

Those who like Maria Kang demand "What's your excuse....?" sound exactly like things that have been demanded of me often-as someone brought up by Xtians, best embodied by the assertive entreaty,

What is your excuse for not accepting Jesus Christ as your lord and saviour?

Answer,

Erm, I'm an atheist. 

They know this, but they sort of don't believe me. Well, it's not so much they disbelieve me, as they reject the concept of being outside their frame of reference. You're either with JC or the Devil- for something else, doesn't scan.

The trouble with either viewing yourself or allowing yourself to be cast purely as "anti the obesity crusade" is, you remain imprisoned within its terms, ones which do not allow for your sentience, whilst addressing it directly of course.

Clashing with that isn't enough to define you properly.

Better to stand for what you stand for.

Liberation Posture

If those running NHS England and other health politicians, medics et al are solely motivated to elevate people from a passive infantile attachment to the healthcare machine. They might spare some focus for poor posture.

After years of seeming to belong to some quaint past, people have been instinctively picking up again, with nary a peep from from our unquestionably benign patrician establishment.

Sports people increasingly use posture braces and wear t-shirts with built in aides to hold the body in better alignment, whilst on the move, which is a step on from the adjustment of standing or sitting. That gives a potential public face to raise awareness among people, without the necessity for coercion of either party.

I remember cottoning on to this many years ago. It came into play when too much of my rather overwrought desire to improve/support my health was going down the drain, due to the cul-de-sac of weight loss dieting and exercise as a vehicle for it. And whilst I do not claim to be an exemplar, far from it. I'd say without the level of awareness I have, I'd be palpably worse off for it.

I know other fat people (as well as others) arrived at the same point for the same reason. Depending on how your body's shaped, higher weight can make it seem more of a challenge, due to the pull weight can exert but don't let that put you off. It's possibly more rewarding for fat people to take care of their posture.

It's one defense against succumbing the burden of the 'obese' construct, which exerts a physical as well as mental toll. A lot of the things fat people are supposed to have, bad knees, hips even things like joint pain are often the cumulative effects of bad posture and mis-use, ditto for others including thin people. Consider why so many people require one hip or knee to be replaced.

Use. The way you use your body, your habitual posture, stance, gait. That goes for fitness related injury too. Usually the dominant side that goes first-i.e. if you're right/left handed. 

This is all challenging enough which aids mindfulness and patience, force is likely to cause harm or impose more strain.

It's pretty obvious that this is a big influence on the extent of back problems. Ditto those who keep getting the same injuries whilst doing sporting or other physical activities. That's usually a postural fault or a problem with the way you use your body, and/or even your mind whilst you are being active. Other times its a physical kink.

Seeking to restore, and improve posture and use is accessible for most people, regardless of physical status. It challenges and increases our awareness of our bodies, rather than shifting more locus of control to the medical machine under the guise of "personal responsibility". It reminds me a lot of the aims of HAES, which was a therapeutic desire to keep and restore function to fat people abandoned by the medical system. You have to start from a place of acknowledgement, preferably acceptance and work from there.

Above all, it's positive. It seeks to liberate rather than to constrict in preferred pathology. Even just  regularly visualizing pulling up a string coming through your spine and out the top of your head, is enough to help to begin the process of re-training the way you hold yourself.

Ye GADs

Something I did to relieve myself of a very trying eating disorder-hyperphagia nervosa (HN) or over functioning hunger/appetite mechanisms-was to (what I called) "train my nervous system down." To retrain it from hyperactive to calm.

First at rest, later in action. This was a slow process where I first trained myself to be physically and mentally calmer whilst still. The next step was to transfer as much of this learned state of calm as I could to motion.

I was amused to find out that this reference to the tension in your nervous system, has been coined; generalized anxiety disorder [GAD], since 1980 apparently! Typical of psyche professionals turning the whole world into a psyche ward.

What I saw as merely part of a condition, is named as a "disorder" in its  own right. Boo hoo.

This kind of thing is one of many reasons why 'obesity' isn't compatible with modern society's trends. It's not just that it is demanded that you prioritize other people's offense with your existence/physique, it's that you have to dry their tears over something you barely have time to take seriously.

Whilst being accused of being the ones too incontinent to stop considering every little thing an illness-remember critique of the AMA's "obesity is disease" as if we personally said it was.

We of course didn't.

Catatonia

This is one of the very bad places depression can get you to;

I follow his eyes to the figure huddled in a corner, head resting on upturned knees, a flimsy blanket covering her modest frame. A saline drip atop a metal pole is connected to her arm.“She doesn’t move from there”, the special offers.
Indeed, in our short time there, as we hover uncertainly, she appears as still as an apparition.....She refuses all food and drink in the next few days and needs intravenous hydration, which is not permitted on the psychiatry ward so she stays on our unit. .....the psychiatrist diagnoses her with catatonic depression, a condition aptly described in 1843 in which patients appear “in a state of stupor, with fixed gaze, a facial expression of frozen astonishment, muteness, and indifference.’

Here's why the body will throw everything it can in the path of something like this. Put it crudely, would it be better to gain 100lbs or end up suspended in the grip of this deathlike de-animated catatonia? That's a rhetorical question. I'm not seeking your imagined preference. I'm getting you to think more in line with your body's instincts and what kind of state it might go all out to stop you reaching.

We're so used to "depression" in the form of a relatively trivial misery that goes with a bit of exercise and self management. The sense of urgency the body might feel about it is lost. Ironic given the supposedly progressive touting of the importance of mental health.

Weight gain=disease process ignores the body's defence mechanisms against mental illness and just what the body might be defending you against. And how well they work-overall. The 'obesity' construct further trivializes mental health by using the destruction of mental health as "motivation" for its neuroses as treatment cure-anorexia and exercise bulimia.

Weight gain can be a defence against sinking into depression, like a life jacket trying to keep you afloat. Stop you from drowning, but obviously, not able to get you out of the water-that's the job of your conscious mind-including and up to enlisting the help of others. Bear in mind that weight is often a layered process. People are on a spectrum of weight, lowest to highest and in between. Weight gain can and often happens on top of/in addition to that.

It can be hard to grasp just how serious a potential threat depression is to your life.  Suicide is obvious, but if you've been depressed, felt miserable as anything for long periods, without feeling that, it may be hard to grasp the feverish activity of your nervous system trying to prevent a slide.

The closest I've ever been to this state was some temporary catatonia when I was trying to prevent myself from eating-this is the absolute truth! Long story short, I ended up with my arms up in the air in a claw-like pose. They'd risen on their own as my muscles got tighter and tighter on their own.

In slow-mo, I became aware of not being able to remember what I was not supposed to be doing, only that I had to keep resisting. I was paralyzed and couldn't move; not a metaphor, I genuinely could not move. I hung there for a while mesmerized by the way my conscious mind's ability to function ran out of any nerves to operate in. Taken over as my brain capacity was, by this rigidity.

So when people tell me, not ask, tell, that I tried minimal calorie restriction for five minutes then threw in the towel, you can imagine why I can lack a certain patience with them. It's also why I tell those who think they've barely bothered with dieting. Don't worry about that, people like me have. You were just more in tune with your body's own wisdom than I. Pat yourself on the back.

To but it bluntly, I was an idiot about dietary restriction. Even after this episode, do you think it occurred to me for one nano-second that this might be the last straw? I'm actually laughing as I type that.

How did this end? Well, after hanging there for what seemed a long time, with no signs of it abating. And, being unnerved by not being able to call to mind, yet knowing what I was not supposed to be doing- I decided to let it go........my arms flopped straight down to my sides.

Perfectionism

Aim for the moon and you get to the stars. Perfectionism is when you're disappointed with those twinklers because, they're not the moon!!

The belief that perfection is a real possibility rather than something to aim for, is a hard task master. It means the likelihood of spending most of your life in a state of ever burgeoning disatisfaction. Until you crash in some way. You probably will.

Unless you think you're perfect, then you'll just be a pain to everyone else.

Perfectionism is the underpinning to many mental health crises, neuroses mainly. It often becomes depressing, as it is exhausting to the nervous system. Many people in this state of mind feel they have low self esteem. Not necessarily.

Our default is self esteem, we tend to notice if that's being undermined, by falling short of impossible standards.

Necessity Equals Anatomy

The notion that eating is a purely elective act of thought. Like deciding on the colour of your walls, picking out a pair of shoes or deciding whether you hoik your pinkie up in the air when you drink from a dinky cup-or not, is inherently bogus. I'll say it for the eleventy hundred time: Eating is vital bodily function. 

It is required for existence. That this needs to be said, that this can even seem like it's up for any debate sounds the cuckoo 'obesity' cult is as much a cover for worship of anorexia as anything else. [Well, would you openly admit that you feel that way?]

In this climate, this fact is willfully misunderstood. It's not supposed to be defensive. Its merely pointing out that vital functions have to be a part of you:

VITAL FUNCTIONS MUST HAVE ANATOMY

 

Conflations of fatness with; smoking, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, are unworthy of response. Alas fat phobia and the privileging of it requires me to patronize you with the obvious, none of these are required for existence. Therefore, they have no anatomy dedicated only to signalling the need for and satisfaction of said habits. The unnecessary can only adapt what is there for other purposes, or "hi-jack" parts-as some have liked to claim about what needs to jack nothing to exist.

First these habits have to be acquired by use, then signalling occurs only through things put there for other purposes.

It's a tribute to the disembodying and dehumanizing effects of the 'obesity' branding that it numbs minds into overlooking fat bodies are people. Though the human body like others is essentially a biochemical melange. We do not normally see ourselves in those terms substances. Our minds would usually balk at comparing people with cigarettes or bottles of scotch.

The ramifications of necessity = anatomy carry on. Suppression of the urge, instinct or signally of necessary function, will create pathology at some point. Especially mindless suppression of  for example, the sexual urge, tends to produce sexual and/or psycho-pathology, ditto sexuality, of movement, of breathing and of eating.

This is not necessarily to do with sexuality or even the desire to vary the amount, frequency and/or strength of signalling. But suppression without thought to how the nervous system functions.  Vital signalling for things like eating, sleeping etc., act rhythmically, in some kind of harmony with each other. Arrhythmia in one tends to have a knock on effect and spread to another or others. It depends on your overall make up.

A lot of people don't realize the supposed flexibility in (genuinely) addictive substances, is in their lack of necessity. The hope that addiction craving will abate and/or cease if the substance is no longer taken, is not based on willpower, but the absence of any intrinsic anatomical basis for said substance. The "willpower" is in getting to that point. If you're body recovers. It's essentially depriving the body of the causal agent, in the hope that it can heal itself.

And note, even that is hardly foolproof. How much less something that has no potential end like hunger/appetite signalling? 

Suppressing the urge to eat whether that's deemed 'over' or not, isn't the same prospect. It requires different and more subtle techniques that basically aim to restore balance, rather than end anything. You could not end that, without ending a part of yourself.

Never Run, not Running

There's a fat hating riposte to, "Fat runs in his/her family". It goes along the lines of. "The trouble is, nobody in his/her family runs!!!" Tee hee, hee, pfft.

Ever noticed with the "fight or flight" response- little is said about the fight part? What would that look like? If flight's job is to run off, and presumably get help, it makes sense that fight's job would be to look imposing. From a distance.... look, immovable, difficult to get past, to put off any potentially liberty takers. You're following my drift.

It's not about pugilistic ability per se, more the psychological impact, weaken the mindset of the opposition. 

Whilst the runners go off and get re-enforcements. The 'fighters' have to put the enemy off, absorb some blows, keep guard, above all, they must survive.

And not run.........away.

So, perhaps the eternally bad jokers have a notion after all. Because I say this to you, fat people have not run away. From culpability, blame or responsibility.

Ever.

Seeing weight as within one's personal ability to change is the hook for everyone. Whether thin anorexics or fat people. Though I never thought about it 'til relatively recently, that was the initial attraction for me. That I as a mere kid had the power to impose my will on events, to demonstrate I was capable of using agency to achieve. Instead of standing around uselessly, having to get instruction from adults, or so it felt at the time. 

That's at the heart of why many fatz and others continue to assert-my fault, that's the lever of control. If it isn't, what's to be done?

Fat people have always stepped up. Been out in the open with no shield or even a means to explain ourselves in ways that would fend off bullies. No fat person has ever personally told me, "It's my glands". We've spoken together about our trials, our fails. Our, what am I like with my falling off my diet or whatever. But never, it's a disease. It's an addiction.

And frankly, I've yet to here anyone ask for it. That was assumed because that's the kind of protection others demand. What people want is the "secret" to making what we were told work. The angle, the missing piece.......

Not a dodge. Not a gazebo made of dung to lounge in.

That's what those more favour by the establishment go in for. As an assertion of their ability to talk the most abject bollocks in plain sight and be supported by their puppet masters.

Well let 'em. Because all its brought them is jumping on fat people's backs, trying to drag us down. That's all their glory has brought them.

When any of us challenge the notion of fault in any way. We speak from the position of wholeheartedly asserting that it was our fault, over decades. We're way past having the right to say that without suspicion being cast by others from their citadels of the very thing they criticize in us.

We shown we aren't challenging that out of vanity or hubris, but out of the knowledge of our experience. If we can't meaningfully say this, I don't know who can really.

If it was "our fault" we'd be slim. Few tried harder than us with so very little.

As it is, I wouldn't really care if it was my fault. That's important to haters and they can rave on with their non arguments.

But I have to honour fat people because this is our lives and they, we matter.

We have always said; "Mea Culpa" "Mea Maxima Culpa". No one else. Not mater, pater, no one but us. We even felt guilty at the mere possibility of involving anyone else in our dieting ablutions and served our time in reluctant isolation, often in the midst of company.

That a reputation for the opposite has been imposed on us, is just another example of the way we've been used to project the deficiencies of other people's contrasting approach to their own issues.

Let's wait to see how long it takes for that penny to drop.

Phantom Wh"y"

Virtually all fat haters make this error at some point. Their minds add a phantom "y" to the end of "health" in the phrase "health at every size" or HAES. Changing it to "healthy" often "at every size". Which of course would not be HAES. 

Then they pull out the pin and go off into a sneering fury. Despite being wrong.

No change there.

This additional letter tells us a lot about the only way most people can manage to perceive fat people. As a figment of their imagination, to use as they please. The wish to cast us as wanting to believe we are 'healthy'. When that is clearly them. Most fat people believed it when we were told fatness was bad. For a long while.

Their denial, which is all too human, is then projected onto us, so these folks can tell themselves off by telling us off. This kind of self rejection, shame about one's true feelings, along side a self regard that insists no suffering, even if that ends up creating suffering. Like an excess of safety rules that starts to make things unsafe.

It is typical of the pattern of fat hate. Too much love of self and too little self acceptance at the same time. 

The not bothering to find out what we actually think is self defence. This can only disappoint. A bit like kids who don't want to find out Santa Claus doesn't really exist.

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;

Don't get pleasure when performing the behaviors or rituals, but get brief relief from the anxiety the thoughts cause

Eating 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.

Outmanoeuvring Depression

I was amused to re-read a report of a study which found no difference in outcome between those depressed people who exercised and those who did not. Why (wryly) amusing?

That exercise is effective treatment for relieving depression has become a recent shibboleth. And it's proponents will not take this lying down.

When it comes to neuroses in particular and mental illness in general, many things recommended have not been conclusively established as particularly efficacious.

Something to do with the psychosomatic or placebo effect of intervention. Subjectivity is usually king and has been allowed to bleed senselessly (or been used) to establish an efficacy not borne out in the cold light of day.

So, if people say repeatedly banging their heads against a brick wall, makes them feel better then that is often taken as evidence of positive potency. Well, you can't argue with people insisting it is valuable, because it helped them, can you? Too often, personal advocacy borne of desperation, helps shield methods from rigourous scrutiny.

The amusing thing is how this got started. Exercise is not a particularly promising way of treating depression. One of the latter's most notorious symptoms is a compromise or even loss of one's instinct and desire to move.

This is not, as is easy to assume, because one has become lazy due a nervous system set on standby. It's more down the exhaustion of a permanently overwrought, therefore overworked system. Heavy emotions such as panic, anxiety, fear, trauma, loss, grief and so on tax your central nervous system especially, meaning less available energy.

It is a shock to learn the very thing you think you think is the problem, doing too little is actually the product of nervous overload. And that what you need to do is make your mere existence less like hard work and more like neutral.


Whether it's specific; bringing resolution to as many unresolved traumas and dramas of the past as you can manage. And/or general i.e. re-training our normal state to one which is less nerve wracked. Learning to get less het up about things.

Releasing more energy from your stores isn't without meaning. This is probably along the lines of craving calorie dense foods (appetite) or increased energy demand (hunger) when one's mood is lowered.

Energy is clearly a central fact of your body's attempts to keep your head above water. 

There is a possibility that for some, mindless repetitive motion revives not just your instincts to move, but some aspect of your nervous function. It can help to dispel nervous energy that may otherwise be part of tiring out your system. Moving can mean a break from endless negative cycles of thought.

It should be tested more. Not just exercise. For all we know, simple physical movements may involve parts of the brain in ways that break up negative cycles of thought. 

Trouble is, for many, by the time you are depressed, your body, i.e. your muscles, bones even have already collected so much stress which only at that point translates into depression. If you have this response, it can make exercising deeply unpleasant, if not shattering experience.

It's possible that if it were viewed more objectively, exercise or physical movements could assist in diagnosis as well treatment even. If exercise/movement feels alright or good, it could be a different, less entrenched depression.  This could be down to more recent or current thinking/circumstances.

If exercise is more like an invasive assault, it could that your depression is more long term and more to do with having to be out of touch with your feelings over a longer period.

I'm speculating. My point is we'd do well to examine this in terms of movement, rather than the fitness mindset which clouds the issue.

It would be interesting to test aerobic type against healing based movement regimes such as yoga, tai chi, walking meditation and so forth. I daresay the latter might have a better effect on those who have to use their bodies a lot, i.e. low socio economic groups. The favouring of aerobic type motion speaks to the more office based.

That may even be what's making some of them down in the mouth.

I also have my suspicions about the instigator of this enthusiasm for exercise;

Melanie Chalder, of the University of Bristol's School of Social and Community Medicine, said: "Numerous studies have reported the positive effects of physical activity for people suffering with depression but our intervention was not an effective strategy for reducing symptoms. "However, it is important to note that increased physical activity is beneficial for people with other medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease and, of course, these conditions can affect people with depression."

Well, there you are. It's one thing to be depressed. It's quite another to lose status. Which would be depressing in itself, right?

Using Negativity

It's getting increasingly hard to ignore the fact that people cultivate negativity to use it to achieve their ends. Can we just lance that boil by saying this?

Good.

Because hiding behind the insistence that this is wholly enforced by the media/patriarchy etc., will no longer do as a convenient fiction.

It was okay as long as we all professed self loathing. But when some outrageously decided nuts to that. An unexpected backlash was unleashed.

"That's unfeminine". "Women must hate ourselves to be authentic, real, genuine". "It's not possible for a woman to like herself." "You'll totally fail". "It's an insult not to respect my self loathing, by not mentioning anything about appreciating ones body". Then there's, stating the intent to move in that direction means you are; a) boasting that you've achieved it perfectly.  And b) are now a hypocrite, as you are not matching my ideas of what self love is.
 
Even though I've said no woman possibly could.

And perhaps least favourite of all; "It's easy for you to like your body." Really? I hadn't noticed. But I am glad.

There's just no way this is for real.

Clearly folks have been taken by surprise by fat people's complete exhaustion with a self annihilating, self erasing, self disdain.

Being brought up to believe fat is bad means that it is something you don't have to make your mind up about. It just is. It's a rock. A comfort. Security. When that is challenged, everything changes. You become aware there's a choice. That is upsetting.  It feels like being unmasked. It was agreed, we have no choice. A sure sign of feeling ashamed of one's decision.

Not surprisingly, as doing yourself down goes against your survival code. Perhaps even your sense of personal honour to always keep the faith with yourself even if all doubt you. There's an expectation that you'll be a friend  to yourself, always. 

But if negativity is what you want, why not come to terms with that? Rather than adding shame to the mix?

Nothing to confess

There's one requisite for a confession, doubt that you are guilty.  When there's none. When you're body is "guilty" you cannot. You have no room.

Until fat people are allowed to be people again. Our confessions, however real and heartfelt will continue to be devalued. They'll offer no catharsis, no relief, or no direction.

It is the beginning middle and end narrative of a confession. The denial, the struggle, the acceptance and the bearing witness that gives one an idea of where to go next.

Without that, it's just a damaging compulsion to repeat, repeat, repeat..............

Seeking, a result it cannot provide. Knowing there's something missing, but not knowing quite what.

Yoga

I do not consider myself to be an expert in yoga, far from it, but my ears always prick up when people dislike yoga intensely. It seems to be about the way it makes them feel. I understand. Watch makes me wonder is whether that's so much the asanas or that they bring the feelings we store in our bodies rudely back to our awareness.

A bit like the mental experience of revisiting the sight of a bad experience. It's not necessarily the place in itself, but how you feel about what happened there and the fact that it evokes those memories.

You'd want to stay away right. Perhaps though if you're with someone who you really like. One of those who can get you to shift your mood or attention. Then maybe, you could work through those feelings due to the introduction of different more positive feelings. Greater remove, analysis. Even just being more relaxed whilst feeling those feelings.

The dissipation of enough tension can at times do wonders.

For me, yoga is as much about principle.  

The use of breath. 

Breathing to release tension, relax and in motion. Breathing to release imagination, using that to increase the flow of energy.

The hardest thing for me is that moment when you are so stiff that you feel unsafe. Like some muscle or other's going to go pop or break! I've been known to give up. Especially when time after time, nothing changes. But if I prepare enough and am lucky, I've sometimes experienced the yielding that comes when the body lets go, with such elegance.

Like a flower opening.

There is no feeling quite like it. 

And guess what? It's made me just a little bit braver.

Healthism creates saints and sinners

It was interesting to read Shannon's take on on the supposed good/bad fattie dichotomy. It provoked several different responses in me. The basis of good fatt(y)ism to me is healthism. The belief that eating what is defined healthy foods, and taking part in healthy activity;exercise = healthiness or the creation of health.

Healthism's mentality is reminiscent of a deeply human feeling, that if you ascribe certain values to things, (including people, i.e. cannibalism) and ingest them, you will become imbued with those same qualities.

e.g. if you eat healthy/ good food, you become a healthy/good person.

This idea has no weight limit. It's become a dominant code in society and virtually everyone pays some tribute to it. Therefore it's understandable, that some fat people within fat acceptance are healtists. This is perhaps a slightly more problematic ideal than for healthists who are of an acceptable weight. Fatness has become such a sign of intrinsic unhealthiness that being fat and living healthy forces you to challenge one of those beliefs fundamentally. It's hard to see how you can believe healthy food can transmit health, if you believe fatness is unhealth. 

It's difficult to accept a fat person can be following healthist dictates.

For a lot of fat healthists, this has meant that they altered their belief that fat is intrinsically unhealthy. So in that sense it has positively contributed to fat acceptance, like it or not. But they have maintained the belief that healthy living =health and this can mean the potential to be a bit judgey.

It isn't only them. We've all been conditioned to accept this view of health and weight, so even those who are not, or do not see themselves as living this way, take it as the measure of being healthy. They cast themselves as bad if they're not living accordingly-rather than question that premise- this view is also prevalent in and out of FA.

Unless you see healthism as unimpeachably correct. Unless you agree it is right, you cannot see yourself crudely as a bad fattie. If you respect your own needs and fulfilling them may not make you nutritionists pet, then you won't feel bad about those who are candidates.

Your feeling bad about what you do or don't eat, or what you do or don't do, is itself based on healthist dogma. You are just seeing yourself in the part of the sinner, not the saint. And are looking somewhat enviously at the latter. You could be a sceptic, you could choose to acknowledge that healthy lifestyle is not necessarily definitively validated by evidence. It's often a bit of a guess.

An investment in the hope that if we can just 'control' what we eat, we will control our health. Control. It's similar to what fuels eating disorders, if I can just control what I eat. I can cope with the vicissitudes of life.

Some may feel that's a tainted comparison, but it isn't. Those who develop neuroses have more in common with those who don't than they may like to imagine.