"Accepting obesity"

The above turned up in search terms used to find this blog. Though I'm not particularly judgey about these terms, seeing them more as a means to get somewhere. [You should see some of the things I type in to get somewhere near a desired destination].

It just so happens that whether this was intended or not, this touched a nerve, whether the searcher intended it or not.  

I do not "accept obesity." And it is discourteous of people to use that term for fat acceptance. I reject not only the term's defunct explanation of fatness, but its impertinent assumption of bowing to authority.

The hardest thing for all of us to grasp is that the way we've come to see weight eating and food is a singular model of distinct extremism, masquerading as normal. That great conglomeration of neurosis.

'Obesity' is not how fact arranges itself. Fat acceptance is not 'obesity' acceptance because that would be the acceptance that this is a meaningful, useful and indeed viable term. It is none of those.

Obesity Related Phantom Addition/Deletion

.............speaking of that last link. Check out this part of the comment thread.

A commenter called "mikedee" [03 April 2013 2:56pm] quoted from Ally Fogg's piece;

Basic physics confirms that the weight of passengers does affect the fuel costs of flights,

But his mind read "does" as "does not".

This was spotted and a few people responded, eventually including Fogg. It was let go. But I'm sure FA aficionado's will clock this as an example of the phenomena where, under the influence of 'obesity' mal logic, people read anyone not fat hating as being in league with satanism 'obesity'.

It points to the nature of fat hating which is essentially extremist in nature, fundamentalist actually. Fundamentalists believe either you are within their narrow cult or you are with the forces of evil or whatever the name of their baddie is, in this case 'obesity'.

In this schema, 'liberals' or relaxed adherents to their view, are also seen as suspect backsliders. Fundamentalism is all or nothing.

'Obesity' is a hostile creation of what fatness is needed to be by others.  We've been lumbered with forcing what little experience we haven't repressed to oblivion into crude phrases, whether they are true for us or not. Or we're accused of lying or denial.

This ventriloquist dummy routine easily extends to whatever fat people who are no longer complying with this, must think. This happens time and again-any nuance confuses these basic and limited assumptions.

People read over what you've written, writing their opinion of what you must be saying, according to them. Rather like the surprise accusation of "promoting obesity", it's often just their own hateful bigotry flipped over. At other times it's how they'd respond to it, flipped over and assigned to you.

i.e. they hate fat people-I still find that funny-so fat people must hate slim people. They disparage fat bodies, fat people must be disparaging slim ones. They're jealous of thinner bodies than their own, so you must definitely be too. You can imagine how tiresome this can get.

They don't get that you have undergone the same processes that led them to their mental position, the complete disassociation from all things fat, internally. we've all been on the same fat hating side. There has been no mirroring, which would mean the complete disconnection from all things slim, whilst maintaining a connection with your body. 

In this case "physics" was the trigger word. As you know, fat haters have a real mastery of physics. Enough to tell you weight loss diets do work, despite scare evidence of real (long term) viability. But not enough to tell you how they could possibly fail. Or falsifiability. For the record, I'd be astounded if physics couldn't explain how diet's don't work, no one seems to have bothered.

For them, anyone who doesn't pretend dieting works is in denial of their curiously religious like version of physics. Hence "does" added a "not" after it.

{{{Happy Daze}}}

Shame as a means to Means

You may have heard Air Samoa has decided to start charging passengers by the kilo.Though it's also likely to affect those who are taller than average. Obviously part of the insidious opportunism generated by the establishment mandated 'obesity' crusade. Though it has been presented as "fair" by AS mouthpiece Chris Langton, the source is clear; 

Mr Langton also suggested that the move had helped promote health awareness in Samoa, which has one of the world's highest levels of obesity. "People generally are becoming much more weight conscious. That's a health issue in some areas,"

Hardly in the area of air travel. 

"Anyone who travels at times has felt they have been paying for half of the passenger next to them."

A more real sentiment, I think we can guess who "anyone" is. So make seats that fit your customers, but no;

Under the new model, Mr Langton described how some families with children were now paying cheaper fares. "There are no extra fees in terms of excess baggage or anything - it is just a kilo is a kilo is a kilo," he said.

Yeah that's right. People's bodies are now seen as excess baggage. Well, to be "fair", that's how 'obesity' is defined as "overweight".  The result is this coinage acts on and confuses the brains of people who come to think of fatness as in some way, detachable. So another example of money being distributed from fat to thin, on the basis of shame. Can that be defined as economic emotional blackmail?

There's an increasing whiff of organized extortion about it. All gang up to shame a certain group. Under the direction of those with influence who've contrived conditions where they can gain, without being seen as bad. Shame just became one wealth transference scheme.

Remember those innocent days when shame was supposed to be a genuine heartfelt feeling of recognizing your own failure to meet your own moral standards, especially, in front of your good peers?

When taught this by your conscientious caretakers, did you ever think it would become just a crude vehicle for your undoing by other folk as nice as you? Probably not, or I daresay you wouldn't have been able to take it that way, would you? 

That perhaps is one good thing. Maybe it's the excuse some fat people need to become positively shameless. If fat people are paying slim people for shame, they can surely dispense with it.

People generally are bigger, wider and taller than they were 50 years ago

So why not designing planes for today? What else expects to work on the standards of 50 years ago? Being gay was still illegal in the UK. Christianity was a dominant force western society, people stood for the national anthem before films in the cinema.

Apparently this kind of thing is "the concept of the future". That sounds ominous not only for fat people. If "anyone" thinks this kind of stops here other things portend differently;

The same people never march into pubs like a latter-day temperance evangelist and demand to know why the people there are drinking and whether they know they stink of Guinness and that they're destroying their liver. As I drag my own lanky frame down the street, nobody can tell whether my ectomorphic physique is a product of hours in the gym, 40 fags a day or a rampaging amphetamine habit. Only the obese must wear their unhealthy lifestyles as a cloak, and consequently only the obese reap the wrath of a cruelly judgemental minority.

Let me correct that, fat people are pre-judged, we don't wear our "lifestyles" healthy or otherwise, any more than anyone else. Which is a point to consider. That can be applied to "anyone" too, especially after softening themselves up for it through their participation in a culture of shaming fat people.

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.

Almost Anorexia

When I have in the past mentioned proto or early stage anorexia or the bitterness of failed anorexics fuelling and shaping the inexplicably aggressive and now dominant form of fat phobia. I think some may have found me a bit too aggressive. Or unsympathetic.

I'll recap the first aspect. Weight loss dieting (WLD) or it's model, calorie restriction (CR) is a supremely unnatural and unbalanced way of eating, full stop. That isn't the same as saying that a person may be better off having lost weight.

If weight could be lost the right way, it would at least in part consist of being able to a use energy more efficiently. Or what a lot of the benefits of HAES are about. Think about it, the energy your body gets from food is used to fuel the operations of your body (that includes your mind).

This means the way your body is making use of energy affects every aspect not only of your matter or body mass, but of things like your ability to think or regulate your moods.

There is effectively no real argument. There mainly appears to be one due to the presumption that being able to use energy more optimally is the same as forms of starvation or having to endure them in order to attain what would seem to represent that more efficient use-slimness.That falls down because fatness and slimness are not opposite states.

Keep your eyes on CR. That is the heart of the matter. In the past, we all presumed adipose tissue was like savings in the bank. Spend it, through exercise or less calories than you needed (CR) mais voilà; slimness.

Bad though that would still be, at least it would be TEMPORARY. Once the weight was 'spent' you could return to balance.

The flaw was the body's constant reassertion of its cycle of self regulation, spelt a big fat fail. However that wasn't accepted, instead the temporary was to become permanent. Groundhog WLD. That's really when it becomes practicing anorexia.

Again, the temporary is enough to cause a direct or domino effect, in some people. But the real cause of this is attempting to make the temporary, permanent. 

Nobody has noticed it, if you translate 'nobody' to mean many FA people and others not participating in the general delusion. Those who are haven't because FP's experience of being prescribed the practice of anorexia has been totally erased. Even the "thin/slim privileged with anorexia" routinely dismiss it.

The ideology amongst many of those active in the field-for that read anorexia and possibly bulimia-is to disconnect weight loss dieting from anorexia as that has been seen to "trivialize" the damage anorexia can do. And recently I've discovered that many thin/slim PWA feel they have to escape the overbearing assumption that AN is just about vanity and is in the control of PWA

The author of this book appears to underline what many of us have noted and that is that WLD can do so much damage that you don't even have to be a successful yo-yoer to have experienced it.

Even the mere threat of it-if that's ever present-can be enough to do a lot of psychological harm. It can even do physical harm too. So primeval is the design to resist and throw off the threat to life and limb.

A lot of you know someone who's never off a diet, yet always remains the same size as they always were or more.

This is an example of the extent of our erasure, we are 'nobody'. Even when that erasure hurts those who are deemed to be somebody.

Health Related Amnesia

It used to be understood that heart attacks are the biggest killer in western model countries full stop. Once infectious disease are vanquished by modern medicine, heart attacks are just waiting to ascend that throne.

Then came the 'obesity' crusade, along with its casting as leading player in "diseases of modern lifestyles". In reality that's the shift of survival and ageing. You can even get a sense of this in the list for developing countries. The first one after infectious conditions or caused by them is "Ischaemic heart disease". The number of deaths from diarrhea especially heartbreaking, often killing babies and young children.

Like it or not, progress in health does not necessarily go purely in a straight line. I sense some in the medical establishment are deeply disappointed with that and loathe to come to terms. Often risk shift around unpredictably alongside outright progress. We are undoubtedly better off without infectious disease, yet there's been a lot of talk about how we are unhealthier than ever, usually citing 'obesity' as the major source. 

The upshot of this distortion through hype is it keeps creating a form of amnesia as it copies a lie over truth. Like copy and paste on your computer. 

In that constructs such as 'obesity' and 'lifestyle disease' are inherently regressive in nature. 

I remember pointing out the true extent of argument made against fatness is that it's (supposedly) less healthy than being slim. This has travelled to fat="unhealthy" under the assault of framing fat and slim as opposite states. What fat people are, slim people are not, and vice versa.

This must be how anyone could have forgotten that the cardiovascular system can wear out like any other living tissue. The surprised reaction to Ancient Egyptian mummies being discovered to have plaque in their arteries? I never would have predicted it!

Wear and tear can dovetail with inborn genetic and/or epigentic susceptibilities to cause a crisis. Of course, we all hope we can seek to minimize that by the way we live. Including the way we approach life. This hope has assisted food as primary cause of arterial compromise to be oversold to the point where people have been encouraged to almost expect to be invincible through dietary means.

It reminds me of a similar erasure of reality that is in some ways deeper and that is "forgetting" that weight loss is a natural part of the process of our bodies maintaining a constant flow of energy. The idea that weight loss is calorie restriction is a contrivance of the slimming industries. They were looking to switch our connection from identifying weight loss with this aspect of our body's easeful quiet self regulation, to their often obscenely punishing route to achieving it.

Dieters were eager to go along with this, for the same reason. It was demoralizing to keep a mental link with the body's elegant ability and the WLD's dreadful inability.

Now everyone, including many fat conscious people still repeat this lie as if it's the truth. The harm this does is it enables people to be prepared to do far more torturous things to lose weight, because it provokes less dissonance with idea of weight loss as intrinsically hellish. 

With this story, the lie has not bedded down enough to be that unshakeable in the face of fact. Luckily proper science has the upper hand there.

One of the few things that have really scared me from the start of my realization about the crusade was the regression into forgetting truths for pathology generating falsehoods.

Stigma Variations

The dull brained obesity cult is slowly working out that adults openly bullying fat children, even in an atmosphere of fat hating license, dislodges the mask of self-exalting piety.

Typically for it's regressive and brutish mentality, it's has now landed on it's twisted version an underlying truth of family therapy. No wo/man, let alone child is an island. This becomes fighting fat parents. This is defined as "fighting parental obesity" but we know 'obesity' is just a euphemism for "person or people". It's a shame because family therapy seeks to (be):

• Inclusive and considerate of the needs of each member of the family and/or other key relationships (systems) in people’s lives
• Recognise and build on peoples’ strengths and relational resources
• Work in partnership ‘with’ families and others, not ‘on’ them
• Sensitive to diverse family forms and relationships, beliefs and cultures
• Enable people to talk, together or individually, often about difficult or distressing issues, in ways that respect their experiences, invite engagement and support recovery.

My emphasis (can you imagine things ever getting to that stage with fat people?) Sometimes that's what being fat is about. Walking into what people expect for themselves and each other and realizing that should be you too but somehow isn't.

This is what's deemed thin privilege. It's not that slim people get anything they don't deserve, it's that fat people are excluded and made the poor relations. Do I need to say calorie restriction has not be a successful slimming strategy? Yeah, some people can manage to become less fat-leaving aside those who become fatter-but that isn't going to stop 'obesity'. 

If people can go from fat to slim by just laying off having a competitive attitude to eating, I have to wonder if they are fat in the way many of us are. I never lost a significant amount of weight, even when my metabolism seemed to be using up a lot of energy. Are a minority like the reverse of the reduced obese, perhaps the enlarged slim? Probably. I often find caricatures are someone's story, just not the majority.

Assumptions of insufficient motivation though signal of a point blank refusal to acknowledge the efforts of most fat people has led us more or less where we are. Though picking on (fat) parents is a pretty obvious gambit, it has the potential to drift towards the unpleasant realities the crusade loves to avoid.

I caught sight of a show called The New Normal recently. In short, it's about a gay (male) couple expecting a baby through a surrogate. She usually appears with a girl in tow. This particular scene featured thanksgiving as they and some friends were about to tuck into a seasonal tofu substitute for turkey.

They all took their first bite and spat out more or less in unison. Turns out the intent was to be supportive of the little girl's foray into vegetarianism. It's just a more fancy example of the kind of supportive-all for one and one for all that has always been glaringly absent from weight loss dieting.

From the beginning, despite the health warnings, when you (weight loss) diet, you're on your own. It's nothing to sit at a table with your beloved family, gnawing hunger inside - trying to swallow the lump in your throat, along with some offensive tasting low calorie -shit whilst your family set about their communion.

It's not so much the deprivation as the isolation. Especially in plain sight of people's relaxed fulfillment of their own needs. To break bread with those you care about is one of the everyday things that binds us together, we take it for granted. Every religion has to get involved with what you eat, indeed, it's fair to say it's the other way around too, focus on food quickly becomes a system of faith.

Focusing on the parents of fat children, specifically fat parents-it could just as well be slim parents of fat children-may be fine and dandy in the sense that any distress is shared by all. Slimz would be the most ferocious resistor's of enforced WLD, hence their role as holier than thou. Whole families dieting points to the much evaded logic of whole societies dieting.

The avoidance of which has been the purpose of individualizing weight loss dieting in the first place.

To stop fat people's WLD getting in the way of those who aren't. Let's face it, if the logic of weight loss dieting had been followed, it would have stopped the advance of industrialized food and restaurant chains that have come to dominate the food environment during the crusade.

Not a co-incidence. The manufacturing base of certain countries has been dismantled/allowed to wither. Big Food as some are trying to call it-or what used to be classed as the "service sector"-was part of what stepped into that gap, often employing people from the classes that had been put out of work by said policies.

Hence the deluded insistence that fat people individually, against the environment and against societies economic imperative, and be part of a countervailing force to derail this. Whilst the majority wanted and liked this expansion! Unsurprisingly, yet another self comforting delusion that hasn't paid off given drastically controlling the environment in the way of reversing the last 30 years, is one of few examples of a different approach-to calorie restriction.

Beating up on fatz is just a displacement activity. A way to make people feel like they're doing something, when the outcome of it would be undesired. And oh, get this;

I also agree with West that we'll never conquer the obesity epidemic if we don't face some hard truths about grain subsidies and other economic (and marketing) factors that are contributing to it. Everyone should be able to afford healthy food -- and have access to safe and affordable exercise options. There are real social justice issues here, and we need a groundswell of indignation and action.

Yeah, I discounted that ages ago on the grounds that the only way for this "indignation" to build was to develop a high value on the lives of the poor and/or fat. And the primary vehicle for getting there was actually destroying that through a relentless campaign of social stigma. 

That's why I just figured, let's just get real and concentrate on the possibility of scientific advance. That way, if weight can be adjusted successfully, there's no need for unrealistic nonsense about interrupting capitalism etc.,