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";

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.

Serious

Someone spoke about fat people needing to be taken seriously, presumably by some counsel of slimness where all seriousness resides to be doled out to those who are granted this favour. Slim people possess it as a given of course. Whatever they say, can be dismissed, but not specifically because they're slim. That includes physical diagnosis, psychological evaluation of fat people-on sight.

That's a distinction between fat and slimmer people. Fat people take others seriously, more seriously than they take themselves. It's part of the mystery as to why we simply do not laugh our arses off at slim people, like they apparently do us. There are things slim people say about weight or fatness that I know objectively speaking are really stupid or plain hilarious. I mean, imagine seeing a fat person as a mountain of junk food and slim people as bodies made from "healthy" food?

Yet no one's really laughing. It's odd, like there's a huge chasm of emptiness where funny should be. Without perhaps knowing it consciously, the person was referencing this underlying credibility, and that people cannot be taken seriously without it. And fat people don't have it.  She felt this was the responsibility/fault of fat people. That we need to somehow correct it by making supplicant representations to slim people. [Yes, this is an example of real stupid/ funny, but somehow not.]

To an extent, this kudos seems something others agree to of their own volition.They back up your sense of taking yourself as read, they complete the circle. There's no reason fat people should take slim people any more seriously, we just do. I dunno, 'cos of the humanatee. There's also a lack of directly and strenuously undermining it, by defining a person as disease and therefore, everything they say as the voice of that.

This doesn't mean everything backed up by this credibility is taken as read though. One of the more glaring faults of the fat people are disease declaration, was the clear assumption that this would be welcomed by fat people. After all, it seemed to be by say alcoholics, drug addicts, people with eating disorders etc., Like it or not, society wishes to cast fat people in these modes, addict, substance abuser, neurotic, heretic etc.,

Fat people of course can be some or all of those things, but that's not their fatness.

I don't think many of us take this seriously or are indifferent. It was assumed we would because slimz seem to cleave to it which has given it a credibility which would be thought to enhance fat people, hence telling us it will remove stigma.That was the argument favoured by alcoholics when they wished to use disease to characterise their condition. 

Of course, what would remove a lot of stigma from fat people is to unemotionally tell the truth about metabolism and weight regulation as  given. Given the establishment is still resisting that, it cannot pretend-that was supposed to be a sop to sell it to fatz. We're thought to be so uniformly desperate that we'd cling to this life raft. 

Yes, there are fat people who will take to this. It's the learned default to believe anything slim people do is automatically imbued with the halo of slimness and in some way, better than it is.

Truth is, the idea of going around battling food addiction and the disease of 'obesity' is plain silly. It doesn't even feel right and feels like a lie. Moreso than when slimz do this because at least for them, it's heartfelt and often their idea. They look just as fake and stupid of course, but their earnestness about it, and our regard for them wins through. It's what they want. So, silence. It would feel a bit invasive to comment on how others see their condition.

Once you start applying those labels to the less than enthusiastic and worst still, critical. What advances on that silence can start to break down, when its finally subject to real critique. It's okay to voice these feelings, because this nonsense is now being applied to you.

The Scent of Cray Cray

What are the triggers of fat people's self-acceptance? Science, reason, logic? Clearly diet's don't work, self hatred is pointless (it only means you'll hit a point where you have to go into reverse) and punitive etc.,

Is it being loved and supported by family, friends, a significant other? Discovering that you are desired by potential lovers? Feminist analysis of how the position of women takes a toll on how they perceive their own bodies. Humanism and so forth?

All these. 

The other could be catching the scent of cray cray. Or, fat phobia is actually unhinged.

Now, this terminology may be upsetting for some people.

We make basic errors of reasoning all the time. One of them has been to identify craziness as purely in the symptoms of mental disorder. This I think is an error. "Craziness", biochemical imbalance in the brain and/or nervous system, produces certain symptoms; mania, hallucinations, incoherent addled thinking, mood disorder, delusions-not being able to tell reality from fantasy.

It is not the only possible creator of many if not all of those symptoms though. That's may also be why sane people are called crazy, rather simply using mental illness as an insult.

Wrong thinking, that is uninterrupted and continues on and on. Ideas that should be rejected by our basic critical faculties, but are instead accepted and extrapolated from can if persisted with produce symptoms more usually associated with underlying imbalance. Even if you have none.

Hence terms like "wing-nut" for those who's political or religious views are an implosion of any discernible kind of rationalism.

Now, the habit of calling the sane on their crazy has been deemed stigmatizing those with mental or intellectual disorders. I've no pressing desire to revive calling sane people this 'c' word on the basis of them being genuinely batso in some specific area or areas. It must be said though that this assumption is incorrect.

It also must take some responsibility for the recent and swift conflation of criminal mass killings for instance as the product of mental illness. Indeed, it has almost made evil and madness interchangeable. I've always felt this was the beginning of a lot of modern stigma against the mentally ill. Along with other things that aren't mentioned.

The madness of sane people can be worse than that of those who's symptoms are from an underlying biochemical imbalance. Their sanity makes them more able to act on their deranged thoughts more effectively. They are less likely to be stopped by intervention of others as the disabling effects of internal imbalance tend to derail someone who's mind is not functioning properly. There may well be a lack of intent too.

There is of course overlap. Wrong thinking of all kinds, often brains scrambled by trauma can add to momentum dragging someone toward mental crisis and be reflective of it.

But there's no doubt, that we can all become unbalanced by pursuing lines of irrationality way beyond all reason and there needs to be a way to acknowledge this. Reserving this only for those who are unwell, further others their experience.

I've learned more about mad logic from those advancing the 'obesity' construct than I ever have from someone who's mind isn't working properly.

For years, like many, I accepted what I was told about being fat. About that being my direct deliberate choice, despite knowing it wasn't. I accepted what and who that made me, despite their being little evidence that it was, I thought it must be.  I acted on that. I harmed myself in different ways. Yet never did it occur to me to question it, I saved that for looking at others, I didn't think of them in the way I thought of myself.

Only when I finally got a real sniff of the sheer unhinged nature of what investing in the construct of 'obesity' does to people's minds, did I come to my senses somewhat. You know the scent I'm talking about?

Ever been near a really volatile person who's holding it all in? Your animal senses feel they kick off at any moment. Have you smelt that edge? That's the smell I'm talking about. The feeling that if this takes off, it won't be easily stopped and take down much in its path.

When perfectly decent people started to saying, yes, fat people deserved to die because they were fat. That was the final awakening for me, that's when I had to face the fact that no, this wasn't right after all.........

Because it doesn't work and we all know it

I couldn't help but be amused by the latest weight watchers ad campaign running over here in the UK. The tagline is; "Because it works", puh-leazzzze.

I don't know what planet the slimming industry is on, if they think they can pull that trick again. Of just asserting that dieting does work, when it has clearly failed and millions of people are learning to recognize that.

They no longer have the medical card to pull, or do they? The profession has sold its patients out on the pretence that they're the experts on weight loss. Surely they can only get away with saving the weight diet industry once?

This is effort is partly a tribute to fat acceptance, but it's mostly tribute to the good sense of fat people who've finally woken up to a dud. I don't doubt that it helps that we're surrounded by people who feel its acceptable to take pills to turn their smiles into frowns. Sorry, but if you rely on sunshine or calm out of a bottle, you can hardly tell people to struggle with a primary element of their life force as if that would be less unfeasible.

Though weight watchers has long since relegated its fatter clients to the background, featuring chubbies. Five minute fatties who are basically slim but temporarily expanded due to child birth, grief, depression and other things people expect to get stuff from their doctor for. It can only get away with so much with them too. Despite the fact that obviously they know what is like to be slim, so, know what they're losing/have lost.

Like all slimming lore, it requires fat people to be under the cosh to motivate, read scare others, tragic sad, hunted and haunted, aspiring to anorexia in order to keep the fat phobic engined chuntering on.

I don't believe it is necessary for fat people to hate themselves to keep dieting going. But its certainly felt that the nature of dieting makes it incompatible with self love and kindness towards oneself.  It also help dieters who's too often bitter self denial and reproach finds relief in beating up on fat people.

Fat people are increasingly refusing to go along with this, messes up this equation.

So, keep pretending people can't see their hard won semi-starvation induced weight loss snap back in their faces in a half or a third of the time it took to grind out that loss. And we'll keep questioning why there's nothing better for those who need or want it.

Nope, not like cancer

Apparently, people have a lot of trouble grasping why the 'obesity' construct is defunct, useless, doa. Just to recap I don't mean 'obesity' to refer to fat, fatness or fat person/people, though that is who it refers to. I mean the idea that it is disease.

Not "a disease" because that's its first fundamental flaw. It ends up defining bodies therefore people as disease. By defining humanness as slimness and fatness as a covering, it tries to pretend that all people are slim and fat people are slimz with a fat suit of disease. This doesn't work because we are whole.

You can see this through what happens when people try to lose weight. Their mythical slim bodies do not yield the foreign fat. The body reacts as a whole and when the body shrinks, it still behaves as if it is fat, whilst not being that size.

What we describe as the almost inevitable "regain" is actually the reassertion of a size that was never really lost. Only attacked and overwhelmed, only for it to strike back with a vengeance as time goes by.

Part of the legacy of the religious separation of soul-seen as the essence of self- from body means the idea that we aren't our bodies is deeply ingrained. Even secular folk claim to be "living in" their bodies, as if they are a tiny little essence that lives somewhere within the larger structure that is their body.

This melds with the fact that our mind is self reflexive-meaning it can observe itself, in action. This gives the impression of two. Imagine if your mirror image could observe you observing yourself.  

Whilst I don't seek to abolish that, we must remember than objectively speaking-we are our bodies, whether that feels right or not. We are. When someone defines us physically as disease, they define us as disease.

This is not a viable proposition. It's one that should be rejected on hearing. It isn't though and this is causing a lot of conceptual problems.

I'd say it is the basis of why fat people aren't "taken seriously". If you know anything classed as neurosis, it will eventually take over your mind. If it becomes serious enough, you will start to become as much or more the voice of it as much as you are yourself.

This is how fat people's first person testimony is viewed, there can be no distance between them ,and the disease of themselves.

In psychological terms, this kind of mess is usually only experienced by people in extreme states or out right mental illness. There's something rather schzoid about it. You are yourself but psst, some of you isn't-don't tell that part I said so!

Only those with the kudos to get people to accept ideas uncritically could get away with inserting this kind of nonsense in everyone, including the self respecting. As well as fat people themselves. That's why FA is recovery. It's when you realise how crazy this shit is. And yes I said crazy.

It's a vicious cycle being seen as the voice of the disease of you. you cannot be taken seriously, because you're disease. And no, that doesn't happen to people with cancer, though they have their own crosses to bear.

Nor is it like alcoholism or drug addiction. Neither of which are diseases either, but they're habits anyway,  not bodies.

Of course it must be said, fat people should not take most criticisms of their self acceptance seriously either. 

Speaking for himself

A too rare voice is welcome. Billi Gordon is a 500 lbs plus man, whose top weight was 970. He's a PhD in neuroscience who has compulsive overeating disorder (CED) as he might call it, or hyperphagia/polphagia nervosa (HN) as I probably would.

One of the many objectionable things about 'obesity' has been the way it attempts to formulate some kind of understanding, without the human angle. something that's unprecedented for something to do with human biology.


As has been proven again, the more you hear from fat people-of all types and states- the more fatness makes sense.

I wish him well.

Your thin or slim body is no insult to mine

See, this is the kind of thing that gets fat people into even more unnecessary trouble than we already have. In short, a Norweigan health 'n' fitness trainer-who happens to be the girlfriend of footballer-posted a selfie of her abdomen four days after giving birth. She is thin and it is flat.

What do I think?

People's bodies are not statements of meaning.

Positive objectification is still, objectification.

People's bodies are not against your own.

Nub: Bodies are not talking to your dumb arse.

If you think so, that's likely because you see weight solely in terms of calories in calories out. This means that if a body is fat, its overate. If a body is thin, its underate. The two only diverge if you're the type that cannot sustain an underlying thesis-which is-bodies = calories.

Luckily, I know this isn't true. From observation of others, even more than personal experience, though that has been instructive enough.

Therefore I know that some women's bodies appear largely unadjusted by pregnancy. This is relative of course. This woman Caroline Berg Eriksen's life is exercise and fitness. The women I've known were just living their lives, yet, their stomachs flattened themselves. Presumably, on the face of it, they're even more "lucky" than her?!

It's not unheard of for a (thin/slim) woman to double her weight in one pregnancy, yet others already fat, put on nothing or a fraction of the (previously) acceptable 21 pounds.

I personally know of a few women who left the maternity ward-after a couple of days, in the clothes they wore before they were pregnant/were showing. I know women who lost weight after having children, one quite dramatically, she used to be fat and became thin, not slim thinnnn. I've seen women beat up by pregnancy, age 10 years, look like they've had the life sucked out of them. Ended up thin of hair. Oh, that's just visuals.

It's turned inside out and out of their minds, never to really recover them. Trust me, "luck", is way more than appearance.

I've no sympathy for the whining "because I've hated myself since I was twelve". That is not the voice of those trying to reclaim their humanity. That's the voice of hustling the body hierarchy. People like that can have it.

For years, now I've watched as mostly slim to plump women have insisted on turning thin women's bodies into some kind of insult against them. Framing them grotesquely as being the cause of "eating disorders"-anorexia. Using that as a crude way at undermining the currency of thin, they themselves largely supported by desiring to be thin themselves. Happy to buy into the abuse of fat ones which they also turn into an insult that bites them on the arse if they fatten a tad too much.

I used to wonder why thinz never seem to tell them baldly to stop riding them like this. To the extent that I began to wonder if they perhaps didn't care in some way. To my astonishment, it was when fat acceptance revived on the nets, that the missing critique was dumped on us. Yes, apparently this mis-use of slim bodies came from fat people hating thinz!!! That was ironic given some many fat, myself included actually identified more with the plight of thinz and not with the women misusing them/their bodies. After all, we know how that feels even better than they do.

I realized, they're playing some kind of tag team on this. Snooze. 

Since then, fat acceptance often via "body positivity", has been lumbered with this crude attempt to undermine the false value accorded to women who are less than slim. Especially with the endless squawking about this unconvincing  "real women" meme that travels purely on the currency of the halo effect of class, race and slimness.

I will say this again fat people cannot solve slimmer people's petty positioning, hatreds and resentments. We've got enough on thanks. And if thinz aren't going to take it up with those dealing this, directly, naming and shaming exactly who's up to this, expect them to keep doing it.