Tolerance

A little word on this Maria Kang incident. To sum up this non-event, Ms K decided to post a picture of herself and her three children, aged 8 months, 2 and 3 years on her f***book page topped off with the headline; "What's your excuse?"

This triggered a kerfuffle, cries of fat shaming plus defence of her. My response was indifference to the image. I was going to ignore the whole thing, buuuuut (yet again), I was exercised a bit by the response.

I must admit, fat shaming has never been my favoured way of representing the trouble with being fat. Its become the lingua franca for expressing it and that's that. Its popular as it is one of the few things the fat hating world can seem to understand (fat hating mashes the IQ) and that fat people also can grasp so makes them feel how they should but rarely feel. In charge of defining their own experience.

It doesn't convey that the real issues are about a cultural hegemony that is supported and fuelled by the influential medical establishment. Rather than simply emotive.

I'm not particularly sympathetic to those who moaned about people like this. It features something I detest and has no name, when people who would count as having disabilities, use them as a get out clause for being hated. As if it's somehow okay to hate those who do not have disability induced fatness.

People should be able to tell the truth about their situation, without implying that their disability is some kind of exemption pass. Though its not quite as bad as those who list their litany of good behaviour, it runs.

The best thing to do with people like Ms Kang is to laugh or pity them, not get on the defensive- when there are truly things to get on the defence about. Like being cast as disease. That's something everybody should be up in arms about.

The premise of "excuses" is something central to the whole 'obese' bogey. You are supposed to lose weight through dieting. That doesn't work. Because that truth is rejected, your placed the back foot if you cannot assert that. Reality being cast as "an excuse." We need to learn to stop falling into this trap, making it clear we know assertions about weight loss diets are mainly about belief.

Belief does not an argument make, as it depends not on reason, but the suspension of it.

I find this kind of mentality peculiar. It loves itself in a way that erases all faults, requiring them to be shifted onto others and expected to be borne by them. It's a kind of love I would neither wish to give nor receive. That kind I need is that which recognises faults and loves anyway. That to me is true tolerance.

A word much assailed by the type of brats who've not yet seen past their privilege, but when done properly, is a true state of grace.

You need a love that can tell you to stop being an arse when necessary and one that understands that your faults are just the other side of your strengths and that you can't really have one without the other, no matter how desirable that seems. Not one that's so disgusted, that it as to pretend they don't exist, only to see them in others. Because that's not how we are.

The kind of love represented by Kang's mentality used to just unnerve when I was locked into trying the calorie wastage game. It now repulses psychologically and physically, now I've had a chance to truly examine the cost to those who are dumped on by its incontinence. There is no separation now, I can see it all too clearly now.

I don't envy her or her kind and I'm sure she's not bothered one bit by that.

Which is okay because I'm sure my kind repels her, and that's okay by me too.

Personal Responsibility II

This idiot's obviously referring to the AMA's recent mind numbing decision, so why didn't he say that? It's just has to be the "fault" of fat people. Even though its obviously the fault of his own profession. That tangle is courtesy of the absence of criticism of fat phobia. Slim privilege doesn't like to confront itself, even when it is disgusted by itself.

Producing the weird phenomena of people who disagree defining mood disorder as disease, refusing to state that openly. Yet critiquing it all the same, by projecting it onto fat people. Weirder still, you've got people who do agree with defining mood disorders/neuroses as disease also dismantling that trope in fat people. Suggesting that they're agreement with is purely predicated on the amount of sympathy they feel for a person.

To put it in their favoured allegory, if two people broke their leg, they'd put the one they liked in plaster and tell the one they didn't to take "personal responsibility".

The suggestion here is of fatness = mental problem + eating because of said mental problem. As mental problem is supposed to equal something you can't just get rid of-its a chemical imbalance/"disease like cancer".

You get a totally different attitude to the same thing. Though fat people are supposed to have two parts, mental and its physical marker. By some magic, two are supposed to be more soluble than having just one mental part. These people have become bootstrappers. They would bitterly decry this as the ultimate in stigma.  They're forced into this ludicrous position, that goes against their grain, due to their refusal to acknowledge the truth about calorie restriction.

 I've said this so many times, it beggars belief. Well, it should.

This is all set in the refusal to study fatness and/or fat people honestly. Instead, it's forced into categories that already exist for other purposes.

It does not fit any of them. Nothing truly fits a category until properly define it on its own terms. Then you can see where it fits, overlaps or neither. Because fatness, weight doesn't fit, it ends up being a suggestion of all things and none.

A further nonsense is it's been defined as 'disease' for ages. That never came from studying fatness objectively, but from deciding it was all bad. It never bothered with underlying process, until most people were on board with it as disease and could see it only in those terms. Unlike other abuses of the word, it was used precisely to stigmatize and de normalize being fat. To suppress it, by forcing people to diet.

People compare it to things like alcoholism, but that's not a person. Ditto smoking, drug taking. Seeing bodies as excess calories, still cannot do it. Its really the absence of sustained or rigorous critique that allows that.

On the one hand, you have "obesity researchers" and medical professionals claiming people are disease, others raging against excess calories being seen as anything but conscious volition. But, instead of having it out with each other, both sides keep addressing their arguments to fat people. Not to persuade or charm, but as if we're the ones making the arguments they're objecting to, without addressing the source. This is unusual.

Parts of their arguments fall over each other. Fat is sick, but not disease- because that could slip it into the 'behavioural disease/addiction' category, which would mean the onus of doing something would go where it usually is, on those who get paid for that.  For some reason, they seem to think that's over the top.

I'm not sure there's much point in saying fat people should consider pointing this out, especially to those who apply different rules to themselves. Anyone who talks this version of "personal responsibility" should live by it.

We also ought to make clear that fatness doesn't fit any of these categories. Not disease, addiction, neurosis, mental/behavioural disorder. It is metabolic, it is lead by the body. Yes, other things can be too, no doubt, however weight is more so, we can see this by the low efficacy of calorie restriction. It just doesn't make sense that this would be so if fatness was all in the mind. 

I said earlier that looking at the mental state of fat people is an unknown quantity. Many of us have experienced changes mental and physical through letting go of the 'obese' mentality. I always felt if everyone received good life counselling, we'd increase the health of the population, manifold.

So yeah, if you pick out a randomn group of people and improve their mental health, you'll probably do that. I doubt you'll make them all routinely slim, effects may vary and may be minimal to most.

As usual, no trials have been done, that's the way to find out. That's typical assertion without foundation.

If society wants those of us who wish to divest ourselves totally of negativity it has put on us to find this out, then it will have to be open about that.

I used to criticize FA by saying if we fat people haven't told people how we feel, how will they know what we think? Equally, if fat haters want us to take "personal responsibility" i.e. beyond where they've left it. They'll have to have the guts to out their privilege and tell fat people that directly. They'll have to say, "You have to do better than this." Or how do they expect most to know?

 Not only do many of them not have the guts. They don't wish to lose that protection and they're under no pressure. Though they may drop themselves in it out of sheer stupidity. Their trap has been built by ego. Defining fat people as inherently inferior is the kicker here, it means they cannot tell us to better their standard, without that being a painful psychological blow.
 
All for keeping up worthless fantasies.

Anyone claiming fat haters personify human intellect, personal responsibility and a superior sense of consequence, should consider this.

Personal Responsibility

The aftermath of seeing the low probability diet success won't rise in the face of willpower is becoming curiouser and curiouser. It is predictable that if your crusade is predicated on a falsehood, you need to keep that going, to keep it going.

If that's busted, keeping things the same means, re-arranging the surface. So that things 'change' but remain the same. The phrase "personal responsibility" is currently being bandied around to bring to achieve this. On the face of it reasonable. We should all take responsibility for ourselves right? In this instance it has little meaning. It's purpose is to erase action in order to deny the outcome of said action. Which is undesired.

Thus re-asserting calorie restriction as dependable and up to fat people to make the necessary effort to make it work. Rather than accepting the truth that this is highly unlikely, due to the way we as humans are made. Let me repeat this is not about being fat, its how our metabolism is designed. To return weight more or less to where it started after loss.

You can see it in fat people, you can see it in thin people repeatedly losing 5 pounds over  and over again. So for now supporting and increasing well-being and health is needed. Plus more research into how to alter human metabolic function. As this isn't just about weight, it ties into dealing with actual metabolic problems. And yes that includes for some people, matters of bulk and mobility. 

Anyway, this attempted flummery is bad enough, but ironically, what makes the unknown quantity of insisting lay people do some self-experimentation awkward, is this level of responsibility is simply not the expected norm.

This is something that is consistently alluded to, not often openly. Contained in such phrasing as, "Nobody takes any responsibility anymore." Ahhh, that old chestnut. It ironically critiques the-effectively-thin privilege enabling conscious actions to be declared, disease/illness/nothing to do with me guv, when they're troublesome. i.e. They're hard to get rid of or even bad for your health.

Well, riding a motorbike can be deadly if you're unfortunate, we know this and are able to state it without calling it disease.

I repeat the weird thing is a group who've left themselves and been mostly left out of this is fat people. At the same time, we have been made to epitomise the very lack of responsibility being complained about, which is really anchored in the social kudos of slimness. And the respect for its little fee fees, up to and including taking over fatness to use to create a bogus identity of false superiority.

In the guise of health.

It's not even unusual, it's just a more obvious microcosm of what goes on whenever there are race or class structures of contrived inferiority and superiority. The two become half of the human character. The latter get the good half, the former the bad.

What tends to happen then is the "bad" becomes the route to expressing what is deemed wrong about human nature-personal or general-and vice versa. If you're a baddie and wish to express your goodness, you tend to have difficulty. If you're a goody and wish to express your badness, you tend to project it onto the baddies and deal with it in them. Often beneath your conscious awareness, which is the point, this allows you to be all good. And being all good is in its way as dehumanizing and unsustainable as being all bad, though less damaging.

The general personal responsibility set by privilege- and deemed not good enough- is being projected onto fat people and critiquing slim people and their privileging, indirectly. There's a stupid hack piece, which I wouldn't bother to read unless you wish to soil your brain, but it does display this mind-altering effect;

‘Well, what diets have you tried so far?’ asked the GP, flicking through the patient’s notes. I was an innocent trainee doctor on my general practice placement at the time and watched the interaction carefully.‘Look, I don’t want to go on a diet, I want you to prescribe me these,’ snapped the patient, bringing out a neatly folded page she had torn out of a magazine. The GP, rolling his eyes at me, took the paper but didn’t read it. This was yet another example of what’s becoming a very British epidemic: obesity being self-diagnosed as disease.

Being fat has been defined as disease by researchers and invested with medical authority. Requesting pills for every ill is de rigeur and has been embraced by medical professions. As much a product of psychiatry as anything. Defining habits of thought, mood and behaviour as disease is perfectly mainstream. Even taking fatness as behaviour, which it isn't, if asking for pills for it is degenerate, so's the rest.

Power and Status

Rather sobering article by a practising medic on a survey revealing the extent to which doctors suffer from mental illness. It seems like an emergency to me. Something requiring thoughtful action. IMHO the situation is exacerbated-if not created- by some long term structural conundrums.

It more or less comes down to this;

Our patients are defined by their illness, while we are defined by our ability to cure their malady.

"Defined" by them, the doctors of course, not by the patients themselves. And isn't it amusing that this describes 'obesity', almost to a tee, except the other way around. The illness is defined by the patient because they are "it". (As we used to say as kids playing tag.)

It's a model that came into being in the era when contagious diseases held sway. For many countries that is still the case of course but as they progress, they too will experience this shift. It's never been as suited to chronic disease, the diseases of ageing and nervous disorders that have come increasingly to the fore. Those require a different model of patient doctor interaction. That's the rub. 

There seems a desire to cling to the increasingly obsolete codes out of a sense of entitlement to the sense of power and status it brings, i.e. "defined by our ability to cure their malady."

This is helping to overwhelm the energies of the medical professions. Instead of using preventative medicine as an avenue to liberate both lay people from our abject passivity and them from being overburdened and drained by it. The docility remains but the responsibility is piling on. When there's little prospect of relief of the burden of that, despite ones efforts, burnout ensues.

Something has to give as some of us know only too well. 

The combination leads to a culture of invasive encroachment that causes as many problems as it solves for both.

We all need to adjust to this new era.The professionals must relinquish control and lay people must step up without having to be dictated to by ill conceived "wellness programs" and the like with their bullshit standard of quackery. Fat people have demonstrated this to an extraordinary extent already.

It's the methodology given to us that let us down, not our sense of responsibility which we followed through with rigourous and sustained action. Efficacy of method is a key point. Standards of scientific endeavour should not drop just because the professionals are in two minds about letting go. That kind of quackery also a sign of the contempt encouraged by the overall passive countenance of lay people and patients, before you consider us being set up even more for failure through an extensive campaign of stigma.

It's not so much that we were consciously set up by others for failure. It's more mixed feelings invoked sabotage. Such an unresolved and overwhelming desire to retain control will not go quietly unless openly addressed and explored. The pushmi-pullyu effect of dumping everything on lay people, but at the same time realizing on some level where the logic of that might lead (not so much voting for Christmas as creating it) meant there was an instinctive inhibition to commit to it. Not sure there was ever that desire, only to relieve themselves of the burden of an issue they could not resolve-and knew it.

If its up to us, then we have to be fully empowered. That means what we do has to be properly and objectively monitored, and the results properly tabulated. No weird denial of reality, because fantasy satisfies the desire for total responsibility with active dis-empowerment. That combination of even lower status than the pathetic norm, plus responsibility far beyond anyone has been a psychological disaster for not only fat people but for the medical profession's chance to graduate from their attitudinal funk. 

The whole direction of research needs to change to facilitate more self/inner directed healing. Leaving the professionals free to deal with more medically complex cases. Yes, that has potential problems. But it's certainly worth trying, this time in a rigourously and properly scientific manner. No quack BS of the "Those who spend more than 5 hours a day on a computer are 15% more likely to be obese" type. This is bollocks and of no earthly use. Even the AMA suggested in its recent repellent decision that research needs to be done, an honest judgment on the worthlessness of the millions spent producing this kind of garbage.

We need actual research into how we can link conscious thought and intent to change the functioning of our bodies, via our nervous systems i.e. our minds. We are at the early stages through using ancient techniques of meditation and more modern imprints of mindfulness-a different awareness of our (major) inner signals and rhythms. And physically through again ancient techniques that can promote the body's self healing capacities.

This shows we are in a way, coming full circle. It could be said that the magic bullet model that was perhaps the real departure, though brilliant, effective and necessary. Great though that is, contagion will always be with us in some forms, it's demands have somewhat distorted the profession and our relationship with ourselves and our bodies. We cannot afford this model in terms of our own health, gaining and sustaining widespread access and healthcare costs.

I don't care what anyone says, drugging our moods, is so not the way to regulate them. Useful though that might be, it's not a long term solution. And some of us just don't want any part of it. There needs to be more catering for that. I'm not saying that from any bullshit bootstrap mentality but from my understanding of how we function.

And when the methods are not working, that has to be properly acknowledged without any rage or violent assault through surgery. People have to become part of this experimentation process. If drugs are not to be at the heart of it. Lay people being part of this kind of large scale natural experiment in public health, can work and be effective and have genuine scientific merit.

It can become another route to advance health and science.

We all have to adapt to it though. As we see in the case of fat people, the public can. But, it doesn't matter how much effort lay people put into their health, if professionals have the power to slander people, deny reality and derail the process. If they dig their heels in, no matter how responsible and honourable you are, ultimately can bring your efforts to naught.

Weight as Opinion

Looking back and wondering, how did some weird historical phenomena get ahold? Why some and not others? The best I've come up with is the ones that took were capable of being all things to all people. They were able to absorb projections and fulfill needs unsatisfied elsewhere in their respective cultures. 

Being on the wrong side of these can be very hard work. One learns how much we rely on taking common premises/understandings for granted. It's not just not sharing terms, it not sharing frames. Then you can easily be cast into an oblivion of mutual imperceptibility.

Difficulties are often surprising and hard to read or fathom. One of the more simple ones is that we, fat to thin alike, were taught exactly the same ideas about being fat and slim. About weight, eating and dieting.

We absorb it in exactly the same way. So, imagine thin shaming being the law and all slim people not realizing there's anything untoward about that. Like, there is one consciousness that is shared regardless of weight.

The key differences came about not through fat people being on their own side and slim people being on their-which would be the same thing as the mainstream.  It came through the reality of being fat and not slim.

This is something I thought was patently obvious. Apparently no. Not only to many slim people, which at least makes some sense, but to many if not most fat people too. Ironically, due to seeing through the same frame.

What's freaky, is that so many slimz and fat hating fatz especially, behave as if this was not so at all. They act as if fat people have always put up a ferocious fight against this shared consciousness. This non-occurrence should have happened. That would have been normal.

It just didn't. 

Fat people did not behave that way at all. Suffice to say this was all underwritten by scientists who cited 'physics' so it was "truth". There was nothing to oppose, it wouldn't have occurred. Still, it's perfectly expected that one would defend one's honour, regardless, even if its to say; "We're not all bad." Or "Consider our good points." How about, "Let the punishment fit the [non] crime"?

Even psychopaths, caught in acts of real badness will sneakily make a case for the ordinary/good people, being as bad as they are. Perhaps lacking the(ir) moxie to follow through. Given recent experiences, a bit more believable than before.

This merging of fiction over fact is typical of the cavalier way with truth that characterizes this crusade. Virtually anything they assert goes unchallenged. Not because of bullying, but because of what? Brainwashing? Nope, that word doesn't work, Stockholm Syndrome? Nah. Not quite. I really don't have a word for reality that becomes false through the reality of your existence.

There are similarities, we are like the lapse ex-religious living in a theocracy. Yet, like so much about the experience of being [fat], it doesn't quite fit other descriptions. Science is not a religion. (Not yet anyway.)

The key to this, as ever, is realizing what being weight represents in this particular scenario. It represents opinion. Your opinion. Your weight, is your point of view, it's your argument. Fat (body) must therefore be versus slim. Despite the fact that it never really was. Except in mainly isolated corners. Your body is your fightback that never happened.

Porous People

Here's why men complain about fatness "feminizing" them. It can share the archetypal trait usually attributed to femaleness, porous if not non-existent boundaries;

Albert sees nothing wrong with his size. He feels no need to pin the blame on his genes or an overactive thyroid.

[The character's played by the late James Gandolfini.]

He's not going to change; why should he? It's Marianne who's got to learn that what really matters is the man inside the bloat.

That's his love interest played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who's increasingly attracted to that man inside, but increasingly irked by his bigger body. Opinion/physique, comparable right? She's a slender masseuse who therefore has a body that is actually her;

Insofar as the pair of them sort it out, it's on his terms. 

In other words he no more changes than he (presumably) asks her to. Yet that's still a loss to the whiny hater writing. "Sort it out", should mean, she gets over herself and that's a good phrase to invoke, because his fat body seems to be more malleable than the insistence on making his body an issue. Rather like a woman's often is;

He's no more going to alter his eating habits than his unlovely bedroom furniture. Fortunately..... a bigger feller can after all be "kinda sexy", so long as his perfectly proper shape isn't held against him. 

Well, the character has the tedious history of weight loss dieting. And that observations kind of obvious. If you want to enjoy someone, cultivating disgust for them isn't the best way. Not to forget another fat dis-embodiment trope-the elision of food eating and weight. The body as food and food as your body waiting to be;

While the story is unfolding, this approach seems perfectly in order. After all, we've been educated to understand that it's wrong to question the life-choices of the generously proportioned.

I think this's probably the one that renders me almost speechless. I should know better, but I'm thinking, is this really how you see totally erasing someone's body? "Questioning their life-choices?" What the hell is wrong with people? It's at times like this when I feel I just can't stand much more exposure to this kind of mindset.

This plank actually invokes comments about Keira Knightley as if that must somehow be from fat people. Though there's a long tradition of slim women using that hook to dump their own resentment about not being even slimmer on thin women.

Putting aside the presumptuous sense of ownership about someone else's body, its the invasiveness that's so creeptastic. How does someone allow themselves to get such a sense of entitlement over other people? I've spoken before about the way fat bodies are put up for nonsensical "debates" by all and sundry, pitted against the opinion that they're a problem, as if there's parity. Goodness forbid anyone should question the mechanical acquisition of desire for a body that doesn't actually exist.

People are asked to do "body maintenance", but mind maintenance for those picking up society's detritus is some kind of heavy imposition. Everything must run around their opinion, that a lot of the time is barely even theirs. Just part of an impersonal drone of a campaign that has attacked the mental health of millions, for their health. Including those who allow themselves to be its bitter tools. Yeah, why the bitterness?

The author then goes on to mention the death of JG this year at 51, using him as a 20 stone (280 lbs/125 kg) morality play for "the obese".

He did put on weight at an accelerated rate during his latter years. At the time of his death, he looked to me, not just fatter but bloated, especially around the face. We are taught to see weight as the product of indiscreet conscious acts, but it seems to me that gain and it's type and speed, may well have been signalling a body under duress.

Fat people are people, we're individuals, we have lives. Whilst I'm not interested in judging he was said to participate in habits that may well have damaged his heart. It may have been some weakness that meant an intervention would have been necessary anyway. He never had the chance to find out.

My suspicion as in other cases is that if weight was seen in a level headed and objective manner, the sense that not all gain is the same, even in one person, might be more obvious by now. An investigation may have brought an intervention that could have prolonged his life.

As it was, he was just a man who had too big a middle aged spread caused by his pasta consumption, who knows, that could have been a side issue. Hunger and appetite are functions of metabolism, not character or personality. Changes in them could well be warning signs too. But how much of that observation is being done? Fatsphere denizens have spoken much about how this strange de-materialisation of a fat person's existence renders things that could be observed, imperceptible and overlooked.

That's a genuinely valuable lesson. 

Weight loss is not Difficult

Yep, that again. There are a lot of people who like to explain why people-its slimz too-can't lose weight and have it stay lost. These people are choosing to stick with stupidity and that's a lot easier to change than weight. They won't, because they like to make the barely possible seem everyday and the absolutely nothing appear impossible.

That they could give up their figment of their imagination, their belief in calorie restriction, is an outrageous demand compared to insisting people who are not anorexic impersonate that. Against their own design.

Again, for those of you atheist types. It's like those who believe in gods. Those are a product of the human mind. So's the idea of weight regulation through maintaining calorie deficits.

Adherents of both, believe in what's in their head more than the reality of flesh and blood people. Except that's somewhat unfair on the former who believe in the two equally. They don't pretend people are non-sentient 'disease' whilst addressing the very sentience their stupidity requires them to deny.

Urgh.

Weight loss is not "difficult". It's just that we only have one way to pursue it and it's the wrong way. I dare anyone to tell me FA's are paranoid or extreme. Many of them cannot accept the obvious fact that there have been many avenues to weight loss that have gathered dust over many, many years. Weight loss dieting has been picked out. It is not 'weight loss' it's an idea of it.

Yes of course those other potential routes have hit what seemed to be dead ends.

As opposed to something that has always been a dead end that just flattered to deceive. If as much effort had been put into them as 'obesity' bullshitting, something might have yielded by now.

Weight loss would be piss easy if we had the right way/s, I'm guessing there's more than one, due to the multifarious nature of human metabolic function. You know how it is when you have the correct technique, it just feels right? Like that.

Objectively speaking, dieting feels all wrong, because it is all wrong. There is nothing to be said for it. Except possibly that an honest study of why it fails would yield an understanding of something central to our function.

Slim people are slim without running marathon's and starving themselves. Apparently, some deign to be upset that their mere existence isn't evidence of their superior ubermenschen discipline. Let me give those slimz a tip. That's a sure sign of needing to return to your birthright, which is to believe you are wholly worthwhile, merely because you exist. No other reason. That's where its at, for all of us.

Sadly, we become detached from our innate assumption of self worth, all of us, in the process of learning how to exist on this earthly plane. We learnt to 'motivate' ourselves by behaving as if we're incomplete, unless we achieve this thing that will complete us (familiar?) Dieting takes this too far, there's just no function to squeeze out of the motivating incompleteness of being fat. If we can use this weight farrago as an excuse to see if we can right this misstep, we can really stick it to those who are just so sure we will always miss the greatest prizes, settling instead for competing hatred of each other.