Sunday 7 June 2009

Feederism is dieting

The thing about calorie manipulation is the focus is on its use in reducing weight, so its often forget that it works both ways as they say. I don't even think this is news, people who overfeed or starve are not necessarily in opposition to each other, really. They're more like two halves of a whole principle.

That monitoring calories is some kind of life enriching experience and modus vivendi.

The one creates the other, surfeit causes need for deficit to restore balance and vice versa. Both advocates for indulging in wilful excess and wilful paucity seek to split one from the other as if unrelated.

This relationship is why fat acceptance is often described carelessly as advocating for mindless excess by those who advocate for mindless scarcity. As they don't get out of their heads, much if at all and see it as their role to tell fat people everything, as that is what they understand, that is what they presume. They don't get FA.

Obesity wallahs and those who sell slimming see it as the opposite of their dieting cult, as that's how they define being fat. When in fact, fat acceptance is separate from using weight as a signifier and regulator of self esteem.

Unlike any of the above, including feeders.

It is called "acceptance" not, acceptance when I've lost/gained x amount, thereby being kept mostly in a state of increasingly heightening anxiety waiting to be allowed to feel okay about yourself and for that often to become a problem in itself.

Waiting to really exist, after experiencing that with dieting, who needs that? I've certainly more than had my fill.

The more respectable end of "overeating" deliberately eating in excess of your body's needs are those who are or consider themselves "underweight" and wish to increase it to a higher level. They often complain too of being failed by the energy route.

Though the frequent refrain of all the help is for fat people is not charming.

When a person especially one who is already fat or seeks to become so, they are indulging "feederism".The purpose of this is to gain pleasure from eating and gaining weight, exactly the mirror image of those who gain pleasure from under eating-eating less than your body demands.

It is categorized as a sexual fetish, by those who define it official and those who participate, but I suspect there may be some confusion about the difference between enjoyment pleasure and sexual pleasure.

Sometimes the latter is about context, I find it hard to see how one can get sexually overexcited about eating as I would think it could get perilous.

It has other flaws of calorie restriction, pushing yourself  to eat outside your requirements can disrupt your body's ability to regulate itself, sometimes permanently. I should think it can be hard emotionally too, indeed, there is a role in all this of "encourager" suggesting it requires a lot of effort to keep overriding your needs.

One thing it does have going for it in comparison is it doesn't restrict calories, which is the essence of what the body is defending when it sees off slimming attempts. Because of that, it doesn't invoke that extent of taxing response and is on the whole, not as harmful as anorexia in the short to medium term, though I'm sure it varies according to people's innate susceptibilities.

Its not unusual for feeders to flit from there to slimming and back again, I suppose its like feast after famine of dieting, but less fraught.Some like the sense of control and of changing one's weight, in a similar way to those who enjoy it the other way around. 

They get a good feeling from doing something they're good at the way weight loss dieters can.

I have to be honest, I dislike the idea of feederism intensely. As someone who had a compulsive eating disorder, I don't appreciate an imitation of it being turned into someone's of punked out fetish. Nor do I like the idea that someone with similar problems to the ones I had would be exploited by creepy people getting off on diverting it into control over them.

I know that some feeders feel fat acceptance is about worshipping fatness, for me it isn't, it's about the power of being connected and respectful of yourself and your body and its needs either way.

I don't feel feederism achieves this, where it isn't sinister it tries too hard, making people inadequate as they are.

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