Friday 15 February 2013

This is reality

Perhaps my mind is just being belligerently twisty, because I still find the idea of fatness or my weight "impacting on my health" profoundly ill conceived and uninvolving.

Now before anyone gets any funny ideas. I am not an essentialist when it comes to weight. Whether you're speaking of fat to thin, some people would struggle to be anything but the weight they are, fatter or thinner. The main body of people probably fall in between.

Nor do I identify as fat. I see myself as a human like any other, which means the 'obesity' construct cramps my style and I'm going to keep saying that. And keep using every possible opportunity not to play down to it. 

It's entirely possible that if I'd grown up in radically different atmosphere I might not have either been fat, or been fat at such an early age. Who cares? That is not my life this is. My body is this actual real version, not a mythological, theoretical one.

My body is fat, it cannot be attacking some not existing version of itself. It cannot be disease unto itself. Pathogens can attack our systems internally, cancer is a cluster of rogue cells, needing a joint replacement comes from disease or wear and tear which attacking the integrity of the joint. Even the dubious, my neurosis is an illness bull pucky, works in a way "my body as disease" just doesn't. It cannot fit any cogent disease model.

Fatness can only be a symptom of something underlying in the context of me.

If my health takes a turn because of a metabolic issue like diabetes, then that is down to how said function is working. That cannot define those who weigh the same as I do any more than being part of  the highest suicide rate group means all have a higher suicide rate. My body as disease, my character as the pathogen or causal factor, doesn't scan. Not as science anyway.

There is a different balance of reaction between internal and external factors. Some people always know something about themselves, even though it is no where openly at least, in the environment around them.

Others do not know that same thing about themselves and are happily ignorant until they encounter it openly, outside themselves. Then they can never again not know. Like non dominant forms of sexuality.

If it was the case that we totally know ourselves regardless of whether anyone else backs it up or not, then it would have been impossible for fat people to doubt our own experience of calorie restriction fail.

It would have been impossible to ever assert anything different. And that would have made the delusion of fat haters hard to establish, let alone sustain. I realise I'm saying in a way that our willingness to dismiss our own experience has permitted and encouraged others to do the same.

But that's the truth for fat people just as much as it is the truth for others, whether it sounds victim blamey or not.

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