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.
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.,
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