Wednesday 28 May 2014

Manuel Uribe

As you may have heard. Manuel Uribe died on Monday aged 48. He once had the distinction of being named "the world's heaviest man" weighing over 1,200 pounds.

He worked as a technician, repairing machinery and married twice, eventually losing a third of his bodyweight. He had heart trouble and was suspected of having a liver complaint though his exact cause of death has not been reported.

He was always quite big, but unremarkably so in childhood. He was reputed to have described the process of his outstanding gain as feeling like-something taking over his body. No quotes though.

I'm pretty sure that represented something going awry with the functioning of his body. It's funny, people often tell fat people what they're feeling-incorrectly. Yet when they're offered real information, to make a start with, they're just not interested.

I'm thinking especially of those who claim to be making a specific study of fatness. That he could hope to have had that seriously investigated by anyone was as likely as "obesity science" is to produce anything worthwhile any time soon for those with real problems.

The lack of interest in weight outliers like Uribe has always been a bit of mystery. When a condition is most pronouncd, its usually easiest to trace its course. To see what its about. The lack of interest speaks to a knowledge that someone like him hasn't got a whole lot to do with the average fat person and that might be shown up if closely investigated.

That would be even worse, they might find something out. They'd be a danger of having to follow the course of that, rather than the 'obesity' ideology, then where would that be?

So, like everyone of us, Uribe had to live as best he could with the cards dealt him. He seemed to do a lot better than some who claim with soulful depths that "Being fat sux."

Not as much as being at the top of the weight tree with no objective study to maintain and assert and uphold your humanity.Yet he did that through living his life nontheless.

Braindead 'obesity' drunk hacks will tell you his is a modern story of "morbid obesitay" blah, blah, blah. The real story here is of a primitive and debased response to social change/ identity crises. They are so much a part of this mess.

People like Uribe who are at the top of the weight tree are the ones who pay for the worthless "obesity" construct. And the deranged cultism surrounding it.

It does little for people like him, who clearly have something wrong with them. Yet harasses and seeks to sicken and disable those who do not.

Uribe and others like the woman who died when firemen claimed to be unable to get her out of a burning building and more recently, the 12 girl who experienced tremendous weight gain in the wake of the removal of a brain tumour are the ones most marginalized and dehumanized by the rejection of objectivity. 

That should be remembered more often.

Rest in peace SeƱor Uribe. 

Saturday 24 May 2014

Knotted Knickers

Seriously, not in my name.The size and features of that mannequin don't offend me. Nor do I recognise the abusrdist sub-gothic ranty description of it in italics. I can see a hint of a double belly at the bottom there, which I think is kind of cute.

Even if it did sting, I'd have to do a self inventory as to why.

Why would I feel inadequate beside another body or representation of? The answer's probably in my attitude to my own. If I don't appreciate my own body and what it does and can do then that is shown up by bodies I do appreciate. Even before FA, I discovered this.

Being fat, amongst other things has undoubtedly influenced that. I've learned to rule myself out as a source of my own pain, it can make for a quicker and easier solution tbh. And let's face it, body angst gets old.

This is not means always a good thing. I'm glad slimz especially, seem to feel so able to point fingers at the source of their distress. I've often admired it from afar-had to.

Sometimes there's something bravura about the relentless no flies on me, if its done with some skill. And yeah, often institutions/ other people are messing with us. However, this has never convinced And the great thing is now, thanks to the revelatory side of fat phobia. We know many slimz feel exactly the same;
To reduce the complex psychology surrounding body image to the waist span of a mannequin is to utterly miss the point . To imply that women are affected by the size of an abstract humanoid in a window display is to equate seeing with believing, and to suggest that women – silly, gullible women – are taken in by the sort of marketing nonsense that we all of us disregard in other spheres on a daily basis.
They just didn't know it when they were the only context. Absent of any real sympathy-for fatter women-suddenly they can really see how that looks for the first time. And a lot of them see it the same way I do. Be amused.

It's a classic case of not knowing your own argument until you remove it from the context of your own sympathy for yourself. So, slim/plump people-busted. Please stop using a suggestion of cod-fat acceptance to land one on thin women. This is about you, not fat/ter people.

Thin models are not responsible for your dieting or your eating disorder/ body discomfort, they only show up your own desires. Why can't women accept their own foolish potentially self annihilating fancies? Men can jackarse around putting their balls in a mousetrap and that's high jinks. But apparently, women cannot accept their own potential for daredevil foolhardiness. Everything has to be a veil of fracking tears.

Yes, perhaps that's about a context of women being ridiculed and branded silly and trivial. But this attempt to run away from the instances where there may be some truth isn't helping. In fact, its getting in the way of resolving this conundrum more positively. Assuming that's what people want of course.

In case anyone's confused, each body has its own laws; fat, medium, thin, black, poc, white, old, young, tall short....

Your body is not the measure of others (though exploring difference is fine). That's something you're supposed to get over in kindergarten. Along with not all families are built around the rules of your own. Whether you are fatter or thinner than you want to be, think you should be etc., Bodies need to be judged, if at all, in their individual context and function.

This means, you don't get to pretend thin bodies, or what you think signals them are thinspo and ban them from sigh. This bullshit is probably the genesis of the pathetically asinine "glorifyinging obesity." i.e. taking pictures of fat people who don't look miserable and self hating. See how stupid this bodies cause ED's looks when the glow from the slim halo is removed?

It has always been thus.

Eating disorders are about how we act and react meeting our genetic and emotional inclinations. 

The cause or trigger of eating disorders is also in bound up in the cultural surround of how we think; extreme fat phobia and the cult of anorexia feature heavily, boom, boom. So everyone who keeps up with that as a means of keeping fat people in check (they image)? Prepare to sacrifice your children to increasingly discover their propensity for ED's, okay?

We can't always have everything we want, either we bully people and aggrandize ourselves at their expense, or we find ways to achieve things we claim to want positively. But if we keep with the elective delusionary psychosis that weight loss dieting as viable and "healthy" then pathology begets more pathology. We have to move on if we want a reduction in disordered eating and ED's.

There are some fat people who've assumed this kind of branding of thin bodies is okay. Whatever slim people do is bathed in the glow of righteousness. They are the only bona fide humans, so do what they do, think what they think you become human too!!

We're encouraged to do that as a weight loss strategy actually. 

Which is why they need to get over their learned privileging of slimz.  They are not the only humans, nor the only way to be human.

The slim mainstream has always sought to blame thin models for eating problems, failing to ever say what exactly is "forcing" them to do a goddarned thing. The medical profession did not insist they must be thin. What purports to be science didn't insist it was health and scientifically valid for slim people to pursue thin, so precisely what as been the noose around their necks?

Their own desires.

The perfectionist leanings of their own class, which are reflected, more than generated by fashion. Such is the shame surrounding this-it's hardly perfect to have desires that can destroy you is it? It's one thing to demand diversity, wall to wall uniform bodies becomes banal for one thing. It's quite another to objectify other women's bodies as visual toxins. This shows an overwhelming desire for self evasion and is pathetic.

It's about time this whole conversation about weight grew the heck up.

Saturday 17 May 2014

Readers of a nervous disposition, turn away NOW

You have been warned.....

I bring you the tale of a very, very, very bad person*. One so bad that James Brown's Superbad springs to mind, but not at all in a cool way.

This psychopath, the bad kind has diabetes. The bastard kind.
My GP didn't say it like this, but it felt like he was saying "it's your own fault", because it's a lifestyle-related disease. It felt like he was saying: "The way you eat, your lack of exercise – those things are creating this diabetes for you".
Baaad.
That's quite hard to hear: the diagnosis, then the complications, and then "by the way it's your fault". But in truth, it was absolutely, completely my fault.
 Ah so you openly admit it, you scoundrel! Have you no shame!
I had lost control of my health and my lifestyle. I had essentially abdicated responsibility for my own health and allowed it to get out of control, even though I was the chief executive of the NHS.
What a cad, you bounder, you blackguard. Shame, shame and more on you.



So um yeah, if you'd been dancing like that fellah, all through your high powered meetings, you wouldn't be in this mess son.

Instead you wallow in your own filth;
For years my lifestyle was completely and utterly unhealthy. My jobs in the NHS meant I was away from home a lot; three, four or even five nights a week. Every morning in the hotel I'd have bacon, egg, sausage, tomato and fries for breakfast, then there'd be a dinner most nights.
Sausage? Urgh, that's just unnecessary, a knave for sure.

Let this be a cautionary tale to all.

Thursday 15 May 2014

Can we all now STOP conflating weight loss with weight loss dieting?

Ah ha, now a couple of white men- Kelly Brownell and Christopher Fairburn-have put their name to this;
"while to the general public dieting and weight loss remain conflated."
In other words, weight loss and weight loss dieting are not the same thing.  Can we all now STOP, conflating weight loss dieting with weight loss? Please, pretty please?

Weight loss dieting is supposed to be the route to sustained weight loss. It is not weight loss. It is a route to it. A method, okay?

Repeat, the collapsing of a form of weight loss as weight loss full stop, was a convenient fiction spread by the slimming industry. A convenient fiction is a falsehood we treat as truth because we feel the effect of believing it is useful in some way. i.e. If you behave well, you will be treated well and so on. 

The slimming racket wished to re-cast weight loss in the image of benighted sub-product; calorie restriction dieting in order to obscure its expensive, punitive ineffectiveness. Weight loss by the body itself is; unconscious, pain free, elegant and easeful. Identifying this as weight loss would be deeply demoralizing when under the cosh of the slimming grind. Better to see 'weight loss' as dieting, ugly, stupid, self abusive, crude and usually pretty futile. That way, you can overcome your mind working out that your course is not altogether sane.

And before you judge, we're told anorexia-when calorie restriction acquires a self-sustaining momentum-is a "mental illness". What's "madder" having schizophrenia or trying to?

Dieters jumped on board with this, seeing themselves as needing all the help they could get. And this spread and inexplicably became the law.

Let's all get over it, NOW. 

The reluctance of fat activists to grasp this has always been odd. Yes, it's an FA plinth that weight loss is bad, but that refers to weight loss dieting, in which case it is correct. It's also true that it, dieting, doesn't work. However, it simply is not true that weight can't be lost. Again, that is the conflation of WLD with weight loss.

We just haven't found the right route. And frankly, there is no valid argument against it. Breast reduction is already accepted and that has no more merit than high weight. If you agree with it, you already agree with the idea of weight reduction as a desirable end. Deal with yourself.

It's about time the 'obesity' cult's notable lack of interest in producing actual weight loss was continually confronted. No one interested in slimming people would focus any thing on dieting. As I said, when it was decided that was the key strategy, that was where fat acceptance started, continued weight gain was inevitable from that point.

Dieting is an oxymoron. If it was effective, it wouldn't need to exist.