Thursday 28 August 2014

Embodiment Switch

Reblog, with edits!

The 'obesity' construct and the demand to be slim forces a fat person to disassociate and become somewhat detached from your own body-i.e. it's not real, it's temporary. And bond with a [slim] version of it that doesn't exist as the real one. We know this.

Following instructions from outside yourself-because your own thoughts are making you fat or what a men's diet club forum calls "fat logic"- a consequence of this unnatural situation is the internal balance of being grounded in yourself goes off.

The general norm is to set standards of behaviour and reaction rooted in the way you are generally treated and expect to be treated. That helps to set an internal standard by which we judge how others ought to be treated. What they should have to put up with. 'Obesity' alters that. Our internal standard becomes the treatment fat people accept for themselves. We couldn't possibly use that as a standard to judge others by.

Removed from a fat context-it would disturb, become sinister and unhinged, often psychopathic in tone. You get used to it, yet you know it. In abstract, it doesn't necessarily seem bad. It would though to judge slim people that way and would to me if I were to judge slim people by that standard too. So we know it is.

We instinctively get used to applying expectations born of how slim people are treated to judge situations and people. This becomes the automatic human standard, one we apply to ourselves too, and yet not.

I suppose the distinction is a little like the way you treat visitors as opposed to the way you treat your family.  I used to say a lot when I first got into FA that fat people have no double consciousness. WRONG. This is sort of one, though its nothing like as profound as that of a Black person or even a female double consciousness. It's more a mental switch than a consciousness.The fact that I overlooked it though, shows how ingrained and unnoticed it is.

The problem comes when we stop participating in the 'obesity' cult. Stop rejecting our own bodies and selves as somehow temporary or unreal. Not immediately but gradually, nature begins to reassert itself as we become (re-)grounded in ourselves. Our minds start to normalize, judgement grounded in our own experience and the standards we've inevitably adapted to.

This causes immediate problems. Cries of not grasping how slim people can have body issues etc., arise. That's not the case. It's more some of these problems which previously loomed as large to us as to them, begin to need a microscope. Because the place of judging them has shifted from an internalized form of their own, to a further distance away from there

Working out acceptable expectations can get interesting. We carry on using to the human [slim] standard, but some of our necessarily blasé attitudes born of facing the most outrageous nastiness can start to bleed into that.

I have this problem big time.

Going back and forth between the chasm that is how we have to think of slim people and how we have to think of ourselves becomes more and more, meaningless, boring, even irritating. It's a standard no longer nourished inside you as it was. And let's face it society has this divide too, in frustratingly plain sight. Which is causing its own issues. I've always wondered why people think shitting on a large minority of the population isn't a threat to democracy, in the sense that people get used to that treatment undermining the ability to perceive infractions.

I know that I can grasp far more of injustice perpetrated on others, than I could before. That is a big shock and I wonder if it's part of the suspicion the left has about fat people as a group.

This pre-post mental aspect of re-embodiment, has always caused a divide amongst fat people, especially the self hating kind, but also amongst many who do get it. It occurrence, degree and how one incorporates its strands are unpredictable and don't match ones commitment to self-assertion.

To those people as much as slim people, it can seem like fat people are being angry or even vengeful. Alas, it rarely occurs that fat people might have a reason for feeling anything that deviates from the 'obese' script that isn't malevolent. It's as if there's as much of a script for fat people's unexpected actions as there are for what's expected of us, i.e. imperfect eating and exercising.

I think the definition of people as disease pathology creates that. Priming minds to expect wrong doing. So the well is often immediately poisoned with these expectations, in lieu of more just explanations. How to explain these things? It never occurred for one second that this would happen, until it did to me.

Thursday 21 August 2014

Oversensitive

Due to the nature of both the eating disorder and 'obesity' construct fields and their spread of disinformation, we've lost a real sense of what hyperphagia nervosa (HN) is really like. 

I want to try and give you a basic idea of what HN, which used to be called "compulsive eating disorder" and is now latterly being styled as/or overlapping with "food addiction" feels like.

I used to object routinely;
  • a) CED/HN in essence a mechanical fault-of the nervous system functioning 
  • b) neurosis can help cause it by provoking the nervous system to keep triggering the part/s of itself concerned with hunger and appetite 
  • c) eating is not the real problem, excess hunger/appetite signals are 
  • d) it is not eating to get high, nor can any food but alcohol make you high that is intoxicate 
  • e) it is not done (directly) for pleasure. You are compelled by the signalling, which is even more powerful than normal hunger-which is more than compelling enough 
  • f) it is not caused by eating, it's caused by the misfiring of your hunger/ appetite mechanisms i.e. it doesn't have the conscious input of A or BN 
  • and g) treating it by suppressing that signalling is more likely to increase than reduce it. WLD alone can trigger it in those susceptible to it.
"Some crave food even after they have just eaten, suggesting addiction."
This kind of ideation is currently being spread around. It's from one of latest studies trying to craft hyperphagia into this nonsense category-the ubiquity ad absurdum use of [f]"addiction" should get your bs detector zinging like a buzzsaw;
Claus Voegele, Professor of Clinical and Health Psychology, said: ‘All addictions are similar in that the sufferer craves to excess the feel-good buzz they receive from chemical neurotransmitters produced when they eat, gamble, smoke, have sex or take drugs.’ 
Absolute cobblers.

Says more about the wild imaginings ignorant fat phobes want to have about fat people than real life hyperphagics who come in all sizes. I'd say they get a feel good buzz out of this similar to "drug addicts", except without the accountability of their actions being visited on their own bodies.

The 'obesity' construct, merges all fat people together-functional outliers and average alike-no matter what else they do-does being fat prevent you from using drugs? Prescription ones obviously-they're the more (immediately) fattening ones.

So what is the above, wanting to eat straight after eating quote referring to really? It may surprise you if I say that the thing that most came to mind was a friend of mine who's bladder became sensitive. She had a constant urge to go to the toilet, even when her bladder was not closed to full or even empty. More than once, she went to the toilet with an empty bladder, came back and then immediately felt like going again.

Catch any resemblance?

Wanting to eat, after just having eaten-in this case after the stimulus of seeing a picture of food. Versus wanting to go to the toilet straight after trying to empty an empty bladder.

Both centre around a sensitized area, subject to an excess of nerve signalling

There are several forms of bladder problems. My friend had a sensitive/sensitized bladder, but this woman developed both that and urge incontinence-the bladder releasing too quickly.

What's remarkable about her description and that of her doctor, is how many points touch on what I said long before I heard any of this. She Marlene Brown, talks about how her life came to revolve around going to the toilet.

How she tried to adapt to try and prevent it, which caused her other problems. How the "constant urge for the bathroom...... was making my life a misery."

How often do you hear that from hyperphagics? That the constant hunger/appetite signalling is wearing them out? How can you, when the standard issue fat phobic lens is fixated as ever, solely on food, determined to keep fat people in their box, no matter what?

The ever present signalling after about almost a couple of decades put me on the edge too. I described it before as like some who develops tinnitus. The inability to not hear that can drive them up the wall.

It's the unrelenting nature that can erode sanity, even more than the thing itself.

She even talks about how she felt as if something was pressing on her bladder. I used to talk about how I felt as if a foot had its foot on the accelerator of my hunger somewhere in my mind not my head. It was not as physical. More an impression, but a palpable one nonetheless.

Her specialist Wai Yoong, explained to her;
I had urge incontinence, where the nerves around the bladder send off faulty signals that cause it to become hypersensitive. So even when it’s holding just a little fluid, the bladder thinks it’s full and starts to contract and spasm, which is why you feel the urgent need for the loo.
That's far closer to my experience of HN than any eating disorder professional I've come across has come close to in their witterings of what they want HN to be, certainly since I hit the net. Every squeak that happened in that area was magnified by its sensitized state.

And what about the treatment that she says halved her symptoms;
The new procedure involved putting a needle into my ankle for half an hour at a time, with an electrode under my foot to create a circuit. This would stimulate a nerve that runs from the spine to the ankle, passing the bladder on the way — somehow this would get the nerves sending normal signals again. 
So, in order to affect signals going to the bladder, you can get to them through the ankle and foot?! Think of the way they freely bind and cut fat people's organs rather than creating careful and ingenious procedures like this. The absence of loathing is a wonderful thing.

You might also sense the trickiness of treating HN. You have to achieve similar, using your mind on itself. My current conclusion is AN is easier to treat, but is a lethal condition. HN is not acutely dangerous, in the main, but is far harder to dismantle. That's because it doesn't have the direct conscious input that a lot of AN does. It's body led and its extended from a normal state rather than an acquired pathology. 

Yes, I recognise, there are differing perspectives. Most in the ED field, dominated it seems by women, seek an emotional angle. And let me make clear again, just in case, I don't believe the notion that emotions are lesser than or in opposition to thought. I believe they are a form of thought, they are at a different sometimes earlier stage and stand alone to what we translate into word(y thinking).

Emotions are to thoughts as we understand them, what stem cells are to an organ or body part. Emotions are both matter and what larger more conscious thought is read as.

The emotional component is there, but its as much the physical effect of emotions than direct mental disturbance in itself, like anorexia. Emotional signals go through the nervous system. When this is in a permanently heightened state, via depression, anxiety, negative self imagine etc., that gets the nervous system into basic range where your everyday emotions, reactions, experience, activities, on top of that, create surges powerful enough to trigger the mechanics of eating and hunger to signal excessively.

Strictly, you could say that's hypothesis, but its based on experience, it's not speculative. Nor attempting cultural recognition or increased social status. It's about trying to accurately render what's going on, so that everyone who wants it, has a chance to grasp what we are dealing with here.

It was also the basis of understanding that led me to be able to dismantled HN and I did, so there's that. I'm of course not the only one. Others have stumbled on a similar path, though I don't pretend to endorse their typical faddiction lens or premise.

The key to sketching a detailed biochemical view is in the details of function. But we'll only know the full story, when people stop messing around with silliness like forcing HN and anything else remotely or otherwise associated with fatness, into mad, crazed, greedy, consciously degenerate, fat  baddies, faddiction crud. 

Wednesday 20 August 2014

Perfectionism

Aim for the moon and you get to the stars. Perfectionism is when you're disappointed with those twinklers because, they're not the moon!!

The belief that perfection is a real possibility rather than something to aim for, is a hard task master. It means the likelihood of spending most of your life in a state of ever burgeoning disatisfaction. Until you crash in some way. You probably will.

Unless you think you're perfect, then you'll just be a pain to everyone else.

Perfectionism is the underpinning to many mental health crises, neuroses mainly. It often becomes depressing, as it is exhausting to the nervous system. Many people in this state of mind feel they have low self esteem. Not necessarily.

Our default is self esteem, we tend to notice if that's being undermined, by falling short of impossible standards.

Sunday 17 August 2014

Nothing About Us

I've got more to say on the subject of this churnalism. For now though, I wanted to make a point about the nature of fat acceptance and its relationship to the mis-labelled "obesity debate." It might address those who talk about fat people "segregating" themselves and about it being an "echo chamber."

I say might, because it wasn't particularly prompted by that. What I have to say centers on BTL below the line, that is the comments section. There is no real point of entry for a fat person with consistent level of self awareness. It's narrow binds cannot stretch to include knowledge beyond its own constructs.

Any thoughtful appraisal of fat people's experience is at cross purposes with it.

It reminds me of when "Nihil de nobis, sine nobis"-nothing about us without us-was invoked, in conjunction with Michelle Obama's "child obesity" fandango. I instinctively burst out laughing when I hearing this. The continually off-centered way others as well as myself kept experiencing a certain kind of FA thought-stream.

It's not so much that it was wrong more oddly naive if that doesn't appear condescending. Its in no way meant to. The butting of mindsets between between people who consider others in a way those others simply are not considering them and vice versa, without either seeming to realise it.

Peering closer, you realise FA simply views others in the same way others view them. Not as what they are or how they are behaving, but as their (defined) idea of them. That is, fat phobes talk to their construct 'obese' and project that onto any fat person-and increasingly any person who doesn't fully uphold their fundamentalist emoting.

And many FA's talk to their idea of slim people as superior, realer and more credible and project that onto fat phobes, going so far that their minds instinctively construct a reason they simply do not possess.

That, reminds me of the famous effect of when a person pressures themselves into an anorexia corner, not listening to their body's numerous protests, ending up with their mind editing what they eat to fit the restrictions they place on themselves. Predictably, that is then pointed to as the cause of "their obesity" rather than a product of forcing their mind into a place where it cannot produce the desired effect.

Paying any attention to this can be cast as soft, but really, not paying attention to your own mind is just undermines it. Also explained as caused by 'obesity'.

When I got to FA, I used to say, "I've been trying to have a conversation about fat for most of my life." I'm still not sure I've really managed it since. By conversation, I mean a free exchange of views with mutual understanding-including of what is not understood by either.

I had no interest in having rows. I wanted to feel the liberation of talking freely, examining experience. It's fat phobes who want what they've got, endless hatefests, because that's all they've got. Fat people have experience, memories, unprocessed thoughts, learning curves, rising to incredible challenges, saying mea culpa in a world withdrawing from it, being accused, self betrayal, but above all, self rescue.

No body rescued us.  No body told us to have some self respect. We decided, because that's in keeping with our overdeveloped sense of responsibility.

This so called mainstream "debate" has nothing to do with fat people and possibly never will as then it would not be this kerfuffle, it would actually be interesting. Haters don't know how boring it is due to them getting off on it. But some of us do.

The 'obesity' construct involves a willful and continued suspension of disbelief. Actually, of thought. Of even the most primitive critical faculties. The kind that rejects the idea that the sun is a wax candle before you finish thinking it as a sentence.

A slow reversal seems to be happening. People are beginning to talk themselves out of auto-tuned hate. In the past, fat hate was a minority thing, it became a sealed up everyone thing due to 'obesity' propagandizers, i.e. researchers and the medical profession.

As far as I can tell none of this wall-to-wall lipophobia could have happened with us having anything to say.  If you are dehumanizing a group and let me clarify as that can happen in many ways. I mean, if you are casting people as disease not only will that curtail your communication with them to nothing, (when's the last time you felt like speaking to disease-as if it was human?)

Conversing with disease, even if such a thing isn't odd, would humanize it. Talking to things, i.e. a car or a boat, anthropomorphizes them.

Fat people's sentient experience of our fatness our bodies, has been as unreal to ourselves as we are to other people. That I'd say is pretty unique. It's also why its so hard to explain, especially in the face of a continued onslaught of outlandish stream of ad hominem that tends to provoke a defensive survival instinct. That this mismatch is not obvious shows a narrative that has not been interrupted. A "debate", no matter how disparate the views, develops lines of communication.

Despite the fact that below the line, something approaching a reason is breaking. out-questions are being asked It's no easier to participate than the usual show of rage.

The only echo chamber is the mindless assumption we've all shared.

Friday 8 August 2014

Stuck on Repeat

Imagine walking purposefully to a meeting, when someone leaps out and starts barracking you. "You look like shit, you are worthless, stupid, you don't know what you're doing or who you are. I do, I know everything about you...." Etc.,

You continue on, in any state from bemusement to alarm. Then you're waylaid by the charming Shiloh Marie, informing you that by this, you'd not deigned to acknowledge their views and had decided they weren't "valid."

I think you'd be a little surprised. Especially if you'd spent your life doing nothing but acknowledge these 'views' to the detriment of everything. Your own thoughts, feelings and above all, an acknowledgement of yourself.

What's more, the value of this approach to those who demanded it, is eloquently shown by their denial and erasure of it.

Assuming that because someone starts randomnly talking at you, that they are talking to you and about you and that this must have something to do with you, betrays an overdeveloped sense of responsibility for what's going on in other people's heads.

If fat's a "feminist issue", this is where it starts.  It's not a woman's duty to soothe men's anger like that of a toddler having an epic tantrum. Nor even with begging the feminist slimstream to stop colluding with this.

Fat phobes don't have a legitimate point of view and that is their decision, not that of FA's. What they want is for fat people to do exactly what we've already done. Over and over again. Whilst they continue to deny it, because it hasn't and doesn't work.

The slimming industry came to the UK in the 1960's. We're talking a good half century of serious dieting culture. And I'd say nearly forty years of this weird scientifically/medically ballasted loathing. No matter what you think, no matter how it seems, there has only ever really been one view.

The instinct seems to be that because people tend to counterbalance any views that may or seem to go against them, by naturally giving good account of themselves, that this must have happened withfat people. It barely has.

Fat people were as committed to this more than anyone else. Even people burned out by dieting still carried on assuming their bodies and/or they were bad and/or wrong.

There was an overall tunnel vision that losing weight must be done and it must be done via weight loss dieting, shared by fat to thin alike. It was the way weight loss was sold. As scientific fact that if you take in fewer calories than you use, you'll use up stored fat and that will be that.

This didn't not simply feel duty or obligation, as a burning desire for ethical absolution. We felt the sting of being in a state of sin on a moment by moment basis.

We were silenced by the collective hoodoo surrounding calorie restriction. Like all quackery, it relies on the way you act and (supposedly) think. When efficacy can't deliver on the hopes invested in it, an atmosphere of superstition flourishes. We came under pressure to be positive at all times, our body's natural reactions to the imposition of famine became the sign of our internal corruptness-not corruption, corruptness.

It must be repressed, lest we ward off success by a show of reluctance or bad attitude.

That would be pointed to as the source of dieting's almost inevitable failure. No failure was allowed, ergo press repeat, forever.
   
We learned not to complain about anything as that was this was thrown in our faces as proof of; lazy, greedy, reluctant, not complying, failing. In that silence calorie restriction went unquestioned to an almost unprecedented degree. The idea of god was more countered than the idea that fat people should be slim by dieting or trying to at all times.

An incredibly heightened anxiety around being called out as fat to develop. It reached astounding levels.  It wasn't so much the power of the word, but of being called out and cornered stripped of any defense or neutral explanation.

Walking on eggshells, trying to be ultra pleasant, all things to all people. Avoiding confrontation, in the hopes that this bomb would not be detonated. It was soul tiring. The tension that was in my body. I was like an Egyptian mummy.

I'm saying this to remind everyone that all this went hand in hand with the so called 'obesity'  crisis/crusade, whatever you wish to call it. So how could it possibly reverse or prevent it?


In the end, given we're as assorted a group as any, we exhausted this line. Don't forget that your local council can't get people to stop dropping litter. We're talking here about fighting part of our will to exist.

That is what fat phobes want us to go back to. Any thing they say is a cover for that. But don't take my word for it.

Not only is that as undesirable as it is untenable. History is denied by them. Those invested in this cannot take responsibility for their reign of error, choosing instead to blame the results on us despite following instructions. They cannot do anything else, given they cannot accept reality.

That makes it even less an option. If we're going to get the blame and be denied the efforts we've made, then we must responsibility for ourselves, whether we anyone likes that or not.

I get that Shiloh Marie was trying to set out what she said are the ideas involved in the fat acceptance debate. What I don't understand is why someone as educated as herself cannot recognize such an absence of ideas.

Or even why she thinks health is a debate at all. It's about making people healthier, not dehumanizing and attacking them. And even if there is a debate, why does she assume it would be between FA and a fat haters diet club?

As far as I'm concerned, they've never been the issue. That has always been fat people's mental and physical recovery from the damage this has done. As well as learning to plot our own course divested of its baggage.

She's not the only one who keeps making this error. It's good FA's are catching on to just how intellectually barren fat phobes are, by actually trying to reason with them. And its been every bit as nerve shredding for them, as she found the whole process.

I felt for the way she's been mistrusted. Others like myself have endured far, far, worse, believe me. A lot of that is down to the lack of respect fat people have in themselves. That's what a lifetime of pathologization does to your internal view of yourself and other fat people and most don't even notice it.

Along with other more serious prejudices. Fat people could have been a force for tackling those. Instead, they prefer to turn themselves to nothing making a lot of noise.

FA is not an echo chamber. We can agree on very little. I can't even get people to acknowledge that dieting isn't the whole of weight loss. Or even to question whether there is any real desire for fat people to become slim, or if its really about us continuing to diet and rebound, tied to that treadmill.

We are so used to societies fighting useless phoney wars that perhaps we think, this is just another one of those. I wonder. Seems to me that its prefaced an approach, which realising rightist patrician religion has lost ground, seeks to use science in its stead as a route to bypassing critical faculties in order to micromanage people's lives.

It's working. It's it amusing to hear leftist and liberals talk "personal responsibility" in that brain dead way. Failing to see that 'obesity' epotimizes why that approach is hollow. In the time that cancer has gone from unspeakable, to death sentence to in some cases short term or chronic ailment. Ditto AIDS. This faux disease has achieved nothing.

It can't even manage to get rich countries to feed their children properly, something stopped after not before it!

The real problems lie with fat people. Trying to debate with hate has become a way of avoiding facing up to just how little we trust ourselves and how little we are trusted by others. Who have no reason for this beyond the pathologization of fatness.

It all becomes the body as an opinion or set of views. The bodies of fat phobes, always having been deferred to, are deemed logical, no matter what they say. That's what is being read here. An idea of what certain male bodies stand for. Women we know are irrational, emotive, illogical, unscientific. That comes along with the wrongness of fatness.

The meaning of what people say is in the value of what they stand for. What they say matters no, because the meaning is projected onto them. It is as objectifying and dehumanizing for fat phobes as anyone. No matter what they say, they are never really heard properly either. They are made to look better than they are.

Fat people have a big problem with realising they are right and fat phobes are wrong. They're too used to being cast as totally wrong. It's almost intolerable for many fat people to accept they're right. It's just too far from formative experience.

So they look for ways in which their detractors are right, regardless.

I can't say this effort was as useless as I'd assumed it would be. I was wrong on that score. I'd put that down to the qualities of Shiloh Marie which she wasted on a bunch of mind numbed boneheads.

It would have been better to examine the official, "obesity science" /medical doctor endorsed view  and fat acceptance instead.

These jokers are just their puppets....at best.