Friday 30 January 2015

Changing the Terms of Choice

Weight has to be(come) a choice does it? Excellent, welcome aboard the noble idea that there must be a viable accessible way of adjusting weight at source, for whatever reason. More especially for those suffering function and health problems because of metabolic upset. They’re left aside because those invested in the crusade have an agenda that's never involved them either. 

Any sense that the authorities want us to “lose weight” should treated with great suspicion and be answered by such as the efforts of someone like Naomi Cook to seek out actual science in hopes of some proper means of weight reversal for her beloved daughter, Hana.

Once the reality of that is available, those who really don’t want any part can reject it and will then be making a meaningful choice. Not wanting to change what is (or feeling like that), isn't the same as choosing to bring something into being.

Statistical insignificance is hardly relevant. Nor do I have any trouble with the idea of wanting to choose to be fat. I have a problem with pathology being advanced as a supposed means of "losing weight" and anything shielding the extent of its failure and dysfunction. There's nothing wrong with actual weight loss itself. That's just a natural metabolic phenomena our bodies produce on a daily basis, it's part of taking in, converting and using energy.

Ultimately, MM is railing against constriction of her own choosing. She’s one of those insisting fatness is integral to her being and any talk of weight change =eliminationism. You don’t have to choose a state to defend it. Lack of real choice doesn’t cheapen that defence nor the state itself. That's the kind of rot they tell fat people because we still choose to give a shit what fat phobes say.

This is the norm for most states such as race, gender, sexuality. Mostly these aren’t viewed as elective conscious choices.

Again, the difference with fatness is the lack of choice is contrived by those claiming to want people to unchose it. In short, they cannot be trusted to tell the truth about their intentions, they're that unedifying. What they definitely want is for us is to waste lots of time doing busy work. Having our minds preoccupied, engaging in futile fights with our own bodies. As with people in jail, to stop them getting into mischief. 

Actively choosing any state, beleaguered or otherwise tends to change the whole character of your attitude to it. It would tend to lead to a completely different psychology. One that is so obviously not present in fat people, when it comes to their fatness.

One of the reasons (illegal) drug addicts have shown such incredible and sustained moxie, whilst being assaulted, marginalized, tortured and effectively sentenced to abstinence or death by the law, not doctors, the media, or family and friends- is the extent of choice involved in drug taking. Though, I emphasize, dependence is about susceptibility-after choice.

Choice gives you a completely different underlying mindset and awareness. Lack of choice is integral to why fat people are so continually abject and surrendered. And why so many are clueless about the assaults made on them even when ferocious.

There’s no way we would have struggled for so long against something we chose. Choice would have meant we would have negotiated the lack of social approval far better than this for one.

I don't object to the idea that I choose to be fat, it just doesn't feel right. The point about weight is its essential lack of meaning, means you have to have some feeling about it, to choose it. Which may explain why fat liberation makes a person feel in charge and like they're opting for fatness.

Also, defining something you had no conscious awareness of being an option, or meaning to you as choice, changes the terms of the word as we tend to refer to it-conscious elective rational opting for or even preferencing of something. This has nothing to do with the conventions of social justice.  I not having any desire for something means its choice, how can you say other things you've had no desire for aren't also choice? I'm up for discussing that, I think the choice either/or dichotomy is often too rigid. But I'm guessing a lot of people would have trouble with that.

It is a sea change to go from wanting to diet, to slim to having no truck with that. However, that isn’t about weight, its about mindset, which is just as important perhaps more so.

You chose to change your mind in the face of opposition, some of it internal.

Framing fatness as a trait independent of the whole of you is a construct of calories in/out and a false one at that. Weight, is the whole of you and that’s kind of how metabolic function is, holistic. Weight is the outcome of the interplay going on in your whole body and whatever forces are acting on it.

To sum it up perhaps a bit crudely, fatness is not really a trait you can choose independent of its context within you, in the main. That’s an affectation of the delusion based ‘ob’ crusade. Ditto slimness.

It’s ultimately the reason “weight loss” actually calorie manipulation fails. Weight can only be properly changed at source, not after the fact, unless your defences fail or fall short. Equally, weight being multi-factorial and open-ended, means spontaneous reversals can affect homeostasis.  Meaning weight, can reverse because something else has changed that has had this knock on effect/outcome.

For example, whether I’d personally “choose to be fat” or not, isn’t a question I can answer directly. What I want above all, is to function at an optimum level, in sustainable maximum balance. If fatness is needed for that, cool, if not, that’s equally okay with me. Weight doesn’t define me, either to dehumanize me, or to humanize me.

My humanity is in me, it is me, regardless of my body size, that’s the point for me of FA. All size is equally human, end of story. It doesn’t run, human starts at thin, then peters out as weight gets higher.

I’m not here to mirror fat hating idiocies. A fat identity is conformity. It comes of positioning FA as the opposite of the crusade. Mirroring what it does, as if that’s a guide for how to be. The whole of this mess of a construct and its crusade comes from slim people’s drive to turn slimness into an identity. 

I’ve never had any interest in a fat identity due to weight not being a way to sum up a person. It’s more trait than an ID. It’s an aspect, not the whole. It’s not even your body; it’s the size of it. Everything you see that’s unbalanced about the pursuit of slimness, will be mirrored in any fat id-the blueprint is the problem, not the weight inserted into it.

Even if I for some reason felt an urge for such, I’d still resist because, whilst no-one is stronger in asserting fat people are as good as anyone-we are no better than anyone either.Look at what its done to so many slim people to defend their wretched creation. Is that what you want for yourself?

When, you insert fat into slim people’s weight ID blueprint, you end up in the same destination. Now where is that? Oh yes, dumping anything they do not wish to associate with themselves, death, disease, general badness, on fat people.

So I repeat the question, whom or what will be your dumping ground because that is intrinsic to the weight-as-id model?

Not slimz obviously. So who’s left? That’s right, YOU. Fat people. If you think that makes no sense, I give you, self-hating fatz. That’s pretty much their act. Ape what they think slim people are, fat phobes, then separate themselves from such an insult by dumping on any fat resistance.

All this aping of slimz shows they retain an aura of representing human authenticity. One fat people have yet to acquire even in the minds of fat people. If we wish to possess our own aura of credibility, we cannot get it this way. That is something that is inside us, even if its buried-there’s no way around that. We cannot get it from the outside in. Not from social justice strictures, not from approval of slimz or anyone else. Only ourselves.

You may say but how? Well, how did we get from living in terror of being called “fat” to forgetting that its supposed to be an insult? We made the decision and we improvised along the way. We created a route as we went along, making it up as we went.That is what creates social justice conventions.

Whether it was apologizing to the child we were, the one we didn’t believe in and wronged. Or saying the word “fat” over and over again.

Whether it was just hanging in there, keeping faith with our aim, knowing that one day we would reach a point where we neutralized and/or invested fatness with the real positive aura of our own humanity. We did that.

And we can do it again, and again- this time to completely restore the default that humanness that resides 100% within us and needs no confirmation, no borrowing, no aping from slimz, as much as we adore them.

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