Monday 18 June 2012

Self loathing is the instigator of action? Really?

It's posts like this that remind me again that fatness is keeps being used to discuss things that have been shut down elsewhere, due to the extent those things have been defended out of other discussions.

Time after time fatness feels like the last stand of people being able to say what they feel they need to say, yet what has it produced? A deeper understanding of metaphysics? Scientific advance? A great slew of ideas because our psyche's are free not to give a damn about fat people's sentience?

Hardly.

The same thought stopping paradox returns, coming from the disconnection slim people have developed for fat people.

The writer says, self acceptance is really hard, I don't want to feel shamed for not having the discipline/will for it. But I must do something about my weight, others should not feel shamed for the ill discipline, lack of will widely associated with that.

Why can't people connect these dots?

When fat people protest the latter, we're accused of being 'oversensitive'. Excuse me? What about someone in a weight loss diet ascendant society who feels marginalized merely because they rigid hegemony has broken down at xojane?

This disjointed way where slim people keep expressing the same or similar feelings to us and just don't recognise it is getting old. They complain and moan about what we say doing everything to de lgeitimize it, yet lead with the complaint we are doing that by no longer being silent and abject as before.

How awful of us.

Though the complaint is that it's becoming unacceptable to bray loudly about how repulsive your barely plumped body has become, rather than just stating exactly what your problem is. As if it's lacking in compassion to want you to hear exactly that, rather than a whole lot of generic fat hating.

It just doesn't make sense, using fatness to divorce yourself from your real feelings-why is that so important when you are complaining about the distress the underlying feelings are causing you?

This often seems more about self hating as modern femininity, yet pulling its punches by using fatness as a cushion for the impact. You want to reduce the impact, so you can keep on that way.

Often this is said to be a way female bond,  when it seems more- how to be a woman. Those told to knock it off and deal with their real issues feel as if something is being taken away from them. When they are not subject to endless slews of fat women whining tediously about how from this angle they thought his part looked a bit (((gasp))) thin and they was horryfied, horryfied, I tells ya!!!

Having a thin rope (hur, hur) of acceptance for yourself as a woman seems to be an indicator of female acceptability, self dissatisfaction the primary agent of action and change for women. Yet, we associate men with action, even though they are more encouraged to achieve things by seeing themselves as just dandy.
 
Self acceptance for many, fat people especially is often one of the greatest changes a person can make. Yet again that is erased pressing it into the indolence of fat people, making a nonsense and a bore of an emergent fat consciousness of self.

I really wish certain people would just stop enforcing this boredom as a means of shutting down the involvement of fat people as subjects rather than objects.

It feels more like self loathing stems action and enforces that as a state. If women don't cut themselves down, might they go too far?

Some of us are tired of all this and fear the torpor of self hate more than whatever trouble we might get ourselves into if we have to face our real problems and what we do with that anchor lessened or removed.

That perhaps is a feminist isshyoo of.

Wednesday 13 June 2012

Little Garden in the City

I recently heard of the edible bus stop. Patches of earth near a nondescript bus stop in the south of London have been turned into a small garden growing vegetables. It's a community initiative started by a couple of people in the area. They leafleted the locale to ask if people would like to join in a tend a local waste patch, it got going from there. I'm sure you'll note what's missing from all this.

Before (photo: Max Gilchrist)

(Max Gilchrist)

(Max Gilchrist)

(Max Rush)


After.....

The initial few days digging that is.

Now it looks more like this;

Flourishing 


More are planned.

Saturday 9 June 2012

In your cups

The first thing I noted on reading this response to Mayor Bloomberg decision to phase out over 16oz soda cups was it seemed in tone as if it was talking about drugs.

I could have sworn that it was talking about "soda" in this way, precisely because the anti depressant/anti psychotic meds that are increasingly prescribed are off limits. Clearly, something's got to give and as usual its anything associated with fatness.
But the truth is that soda isn’t just mildly unhealthy — it’s really incredibly bad for you, and it’s addictive, and it has no nutritional value whatsoever.
Leaving aside the crude dualism of healthy/unhealthy. What most concerns is the fundamental ideological construct at the heart of this, stemming from the point blank refusal to accept how our bodies actually function.

The idea that sugar, which is the issue with "soda" has "no nutritional value whatsoever" is false. It is one of those lies this kind of mindset tells for its own convenience, rather like weight loss and weight loss dieting are the same, when they aren't.

Everyone then erases the fib and behaves as if its true.

The number one nutrient required by the body is food energy, calories. Yes, even if some don't like it, or it upsets their fee fees or something.

Because the underlying concern is fatness, the avoidance of, that central fact is felt to be something that can and should be overlooked,  in favour of focusing on micro nutrients vitamins and minerals. It is these that processed sugar lacks.

Hence the no (micro) nutrient falsehood.

Not that I give much of a shit about other people's politicisation of food. No the bigger problem is this disinformation doesn't change the functioning of our bodies. We do not just eat, we are designed around eating.

I'd hazard a guess that all life forms are designed around the processing of their essential fuel. If humans didn't eat the way we do, we would not be the human beings we are.

We wouldn't need to be.

The stomach and viscera of our abdominal cavity are there merely because we do and other organs such as the brain would have to be redesigned to work without the way we take in food, our FUEL.

This means we are designed around taking in calories and to seek to do it as efficiently as possible, whether we are fat on all sides or not.

So when someone negates and obscures that, it leaves a conundrum, namely, how do we explain our attachment to the calorie laden foods we are designed to seek out? If you notice, most of our meals are based around macro calorie dense nutrients, fat, protein, carbohydrates.

Enter addiction.

Not being able to redesign the body to crave what it oughta plants such as, leaves, grass, the marrow and nightshade families, berries  and other water logged fruit and veg, means what we are designed to seek becomes addictive.

This ideation marks the turning point in our relationships with ourselves and our bodies. With original shame turning from our sexual to our eating parts.

It's almost as if we need to feel profoundly ashamed of something central to our existence.

It has already been noted that there is a parallel comparison to religious fundamentalist fixation with human sexuality and regulating it. This is a secular replacement. Instead of a profound shame about how we mate, it is a profound shame about how we nourish ourselves.

It is peculiar.

What both have in common is a profound disgust and rejection of human design. This causes them to impose a "redesign" more in keeping with their sense of decorum. The heart of it is an axis of loathing body weight-fatness for a start plus and the means of choosing to manage it, through energy manipulation.

The latter is the real source of the problem.