Fat Warp Essays # 2: The Fat

 

THE FAT 

Contrast the image of THE FIT with its opposite, the fleshly portrait of ooze in the obese individual. Picture soft, dimpled folds, massed into rounded shapes and humps, unbounded, flopping over, easily shaken, rolled, manipulated, plumped. Fat! It mounds in pillows around the waist. It is obtrusive, painfully unsparing even to those who give intentionally forgiving looks at the fatty then turn away. The adipose locker bulks up excess storage for a future winter of starvation that will never come. On the deepest level there is the fat person's gradual organ suffocation, distension and bloat as fat pocks the cells, impairing a once seamless function. The simple acts of walking, stair climbing, cleaning and the most subtle movements are a panting exertion. Heat is a strident enemy: profuse sweat dripping over the fleshly crumplings is a stinking embarrassment. The heavy bins around the waist, the bulbous thighs, the overladen chest folds throw off the body's thermostat. Like a ship's compass demagnetized, the body veers off course. Freezing is comfortable. Humidity with temperatures pleasant to thinner profiles is an agony. The only happy time for the obese is the oblivion of eating.

It is obvious from the pictures which is condemned with the ironic reminder that you choose to be fat. It is being discovered that choice is one of the least factors. Chemicals in our food impact our endocrine system and cause unreasonable weight gain and appetite enhancement, all corporate intentions with the end result profits over people.

The culture has helped to make these images/notions "appear" to be so with its damning assumptions that the fat person is solely his or her fat. To the discriminatory, cruel and weak-minded, fat people, especially women, are non-persons. They are stupid, unthinking, lazy, identity amorphous; they are lacking personality, shape, definition; they are not worthy of love/marriage to attractive, fit, successful men. Like the bloat they are projected to be, it is assumed that their opinions, thoughts, rationality are oppressed by their obsession with food and undisciplined marriage to their lustful hungers. The self-righteous thin exploit the great divide between themselves and the adipose lockers  to elevate their miserable food spartan lifestyles. For them fat folks "live to eat," while they, the beauteous thin "live to look exceptional." The media is the religious judge between the two as it gives a heavenly pass to the often underweight and sculpted physical perfectionists.

Supersizing by restaurants and other restaurants encourage  obesity.

The culture has fostered the lies. The fat, the thin and the fit have accepted them. The lies over the decades have burgeoned promoted by the industrial complexes. The obese have been targeted with the intolerant's oppressive projections of self hate. The tragedy is that many of the obese have internalized the mores as truth and have relaxed into their own self-hatred and the self-hating projections of the moralistic thin and fit. Greater numbers of the obese have embraced the medical arguments against them. Many have bought into expensive surgeries, diets, weight-loss programs to little avail. Such programs despite their heavy marketing have little sustained and prolonged efficacy. Fat extends beyond a metabolic understanding of the body. It extends to the mind, the soul and the being of an individual. As a result diets don't work long term; surgeries (with the exception of the dangerous gastric by-pass), have a 50% fail rate. The weight comes back and the yo-yo effect begins. One must deal with the whole being of the person and most critically their psychology, psyche, mind, emotions and soul to get to the heart of the issue of, "why fat?" Until this is done, the weight will come back. I have yet to meet an obese person who has undergone dramatic weight loss and kept it off for more than three decades, myself included.

                                                             
We cannot thrive and prosper in our whole being if we daily bathe ourselves in such pools of self-reproach or flimsy self aggrandizement lifting up our "greatness" on a shaky foundation of untruths that appearance is crucial to inner and outer joy. We must sink deeper wells that are overflowing with health, love and self-acceptance for our whole beings. We must cleanse from within to achieve the balance within and without. We must throw off image and shadow to make ourselves a solid and sanctified whole as the inner and outer enhance into homeostasis. Until we recognize these truisms, we cannot abide in productive, life-giving relationships, especially with ourselves. We cannot relax without tension, nor can we be open with others. Truth flattened into two-dimensionality becomes the lie from which we flee.