r/fatlogic derail

Ok, so it sounds like you are using heavy drinking as a coping mechanism.

(Also, go see a doctor, because alcoholism is a health problem too)

It is not different from using food as a coping mechanism, except that alcoholic steatohepatitis evolves to cirrhosis a lot faster than NASH. It is still using caloric intake to redirect some sort of feeling.

It is not the cause of the issue, it's a symptom of the issue. Your heavy drinking is a symptom of your issue with the PPC, and overeating is, a lot of the time, a symptom of some unresolved issue - be it mental illness or ignorance or generational trauma, or a combination of the three.

The issue is more complex than calories in calories out and Christian moral values, which is what fatlogic refuses to understand. You being unable to not use alcohol to cope is not a personal failure or a sin, and calling you a degenerate drunkard that can't get too close to open flames without risking ignition and making a meme out of a picture of you passed out in the ditch would not help you stop drinking yourself to death. This is what people on those Reddits are doing; they're reducing complex personal circumstances to name calling and mean memes.

The issue is that because overeating is a symptom, stopping with the overeating doesn't address the underlying motivation to overeat, and creates a very precarious situation where any deviation can cause fall back into unhealthy habits. And most of the time, these underlying issues can't be treated when the person is stuck in a cycle of self loathing because of their size. Sometimes people need to not associate their self worth to their appearance to be able to break this cycle, and sometimes when the underlying issues are addressed people realize that the way they look isn't actually giving them much issue, even if they are Tess Holidays or bigger.

 

Spoiler: tw: just words but kinda graphic words.

bruh, i don't even have a pony in this race but i did lose my dad very slowly to alcoholism. cut your losses and seek out help before the vomiting blood happens, not after. you're more perma-fucked if you wait till after. i mean. that or the chronic pancreatitis'll set in and that's a boatload of bullshit to deal with as well no matter your size.

 

Yo @Beldaran thanks for the good fashion site links btw

 

I'm going to use a personal anecdote to illustrate my point: at my heaviest, I was about 115 kilograms. I'm only 1,69m tall and have a relatively lean frame, so that's a lot of weight for me.

It was also the height of my depression, and before I had contact with body positive movements. I only had mainstream beauty ideals telling me that literally all of my problems were caused by being overweight, and that they would be solved if I lost weight.

So I spent all my very limited energy trying to lose weight, failed, felt worse, then turned to food to make me feel any kind of pleasure, because food releases endorphins and human bodies crave that neurotransmitter. It was a cycle that sapped energy from what was causing the overeating - the depression - and made me unable to see the cause of the depression - that I was in a toxic situation in a career that I despised and had lost all of my hobbies to that career, and that I was in an unhealthy family situation as the main caretaker of my disabled grandmother oh top of said career.

Once i found bodypos movements and learned to like what i like about my body and make peace with what i dont, i realized what was actually making me miserable. After I ditched my job I dropped to 100kg in a matter of months, and once I was not living with my mom and grandmother anymore I lost ten more kilos. I have been sliding between 82 and 88 kgs for a little over a year now because I am still stressed as fuck as I try to get into med school and occasionally go back to eating nothing but enormous amounts of bread cheese and butter, but it's a lot better and more manageable now that I'm in a healthier situation and am in therapy.

I have trouble losing the rest of the weight I want to lose - my dieticians goal is 75 - because I have a host of hormonal issues that make losing weight a slow process and because of said stress; it's not easy to completely let go of a coping mechanism. But shaming me because of this and calling my PCOS fatty fatlogic isn't going to help.

 

Ok, so.
There’s this thing called digital self harm. Contrapoints talks about it here (tw: talking about incels, their worldviews, internalized transmisogyny, very blunt in general) but the basic idea is that people will start to purposefully seek out content that makes them feel terrible, or put selfies up in places where they know they will be just torn to shreds, that kinda thing. It is so, so hard to believe compliments, or affirming things, because it always sounds placating. It feels like its just a “hugbox”, trying to make you feel better without telling the truth, without telling you how to better yourself. So you look for places that are harsher, places that’ll tell you what you need to do- but so often the endpoint here isn’t encouraging you to improve yourself, its telling you rhat you’ve already failed, that you’ll never succeed. And that seems so much more believable then people telling you you’re pretty, that you’re fine the way you are, that you should love yourself, ect. And it kinda seems to me that this is the way you are using fatlogic and similar places- as digital self harm.

 

Yeah, that's definitely a thing I do a lot and this thread does sound a bit like it. I can add a data point there. It's a thing to consider.

 

Yep, I read a similar thing, which is why I said my liver took a nap. This was a while ago, though. I'm not worried. It's not like I really like living. I found a report from highschool where they rated my anxiety as low even though I was being bullied. It was because I thought that even though I was a freak, adults don't really bully over that, so I'd be out of the situation. Now I know that adults just don't tease children about it, and there won't ever be an end until I die.

That joke was about making fun of fat-shamers in a language where they'll pay attention. "Hey, you're still seeing the guy who used to do something you're against because he looks like he's still doing it."

You're reading subtext that isn't there. I was criticized for something I'm not even doing, and trying to express my frustration in a way that will get listened to and won't get me attacked.

I can't find it in the wiggler now, but I told a mod that I didn't like it when people say I'm doing something deliberately, and he accused me of trying to play some sort of game.

Pretty much. I don't know if they're on a weight-loss journey, just don't want to bother changing the way they look, deliberately like being fat... That part's not affecting other people outside of space-invasion in airline seats. It's just a subset of the FA movement who discourage people who do want to try not being fat.

2) I think downthread there were people who were treating the story with suspicion, accusing him of being very dedicated if it was a hoax, and talking about how well it lined up with the tropes. Also, would you stop saying liar? Mathmatically, a lot of the stories of weight-loss difficulty don't add up. Misestimating how much they are eating is a common explanation, but having a really abnormal metabolism would be believable if there weren't so many people claiming it.

1) Search crab-bucketing. The word kept popping up. I have a feeling that seeing stuff at random would be better than me handing you what I find.

Maybe if people could admit that they're painting a nasty picture of me, more importantly, stop doing it? You don't have to go through the whole apology ritual, those steps should be enough.

As far as thread-necro, should I have started a new one? With this software, the former seemed like a better option.

Fatlogic isn't exactly good, but they're not completely useless even with the bad spots. The use is that someone could feel that the corruption of fat-acceptance is wrong and not feel crazy because other voices say the same thing. Fatlogic would be better without the hard-line black and white thinking.

I think also trying to talk this out is preparing for some heavier issues, like why serophobia is a bad thing.

I did say that sometimes the problem is in the mind instead of the body. And fatlogic does touch upon how sometimes these people have mental problems.

Fatlogic also isn't about the memes and they mostly cleaned out the name-calling. (I got banned for saying ham-planet.) They're not as good as loseit for weightloss advice, but it's there, mostly in the form of telling people to find a CICO-based diet and avoid the fads.

If there was a circle that said, "drinking that amount is perfectly fine" and "you should love how battered your liver is getting" would a group that mocked their messages be considered lush-haters?

There is acknowledgement that PCOS can affect weight loss. Saying that loss is absolutely impossible because of PCOS is fatlogic.

And for body-positive, that was a dissenting voice that told you that you weren't crazy for going against the message you were getting. The difference was probably that you weren't getting "skinny-shamer" flung at you just for saying that their message wasn't good.

Fatlogic ended up as not really a good enemy. There was just enough there to not make it great, but mostly it made sense. fatpeoplehate would have been better for understanding a fatphobic POV, but they were gone.

For writing, I know that it wasn't as good as it could be, and I needed someone to be harsh with it. If it were drawing, I would rather someone say "the elbow is in the wrong place" than tell me it's fine when I can tell that something's off but not what.

 

Okay so first off you need to start thinking of weight as pure math. It doesn't apply. If it was just pure math, then I should have lost tons of weight for the several months where i was averaging 125 calories a day, and when i did get a full meal it was still under my recommended daily average. Instead I was gaining fat while clinically starving.

Math does not magically create weight loss. Until you acknowledge that this is a biological truth, all your other conclusions are going to be flawed and based off that flawed knowledge.

 

Yeah calories are a unit of energy but the process actually involved in weight loss or gain is, well, a lot of complex internal biological processes. If something is hyper fucked up with one of those you can gain weight while not getting enough calories. I admit I don't know exactly how this happens, but my assumption is that your body is storing any calories you do get as fat while not processing any to actually keep your necessary physical processes going, causing catastrophic health problems. Meanwhile to keep your body going other stuff is getting eaten into like muscle. It's bad. And it can happen because your body isn't just one of those boxes used in middle school math problems with an 'input' and an 'output', but an extremely complex organic machine reliant on a network of biochemical reactions.

 

... Or, you know, it's more common than you think. Many conditions or medications affect metabolism or fat storage, and even just a sedentary lifestyle (which will happen when heavily calorie restricting, and might even end up in borderline catatonia) makes your body consume surprisingly little energy.
Also: calorie counting is a fad diet as well, because while it makes sense at a first glance, it doesn't take into account either the drop in energy expenditure when your body's food intake is significantly limited, or the underlying issues - not to mention that, uh, you can technically count calories for the rest of your life to maintain that weight loss, but given the mental issues that's known to cause, said life will be pretty short.
I know several people who started losing a lot of fat from eating more, which gave them the energy to exercise more often. The thing is, overall, they were gaining weight - and let me tell you, the one among those people who constantly made "hamplanet" jokes and took being fat as a personal failing, well, he considered that as a failure. He was healthier, but he thought it was better to just stop all the sports he was doing and go back to measuring 20g of vegan cheese substitute to have on no more than three whole wheat crackers for lunch. That... Didn't go well, to say the least.

Well, really, it does create weight loss, it's just that the part you lose is, uh... Muscles, internal organs, stuff like that. Conservation of mass is a thing, sure, but the human body doesn't know how to handle "not getting much of any nutrition except for straight calories" because that's not something that regularly happened for most of modern humans' existence.
I actually think there was a joke about it in Good Omens? Everything about Famine is relevant to this discussion, really. (well, the parts that aren't about Greallan's behavior itself)

 

really? what on earth makes you think anything will be any different this time around?

you are either incapable of understanding what every other human being is saying or of giving enough of a shit to do your own research.

the things you say will always sound fatphobic regardless of whether or not you want them to, because you have assimilated the language and culture of a fatphobic community.

and everything will continue to stay the same, because you are more interested in using people to commit as much emotional self-harm as possible than actually trying to pull your mental health out of shit creek.

if you’re really interested in trying to solve your problems instead of using us as yet enough outlet for you to motivate yourself with self-harm, then you should work on completely relearning how to communicate, stop motivating yourself through forms of self-harm like ppc/fatlogic/drinking, and gain some self-awareness and learn how much of a hypocrite with double-standards you are

 

and really, why are you even here? is kintsugi just another form of motivational self-harm for you to flagellate yourself with? if so, then you should probably just leave. you need to cut all this self-harm out of your life and see a mental health professional

 

Yes. A starvation response means a Hardcore metabolic change. This used to be sensible because getting too many calories was plain not an issue for most of humanity for 95% of evolutionary history.
The same history makes it very sensible that if you come out of a restricted Periode (like a dient!!) your body starts aggressively storing calories to prepare for the next bad thing.
Your body doesn't know what a diet is, but it's BUILT to survive starvation and food restricted periods. So for your metabolism a diet is starvation and needs according treatment.

That's why they don't work. That's why sustained weightloss comes with both fixing potential mental issues and gentle, szstainable lifestyle choices. I am generally not a fan of the term but any attempted weightloss needs a holistic approach, in so far that you gotta look at the whole picture. Not just the calories.

@Greallan
Again, as someone working in a Hospital, what you said about your drinking habits and the knock-off effect it‘s got on your liver: i'm begging you to seek help. Something is hurtling down a very dangerous path with you and you need help getting off this ride before it smacks Into the great solid wall of Complete Liver Failure. Please.

 

Literally this is the thing. This is exactly what it is, full stop.

 

I'm here because the problems won't get better by just shutting myself away. And kint actually has people that understand mental problems, and won't kick me out just because of them.

 

I'll admit that the math isn't perfect, and some people really do have metabolic problems that their doctors should be treating instead of dismissing.

I can't remember much about famine in Good Omens. I'll see if I can get ahold of a copy.

And that one guy was going anorexic, so that wasn't good either. Proper calorie counting does leave room for proper meals. I'm spitballing but he was probably supposed to aim for 1500-1800 for loss, probably more with the sports, like 2000 to 2200.

Hamplanet isn't just about size, it's about an attitude.

 

Weight-loss was just about my only motivation for trying to quit drinking. Now I feel like I should just give up on losing weight, give up on being able to walk into a store to buy clothes... choke down some butter and whatever other garbage is in the cupboard until my poor non-stretchy stomach hurts because there's no point.