Not the self control needed to keep from eating. Thanks to yesterday's fill, I'm currently honeymooning in the luxury resort of little food = long satiety. Yay me.

No, I'm talking about the self control it takes me to remove myself from a conversation with no constructive outcome. The self control it takes not to yell and scream and tear out my hair when someone exhibits just how widespread the stigmatization of the obese in our culture has gone. It's so accepted in our culture to hate obesity and the people who suffer from it,that we have successfully convinced the obese to hate themselves.

Personally, I hate being fat. I hate it so much that I underwent weight loss surgery in the hopes of becoming thin. But I spent enough years in therapy in the meantime to understand that the reason we hate obesity is the same reason why racists hate minorities and homophobes hate gays--because we are afraid of them, and afraid of what they tell us about ourselves. We have managed to convince ourselves that people with the disease of obesity (and yes, the National Association of Chronic Disease Doctors classifies it as a disease, as well as many experts in endocrinology and associated sciences) are entirely at fault for their own condition and should view them selves with the same condemnation and disgust and shame that our culture view them.

Do people who are overweight generally eat too much? Yes, but science is only beginning to understand that there are biological reasons WHY we eat too much, that there are disorders systems in our bodies (endocrine, neurological, etc) that do not react the same way that those in individuals without the disease react. There is something more wrong with an obese person than that they eat too much and move too little. If eating less and moving more were a real solution, no one would be fat, and WLS would not exist.

It makes me so angry and so emotionally hurt when people who struggle with obesity deny the idea that it is a disease, that it is not just a matter of being greedy and lazy and no damn good that makes us weigh too much, because if we agree with the rest of the world that we should hate ourselves, what hope for real happiness will we ever have, no matter how much weight we gain or lose?