Tani asked me: "You come out with statements like where you say
you feel guilty about eating as many calories as before and losing
weight, or being a traitor to your brotherhood of fatness. Is this
serious or is this a joke?"
---------

It's no joke.  I was very, very resistant to any diet for many years because
to do so would be to admit defeat.  It would be to admit that all the people
who picked on, teased and marginalized me were -right- to do so because I
was fat.  It would be selling out and trying to become like them.  And I
feel more guilty, not less, because I am doing very little to achieve my
goal.  I am letting my body repair itself at it's own rate, nothing more.

I wonder sometimes what will I do when the inevitable comes.  The inevitable
event that I dread is one day being with a group of people somewhere, and a
fat person walks by, and everyone starts making fun of him or her.  Peer
pressure is a powerful force, "Ordinary Men" has peer pressure being the
driving force behind the murder of thousands by the 101th Polish Motorcycle
Police Battalion. I say that I am immune to peer pressure, but a large part
of that is my being immune to peers!  I know I won't haul off, even though I
may want to, and start busting some serious heads.  I don't like the thought
of legal retribution, criminal law is bad enough, and what if they sue me?
What if I'm the one who gets their face rearanged?  Verbal insults are out
to.  I can be insulting, but to do so I have to tap into a part of myself
that I would rather not.  To have that dry, cynical satircal
humor-at-the-expense of others I have to -become- a type of person to whom
that sense of humor comes naturally to.  Hopefully, I can say "You are
deriving a PERVERSE satasfaction from making fun of a person with a mind,
heart and soul.  You may not think she can here you, but the odds are she
can, and you WANT her to here you, maybe not consciously, but you WANT that.
You HATE her because she is DIFFERENT from you, and you can't stand anything
that is not some damned clone of your pathetic selves.  I leave you to
wallow in your own arogant sense of physical superiority.  You are the TRUE
freaks of nature, things that should have been STRANGLED in your mother's
wombs.  You are EVIL.  You are only happy when you can inflict MISSERY on
others.  Pain brings your pleasure.  I want NOTHING more to do with you or
your kind.  LEAVE.  Get out of my presence before I CAST YOU OUT!"

    I'm going to have to remember that speech.  I never know when it is
going to come in use.