Body-Positive, Intellect-Negative: Edyn Jacks.

as if being fat is a problem I don't
feel anything I have no emotional attachment to losing weight I'm not mad at anyone discuss first favorite thing about being fat on the internet if I get called all of my favorite animals like cows pigs whales and elephants I also feel really ugly nobody even wants to look at me know what keep talking disgusting and I know it's done I'll hide you % me a baby I've gained some weight but it's also the people here the culture the mindset I mean when I went to the distance if I post an amazing picture of me in a bikini I loved it on the Internet people can see beyond my size and they compliment me on things like my bravery I know this is a favorites video but I actually think it's kind of insulting I mean there are actual heroes out there me wearing a bikini isn't brave I've never ever had anyone say it to my face a friend an enemy somewhat I've hurt anyone I broke it up with a friend I've never had someone refer to me is that my face Toby and this ting so much and it's so painful because he's right I think any big change that you make in your life has to be built on a foundation of self-love and I think that's what I've taught not only bit girls but girls of all sizes is to make sure that any change you're making in your life in all actions that you're taking in your life or base I love like my brake power me she's so [ __ ] pretty it's just not fair said you know well the reason sleeping is like this which were you know wait I'm happy with myself at all sizes but there are points when I feel like I need to lose weight like if I'm huffing and puffing when I'm going upstairs another one for me is if I run a mile and I'm close to the 20-minute mark I like my mile to be around 14 to 15 minutes if I'm near 20 minutes I feel like I need to bump up my workouts in order to stay at my personal quota you justified it right he's like we talk [ __ ] about a lot of people in the minute someone says anything to you you know what you're right you say I don't like somebody good fighting in you or joking with you about people we don't like it justifies you rolling your girlfriend fat everything a TV producer does assistant like this for like at least a couple of weeks I told her from the get-go don't tell me not to eat something don't talk they'll come up my food don't call me weight it's something that's so as you adults because so deep this is what I dislike so much about weight loss I think we lost is a beautiful thing it can be a great journey and process it can be a learning experience a fitness goal in itself can be a learning process and experience my last favourite thing about being fat on the internet is I get endless unsolicited diet and nutrition advice did you know not putting cream in my coffee will solve all of my problems as it being fat is a problem yeah I've been have you dirty it was just a freak that I really enjoy and she said don't know you so fat you so fat really sugar sugar sugar I've lost over 120 pounds on this channel if you go back to my very first video I'm a lot smaller than I am now I lost that weight and I never mention one thing about it the only thing that I ever did was a clothing haul with smaller size clothing I lost the weight and said nothing because once you say something have the peanut gallery they come they appear and I'm not here for it you should never comment on when someone else is eating ever it's not your business you shouldn't comment on someone else's choices um for fitness it's not your business like those are things that are just personal weight-loss and wellness or personal choices and they're not to be commented on by outside sources I see people boiling down on others Worth based on a number alone daily on the Internet it's literally everywhere instead of paying attention to someone's intellectual value their accomplishments their morals the things that actually matter it's all a number they'll try to discredit you completely because of what your body looks like what I do have a problem with is individuals losing weight because someone else has him they should or because they hate themselves so much that they feel like they need to lose weight to be happy a bonus Yin this is not gonna be like a caddy shallow hateful video saying that eating jacks is an idiot the point of this video is actually not at all to say the dean jackson ii i think that her peculiar corner of the body positive fat positive demi-monde raises some interesting questions was talked about she comments herself that many of the body positive youtubers hate her and criticize her for not being truly body positive because her actual situation is that she has already lost over a hundred pounds and she is in the process of losing another 50 pounds and that really changes the significance of a lot of the things she says in a subtle and profound way so she kind of puts up this disclaimer this sort of philosophical abstract point that you ought to be happy with yourself at any size and any weight however she's lost a hundred pounds and she's trying to lose another 50 pounds that's quite a bit different from someone who makes the claim that you should be happy at any weight and therefore they don't care or if they remain massively obese or even if they gain another 50 pounds or gain another hundred pounds or something so it's not another situation um because the things that leaps out to me I got three points I want to talk about I don't know last things first you may have noticed that she goes on the sort of odd rants against her audience complaining basically saying how dare you comment on her health her diet or her appearance her weight and if you just look at her YouTube channel or her Instagram presence or anything else she's doing on social media it is entirely devoted to her health her diet her exercise for weight her body that's what all these videos are about so I find that really quite bizarre now you know if people were commenting on the current prime minister of Germany or the current Prime Minister of France or even the president United States if all they're talking about one of those people is their body weight their health their diet their exercise you'd say hey come on guys this is a little bit tacky this little bit crass it's fair game to talk about a politician's health weight next eyes to some extent but how can we monomaniacal you folks in this isn't the focus is created by eating jacks the focus is created by this fully grown woman so it was good as a young woman to my knowledge she's 29 years old she's 29 on YouTube and history was a fully grown woman and you are choosing to put out one video after another talking about what you're eating what exercise you're doing how you look in a bikini etc so are you really in a position to complain specifically she complains that someone's body food and fitness is personal that it's off limits to content on that on the internet and she herself is earning money offering a commentary and critique about her own body fitness and and she wraps this up this quote really stood out to me that she faults her audience for paying attention to the body the mirror body a person's mirror beauty fitness weight physical appearance instead of quote someone's intellectual value when I scroll through her list of videos on YouTube do I see even a single video that in any way presents or reflects on her intellectual value now I have over 1,000 videos on my channel I can't even say that are really percentage of them are presenting my intellectual values but there are hundreds within that 1000 total um you know you could look at the book reviews the discussions of politics activism philosophy history even just my work experience or something there's a lot of conversation of intellectual substance on my channel so you know yes I have had this kind of criticism directed at me I've sometimes it's been sane and reasonable sometimes it's been insane and unreasonable and sometimes I feel like look guys my channel I have a couple videos mentioning my exercise and diet that that side of my life but why would there be such overwhelming emphasis on on that side of Michelle and the truth is the main reason why people do it is that they're basically trying to drag me down to their level and try to I don't have a tour discuss something where they feel they can win they feel that they're their superior to me and you know it's it's not just sort of stereotypical jock character to do that if anything the opposite most of the time it's the the stereotypical hippies the people who are in a so-called alternative health and raw fruitarian diet people on that side normally try to criticize me and attack me and drag me down on the basis of my diet my exercise or my or my body weight I do the way if you want to see videos about me I when I speak about diet exercise the main thing I emphasize is I'm not an athlete I don't have a lot of time don't a lot of patience for this here's how I managed to get a certain amount of exercise maintain a certain amount of strength within the limitations of my own life some of those limitations are imposed upon me and some of them are limitations I impose myself Oh starting to a guy who's an ex bodybuilder just a couple of weeks ago and I asked him I said you know wasn't the biggest spending three hours a day at the gym didn't that start to you know bother you what you're losing out on in life just by spending someone else's gym and he immediately agreed with me and he said that was the main reason why he quit bodybuilding and I had to reflect on also how much time I've spent in the gym last several months and every minute I'm at the gym I know I'm not studying Chinese and not studying history or politics not writing essays or doing other pauses or organizing vegan political activism doing something for the movement doing something for myself for my family for education what have you but yes it is bizarre truly bizarre and I think blameworthy on a deep level when you see someone who's basically a health and fitness even if body-positive of health and fitness blogger when this is this is your lane cleaning reproach your audience because she claims her audience fails to appreciate her intellectual value instead of paying attention to someone's intellectual value you guys might have thought I was gonna be asking tough questions about her you know the shape she's in or how much wages are you know eating jacks I think you've got to ask yourself tough questions at age 29 what is your intellectual value you you can't just assume this is something sacrosanct oh maybe if people were judging you by your intellectual value you'd be judged much more harshly you know the intellectual world it's competitive it's fierce its oh you'd be subject to criticism of a very different kind from the type of criticism you've been complaining but in this video if you actually step into the ring' intellectually whether that's about politics the future the vegan movement or anything else but still I'd love to see her make the transition I would love to see Eden Jack's Channel tomorrow stop being about weight loss stop eating food stop being about hair and beauty products and bathing suits and Anna defer to commit herself to living up to to her own Bossier that she has some kind of intellectual value she wants the world to pay attention to instead okay you've got our attention showing proof let's let's see what you got all right but some something that might have slipped past some people in the audience but I think is worth dwelling on for just a moment here is her philosophical claim that any changes you make in your life should be based on love interested I mean philosophically it's an interesting claim and I think it is a hundred percent false I think that we make changes in our lives based on really basic instincts and one of the most basic and fundamental instincts not just for human beings but at least for all mammals it's actually curiosity you know one of the reasons to change your life I mean you can kind of Express that the inverse of curiosity maybe is boredom its transport one of the reason to change your life one of the reasons to become more self disciplined physically mentally intellectually to seek out higher education a better job to travel to a new part of the world to take on humanitarian work to take on political responsibilities activism one of reasons is actually curiosity but in talking about this broader spectrum of intellectual ethical political interests how could we even describe our motivation as so-called self-love how I understand she's making this very limited and specific point about weight loss being motivated by self love rather than self-hatred but I think you know on a profound level it's contradictory and even ludicrous and that starts to become apparent if we just take the concept of self-love and try to apply it to some other examples in our own life and experience now look using myself as an example because it's convenient why did I decide to leave Canada and move to Cambodia when I was still in Canada was still in downtown Toronto why did I get the books off of the library shelf and start studying the Cambodian language there are still uploads in the internet proving that was the order of operations I didn't up in Cambodia years later after living in Laos Thailand Sri Lanka Hong Kong a bunch of other places but I got the Cambodia eventually what made me you know do that is it was its quote-unquote self love can I say I decided to make these changes in my life based on self love I think that's profoundly incoherent other than curiosity is an element I think you can even talk about fear fear is the most primal instinct of all and a lot of our behaviors in life are guided by fear which can include the fear of having a meaningless life not necessarily the fear of death but the fear that when you your life ends wasn't worth anything what about you know the myriad sources of dissatisfaction contempt hatred competition and revenge competition is a very culturally and psychologically complex phenomenon you know the desire to be excellent Oh the desire to be competitive you know so many people today will write a book and just dump it on the internet as a PDF they don't care who reads it I sympathize I mean you know a lot of these but what if your desire is not just to have a book that's ignored but to have a book that's the best of the best a book that really earns the time and attention and interest and passion of the readers there are competitive instincts and there's dissatisfaction with one's own life one's own culture as of recently talkative and so and so forth absolutely none of these things can be encompassed within analyzed or explained in terms of self love and I think it's also true that they can't be analyser explained in terms of self hatred guys I understand the complaint in Jax is offering here I myself have been relentlessly pilloried and attacked for being a quote/unquote fat vegan and I've responded to this by uploading pictures of myself with my shirt off flexing my muscles and talking about the fact that I can do 200 push-ups a day and stuff and say hey look you know my life is not about being as lean as possible or as strong as possible or riding a bicycle on her kilometers a day however you know I do hold myself to a certain standard and you know the world's most polite and self-effacing way Eden shacks is actually making the same point I make to my viewers in Jack says that she sets certain standards for herself she says well she needs to be able to run a mile in 14 minutes she needs to be able to get up a staircase of being out of breath well that's not quite as demanding as the standards I've said to myself I need to be able to do 200 push-ups on my knuckles while I'm waiting for an aircraft to take off in an airport lobby which I'm infamous for doing by the way um my girlfriend Melissa has seen me doing push-ups in airport lobbies around the world at this point weight keeps keeps my life interesting I and may shock and horrify other or waiting for the same plane but hey so be it different strokes oh you know we do choose arbitrary goals and limits to oppose ourselves and it's interesting to see eating jacks is actually using a kind of vocabulary familiar to me very similar to the way I talk about these things myself um but if you flip that around why what's the point ultimately why do we create it's for us to live up to I gotta tell you for me it's not beauty it's not the admiration of others it's not to be beautiful or to be attractive or what-have-you and I don't think even Jack's actually grapples with that she claims in a kind of misleading way that you shouldn't base these goals on what other people think is beautiful ie that you should base it just on what you yourself think is beautiful okay I don't agree with that either I think that ultimately the question is how are we going to lead a meaningful life how are we gonna make pause difference in the world and yeah it starts with being able to walk up a staircase it may also involve being prepared to fall down a staircase and to get up and maybe do okay in a fist fight when you scrape yourself off the ground at the bar on the staircase it may involve carrying your luggage in and out of the subway system here in Paris France and all kinds of other challenges but ultimately I mean health and the body has got to be a means to an end it's not gonna be in and itself for any of us I remember a conversation ad about Buddhist philosophy where the guy was talking to said to me he said that he thought that in Buddhism the basic concept was that the mind is your temple and I disagree with him I say no I wouldn't that's true at all I'd say that in tera vaada Buddhism it's more like the body is a washcloth for the mind so you know that if you think of the mind as a lens or the mind as being like a pair of glasses that you're trying to keep your body in good shape so that you can think clearly and then again thinking clearly is not an in itself ultimately this kind of vigilance self-discipline the preparation must be force purpose and I think Eden Jack's is skating close to question what that purpose is there on life when she says she wants to be judged not for the number that shows up when she stands on a scale not for how she looks when she puts on a bikini but for her own intellectual substance well now it's up to you meeting Jack's and all you wonderful people my audience to step up and show us what kind of intellectual substance you've got and guess what the grass is not greener on the other side of that hill however nasty and backstabbing and unkind you think people are about your obesity or about your weight loss struggles or you're going to the gym and working out people are going to be 10,000 times more unkind if you start trying to do original research if you start trying to I don't know challenge conventional wisdom or deal with inconvenient truths of any kind whether that's under the heading of politics philosophy or otherwise a bonus Yin