Eating is a survival behaviour, not a performance. As long as you are getting fed in some way, you are doing the thing.

As long as you're getting fed in some way, you can build on that if you want to. But if you are alive, you're already doing the thing.

"If I weren't, in fact, a living human..."

Exactly. Because diet culture the effort to turn living, breathing human animals into aesthetic cultural objects without needs, desires, feelings, or any subjective internal experience.

This is actually one of the reasons I started ice skating: I wanted to have a thrilling internal experience of my body and my existence. I wanted it without the self-objectification that often goes into most aesthetic sports, and I wanted it outside of any surveillance apparatus.

This is the opposite of what people in abusive or disordered sports/fitness cultures, or diet culture itself, are taught to do.

The entire thing is a process of self-objectification. We are taught, especially as fat people, that we are not supposed to have priorities outside of eating and moving in certain ways in order to "achieve" a particular body weight and size.

Our limited, uncertain lives are not to belong to us. We are not to choose how to live, or which pursuits carry the most meaning and value to us. We are to give our lives over to the priorities that diet culture sets for us. That's the scam.

A bunch of uncompensated labour and mandated consumption, constant vigilance, dissociation...and there goes a whole life.