Health At Every Size and Eating Disorder Recovery

After learning what the Health at Every Size (HAES) approach is, you can better understand how the same approach is the most widely used in the prevention and treatment of eating disorders by dietitians, therapists, and other professionals all over the world.  The Center for Everybody aligns with HAES because it is the most inclusive, compassionate and ethical approach to eating disorder recovery. 

Health at Every Size is the best approach to eating disorder recovery for a variety of reasons, including that it recognizes that bodies come in all shapes and sizes. The HAES approach also says our health is not always in our control and that behaviors, not body size improve our health. [1] Prevention of eating disorders starts with making it safe to be in any size body and knowing that no matter what body you’re in, you can choose to improve your health through behaviors rather than weight suppression. 

Promotes Body Diversity as the Societal Norm
Body diversity has and always will exist. The Health at Every Size paradigm agrees with this and recognizes all bodies are able to improve health and that access to health should be available to all bodies. HAES shows us that bodies come in all shapes and sizes and seeing this can influence how we think about ourselves. Everybody benefits from body diversity – so many bodies exist beyond thin white bodies!

The long term goal for HAES and anti diet professionals, fat activists, folks in eating disorder recovery and more, is to make it safe to be fat. Eliminating the fear of being fat is the ultimate goal because fat acceptance is eating disorder prevention. 

We know that most disordered eating is linked to restriction in the attempt to manage our weight. Because of this, the idea of eliminating the need to be thin, or need to not be fat is taken away and therefore fosters a healthy relationship with food. 

Recognizes That Most of our Health is Beyond our Control

Diet culture teaches us that our health and body size are pretty much the same thing. Part of the problem is that one of the main environmental influences of eating disorders is the emphasis on body size and health. It can be easy to follow suit to disordered eating when you’ve always been told that you must be a certain size to obtain health or you’ve seen others in the media and in real life engaging in weight suppression. 

“Health is the greatest wealth”, is a quote most of us have heard at one point or another. When we’re constantly worried about health and being a certain size, it could be causing more harm than good. It can become disordered, obsessive, and leave little to no room for other parts of social, emotional and physical health. 

To get an even better idea, let’s think of other parts of our health that are beyond our control - our genetic predisposition to certain illnesses, access to clean air and water, cyclical poverty, experiencing racism, sexism or anti-fatness. All of these can influence our health and most of them we have no control over! 

Shows How Multifaceted Health is and Promotes Ending Weight Stigma

A huge reason that the health at every size approach is beneficial for eating disorder recovery is because it shows us that there are so many factors that impact our health and so many of those are beyond our control. If we can accept that most of our health is attributed to factors beyond our control, we can accept that disordered eating, and weight suppression isn’t going to improve our health in the long term. 

Health at Every Size promotes not using weight as an indicator of disease risk and using other measurable indicators such as blood work to determine and diagnose illness. HAES encourages a gentle and weight neutral approach to medicine that eliminates weight stigma in medical treatment. 

Focuses on Behaviors Rather than Body Size & Promotes Flexible Nutrition

The HAES approach emphasizes the importance of healthful behaviors regardless of body size. Adding fruits and vegetables to meals is a nutrition behavior we can participate in that doesn’t have anything to do with our body size. The health at every size approach wants nutrition and eating to be flexible to all. If eating is stressful, micromanaged to disordered it isn’t healthful no matter how many vegetables you eat.

Eating and nutrition aside, Health at Every Size also includes our other health promoting behaviors. There’s plenty of health promoting behaviors we can engage in such as joyful movement - yoga, walking, anything you like. There’s also managing stress appropriately, and building healthy relationships.

The HAES approach works well in aiding in treatment and prevention of eating disorders because it shows us that bodies have always and will always come in all sizes. It also shows us that stressing about our health and body size isn’t going to make us healthier in the long run (stress is directed linked to inflammation). Knowing that any size is socially acceptable, not experiencing weight stigma and feeling that it’s ok to be fat, can help us focus inward to our health. Since HAES is the most compassionate and ethical approach to treating and preventing eating disorders, The Center for Every Body respects and aligns with this method. 

If there’s anything you’d like clarification on, or if you’d like to work together, please email me. Everyone is always welcome! 

-Jackie Garn MSSA, LISW-S

References

[1]     The Health at Every Size® (HAES®) Principles - ASDAH