Accept and respect the inherent diversity of body shapes and sizes and reject the idealizing or pathologizing of specific weights. Just like the color of our skin, the texture of our hair, or the size of our feet, our body size and type are, to a large extent, genetically determined.

“Uniformity is not nature’s way; diversity is nature’s way” ~ Vandana Shiva.

Poodle Science

The Weight-Inclusive vs Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight-Loss

Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift

What to Say at the Doctor’s Office

2. Health Enhancement

Support health policies that improve and equalize access to information and services, and personal practices that improve human well-being, including attention to individual physical, economic, social, spiritual, emotional, and other needs. Social determinants of health are the primary cause of health inequities.

HAES Health Sheets

Sense of Agency and Social Justice

We Can’t Have Body Liberation without Black Liberation

High Adherence to the Mediterranean Diet is Associated with Cardiovascular Protection in Higher but Not Lower Socioeconomic Groups

Examples of social determinants of health include:

genetics
pollution exposure
adequate food and access to clean water
safe and affordable access to healthcare
access to safe and reliable housing and transportation
the education and literacy level of the community we live in
type of job, working conditions, and income level
socioeconomic status that allows time enough to attend to the daily tasks related to health such as time and money for doctor visits, exercising, grocery shopping, cooking, and relaxing
stress levels, including discrimination levels (like weight stigma, gender identity, sexual orientation, and racism)
legislative policies that indirectly affect health (ex: minimum wage, reproductive rights, civil liberties, the environment, etc.)

3. Respectful Care

Acknowledge our biases, and work to end weight discrimination, weight stigma, and weight bias. Provide information and services from an understanding that socio-economic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and other identities impact weight stigma, and support environments that address these inequities. It benefits all of us, across the weight spectrum, to advocate for an end to size discrimination.

The Racist Origins of Fat Phobia

The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMI

4. Eating for Wellbeing

Promote flexible, individualized eating based on hunger, satiety, nutritional needs, and pleasure, rather than any externally regulated eating plan focused on weight control.

10 Intuitive Eating principles:

Reject the Diet Mentality. Throw out the diet books and magazine articles that offer you false hope of losing weight quickly, easily, and permanently. Dieting is like cutting hair; it grows back. Get angry at the lies that have led you to feel as if you were a failure every time a new diet stopped working and you gained back all of the weight.
Honor Your Hunger. Keep your body biologically fed with adequate energy and carbohydrates. Otherwise you can trigger a primal drive to overeat. Once you reach the moment of excessive hunger, all intentions of moderate, conscious eating are fleeting and irrelevant. Learn why and how to give yourself permission to eat anything.
Make Peace with Food. If you tell yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t have a particular food, it can lead to intense feelings of deprivation that build into uncontrollable cravings and, often, bingeing.
Challenge the Food Police. The Food Police monitor the unreasonable rules that dieting has created. The police station is housed deep in your psyche, and its loudspeaker shouts negative barbs, hopeless phrases, and guilt-provoking indictments.
Feel Your Fullness. Listen for the body signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. Observe the signs that show that you’re comfortably full. Pause in the middle of eating and ask yourself how the food tastes, and what your current fullness level is. It is common to feel conflicted when you feel your fullness.
Discover the Satisfaction Factor. When you eat what you really want, in an environment that is inviting and conducive, the pleasure you derive will be a powerful force in helping you feel satisfied and content.
Cope with Your Feelings without Using Food. Even if you don’t turn to food when emotionally distressed, you might eat past fullness to escape the sadness of saying “enough” to food. Learn to work with your emotions as allies rather than enemies.
Respect Your Body. Accept your genetic blueprint. Look at the long line of people you come from for a hint as to what your genetic blueprint might be.
Exercise: Feel the Difference. Shift your focus to how it feels to move your body, rather than the calorie burning effect of exercise.
Honor Your Health: Gentle Nutrition. Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel well.

5. Life-Enhancing Movement

Yes, it is possible to be both fit and fat. Support physical activities that allow people of all sizes, abilities, and interests to engage in enjoyable movement, to the degree that they choose. Research shows that those who exercise regularly are able to do so by shifting focus from extrinsic (ex: weight loss or increased muscle tone) to intrinsic motivation (ex: mood enhancement, enjoyment, and better sleep). Create a buffet of movement:

Let's Not Be the Health Police

Healthism: “Health-ism is a belief system that sees health as the property and responsibility of an individual and ranks the personal pursuit of health above everything else, like world peace or being kind. It ignores the impact of poverty, oppression, war, violence, luck, historical atrocities, abuse, and the environment . . . . It protects the status quo, leads to victim blaming and privilege, increases health inequities and fosters internalized oppression. Health-ism judges people’s human worth according to their health.” ~ Lucy Aphramor, Well Now

Nutritionism: “The fixation on nutrients, at the expense of context and experiential knowledge of food and eating, and the resulting ‘nutrition confusion’ that has confounded people’s ideas about what to eat.” ~ John Coveney, Food, Morals, and Meaning: The Pleasure and Anxiety of Eating

“As the ‘ism’ suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture.” ~ Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food, An Eater’s Manifesto

When Clients Come to Us with a Desire to Lose Weight: Adopting the HAES principles is neither a moral imperative nor an individual obligation. “HAES is broader than the choice of an individual to engage in behaviors such as intuitive eating, joyful movement, and/or body acceptance. The HAES principles include the arguably more potent social determinants of health and acknowledge that ‘Health should be conceived as a resource or capacity available to all regardless of health condition or ability level, and not as an outcome or objective of living.’” ~ Daxle Collier

Healthism: The Desire to Be Healthy Gone Wrong

How Healthism Overshadows Health