We also need to acknowledge that the marketplace is not going to save us. Advertisements try to lure us in with empty promises. The magical pill that will allow us to eat with impunity and be slothful—without health implications—will never materialize. Nor is body mutilation like bariatric surgery proving to be effective for improving health.
Even as we fight the powers that be, individuals concerned about health need to shift our attitudes and make different choices. This is particularly true when considering our attitude toward weight. We have bought in to the myths, internalized fat phobia, and all of us enforce the cultural mandate for thinness: We are oppressors as well as the oppressed. We can all refuse to support this culture of hatred, and we can combat size discrimination, in ourselves and others.
Don’t be a sucker for the cultural version of beauty. And don’t impose it on yourself or others.
The individual choices we make add up. There is tremendous power in our words, our money, and how we choose to live our lives. Send a message to the powers that be. Walk proud whatever your size. Expose the self-hatred encouraged by advertisements that suggest you need their products to be worthy of respect and love. Expose the self-hatred encouraged by health professionals who demonize fat (for your own good!) and prescribe dangerous and ineffective treatments. Refuse to give your money to those who trumpet the old ideas. Transfer your support to individuals and companies that care.
Barrier to Change: Internalized Oppression
It is difficult to adopt or even consider HAES given the strength of our cultural value system. Many of the ideas discussed as myths in this book are typically unquestioned assumptions. Dissenting views are rarely taken seriously or given air time.
Considering Health at Every Size touches deep emotions. People mired in the conventional approach are threatened by it. I’ve received my share of hate mail and have been attacked by seminar audience members and callers on radio shows, often in the name of caring. “You can’t just tell people to drop their concern about weight. Do you want fat people to die?”
Denial and resistance are understandable. People reach for denial when an intolerable situation has been pointed out to them but the means for change are hard to grasp and the penalties for contributing to that change are high. Myths about weight are so deeply entrenched that it may be difficult to imagine an alternative and to have the courage and means to move toward it.
Conventional thinkers provide a simplistic solution, which is that we can opt out of the oppression merely by losing weight or maintaining a low weight. It’s tempting to grab on to weight control as a lifeline rather than confront the overwhelming pain as we acknowledge the damage caused by the weight myths and the major personal, cultural, and institutional shifts required for change.
At the core of the myths are their divisiveness. They ask us to measure ourselves against others or outside standards: “Don’t you just hate women who look like that?” One person’s body becomes the instrument for criticizing another.
The belief that we can lose weight and opt out of the oppression means that we don’t bond with one another about how harmful this message is. It’s not surprising that fat people have not had a Stonewall.
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People cling to their “temporary status,” believing they can escape oppression as “fat” if they try hard enough. They put their energy into escaping rather than fighting cultural prejudice. This accounts for the well-documented anti-fat bias among fat people themselves.
Conventional ideas about weight take away the motivation for self-defense by removing the need for resistance: “Just change yourself and this won’t be an issue anymore.”
Attitudes toward weight are further complicated by social class. It is said that “You can never be too rich or too thin,” and in fact heaviness is much more common among people of lower socioeconomic status. It is common for the privileged class to view weight as a measure of one’s character: People are fat because they are too lazy or irresponsible to take care of themselves. Weight carries a moral judgment, allowing the thin (wealthy) to justify their social position. If the poor and minorities are getting fatter, it is even more proof that they are less responsible and less worthy.
Individuals Embracing Solutions
As angry as I may be at the external system that teaches us to hate ourselves, I don’t believe that the difficulty of fighting the system is the limiting factor. While I certainly advocate continuing to fight and to chip away at the systemic problems, I think our primary power lies elsewhere.
Because the most powerful force preventing change is our own internalization of the myths. We believe that this cultural value system is real and that there is something wrong with us because we don’t measure up. We feel shame. Because we believe there is something wrong with us, we disown our personal experience. When we regain lost weight after a diet, we blame ourselves as opposed to the diet. The culture doesn’t have to exert pressure because we do it to ourselves and to each other.
Internalized oppression hurts people across the weight spectrum. The fear of becoming fat can be just as painful as the plight of being fat.
The toughest challenge in adopting HAES is to recognize that change has got to come from inside you. You are trying to define your own beauty and value in an environment that doesn’t want you to get away with it. No industry profits from your self-love or from the very simple notion that you’ve already got the tools for fulfillment right there inside you.
This book’s message is that you are the best expert on how to take care of yourself. Think about eating. This message is seriously unprofitable to the food industry, which would like you to believe that eating their income-generating processed products is in your best interest. It’s seriously unprofitable to many dietitians, who would be out of their jobs if people didn’t need their expert advice. And it’s just not interesting to reporters, who can do a much better job of selling a story about the benefits of chocolate than the benefits of self-love.
But this message
is
profitable to you. On the other end of the spectrum is the great relief many people exposed to HAES feel when they realize they can stop fighting themselves, that they can ease up on their vigilance and finally enjoy themselves. I’ve certainly received much more “Thank you for this very freeing message” mail than I have hate mail.
Over time, I’ve come to understand that the crucial difference between those in whom the message triggers denial and those in whom it triggers relief has to do with this: the degree to which a person is willing to believe in him- or herself. Because once you trust your experience, HAES just makes sense. Back to that example of dieting: If you trust your own experience, you know it’s not effective long term. The science just confirms your experience. If it did work, why would you have to try again?
Self-love may be the most revolutionary act you can engage in. A person who is content in his or her body—fat or thin—disempowers the industries that prey on us and helps rewrite cultural mores.
Your Own Health at Every Size Journey:
Your Personal Path
Adopting Health at Every Size is a challenge in this fat-phobic culture. Show some compassion for yourself as you address your pain as a result of your “weight problem.” Don’t worry if you still feel critical of your body, still judge others, and are confused about how to integrate this new paradigm into your personal life or your work. You haven’t failed because you are still struggling. We internalize the culture and it is hard to let it go. Regardless of what you believe intellectually, constantly being told by media, experts, friends, acquaintances, and family that losing weight is paramount to health, beauty, and moral character takes its toll.
Your journey is a long-term process of change. You are unlikely to wake up one day and realize you suddenly love and trust your body. Reading this book has not magically turned you into an unrestrained eater who loves vegetables and whole grains, lives for biking, and feels sexy in spandex, nor will you instinctively know how best to respond in the moment to friends or acquaintances with concerns about your weight or their own.
Focus on a moment-to-moment awareness, rather than worrying about the big picture. You will have tipping points. Some day you will enjoy chocolate pudding without thinking about the calories. Or you will realize that today, your pleasure comes from the company of good friends and you’re less dependent on pizza for that feel-good hit. The pleasure of eating assumes its rightful place alongside the many other ways you obtain pleasure, no longer tainted by your anxiety and neediness.
You will experience on occasion how delicious food can be and how good it feels when you maintain comfortable satiety, choosing the right foods to meet your tastes and needs. You will notice when you are satisfied, when food stops tasting or feeling as good, and how right it feels to stop eating then, knowing you can eat again when you want to. You will, on occasion, spontaneously dance or run, or otherwise experience the sheer joy of embodiment and movement.
Many times throughout the day you can apply healthy-living principles, whether that choice is about what, when, or how to eat; how to take care of yourself; what you see when you look in the mirror; how you feel in your body; or what judgments you make about others. Each time you practice what you have learned, you contribute to a larger cumulative effect on who you are. In time, you will find that you think less about when or how much to eat, since your body will let you know what you need and you will naturally and effortlessly respond. You will be less susceptible to that knee-jerk reaction that says “Where’s your self-respect?” when you look in the mirror or see a fat person.
I also want to encourage you to take it to the streets. Re-imagine a more compassionate world, one that supports healthy behaviors and celebrates size diversity. Help make it a reality.
Join a counterculture movement. The “fat acceptance” movement, for example, provides a safe place for people of all sizes to expand the cultural notion of beauty, to celebrate the diversity that fatness adds to our cultural fabric. While the fat acceptance movement poses obvious benefits for fat individuals, I encourage thin people to join the ranks as well. As long as fat is persecuted, thin people will live in fear of becoming fat and will not be free. Fat acceptance benefits people across the size spectrum.
Thin people can also benefit by acknowledging “thin privilege,” the ways in which we have benefited from discrimination against fat people. Whether we choose it or not, we receive untold advantages from being thin, from social approval to preferential hiring for jobs. It’s hard to feel legitimately worthy if our achievements are based on unearned status in a discriminatory system.
Unearned privilege brings with it responsibility. We can use our privilege to help level the playing field.
Clichéd though it may be, no individual is free until we all are free.
Your Own Health at Every Size Journey:
The Professional Path
If you are a health care professional, you may need to confront your own demons while trying to help your clients. You may also need to re-invent your understanding of health itself within an antagonistic establishment.
Know that it’s not uncommon for people to feel considerable grief when they first embrace HAES and recognize the hurt they may have unintentionally caused by promoting the weight myths. Show compassion toward yourself: you did the best you could given the information you believed at the time.
When working with clients, keep coming back to the practice of weight neutrality: If a fat person seeks help, ask yourself, “How would I treat a thinner person in this situation?” Show compassion for how difficult it is to live in a culturally stigmatized body. Support your larger clients in handling the unique challenges of their bodies. And challenge the establishment that instructs you otherwise.
Know that HAES principles are equally valuable and effective across the weight spectrum. If an individual’s weight is problematic from a health perspective, the best way to address it is to improve health behaviors and let the weight settle where it may.
It may be tempting to jump on the anti-obesity bandwagon. Claims that promote weight loss or obesity prevention attract attention, clients, grants, and money, and refusing to participate in these paradigms limits marketability. Health professionals who might otherwise be drawn to HAES sometimes rationalize their participation in the conventional paradigm by thinking, for example, that they can capitalize on weight concerns to motivate better eating or activity habits. In this way, well-intended health professionals are typically the worst offenders in furthering weight stigmatization and promoting obesity myths.