LOVE YOUR BODY

HAES is not exactly the same as size acceptance, because it focuses on health. But it replaces the weight-centered health advice with what we actually know empirically helps people be healthier, whether they lose weight or not. And it challenges the pursuit of weight loss as a solution to - well, anything, since we don’t really have a workable process for that anyway. But also because the idea that weight is the reason we are suffering and weight loss is what will deliver us from that suffering is a delusional, near-religious, near-omnipresent cultural belief that keeps people from working on their actual challenges and making progress.

And there is a lot that is familiar and some that isn’t familiar in that literature, especially the focus on what is sustainable for each individual. The diet-and-exercise advice has left a lot people really pissed off and justifiably so. I don’t really like to propagate advice like, “do this for x minutes” or “eat this and not that” because I would rather help people put their bodies back into the decision process. I can understand how this can sometimes sound “fuzzy” - because people sometimes want to be told what to do, not told they can find an answer within their own wisdom.

The general empirical evidence is that human bodies work best with enough (restful) sleep, good nutrition, raucous and playful movement, freedom from physical and interpersonal harm, a clean environment, and freedom from stigma. HAES focuses on that general advice, and the belief that when people listen to their bodies, they can usually figure out what kinds of food and movement make their bodies work best. HAES also explicitly directs us that these struggles cannot be solved with individual “solutions” alone, but only by changing the broader forces that make us sick and unhappy.

Think about how most of us learn to be toilet trained (bear with me on this). Here is a situation where your parents helped you take information you got from your body (I have to use the bathroom - or not) and pair it with responsive behavior (i.e., get myself to the toilet, or continue what I was doing). Most of us do not worry that if we don’t PLAN and MONITOR OBSESSIVELY and DISCIPLINE ourselves, our bodies will somehow pee or poop ALL THE TIME! We pretty much trust that we don’t have to sit on the toilet all the time, or every three hours, or never after 6pm.

But we don’t trust the very same process with food. And those of us who have dieted have been trained NOT to pay attention to our bodies - how to ignore hunger, how to fool your body into thinking it’s getting food when it’s not, to eat only at pre-determined times or places or pre-determined amounts off pre-determined plates. Our relationship with our bodies, which should be intuitive and cooperative, has become fraught with distrust and rage.

And so it seems like the only two processes are total restriction or total hedonism/rebellion/chaos.

But recall the toilet training metaphor. Those are the same problems a few families run into with that - a kid who is so anxious they can’t go when they think they have to, and they think they have to every 5 minutes, or a kid who angrily/gleefully rejects any input into how to self-regulate.

As adults we have to figure out how to self-regulate the things our bodies can’t just automatically do. And we don’t have very good models for how to do it, but some of us figure it out. Most people are pretty untroubled about temperature regulation - they get chilly and they take action to put on a sweater, no big deal. Most people are pretty untroubled about using the bathroom. We run into more problems when it comes to getting restful sleep or getting physical activity or feeding ourselves, partly because our culture has made so many of us feel like the natural biological size of our bodies must be changed, and that our bodies are diseased, and that they cannot be trusted.

Way back in the late 80’s Pat Lyons and I wrote a book called Great Shape which talked about the RIGHT of larger folks to pleasurable physical activity. Fatter people have no more moral obligation to exercise than thinner people. But they have a right to, and they have a right to activities and gear and clothing that are designed for them and paced for them. And it seems like, for most of us, our bodies tend to run better when we move regularly, so if you care about that, then the task becomes finding a way to do it that you like so you keep doing it. That you REALLY like. Or that is purposeful so you like the outcome, like the time you got to spend with your niece walking her to school, or the vegetables you grew and now get to eat. Whatever it is.

HAES is really a principle of making your well-being an important consideration in your decisions. It does take time to do this, it does take effort. But it is time and effort not in the service of making yourself “an acceptable size” or some other conformist BS, but rather in the service of your own life satisfaction.