Thoughts on the "Healthy at Any Size" Movement
Recently, a Facebook friend asked me for my opinion on the “Healthy at Any Size” (HAES) movement. This is a specific variation of a wider movement commonly referred to as “fat acceptance”, which started way back in the 60’s and 70’s. Check out the HAES website to get a feel for their stance on the issue of body score:
When I weigh the pros and cons I see with the movement, I generally don’t like it. But that conclusion is based on a pretty nuanced argument that to fully understand, requires a thorough discussion on the pros and cons of the movement, and a suggestion for a better idea.
Before I dig into the nuts and bolts of this discussion, I should note I’ve been advocating some form of self-improvement in general for about two decades, and specifically focusing on getting healthy for about 14 years. In that time, I’ve made three observations again and again and again.
#1: The only way people get to a healthy body weight and stay there, whether they’re obese or anorexic, is to change their lifestyle. Most of these people did so by taking up a sport as a hobby, usually running or jiu jitsu.
#2: Every single person who was at an unhealthy body weight, whether that was too high or too low, reported their life dramatically improved as a result of attaining and maintaining that healthy body weight. Further, they also reported they were deeply unhappy at their less than ideal body weight even if they claimed they “accepted it.”
#3: Overweight people who champion fat acceptance are implicitly (and often explicitly) attracted to people who are not fat, and will only settle for overweight partners when it’s their only, best option. I’m a stickler for hypocrisy, and this one is among my biggest pet peeves.
All three of these observations provide the foundation for my criticism of the HAES movement. Fundamentally, the HAES movement is very similar to the entirety of what I’m doing with this project. The methods are sort of similar, and the end goals are kinda the same. But the underlying philosophy is very, very different. It embraces ideas that are, in all probability, wrong. Dangerous, even.
But the movement does get a lot of things right, which needs to be acknowledged.
Pros
It actually tries to help people (versus being a money/ power grab.) This may sound goofy to anyone who hasn’t been immersed in the health and fitness world for a long time, but there are a ton of money-grabbing scammers out there. Typically, marketers induce self-consciousness (you’re a fatty), give a solution (take this pill! Read this book!) that promises to make you fit and/or skinny, and then happiness ensues! These people seem authentic.
It actually helps people, especially, as the friend notes, with eating disorders. I don’t think their methods are great, but they do advocate for making healthy lifestyle choices. Kinda. Bu the real benefit probably comes from dispelling the so-called “thin ideal” myth.
While they don’t explicitly explain it, they are kinda right about waist-to-hip ratios and attractiveness. They often preach that you can have a high BMI and still be attractive, which is accurate if you maintain the right waist-to-hips ratio (which I’ll discuss in another post in detail.)
They celebrate diversity. There’s a “con” side to this one, but the fact remains they celebrate different kinds of people. This is always a good thing.
They make the correct assumption that a person’s value as a human is not the same as their value based on body score (what I call “social score.”) Our body type is a big factor in how we’re perceived socially, but it’s far from the only factor. They don’t go into a ton of detail here (I identify about 75-85 traits we’ll work on in this project, body type is but one.)
They promote the idea of eating based on hunger, satiety, and appetite. If done the correct way (which they advocate), it does work, but only if you establish dietary guardrails. This is basically how I eat most of the time. This is known as “intuitive eating.” Unfortunately, the way many people interpret “intuitive eating” is wrong; they just eat a ton of shit food all the time.
They are correct about the shittiness of “diet culture.” As I mentioned above, the diet world is a cesspool of marketers and scammers peddling products and programs that make promises but don’t deliver. For the long term, anyway.
They are correct that BMI is a fairly bad measure of health. Their arguments are bad, but they are right that BMI is basically a sledgehammer tasked with tapping finishing nails into fine cabinetry. A high (or low) BMI alone is only a marginally valid and reliable predictor of future health problems.
Cons
Unfortunately, the HEAS movement has a slew of cons, some of which are simply unforgivable and invalidate the movement as a legitimate tool of widespread positive social change.
It largely ignores the social consequences of body score. Fit people get treated better socially in every culture in the world. We have a ton of empirical evidence supporting that premise. So overweight people accurately perceive how they’re treated; HAES denies their perception and leads them to believe OTHER PEOPLE are wrong. This is not surprising given the influence of positive psychology and the “self-esteem movement” on the development of HAES. Basically, HAES is like a participation trophy; it gives people endless praise that has no basis in objective reality and does so by lying to people under a rationalization of making them feel good. HEAS is an ideology based on dishonesty.
HEAS falls for the diversity and equality paradox by celebrating diversity but also promoting the idea that we should all have the same outcomes based on how society treats us. You can’t be diverse and equal at the same time. They’re diametrically-opposed constructs. Diversity, by definition, means different. Different is the opposite of equal. We can be diverse. Or we can be equal. Not both. For what it’s worth, I agree with the overwhelming evidence (and evolution) that diversity is FAR more important in our world than equality.
Honest, accurate feedback is the only way we improve. I’ve been a teacher and coach for over two decades. If we fail to give people feedback, they don’t improve. HAES greatly retards growth by failing to give people accurate feedback.
We can’t change other people, only ourselves. Society evolved the way it evolved for a reason; obesity will never be universally valued over fitness. It’s akin to convincing society arrogance is better than humility, mean people are better than kind people, lying is better than honesty, or men under 5’ 2” are sexier than men over 6 feet. No matter how much we wish we could change that, we can’t. We can only change ourselves.
It often devolves into skinny shaming. This one is more about how people implement HAES than HAES ideology itself. If you visit any HEAS online community, you’ll see A LOT of implicit and explicit bias against people who are fit, skinny, or actually attempting to lose weight. This isn’t surprising; this in-group/ out-group bias occurs in any group that draws a line between us (fat is beautiful) and them (fitness is beautiful.)
HAES Ignores the medical consensus in the same way anti-vaxers ignore the medical consensus; the movement makes the bad “correlation” argument we see in any group that disregards medical consensus. There’s virtually no doubt obesity causes health problems, especially as we age. Note most HAES advocates are young, ergo haven’t experienced the real long-term costs of obesity. Denying the health consequences of obesity is just fucking stupid. This video is worth the watch:
HAES is focused on accepting your body and nothing else. This laser-like focus on one variable is unlikely to cause the kinds of wholesale lifestyle changes that actually result in permanent change.
HAES has become entwined with the social justice movement. This movement is a deeply psychologically flawed ideology for, among other reasons, promoting equal outcomes, not equal opportunity (which, as previously mentioned, is diametrically opposed to diversity..) The social justice movement features seriously flawed methods (requires a victim mentality which demands an “us versus them” mindset) and has established a long series of troublingly-spectacular social failures when applied practically. For example, social justice was responsible for creating “safe spaces” which turned out to be a modern version of segregation. Social justice promotes political correctness and language policing which discriminates against anyone who can’t read nuanced modern American social justice-defined cues like immigrants, people with Tourrette’s, and people with autism. Social justice advocates promoted the “defund the police” idea, which caused a huge spike in criminals victimizing poor minorities. Psychologically, “social justice” creates an external locus of control by blaming “systemic this and that”, which ultimately treats people like small children shrouded in a veil of implicit negative stereotypes (“You can’t resist eating McDonald’s every day or getting regular exercise because you’re black/ gay/ poor/ etc.”) Social justice requires adherents to be racist, sexist, bigoted pieces of garbage who are incapable of logic, reason, introspection, or taking personal responsibility for their actions. For those of us who have actually been using methods to make our world a better place, social justice is an absolutely disgusting ideology. The fact that the HAES movement has embraced social justice should immediately disqualify it as a solution to any problem.
The Better Solution
The HAES methodology is better than nothing. And it’s WAY better than buying into “diet culture.” But it’s still a deeply-flawed method because of the “cons” I outlined above. The better solution? Work on raising social score, which includes a foundation of sleep, diet, exercise, and meditation.
This combo of activities will inherently improve body score without going too far (getting too skinny.) The 75-80 traits and skills that make up The Curvy Road Project are all-encompassing. We don’t just focus on what you look like or how you feel. As a sample, we teach improving mental health, goal-setting, finding your life purpose, balancing work and play, developing confidence, how to get better at having conversations, how to find better people to date, how to improve long-term relationships, and so on.
So those are my thoughts on the Healthy at Any Size movement. It’s not bad. It can be helpful. But it’s also a flawed ideology that’s regressing ideologically.
Thoughts or opinions? Join our Facebook Group and share your opinions!
~Jason
***