What is Health at Every Size?

If you’ve visited my website, read anything I have written or ever had a conversation with me, you’ll know that my work is centered around food and bodies. I serve by helping people find freedom with food and make peace with their bodies. That means accepting, honoring and respecting ALL bodies for what they are. 

What began as a clinical career in helping individuals treat or prevent chronic disease through proper nourishment and movement has evolved into something far more complex. My practice now is centered around the individual, meeting them where they are in order to guide them upward and onward, like a spiral, toward a life of freedom and joy. The framework surrounding Intuitive Eating (VeriWell's June Newsletter) helps to achieve those values and the philosophy at the core is Health at Every Size®. 

Health at Every Size® (or HAES) is a model set forth by The Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH). The framework aims to shift how health care professionals and consumers define and respond to a person’s food and weight related struggles as they relate to health because what we have learned through decades of lived experience and research is that weight, shape and size are not a choice.  Genetics plays the large majority of the role however, among other things, so do social and economic opportunities; the nature of our social interactions and relationships; the resources and supports available in our homes and communities; the quality and safety of our schooling and workplaces and the cleanliness of our water, food, and air.

From this acknowledgement, the movement incorporates principles in which to guide the provider. They are as copied from the ASDAH website:

• Weight Inclusivity: Accept and respect the inherent diversity of body shapes and sizes and reject the idealizing or pathologizing of specific weights. This means remaining weight neutral as opposed to centering health solely around weight, shape and size. It negates attempts to take drastic measures to morph your body into what you or others think it should be based on societal ideals. 
• 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.
• 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.
• Eating for Well-being: Promote flexible, individualized eating based on hunger, satiety, nutritional needs, and pleasure, rather than any externally regulated eating plan focused on weight control.
• Life-Enhancing Movement: Support physical activities that allow people of all sizes, abilities, and interests to engage in enjoyable movement, to the degree that they choose.

After processing the events surrounding the death of George Floyd, I have more so now than ever recognized the vital intersectional lens that impacts a person’s capacity to feel safe in their own skin. In the words of Nadia Brown and Sarah Allen Gershon,

“Bodies are sites in which social constructions of differences are mapped onto human beings...” In order for body healing to occur, the whole of one’s embodied experience must be considered.[1]”

My work makes me a better person. It teaches me to listen, really listen. I say it to all my clients and patients… “What you say matters.” All of it. My role as a nutrition therapist requires that I listen more than I talk. While I'm not perfect, I do like to talk, I am improving my capacity to listen with deep curiosity and a genuine desire to understand another person’s experience. It’s never too late to become aware, educate, and start a conversation. Whether it relates to size, skin color, or any other difference between us, may we all remain committed to unlearning our biases around bodies and advocating for equity in any way we can.

Soon we will be celebrating our country’s liberty and independence. This brings new meaning for myself and, I hope, you as well. This July 4th, let’s also celebrate the cultural diversity from which our country was founded and include the freedom within ourselves both as a collective and, in the tradition of Intuitive Eating and HAES, ourselves.

[1] Brown, N and Gershon, SA. “Body Politics.” Politics, Groups, and Identities. vol 5, issue 1. 2017.  6/1/20. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21565503.2016.1276022.