I’m not engaging in this conversation until you read that piece. Health at Every Size is a very specific movement, it’s not just the meaning you assign to the words. There’s a little FAQ at the end of that piece with common myths, one of the myths is “The HAES model argues that people of every size must be healthy”

You’ve created a strawman of HAES and you’re asking me to defend it, please read the article from last week https://www.dropbox.com/s/ybfbkqak4wtu3wp/What is “Health at Every Size”%3F.pdf?dl=0

There’s a bit of a tricky situation though, in that just because you lose weight doesn’t automatically mean you are healthier. Anorexic women are praised by society for their unhealthy eating habits, and fat anorexic women:

Erin Harrop, a researcher at the University of Washington, studies higher-weight women with anorexia, who, contrary to the size-zero stereotype of most media depictions, are twice as likely to report vomiting, using laxatives and abusing diet pills. Thin women, Harrop discovered, take around three years to get into treatment, while her participants spent an average of 13 and a half years waiting for their disorders to be addressed.

The HAES movement moves the focus from losing weight, as dieting is a strong predictor of eating disorders:

In a large study of 14– and 15-year-olds, dieting was the most important predictor of a developing eating disorder. Those who dieted moderately were 5x more likely to develop an eating disorder, and those who practiced extreme restriction were 18x more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who did not diet. Golden, N. H., Schneider, M., & Wood, C. (2016). Preventing Obesity and Eating Disorders in Adolescents. Pediatrics, 138(3). doi:10.1542/peds.2016-1649

Staying active and eat intuitively do lead to losing weight, but there are many ways to lose weight and harm your body. By focusing on health, you avoid a lot of these pitfalls

just to let you know, losing weight with your walk to work is something that is completely compatible with Health at Every Size. Like HAES doesn’t say you can’t lose weight, but that you should stay active, eat intuitively and losing weight can be a side effect of those healthier choices.* It’s hard for me to imagine that focusing on being healthy, rather focusing on decreasing your weight is complete bs.

From what I can tell, I think you are mistaken that the “Health” in HAES is a noun rather than a verb

edit: I meant * you should pursue staying active, eating intuitively rather than pursuing losing weight itself

I don’t think I can respond directly to your first point, as I think we are working from very different premises. I think being fat is normal and okay, and you think that it is inherently unhealthy. I recommend the Health at Every Size reading from last week if you would like to understand where I’m coming from.

and I think you can just as easily say having a body is medical. The emphasis in my phrasing is arbitrarily, it’s difficult to say what is obese and what isn’t, as body fat is distributed differently across races, body types etc.

I’ll post some sources about BMI tomorrow, however I direct you to this study which shows that it’s not as simple as fat = bad https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/health/study-suggests-lower-death-risk-for-the-overweight.html

anyone can have disabled kids 🤷‍♂️