Social Justice Usage
Source: Bacon, Linda. Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight. Benbella Books, 2008, pp. 1–2.
Health at Every Size is not a weight-loss book. It’s not a diet book. It’s not an exercise program. Health at Every Size is a book about healthy living, one designed to support you as you shift your focus from hating yourself and fighting your body to learning to appreciate yourself, your body, and your life. It’s a book designed to help you break free of the weight-loss mentality and embrace the health-and-happiness mentality. Because really, what’s beneath your weight-loss quest? Isn’t your ultimate goal to feel better about yourself, to feel love, acceptance, vitality, or good health?
That’s the Health at Every Size promise. You can feel better about yourself. You can feel loved, accepted, and vital—and you can improve your health—regardless of whether you lose weight.
New Discourses Commentary
“Healthy at Every Size” is the self-explanatory name of a body-positive movement within fat activism that has the specific agenda of breaking “healthist narratives” and “medicalizing discourses” that associate obesity and matters of health (see also, fat studies and body equity). The primary agenda of the Healthy at Every Size movement is to challenge, disrupt, subvert, deconstruct, and problematize the idea that one’s “size” status has anything necessary to do with one’s health, as it is believed that this association causes oppression. Simultaneously and relatedly, it promotes body positivity as a means of furthering these goals and to address mental health concerns (primarily those centered in self-esteem) in a broader “well-being” picture of what it means to be “healthy.” In this sense it is loosely connected through fat studies to the Theory of Critical Social Justice but is primarily an fat-activist activity, with one notable scholarly exception.
The Healthy at Every Size movement either began with or was first documented by the fat activist and scholar of physiology and psychotherapy Linda (now Lindo?) Bacon, in a book titled Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight. This book argues that one can be healthy at every weight, and despite its appeal to revealing the “truth about your weight,” this claim lies in direct opposition to medical consensus and common sense (see also, medicalizing, science, biopower, Foucauldian, objectivity, positivism, and realities). It claims it is not based upon theory (or Theory) but upon science and seems to achieve its titular claim largely through the fallacy of cherry picking—picking exceptions to claim that there is no rule. In that sense, the Healthy at Every Size movement appears to be an example of a failure of statistical reasoning. That some fat people are also in relatively high health does not imply that there is no relationship between obesity and any number of health conditions.
Healthy at Every Size is also deeply invested in the concept of body positivity, roughly holding that the fat stigma and other deleterious impacts of fat shaming on one’s well-being outweigh the negative health associations of obesity, insofar as it will admit these exist at all. The movement sees it as a matter of unjust systemic power that fat is considered connected to health at all (see also, fatphobia), and it particularly sees the idea that being healthy is considered normal to be problematic (see also, normativity). This strange attitude is the result of conflating a descriptive sense of normal with a prescriptive moral judgment that being “normal” is better than being “abnormal” (see also, Foucauldian and queer Theory). Attempts to make reparations to the systems that cause these problems are Theorized under the heading body equity.
Thus, Healthy at Every Size attempts to disrupt healthism—the prioritization of health over other concerns, belief that being healthy constitutes a moral good, and connection of health to well-being in a central way—by expanding and shifting the meaning of the word “health” (to a broader category of “well-being”), arguing that “size” has nothing necessary to do with health (in either regard), and promoting self-esteem projects for fat people that rely heavily on these beliefs. This self-esteem project is ultimately what the Healthy at Every Size movement is about.
NB: The official movement, started by Linda/Lindo Bacon is rightly called “Health at Every Size,” following the title of Bacon’s book, and is trademarked. “Healthy at Every Size” is an alternative that has appeared online, possibly as a result of that trademarked status.
Related Terms
Biopower; Body equity; Body positivity; Common sense; Critical; Deconstruct; Discourse; Disrupt; Fat activism; Fat shaming; Fat stigma; Fat studies; Fatphobia; Foucauldian; Healthism; Injustice; Medicalizing; Narrative; Normal; Normativity; Objectivity; Oppression; Positivism; Power (systemic); Problematic; Problematize; Queer Theory; Realities; Science; Social Justice; Subversion; Theory; Truth
Revision date: 8/8/20
9 comments
I came across a graphic novel recently: “Hungry Ghost”.
It’s a semi biographical account of the authors struggle with bulimia.
Now that’s all well and good, but the keen observer in me also noticed..a little something else in the book. My suspicions were confirmed wheb I got to the publishing credits and saw something along the lines of “If you are struggling with an ED, find a nutionist that specializes in *Health at Every Size*.
Here the book was full mask off for me because it was now abundantly clear it was HAES propaganda wedged in a story about bulimia. Throughout the book the author has this “friend” (mosty likely fictionalized) who is overweight. Her obesity is never treated as an ED in it’s own right. Instead this character is always pictured as healthy confident and even more desireable as she even gets the main chracter crush as her boyfriend (though we never saw them interact in ANY romantic capacity beforehand).
I’ve dealt with a bit of an ED growing up, always too embarrassed to eat around people and obesity runs in my family so I know first hand the consequences of that lifestyle.
What I find truly blood boiling, however, is that this is couched in a YA graphic novel aimed at teens, most likely dealing with an assortment of mental issues on top of eating disorders. It is suggesting supplanting one disorder with an opposite but equally destructive one under the guise of “loving your body”.
@Kim Burke: (first comment) I more or less agree here.
I do think this idea, plus the term fat phobia, are going overboard and just recently, but… this book is from 2008. Fully 15 years ago! and this was before the present day craziness over Marxism, gender issues, even the political climate. BUSH was President when this book was conceived, written and published.
I am not fat, but come from a family with many fat people and I have seen with my own eyes how they suffer. No fat person is happy being fat IMHO. My own mom lost 100 lbs on THREE separate occasions, so I have seen close up how someone can work insanely hard, starve, deprive themselves… have the euphoria of weight loss, new clothes, admiration… only to regain every ounce (plus another 10 lbs as punishment for even trying) and fall into utter despair at the effort and failure…. not once. THREE TIMES. (BTW: to lose 100 lbs, took my poor mom about a year each time… but the weight returned in just weeks.)
The reality is that there is no effective treatment for weight loss… not Ozempic, not diets, not exercise, not even gastric bypass… that is permanent. Meaning once you ARE fat (and I mean seriously so, not a 10 or 15 extra lbs)… the chance that you will return to normal weight forever is very very low… something like 3% of all dieters succeed by this standard (keeping the weight off and being normal weight for FIVE YEARS).
Again: per the first comment… we should treat fat people with compassion and bullying/name calling is NEVER acceptable treatment of another human being.
That said… we shouldn’t glorify obesity or pretend it is healthy. It isn’t. And there isn’t a fat person on earth would not want to be thin… if they could. But they can’t. And stop pretending that diets work.
One thing that is proven over 100 years and billions of research dollars and studies and programs… is that DIETS DO NOT WORK (for permanent weight loss).
Some versions of HAES seem quite sensible. The idea is that since diets almost never work and weight loss goals almost never achieved, an overweight person should instead focus on healthy behaviors rather than weight loss targets. Eat real food, exercise, sleep, sunshine etc and forget about your weight. If you don’t lose weight your health will improve anyway, but ironically by not focusing on weight you might end up losing some. That sounds pretty reasonable and hardly an ideological position.
How does Health At Every Size define “health”? This from the HAES Australia website: “Health should be conceived as a resource or capacity available to all regardless of health condition or ability level.” In other words, health is something you have, regardless of whether you have it.
I can’t know for certain that one can be healthy at every size until I know clearly what ‘health’ is. Is it simply the absence of a clearly defined disease? What medical test can show me that I am healthy?
I’m more than a little skeptical of the medical profession and work hard to stay out of their clutches. But even with the loosest possible definition of ‘healthy’ neither an obese person nor an anorexic can fit the definition. Do the under- or over-fat have the agility, stamina, and functionality that a normal human enjoys?
Until the USDA got involved with food policy in 1977, Americans had very low rates of obesity. Now, 88% of American adults have at least one marker of the Metabolic Syndrome. The current generation of kids is projected to have shorter lifespans than any previous generation, all due to metabolic disease.
Healthy at any size is a disservice to the millions who deserve a better life than what awaits them.
Obesity and anorexia are eating disorders and mental health issues.
People with these disorders deserve compassion and understanding care, not to be told in an upbeat positive way that they are beautiful just as they are.
I meant to say in other response:
or for many people and especially many women/girls competing for approval of men and even more of other women
can touch off extreme negative self-esteem issues for even being slightly overweight, or even being normal weight but 3 or 5 lbs over what someone claims is ideal.
I saw a mother shame her daughter, probably age 11, for eating dinner at her grandparents house, and then wanting a slice of pizza when we were out at a restaurant — but there was like 12 adults around the table watching this preteen get shamed in public by her own mother for being a little chubby.
This lady had a pretty bizarre personality when it came to friends too. She despised them and talked trash about them behind their backs,.
It should go without saying, to engage in self hatred, extreme feelings of inferiority, and the like, over being obese — or for many people and especially many women/girls competing for approval of men and even more of other women — that is emotionally destructive and probably counterproductive to weight loss too.
I also read something surprising on a skepticism site that seemed to echo this weight is okay view, but it wasn’t aiming for neo Marxism or critical theory. What they suggested was 2 points.
That the obsession with weight loss that leads to yo-yo weight is disruptive and harmful.
That the surgical approach of stomach stapling or stomach bands, that has a mortality rate many times higher than the excess weight risk.
Obesity kills. Fact. The end.