Significantly higher retention rates compared to dieting (92% vs.Research on HAES has shown to have the following long-term health outcomes HAES rejects these notions and refuses to blame people for their health outcomes and works to end discrimination and stigma based on body size or any other form of identity. Our society is innately fat-phobic and assumes that every person in a larger body can be thin if they just work hard enough. Moreover, Health at Every Size® provides a lens to look at how society negatively views larger bodies and promotes the “thin ideal” - the best-known environmental contributor to the development of eating disorders. The HAES approach honors the healing power of social connections, evolves in response to the experiences and needs of a diverse community, and grounds itself in a social justice framework. It also helps people find sustainable practices that support individual and community well-being. It addresses broad forces that support health, such as safe and affordable access to healthcare. The HAES model is an approach to both policy and individual decision-making. The Health at Every Size® approach comes out of discussions among healthcare workers, consumers, and activists who reject both the use of weight, size, or BMI as proxies for health, and the myth that weight is a choice. The HAES approach promotes balanced eating, life-enhancing physical activity, and respect for the diversity of body shapes and sizes. It is a movement working to promote size-acceptance, to end weight discrimination, and to lessen the cultural obsession with weight loss and thinness. HAES offers an alternative paradigm to health. This conventional weight-centered approach to health perpetuates weight stigma and bias and ultimately harms individuals’ health rather than improving it.

This conventional model of health often purports weight loss, weight control, or weight management as an effective way to improve or sustain health. The conventional weight-centered approach to health emphasizes measures like weight and BMI as essential health indicators. The Health At Every Size® (HAES) approach is a continuously evolving alternative to health’s conventional weight-centered approach. Online Eating Disorder Treatment Programs.Timberline Knolls Residential Treatment Center.

Health At Every Size by Linda Bacon