For many, intuitive eating is a radical approach to satisfying our nutritional needs. Even after understanding the principles of intuitive eating, some people do not think that trusting our intuition leads to healthy eating habits. Some people may be against intuitive eating if it means that they might gain weight if they believe that weight is an indicator of health.
Additionally, others may be against the intuitive eating approach if they believe that people must train their bodies to eat through food restriction. This may include knowledge related to the influencing power of the food industry on our minds.
Others might accept that intuitive eating could be a useful approach for generally healthy people, but they may feel that it is not relevant or applicable to people who are living with metabolic diseases, like type 2 diabetes or thyroid disease, since hormonal and hunger signaling pathways are impaired.
Health at Every Size (HAES) Movement
What Is the Health at Every Size (HAES) Movement?
The HAES movement is an approach that states that all people, regardless of size or weight, can be healthy. It highlights that body ideals, including shape, size, and weight, are cultural, and, in the West, they are made persistent by diet culture and those who benefit from people spending money to achieve a specific body ideal. The HAES movement is closely tied to the Fat Liberation Movement.
What Those Who Are For It Say
People and professionals who are supporters and proponents of the movement are firm believers in the HAES principles to close gaps in access to healthcare, build an inclusive and respectful community, and support people of all sizes in finding ways to take care of themselves in a way that makes sense to them.
Those who promote the HAES movement believe in the HAES principles. These include:
Respecting body diversity and honoring differences in size, age, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religion, class, and other human attributes.
Being critically aware of scientific and cultural assumptions that connect weight and size to health status.
Promoting compassionate self-care, including finding joy in a variety of movement types and supporting flexible eating that values pleasure and honors appetite, satiety, and hunger, while also respecting the social conditions that frame what is available to eat.
HAES promoters point out that many of the measures of health connected to body weight and body size in adulthood are not relevant or based on principles of causality. This applies to BMI and waist circumference, which HAES promoters believe are poor and arbitrary measures of health status.
In other words, it points out that there is limited to no evidence to point out that body weight is a cause of common health problems. In this sense, one cannot assume that a person in a larger body is unhealthy or that a person in a smaller body is healthy.
Proponents of HAES also demonstrate how damaging it can be for individuals in larger bodies seeking care when health professionals assume that weight is causing the health problem without looking at labs that actually indicate health status (gaslighting).
What Those Who Are Against It Say
Many of those who are against the HAES principles or movement are not convinced that a person’s health cannot be determined by their size or body shape. They may also be against HAES for many of the same reasons they may be against intuitive eating and anti-diet culture approaches, including:
Believing that people’s bodies and minds need to be trained to eat in a certain way through prescribed restrictions.
Pointing to research where weight loss did result in improvements in indicators of health, like blood pressure, triglyceride, insulin, and even subjective measures of health and wellbeing.
People feel inspired or motivated by external changes they see as a result of dietary changes they make.
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