Irony, Thy Name is Prevention
While glancing at MSNBC this morning, I clicked on a provocatively titled link, “End of Dieting? New Movement Breaks Cycle” – which led me to an article on “Health at Every Size” (HAES) reprinted from Prevention.com.
What is “Health at Every Size“? It’s a philosophy that’s based on health, rather than weight loss. The goal is to break the vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting and promote body acceptance. While not entirely “new” (I’ve known about it for ~2 years), it’s growing in popularity.
At any rate, the point of this post isn’t to debate the pros/cons of HAES… rather, to note the editors’ lack of awareness. As is clear from the (largely favorable) article, the point of HAES is to avoid obsessing over weight or calories, and practice “intuitive eating.”
But according to a controversial new movement, it is possible to break this cycle of failed diets and poor health, even if you never end up in a pair of skinny jeans or in the safety zone of the BMI chart. It’s known as Health At Every Size (HAES), and its principles are so radically simple that they can be difficult to grasp after a lifetime of trying to follow complicated plans full of rules, stages, calories, grams of fat, points, scales, and math.
The basic premise is that healthy behaviors can improve your life regardless of whether they result in weight loss. You abandon diets in favor of “intuitive eating,” which means paying close attention to what you crave and how the foods you eat make you feel, as well as gradually learning to distinguish emotional hunger from the physical kind. For exercise, you identify any activity that provides enough fun that you don’t need to force yourself to do it regularly. HAES also demands that you love and respect your body just as it is, whatever size it is right now. At its core, HAES is about stripping away rigid ideas about food and fitness.…Though most women understand that dieting can be destructive, it’s hard to give up the dream of getting thin. Even at Green Mountain, some clients continue to calculate calories and fixate on the scale, which the staff keeps under lock and key to discourage the obsession. Some have histories of eating disorders, and many have trouble learning to respond to real hunger cues as a signal to eat, which is among the most important skills you’ll need to develop if you want the HAES approach to produce results. “Intuitive eating tunes you in to your body so you know when you’re really hungry and when you’ve had enough,” says Marsha Hudnall, RD, the program director at Green Mountain. And it’s not all candy, ice cream, cheese, chips, and fries. “Some do end up eating more of those foods initially,” Hudnall says. “But as you truly give yourself permission to eat what you want, you naturally gravitate to healthier choices.”
The thing that made me laugh, was that the editors actually interspersed links to Prevention’s latest, “400-Calorie Fix” weight loss plan, between the paragraphs of an article touting the benefits of not following weight loss plans.
Check out the attached examples, lol.
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I have nothing against the 400-Calorie Fix program per se, but pushing a conventional, 1600 calorie diet plan in an article about HAES is a trifle tone-deaf, methinks.
