Health At Every Size® and Faith

In this article, you’ll get an overview of Health At Every Size and faith and what this means for your intuitive eating journey with Jesus.

What is Health At Every Size®?

What is Health at Every Size®? You could call it a movement, a paradigm, or an approach.

Health At Every Size® and HAES are registered trademarks of the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH), which is an international professional organization composed of members committed to the Health at Every Size (HAES) principles.

Health at Every Size® is also a book by Dr. Linda Bacon, so who better to give an overview than the author. Dr. Linda Bacon explains it like this:

“Let’s face facts. We’ve lost the war on obesity. Fighting fat hasn’t made the fat go away. And being thinner, even if we know how to successfully accomplish it, will not necessarily make us healthier or happier. The war on obesity has taken its toll.“

“Extensive “collateral damage” has resulted: Food and body preoccupation, self-hatred, eating disorders, discrimination, poor health, etc. Few of us are at peace with our bodies, whether because we’re fat or because we fear becoming fat.”

“Health at Every Size is the new peace movement.”

“It supports people of all sizes in addressing health directly by adopting healthy behaviors. It is an inclusive movement, recognizing that our social characteristics, such as our size, race, national origin, sexuality, gender, disability status, and other attributes, are assets, and acknowledges and challenges the structural and systemic forces that impinge on living well.”

An edited excerpt from Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight by Linda Bacon, PhD.

HAES in a nutshell

If we were sitting down to coffee and chatting about health, I would likely describe Health At Every Size® (a/k/a HAES) in this oversimplified way:

• HAES helps us challenge the weight-centered health paradigm and the idea that weight and health are the same thing (they’re not!)
• HAES shows us that health and well-being are for EVERYBODY
• HAES shows us that health is the result of our habits and NOT the result of our body size or shape.
• I personally like to sum up HAES in this way – health is a behavior, not a number.

If you’ve tangled up weight and health in your own mind and body, you’re not alone!

Health At Every Size flies in the face of widely held cultural assumptions and diet culture lies about weight. In this way, HAES is counter-cultural.

{Related Article: 4 Lies About Weight Loss Every Christian Needs to Know}

A Weight-Neutral Approach

In the past few decades, science and health professionals are waking up to something that almost every dieter knows from their own lived experience- losing weight and keeping it off are incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

Scientific evidence now confirms that the long-term failure rate of weight loss programs is as high as 95%! Diets just don’t work.

Emerging research is showing, diets don’t just fail, they can actually harm your health.

Despite the new evidence on weight and health, diet culture and its weight-centered health paradigm continues to be the prevailing view. This prevailing view sees weight as being the most important part of health.

Diet culture (which includes government, media, the $7 billion diet industry, beauty industry, and even the medical field) sells you the idea that weight is a direct cause of health problems and that to be healthy you have to be a certain “healthy” weight. But the emerging research doesn’t support this causal link anymore.

For a deep dive into this topic and a better explanation than I can ever possibly give on the idea that correlation in research does NOT equal causation, check out the book Anti Diet by Christy Harrison.

{Related Article: Best Books About Food and Faith}

Health At Every Size® challenges this false and narrow view of “health” with scientific evidence that shows people of ALL sizes and shapes can be healthy.

Health At Every Size® teaches us there are more effective ways to improve your health than trying to achieve a certain weight.

Health At Every Size® Principles

The Health At Every Size® Principles are:

1. Weight Inclusivity – Accept and respect the inherent diversity of body shapes and sizes and reject the idealizing or pathologizing of specific weights.
2. Health Enhancement – Support health policies that improve and equalize access to information and services, and personal practices that improve human well-being, including attention to individual physical, economic, social, spiritual, emotional, and other needs.
3. Respectful Care – Acknowledge our biases, and work to end weight discrimination, weight stigma, and weight bias. Provide information and services from an understanding that socio-economic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and other identities impact weight stigma, and support environments that address these inequities.
4. Eating for Well-being – Promote flexible, individualized eating based on hunger, satiety, nutritional needs, and pleasure, rather than any externally regulated eating plan focused on weight control.
5. Life-Enhancing Movement – Support physical activities that allow people of all sizes, abilities, and interests to engage in enjoyable movement, to the degree that they choose.

Source: https//www.sizediversityandhealth.org/content.asp?id=152

Health At Every Size® and Faith-Based Intuitive Eating

If Health At Every Size® is the umbrella or philosophy, intuitive eating is what you do to implement that in your life and practice it by how you eat, move and relate to your body on a daily basis.

In Episode 2 of the Intuitive Eating for Christian Women podcast, we introduce the concept of Health At Every Size® and discuss how this philosophy impacts your Intuitive Eating journey with Jesus. We unpack our assumptions about weight and explain how weight is actually not a good measure of health.

The first principle of intuitive eating is Reject the Diet Mentality. This first principle draws on the foundation of Health At Every Size®. Until you really understand the diets don’t work and diets harm us baseline established in HAES, you will struggle to implement intuitive eating.

Intuitive Eating Principle 1: Reject the Diet Mentality lays the foundation that diets can’t and don’t live up to their promises. If you keep buying the lie that thin equals happy, you will never break free of diets. 

{Related Article: Intuitive Eating: 10 Principles for Christian Women}

As Christians, we have to recognize and reject the lies of diet culture as worldly wisdom, at best, and as spiritual warfare, at worst.  With eyes of faith, we can call it out for what it truly is: a false gospel of salvation by weight loss.

These lies are designed to distract us from our God-given purpose and steal our lives with dieting. As believers, we must reject the lies of diet culture and replace them with biblical truth.

{Related Article: Don’t Let Dieting Distract You From Your True Purpose}

Health At Every Size® and Faith

What does Health At Every Size® mean for us as Christians?

Beyond rejecting the worldly wisdom of diet culture, HAES also speaks to our views, values and judgments about our physical bodies which has significant implications for believers.

Health At Every Size® includes respecting your body, accepting it the way it is, trusting your body, adopting some healthy lifestyle habits, and embracing size diversity.

This is an inclusive, compassionate approach that opposes oppression. Does that sound familiar?

God did not create us all the same, and for good reason! Diversity is something to be embraced and celebrated.

All bodies are good bodies. Because God made them.

It all comes back to the gospel. As my podcast co-host explained in Episode 2 of the Intuitive Eating for Christian Women podcast:

Did God want us to be walking around hating our stupid bodies or doing everything we possibly could to try and preserve our perfect health, to be here forever focused on that? No! He wanted us to walk around loving people. He wanted us to know who we are in Christ and to trust Him with our health and to trust the body systems that He gave us. So, it always comes back to for me: is walking and living like this Gospel? No.”

Char-Lee Cassel, Intuitive Eating for Christian Women

As Christians, we need to rethink our ideas about weight and health. Let’s have an open mind and explore what Health At Every Size® could mean for us.

We need to examine our own weight bias and think about our true beliefs. Let’s do some self-examination, pray about it, and see if weight is an issue we need to get past in our own health journeys. That’s the first step in your intuitive eating journey with Jesus.

Learn more about HAES & Faith

If you want to learn more about a faith-focused, weight-neutral way to pursue whole health for your mind, body and soul, then check out our podcast Intuitive Eating for Christian Women – that’s what we’re all about!

And if this inspired you to finally want to really dig in, learn more about Health At Every Size® and understand the science behind why dieting doesn’t work (and what to do instead!) then I’ve got more great resources for you:

READ // Understanding Setpoint Weight As a Christian– I explain setpoint weight theory and its implications for faith-based intuitive eating HERE

LISTEN // Listen to Episode 2 What is Health At Every Size? of the Intuitive Eating for Christian Women podcast HERE

JOIN // Come join our podcast monthly membership program to access the Virtual Book Club for Health at Every Size®

Even if you didn’t catch the live version we did as a community over the summer of 2021, the content is still there and available for you to go through on your own. All you need is your own copy of Health At Every Size by Dr. Linda Bacon (get wherever you buy books).

What the Virtual Book Club includes:

• Reading plan for 1 chapter a week (but you can go at your own pace since it’s not live)
• Chapter summaries with key quotes information to focus on
• Reflection questions for each chapter
• A video from us unpacking the chapter (ranging from 15-40 minutes depending on the complexity of the chapter) specifically from a faith-based perspective
• Access to the Zoom recording of the book club finale, Q&A session

We had so much fun doing this Virtual Book Club! Understanding HAES and applying this information to how we approach food and how we live out our faith is so important! Don’t miss this incredible resource!