Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight is a book that contains tools to help people break free from an obsession with body weight. It suggests focusing on health behaviors rather than weight.
The book suggests concepts such as: eating whole, unprocessed foods in whatever amounts satisfy your hunger; participating in enjoyable physical activity because it feels good; food/weight obsession and weight stigma are more harmful than being overweight.
Health at Every Size is not a weight-loss method, but rather a shift in focus from scale numbers to health behaviors. The HAES philosophy claims that you can be overweight and still be healthy. There is robust evidence that this is not the case, and this is a principal Health at Every Size criticism. One study of over 5,100 people from the journal Diabetes Care found that when overweight people lost just 5 to 10 percent of their body weight, it was associated with significant improvements in cardiovascular risk factors. This pokes holes in the idea that you can be healthy at any size.
But what about overweight people whose vital signs and bloodwork are all normal? Can they be healthy at any size?
Recent research shows that these people are still not in optimal health, because of their excess weight. A 2018 case-cohort analysis of 520,000 people, published in the European Heart Journal, found that overweight and obese people with healthy bloodwork still had a 28 percent higher risk of developing heart problems.
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DietSpotLight.com for the following information about this book:
• A review published in the Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine states that this book contains scientific evidence and historical background to explain its position, with 437 references.
• Nutrition Journal – this research paper makes a good point that current dieting messages and popular methods do not work in the long run for people who attempt to lose weight.
Journal of the American Dietetics Association – a study on 140+ women showed that compared to the control group, those who participated in a “health at any size” program experienced long-term benefits for eating behaviors, including excess hunger and feeling of “losing control” around food.
Journal of the American Dietetics Association – the study looked at 78 women who either attended six months of weekly HAES meetings or six months of weekly diet
• A study of 218 women found that those whose eating habits were considered "intuitive eating" (a HAES-aligned style) were less likely to gain excess weight during pregnancy.
• The only possible side effect of Health at Every Size is gaining weight, which may be temporary or permanent.
•Lindo Bacon, formerly known as Linda, wrote Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight.
• Bacon holds a doctorate in physiology from the University of California Davis, with a specialization in weight regulation.
• Bacon has additional graduate degrees in psychology and exercise science.
• Lindo has two other books available, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand About Weight and Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better).
Health at Every Size suggests always eating enough to satisfy your hunger. However, it is questionable whether feeling hunger actually means that you need food at that moment since a large proportion of Americans have hunger hormones that are out of whack.
The Journal of Diabetes and its Complications notes that at least 32 percent of Americans suffer from a metabolic state that has the side effect of increased appetite (but no actual additional need for food).
The journal In Vivo says that obese people’s levels of ghrelin (a hormone responsible for hunger) do not drop as they should after a meal.
Between these issues, eating until full whenever you feel hungry could lead to excess caloric intake for a lot of people, which spells weight gain. This is another Health at Every Size criticism.
•The HAES philosophy is flawed because it does not take into account the fact that being overweight can lead to health problems.
• A study of over 5,100 people found that when overweight people lost just 5 to 10 percent of their body weight, it was associated with significant improvements in cardiovascular risk factors.
• Recent research shows that even if an overweight person has normal vital signs and bloodwork, they are still at a higher risk for developing heart problems.
• HAES also ignores the influence of hunger hormones, which can cause people to eat more than they actually need.