Keir Bristol

The diet industry is just that- an industry. But it’s a very influential industry, and coupled with the media it’s an extremely powerful force. Every day girls of all ages are being told – you are not good enough.

You are not thin enough. You are not pretty. Why are your thighs touching? You eat too much. See that Barbie? That should be you.

Think I’m exaggerating? Take a look at the statistics:

  • 50 percent of girls between the ages of 13 and 15 believe they are overweight.
  • 40-60 percent of high school girls are on a diet.
  • 30-40 percent of junior high girls are concerned about their weight.
  • 80 percent of 13 year old girls have dieted.
  • 40 percent of nine-year-old girls have dieted.[1]

In today’s society, this may sound normal. Maybe you know so many girls (and even guys) dieting and trying to achieve perfect bodies, that this information doesn’t surprise you. But ultimately, dieting can sometimes cause more harm to your body than good. For example, 90-95 percent of dieters regain the weight that they lost (plus some extra pounds that they didn’t have before) and, yo-yo dieting (gaining, losing, and then gaining again) is actually less healthy than staying at a steady overweight stance.

But now, a new alternative to dieting and extreme exercise is taking shape. Health At Every Size, or HAES, is a new movement that encourages men and women alike to love themselves no matter what size they are, to eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full, and to move more and exercise in ways that are pleasurable to the body. And this way of living goes much more than skin deep.

A lot of doctors measure people on a height to weight spectrum known as BMI, or body mass index. It is used to figure out whether a person is underweight, a healthy weight, overweight, obese, etc. But what doctors rarely tell their patients is that BMI doesn’t actually discriminate between fat and muscle tissue, and it doesn’t take race, gender, or age into consideration, all of which are important influences on a person’s weight.

Therefore, if you have more muscle than fat, since muscle weighs more than fat does, you can be considered overweight even though you are not. Or, if you are naturally curvy, you’ll probably be consideredoverweight even though you are perfectly healthy for your body type. And then of course, some races tend to carry more weight on their bodies naturally than other races do.

HAES addresses this by acknowledging that people have different body types, and so they can not all be measured on BMI. The main principles of HAES say that if a person eats according to hunger cues and not emotional cues, and gets enough exercise, they will be healthy, even though doctors may not find them to be the “perfect” weight.

A lot of the time dieting is a psychological and/or emotional response to the media telling them that they need to be skinny in order to be deemed attractive. Another draw to HAES is that the program focuses on physical and psychological health rather than size. Rather than focusing on meeting an extremely high standard, HAES followers focus on health and happiness.

And it pays off: a 2006 study measuring Health For Every Body (HFEB) indicated the following:

  • 17 percent improved in terms of obsessing about food.
  • 23 percent improved in over eating.
  • 37 percent felt less hungry throughout the day.[2]

Ragen Chastain of Dances With Fat [danceswithfat.blogspot.com] wrote a blog post called “386,170 Unhelpful Things” about an “unscientific experiment” she conducted in which she counted all of the signs that she received throughout the day telling her that she wasn’t thin, and therefore she wasn’t beautiful. She said, not including television or magazines, that she received a total of 1,061 messages about her body that day, and only three of those messages were positive.

Chastain is only one out of approximately 157,213,477 females in the United States receiving these messages. And with HAES hopefully creating a rift in the diet industry, maybe those negative messages will decrease and the positive ones will increase.