Health at Every Size: Toward a New Paradigm of Weight and Health

Promoting weight loss through exercise, dietary restriction, and behavior modification rarely succeeds. It often results in cycles of weight loss and gain, with the potential for serious physical and psychological health risks, and contributes to body hatred, dangerous eating disorders, and exercise addiction. Yet we believe that if we continue to use the same approaches, we will somehow obtain different results. Indeed, this is the definition of insanity put forth by Alcoholics Anonymous.

There is, however, an exciting, effective, alternative approach to this problem. It is called Health At Every Size (HAES). The basic conceptual framework of this approach includes acceptance of the:

• Natural diversity in body shape and size
• Ineffectiveness and dangers of dieting for weight loss
  
• Importance of relaxed eating in response to internal body cues
  
• Critical contribution of social, emotional, and spiritual as well as physical factors to health and happiness.

The Table below contrasts the underlying assumptions of traditional weight management approaches with those of HAES

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From: MedGenMed. 2005; 7(3): 13. Published online 2005 July 12.