What is Health At Every Size?

Before I know what Health At Every Size was – when I ate or drank anything – I asked myself the following: will this make me thin or fat? And that was pretty much all I cared about. There was no “will I truly enjoy this?”  There was no “how will this make me feel?” And there was no concern for my actual health. I didn’t really care if what I was about to eat contained a million different chemicals in an attempt to try and replace the flavour of the missing fat and sugars to keep it “low calorie.” I didn’t care about anything else apart from my reality of “thin-is-good” / “fat-is-bad”. My obsession with food and weight lead me to a variety of disordered eating behaviours, including: Constant attempts at under-eating/restriction, followed by binge eating weight-cycling (aka “yo-yo dieting”) food obsession, low self-esteem, (A LOT) of emotional eating, Anxiety around going out for food Body dysmorphia and generally feeling like a crazy person around food. When I started my recovery journey, I clung tightly to the hope that I could “recover” from disordered eating yet still casually try to lose weight. But let me tell you this, I was never able to truly heal my relationship with food—including my binge eating—until I fully committed to giving up all aspects of dieting and started seeking “health” in weight-neutral ways. Health At Every Size, combined with Intuitive Eating and some profoundly important self-acceptance and body image work eventually helped me to break free from the diet-binge cycle. So what is Health At Every Size (HAES)? ...