Review: Health at Every Size

Title: Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

Author: Lindo Bacon, PhD

Genre: Food and Health

Trigger Warnings: Eating disorders, dieting, fatphobia, moralizing about food, weight loss

If these trigger warnings concern you, please read the review before making a decision about reading this book.

Back Cover:

Fat isn’t the problem. Dieting is the problem. A society that rejects anyone whose body shape or size doesn’t match an impossible ideal is the problem. A medical establishment that equates “thin” with “healthy” is the problem. Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight by Lindo Bacon, PhD, presents a well-researched, healthy-living manual that debunks the weight myths and translates the latest science into practical advice to help readers forever end their battle with weight.

Review:

This is a book about why the “obesity epidemic” is a problem – and the problem isn’t people being fat. Health At Every Size (HAES) is a movement to reduce the stigmatization of fat bodies and change the conversation around health away from weight as the only marker of health to an evidence-based paradigm focusing on health, not just BMI. Lindo Bacon didn’t start the movement, and they make very clear that this book isn’t the end-all be-all of HAES, but it does put the fundamental principles of the movement into a single accessible volume.

There is some content in this book that can be triggering to people with eating disorders. Though Lindo comes at all these issues with compassion and sensitivity, there is still extended discussions of diet behaviors, weight loss, fatphobia, moralizing about food, and similar topics. However, it’s also full of really important information that is helpful in recovering from an eating disorder. If a healthcare professional who’s working with you on your eating disorder recommends it, or if you are past the beginning of your recovery and feel you can handle diets being mentioned in the context of “diets are a really bad idea and here’s the science of why,” I think this book can be very helpful. (If you’re still early on in your recovery, though, please use caution.)

I had hoped to learn a lot from this book, but personally I didn’t learn much. That’s because I’ve been learning about HAES principles from various other places for years in the course of recovering from my own eating disorder. What this book did do for me, though, is provide citations. It’s one thing to see someone on Tumblr post that people in the “overweight” BMI category have a longer life expectancy than in the “normal” category, it’s another thing to have a researcher and professor with a PhD in physiology and a graduate degree in exercise metabolism discuss the peer-reviewed studies that demonstrated this fact.

This is an incredibly valuable book. If you’ve ever been on a diet or counted calories, been told to “lose weight for your health,” or felt bad about your weight, if you’re a medical professional who interacts with patients, or if you’re a mental health professional who treats people with eating disorders or people with body image issues, this book will be invaluable. The way modern society treats weight is not only cruel, it completely goes against what the science says about weight.