And I certainly don’t only eat when I’m hungry. If I’ve been reading the news and getting super depressed, I think it’s just fine to find comfort in a big warm bowl of extra-cheesey bean dip. No, my body doesn’t need it, but it makes me feel so much better. I really don’t think there is anything wrong with that.
I have no physical ailments to deter me. I’m young. I could be a lot healthier. But I just don’t want to be.

Cheesey bean dip sounds healthy to me (unless you’re lactose-intolerant). You got all the protein and the calcium and mmmm good. But anyways, I don’t think HAES is about eating all your carrots and fitting a perfect diet plan so you can be the model fat person for when we tell people to shut about how fat is killing us. HAES is about what’s eating good for your individual body. If eating cheese and bread and beans makes you feel good, that’s great. If eating only broccoli and carrots and low-fat yogurt would make you feel sick and sad, that’s not HAES. Everyone’s different. If you feel good eating the way you currently do, that’s HAES. It’s about making your body feel good, not following some stupid plan.

I’m sick of the message that if your physique doesn’t match the norm, you don’t have the right to find your own point of equilibrium.

I really like cake, is probably why.

Heh. I do the same with fries. Maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on the people who talk about fatties and donuts all the time. They probably just really like donuts.

I really like cake, is probably why.

I like Cake, too.

I’ve been thinking recently that the simplest version of HAES is this: it says to everyone no more and no less than what a responsible doctor would say to a thin person. No responsible doctor (though plenty of irresponsible ones) would tell a thin person to lose weight; the assumption is that you’re the size you’re supposed to be. No responsible doctor, no matter how much they bought into the obesity hype, would expect a thin person to unerringly eat nothing but vegetables, exercise an hour a day, and eschew cake for the rest of their lives. No responsible doctor would advocate taking up habits that are detrimental to your mental health. And no responsible doctor would tell a person with chronic pain that she had to take up running, or a person with food intolerances that she had to follow the single food plan deemed healthy for everyone.

All these bets are off when the hypothetical patient is fat. Suddenly we’re supposed to believe that we are the wrong size, that we must be perfect in our habits according to a particular draconian idea of healthy behaviors, that we must work out to exhaustion and eat restrictively regardless of our needs and limitations, and that we can never ever relax or show that we’re not striving with every fiber of our beings to behave in the way we’re led to believe thin people do (even though, seriously, most of them don’t — most thin people eat some vegetables and some cake like the rest of us). HAES just wants to restore sanity and balance to that equation.

As has been discussed on this blog before, it’s hard for fatties to get even-handed treatment from the medical profession. We have to be our own responsible doctors.

Surely the most ‘normal’ eating involves consuming a range of food, with the individual finding an optimal balance between food consumed for nutrition, food consumed for it’s emotional or social effect, and food which is a mixture of the two. It is normal to take pleasure in the food we eat, and to sometimes eat just for pleasure. Presumably humans always have, or eating wouldn’t have developed into a social pastime.

And yet that normal physical and mental enjoyment of a necessary physical process is being denied to anyone a few pounds over an arbitrarily assigned set point (a set point that Mikey T seems to believe sits somewhere not much over 800 calories a day – a level that wouldn’t even satisfy the basic metabolic needs of many adults).

It appalls me that even at a relatively trim and muscular 160lbs, I was starting to be told that I needed to eat less than normal, and exercise more than normal. I did both for a while – and found myself obsessed with eating (less) and exercising (more) to the point where I couldn’t concentrate, didn’t have sufficient time with my husband and was no longer functioning normally, let alone optimally.

And this is where I find anti-HAES sentiment hard to stomach – as far as I can see, HAES says that everyone has the right to try and find their ideal norm when it comes to eating and exercise, regardless of their size – that noone should be forced to eat abnormally, or exercise obsessively, because their weight doesn’t match that arbitrarily assigned set point. I just don’t see what is so controversial about that. I’m sick of the message that if your physique doesn’t match the norm, you don’t have the right to find your own point of equilibrium.

It’s easy to twist HAES into a paradigm that says you can only find mental and emotional equilibrium after you’ve achieved ‘healthfulness’, but I’ve never seen any of the Shapely Prose bloggers saying that. If your ideal norm, your point of optimal function, requires more emphasis on time with loved ones than time spent exercising, more emphasis on physical rest than preparing time-consuming vege-filled meals, so be it. HAES, as I understand it, allows for that.

I don’t mind exercising, and I do swim and go to the gym, but it’s unlikely I’ll ever want to do concentrated intense exercise more than a few times a week. I have other priorities. The “OMGOIGTKUA” movement says I shouldn’t have other priorities. HAES says I can if I want.