Health at Every Size

haes1 If you read only one book to educate yourself on the truth about body image and weight and health, this is the book.

Linda Bacon is a psychologist and exercise scientist, and most importantly to me, a woman who has battled her way up and down the scales, battled with negative self- and body-image, and knows what it’s all really about, unlike most of those people in the diet industry who are naturally slim and think it’s easy (and ‘ normal’ to stay that way. (Which doesn’t mean they have an easy or healthy relationship with their bodies or food, but that’s another story.)

Linda understands the newly-emerging research into body fat, and the biology and wisdom of our bodies, explained in plain English for the layperson.

Her most important message though, one that I’m completely in alignment with, is that your body will settle at its normal natural weight, when you get out of the way and tune in to your body’s signals. You can adopt lifestyle habits that will support you in achieving robust good health and an irresistable female power.

As well, you will be free of the nagging obsession with food that many women accept as ‘normal’. That obsession is a symptom of starvation, as the Minnesota Starvation Study proved. Of course I suggest you use EFT to help release the negative beliefs about your body, as you also reprogram your thinking processes with the new information from books like this one.

Be warned though, you may well get really angry, about the lies you’ve been told for years, about the pain and grief and despair you’ve felt as you’ve tried to do what you thought you must, and about all the time and money you’ve wasted. I was past that stage when I found Linda’s work (it was published in 2008), I’d tapped it out. But as I read I remembered it, and if you can read this book without going through those feelings I’ll be really surprised. But know that would be a normal and healthy response!

The chapters cover healthy weight, emotional starvation, resisting weight loss, eternal hunger, and fat and food politics. With that groundwork laid, Linda then moves into the program itself, with the story of how the Health at Every Size Program developed. She moves through a program of learning to respect yourself body and soul, take care of your hungers (note the plural!), live well, change your food tastes, and finally, solve the weight “problem”.

This is not a book about aggressively defying the expectations of our anorexic-thinking culture, which is what you often see in the “fat-o-sphere”. It is about truly accepting yourself just as you are.

Recommendation: