"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style." ~Maya Angelou
Whether you celebrate a holiday or not, this time of year can be a really stressful for people who practice Size Acceptance and/or Health at Every Size. Tons of mixed messages around food, dealing with family, trying to set weight neutral resolutions and goals while everyone else is starting their new diet. I’ve put together a group of speakers to give you information and ideas to support you having a happy holiday season.
I realized after posting about Virtual Curvesfest the other day, I hadn’t posted about Ragen’s holidays HAES workshop. It’s coming up November 13th & 15th. Registration is name your own price, & the suggested cost is $39.
I received my Body Love Wellness email from Golda Poretsky the other day & in it was an announcement about the upcoming HAES Master Class, a two day online workshop with numerous speakers from the HAES-sphere.
In this HAES® Master Class you will meet the experts at the forefront of HAES® research and practice. Collectively, we’ve worked with thousands of people just like you, who have implemented HAES® principles and no longer face a daily battle with food, weight, and the scale. In this engaging two-day event, you will discover simple ways to improve your health and well-being without the stress of dieting.
In a weight centered approach body size is used as a proxy for health – assuming that a thinner body will be a healthier body and so if someone is above what is considered a “healthy” weight, weight loss is advised to increase health. There are several issues with this
I received this blog post from Ragen Chastain’s Dances With Fat yesterday & decided to share it because I thought it was topic worthy of a signal boost.
I don’t talk a lot specifically about HAES, but I like to think I live it & I talk about that. After all, practical application is a necessary balance to intellectual discourse. It’s something new for me, & my long time readers will know this started out as a Weight Watchers blog just last year. Ragen here has some definite ideas & facts & things that might be useful to those looking to understand what it’s all about or trying to find ways to help other people understand.
A few choice snippets I’ve decided to pull out (but please do give the entire post a read as she says a lot more good stuff, & it’s not even a very long post):
Health at Every Size (HAES) is a health practice where the focus is on health rather than body size, based on the evidence that habits are a much, much, better determiner of health than body size.
With HAES the focus is on practicing healthy habits and allowing your body to settle at whatever weight it settles.
The transition from a weight-centered health practice to a health-centered health practice can be difficult. The problem that I most often hear from people initially is how to set goals. In a weight centered practice the scale is our judge and jury. All eating and movement activities are centered around changing the size and shape of the body. In HAES our activities are focused around nurturing our bodies and giving them their best chance for health.
That last one, goal setting, is what I struggled with most after I transitioned from a weight loss oriented blog to HAES/running. Weight loss made progress easy, I posted numbers & progress pics. Without something as concrete as those numbers, how could I simply track progress on my blog? If you’ve seen my Victories page you can see I opted to track how many miles I can run without stopping & dates of when I meet certain milestones. The more I run, the more I love & appreciate my body as it is for what it can do, & the better I want to take care of it. I have found myself to be much happier & healthier since I decided to embrace fitness over thinness.
I am going to end this by quoting someone I generally consider a travesty & hearing him speak makes me want to poke my ears out, but this one time in the early days of Dr. Phil having his own show I accidentally watched part of it & he said something that has always stuck with me. I can’t quote it verbatim, but the basic idea was, to focus on behaviors rather than weight loss because you can’t control what the scale says but you can control what you do. I know, he actually said something smart. Who’d have guessed it?
I haven’t read it yet, so this is not a review, but I saw today the ebook is now name-your-own-price so any budget can access this book. For the money crowd, you can still purchase the softcover for $14.99 + s&h.
For those not familiar with Ragen, she is an activist for Health At Every Size & Size Acceptance. She blogs at Dances with Fat & co-founded the Fit Fatties Forum. Not only is she a speaker, writer, blogger, & promoter of fitness for all sizes, she is also a dancer & choreographer with three National Dance Championship wins.
I suppose if you’re going to listen to anybody talk about how being fat isn’t a synonym for being lazy & out of shape it might as well be her.
My Year To Thrive 