5 Reasons why you need a Health at Every Size Therapist
Has your therapist ever advised you to change your diet, lose weight or restrict what you eat in order to improve your mental health?
I have therapists who have. At the time, I didn’t realize how damaging this was to my eating disorder and my self worth. How giving me this advice set me up for failure time and time again. To be fair, I don’t believe that they knew this either. Our diet culture has taught us that larger body= poor health.
Prescribing weight loss or diet change/restriction is out of the scope of practice for your average therapist.
As a therapist, I do not have the intense, formal training of a dietitian about nutrition, physiology, etc. All the information I have about nutrition is based on my life experience, my biases and my personal interests. My license does not cover me handing out nutritional counseling and could in fact land me in big trouble if I advised someone to do something that caused an adverse effect.
So why would a therapist tell me to lose weight or change my diet?
Because they buy into the ideal that restricting what I eat or shrinking my body will lead to improved happiness. Having lost and gained hundreds of pounds since the age of 12, I can tell you with certainty that losing weight NEVER made me happier. No matter how thin I got, there was always more weight to lose. Or specific body parts to criticize. Restricting what I ate lead to inevitably gaining back the weight I lost plus some. So… that was basically really shitty advice from those therapists.
I treat all of my clients from a Health at Every Size perspective, whether they have an eating disorder or not.
Health at Every Size (HAES) is a way to focus on improving health without intentional weight loss. The premise is that it is BEHAVIORS that lead to SOME health issues, and not simply the size of one’s body. There is a TON of research out there that shows how ineffective and damaging intentional weight loss is. If we focus on the behaviors that affect our health (increasing nutrition, movement, reducing stress) we can improve it without cycling through diets that are also detrimental to our health.
So why choose a Health at Every Size therapist?
If you have a history of eating disorders, you can trust that your therapist will not be feeding into or encouraging disordered behaviors. HAES therapists help you develop a safe relationship with ALL foods so that you can feel at peace when you eat.
If you have body image issues (and how many of us don’t??) you can trust that your therapist will not be encouraging continued self hatred by trying to help you lose weight. You will learn to appreciate and accept your body AS IT IS.
Regardless of the issues that brings you to treatment, you can trust that your therapist will not recommend diets or weight loss as a solution to an emotional/psychological issue. You know that your therapist knows where their expertise begins and ends and that nutrition is not usually part of our advanced training.
If you are living in a larger body, your HAES therapist can validate and help you cope with the fatphobia that you experience everyday. You will learn how to speak to fatphobis medical providers who give you sub par treatment due to your size.
A HAES therapist will help you neutralize the word “fat” that is so loaded in today’s culture. If/when you feel ready, you might even find yourself describing your body as fat without judgement (can you imagine? I do!)