Health-at-Every-Size®
A framework to safely work with your body, instead of against it.
Health-at-Every Size® - What Does it Mean?
At Balanced Gut Nutrition & Health, we specialize in a Health-at-Every Size (HAES®) approach to your care.
HAES® is a multifaceted approach that prioritizes your well-being over numbers on a scale and allows you to not equate your health and worth to your weight.
It creates a safe and supportive space for you to improve your relationship with food, movement, and your body without perpetuation of diet culture, weight stigma, “food policing”, or anti-fat bias.
As a HAES® practitioner, I honor that every single body deserves to be treated with respect and dignity and has the right to be cared for in whatever way you desire.
Why I Embrace a Non-Diet Approach
Diet culture is rampant with problematic and false ideas around the concepts of body weight, health, and morality.
Size does not equate to health. For more than 100 years, Western societal norms have prioritized and idealized “thinness”. Equating health with thinness is wrong and imprecise —people can be healthy in any shape and size.
Size does not equate to your worth. Diet culture perpetually equates body size with moral worth - predominantly with messaging that “thin” bodies are morally superior. Your worth is not tied to your weight, nor is it a measure of morality.
There are no “good” or “bad” foods. Diet culture is rooted in “all-or-nothing” thinking. In addition to “correct” and “incorrect” bodies, it labels foods as “good” or “bad.” Food has no morality; you are not “good” or “better” for eating fruits and vegetables, just as you’re not a “bad” person for eating pizza and ice cream. Taking the morality out of food allows you to give yourself unconditional permission to eat all foods without preset limitations or judgment.
Dieting doesn’t work. Any type of dieting, short-term, fad, or elimination, genuinely doesn’t work long-term. In fact, UCLA researchers analyzed 31 long-term diet studies and found that about two-thirds of dieters regained more weight within four or five years than they initially lost.
The Benefits of Health-at-Every Size®
HAES® is based on five principles: weight inclusivity, health enhancement, respectful care, eating for well-being, and life-enhancing movement.
HAES® shifts the focus away from diet culture. Human bodies come in all shapes and sizes, and size does not equate to health or morality. HAES® shifts the focus from dieting and weight loss to creating a healing relationship with food and your body.
Trust your body. HAES® is rooted in intuitive eating, which promotes flexible, individualized eating based on hunger, satiety, nutritional needs, and pleasure, rather than any externally regulated eating plan focused on weight control. You learn how to trust your body’s cues and signals.
Establish a balanced relationship with yourself. This relationship includes your body, food, movement, and your overall well-being.
Start Your HAES® Journey Today
Whether you’re looking for gut balancing or general nutrition support, we’ll help you create balance holistically through HAES®.
You can improve your relationship with food, explore movement for joy, and make space for body acceptance without the discrimination or stigmatization present in diet culture.
Our work together addresses the whole person, looking at gut health and overall lifestyle to create individualized therapeutic recommendations.
