Health at Every Size, book by Linda Bacon – A Review

Health at Every Size, a book by Linda Bacon

Name: Health at Every Size

Website: Amazon
Price: Kindle: $9.99, Audiobook: $22.95 or 1 credit, Paperback: $13.49, Audio CS: $37.99
Author: Linda Bacon, PhD
Overall Rank: 95 out of 100

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Health at Every Size, Product Overview

This book describes the food and diet industry, and the socially accepted norms of body image, and how they have failed obese women in the US and around the world. The author explains why diets don’t work, and why mass-produced food has screwed up our bodies in a scientific way. The book also explains what we can co to change our mindset, our eating habits, and the way obese people are perceived.

The Good & the Bad

The Good:

The book is backed up by scientific research. It details hundreds of studies done on diet and exercise programs and their results. Ms. Bacon talks about how the body is evolutionally set up to keep from starving, and will go to great lengths to keep us from dying from malnutrition, and that we as humans have no control over these evolutionary aspects. If we are dieting, our bodies think we are in a famine mode, and the body does everything it can to hoard calories until such a time as we can have food again, then packs on more pounds to assure that the starvation event won’t happen again.

Health at Every Size has received critical acclaim by experts in medicine, and the diet and exercise field. “The Health at Every Size program was evaluated through a government-funded academic study, it’s data published in well-respected scientific journals. It showed that the program can give you what you want. Even the United States Department of Agriculture touts the Health at Every Size program as the “new hope” for people struggling with their weight.

The book debunks many of the social norms about “thin equals healthy” and that a fat person is weak, uncommitted, and lazy. Weight gain can be genetic as well as environmental. With our genes and the environment working against us, most of us fail at diets. We can’t help that this happens. It’s not our fault, and society needs to learn that and quit the fat shaming.

The book is written by Linda Bacon, who herself, has gone through the diet roller coaster and not only empathizes with obese people but helps us laugh at ourselves and our wacky eating habits and our goofy self talk. She helps reverse the blame and the stigma that comes with diet and exercise failure, and helps obese people realize that they didn’t fail at the diet, the diet failed them!

Dr. Bacon helps us define our eating habits and has great suggestions on how to change them to become healthy, not necessarily thin.  She gives us great ideas in how to forgive ourselves and to learn to enjoy food, and enjoy life again after being suppressed by what we think we should do, and feeling guilty for not doing it. She helps us learn to love exercise instead of looking on it as punishment for eating too much. Overall, this book helps us let go of all those outside influences over food and exercise, and helps us become who we really are from the internal ques we get naturally.

The Bad:

If you are looking for a new diet program, or a new way to lose weight and get thin, this is not the book for you. This book does not tell you how to lose weight. It tells you how to let go of the fact that you are fat, and to start living your life without all the guilt and stress society puts on us to be thin.

I found the book a little too hard to read on my kindle. It is well written and Dr. Bacon treats the subject with a sense of humor that made it fun, but there is a lot of technical and scientific language that made me put the book down a few times. But then I got the audio book and listened to it in the car while I commuted to work. That helped a lot to have the narrator read all those words, properly pronounced, and the book was more enjoyable to me.

Who is Health at Every Size For?

This book is for you:

• If you are always down on yourself because you can’t stay on a diet
• If you go on a diet and lose weight, but you gain it all back, and then some
• If you have terrible obsessive craving for certain kinds of foods that are not on your diet
• If you view exercise as a punishment for over eating
• If you have been fat shamed for not living up to the social accepted concept of “normal” size
• If you are angry or disgusted by your body
• If you feel like a failure when it comes to diet and exercise

About the Author

“Bacon earned her PhD in physiology from the University of California, Davis, where she currently serves as an Associate Nutritionist. She also holds additional graduate degrees in psychology and exercise metabolism. Dr. Bacon formerly taught at City College of San Francisco, in the Health Education, Psychology, Women’s Studies, and Biology Departments. A professor and researcher, for almost two decades Dr. Bacon has taught courses in social justice, health, weight and nutrition; she has also conducted federally funded studies on health and weight and published in top scientific journals. Her research has been supported by grants from the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health. Bacon is industry-independent. Her pledge not to accept money from the weight loss, pharmaceutical or food industry, signed when getting a PhD almost two decades ago, supports her in speaking truth to power.”  From LindaBacon.org

Health at Every Size, Tools & Training

The book includes several bonus materials, such as questionnaires, study results, work sheets, etc. that help you discover your own story about why you are fat and can’t stay on a diet.

Health at Every Size, Support

There is a Health at Every Size (HAES) community, located at https://haescommunity.com/. Here you will find an HAES pledge, where you commit yourself to Respect, Critical Awareness, and Compassionate Self-Care.

In Conclusion

“We’ve lost the war on obesity. Fighting fat hasn’t made the fat go away. And being thinner, even if we knew how to successfully accomplish it, will not necessarily make us healthier or happier. The war on obesity has taken its toll.

Extensive “collateral damage” has resulted: Food and body preoccupation, self-hatred, eating disorders, discrimination,
poor health, etc. Few of us are at peace with our bodies, whether because we’re fat or because we fear becoming fat.

Health at Every Size is the new peace movement.

It supports people of all sizes in addressing health directly by adopting healthy behaviors. It is an inclusive movement, recognizing that our social characteristics, such as our size, race, national origin, sexuality, gender, disability status, and other attributes, are assets, and acknowledges and challenges the structural and systemic forces that impinge on living well.”  From Health at Every Size, by Linda Bacon, PhD

My Final Opinion of Health at Every Size

This is a great book that should be read by anyone who feels they are obsessed with their weight, fat or thin. It helps us understand how we got this way, and helps us stop getting down on ourselves for things that are beyond our control. I am going to buy this book for my daughters (like their mama, having weight issues of their own) and for a few friends of mine who have weight problems. I know it enlightened me and helped me let go of the fear, guilt and shame that goes along with being obese, and opens the door to becoming healthy at my weight.

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Health at Every Size, at a Glance…

Name: Health At Every Size
Website: Amazon

Price:  Kindle: $9.99, Audiobook: $22.95 or 1 credit, Paperback: $13.49, Audio CS: $37.99

Author: Linda Bacon, PhD

Overall Rank: 95 out of 100

VERDICT: