Viva Vitality: Shift your focus from weight to health
By Pat MacIntosh
Happy New Year! It’s that time of year again when many people make resolutions to improve their health; often involving dieting or weight loss goals. However, weight loss or a smaller body size does not necessarily equal health. In fact, the extreme methods used to lose weight often make people less healthy. Diets don’t work for long-term weight loss and are not sustainable which causes people to feel a sense of failure and distress. Restricting foods doesn’t support healthy eating. Healthy eating is more than just the food you eat. It is also about enjoying your food and the social aspects of eating with others.
Instead of setting yourself up for disappointment consider a new approach to feeling your best. The Health at Every Size® (HAES) approach recognizes that healthy bodies come in all different shapes and sizes encouraging healthy eating according to your body cues of hunger and fullness and enjoyable physical activity as a way to feel better and live longer.
Acceptance for the different shapes and sizes our bodies come in can be hard. We have been taught to think that thin bodies are better or healthier. However, this weight bias affects not just how people are treated, but how they think and feel about themselves. Health at Every Size® is a holistic approach to health that is not related to weight loss. It recognizes that there are many aspects to health such as physical, social, emotional and spiritual health.
Health at Every Size® concepts include:
Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you are full. Eat in a flexible way based on your appetite (not a calorie limit).
Enjoy eating and the social connections of eating with others.
Move your body for fun and health rather than to achieve a certain shape. Find activity you enjoy such as swimming, dancing, playing sports or walking with friends.
Focus on healthy habits that fulfill your physical, social, emotional and spiritual needs.
Love and appreciate your body rather than trying to achieve a certain body weight or size.
Modest weight loss may still be a part of your overall health goals, but weight loss is not the best goal for everyone. Being fat is not the problem. Many fat people are fit, and many thin or ‘normal’ sized people are not. What is good for fat people, thin people, and everyone in between is moving their bodies and following a healthy pattern of eating. These healthy behaviours have more of an influence on a persons’ health than their weight.
Bottom line – the key is to make healthy lifestyle changes rather than worrying so much about what you weigh. Maybe a better health goal for 2024 is to sign up for a virtual cooking class or join a dancing group. Focus on how your body feels and how you feel about your body rather than the number on the scale.
Pat MacIntosh is a Registered Dietitian with Alberta Health Services, Nutrition Services. She can be reached by e-mail, pat.macintosh@ahs.ca.