Recently, the Emerald ran a piece titled “Health doesn’t come in supersized portions” which offered a critique on the “Health At Every Size” (HAES) campaign. While I don’t subscribe to the HAES campaign—because I don’t believe it is radical enough—the arguments leveled against it were not unfamiliar to me as a fat woman involved in body positivity. Many people who are new to body positivity movements perceive them as having little respect for the “science” and “facts” of the obesity crisis.
Perhaps those who are alarmed by the way that body positivity rejects traditional notions of “health” simply fail to see health as a full picture—one which crucially includes mental health. Body positivity calls attention to the fact that physical health cannot simply be achieved through the mental warfare of fat-shaming. Which might be why, according to their homepage, HAES’s primary components are: respect, critical awareness, and compassionate self-care.
With regard to exercise, HAES states that they help members with “finding the joy in moving one’s body and being physically active.” For fat people, exercise is so often made into a practice of self-hatred: we are meant to punish our bodies mercilessly until they conform to some magical goal weight—at which point, presumably, we are meant to transform into happy people with high self-esteem. But the truth is that you can’t internalize feelings of inadequacy, shame, and disgust for years and then expect them to disappear just because your BMI registers as “normal.”
In my own experience as an undergrad at CU Boulder (which has the highest rates of eating disorders on college campuses in the nation, and is located, uncoincidentally, in the thinnest city in the United States), I often felt out-of-place. This feeling was manageable until a peer announced in class that she loved running past fat people on the indoor track because it made her feel good to see them struggling more than she did.
After her comment, I stopped going to public gyms altogether for several years. I was horrified by the idea that this is what thin people actually thought about seeing bodies like mine mid-exercise. Believe it or not, being exposed to more positive views of fatness probably would have helped me get back in the gym after that incident. The stigma of fatness certainly seems to be one of its greatest contributors.
And that stigma is exactly why body positive movements work so diligently to avoid messages of shame, in both exercise and eating. For example, HAES discusses diet not in terms of weight loss, but rather in terms of  “eating in a flexible and attuned manner that values pleasure and honors internal cues of hunger, satiety and appetite, while respecting the social conditions that frame eating options.”  
HAES’s recognition that systemic conditions often determine eating and exercising behaviors is crucial. Those who have never lived in a food desert, suffered from food insecurity, or dealt with other restrictions on nutrition may not understand that financial, cultural, and emotional relationships with food can be complicated.
Being able to access unprocessed food is a privilege; so is having time to prepare food at home; so is having a vehicle for grocery trips; so is having a knowledge of how to plan healthy meals.
Moreover, science increasingly does agree with a weight-neutral approach to exercise and nutrition. In 2015, the American Journal of Public Health ran a study which suggested that:
“The development of the concept of meeting an ideal weight was the beginning of increasing obesity. Weight stigma, the perception of being fat, lack of understanding of normal growth and development, and increased concern about obesity… have reinforced each other to promote dieting. Because weight suppression and disinhibition provoke long-term weight increase, dieting is a major factor producing the obesity epidemic.”
Other studies agree. In “Medicare’s search for effective obesity treatments: diets are not the answer,” researchers reviewed 31 long-term weight loss studies. They found that even when dieting did lead to modest weight loss, “complete weight regain was found in the majority” of participants. One study from the review found that 83% of dieters regained more weight than they had lost after two years; and another found that 50% of dieters “weighed more than 11 pounds over their starting weight five years after the diet.”
Dieting just isn’t cutting it. Fat acceptance starts with understanding that weight isn’t a simple equation of adding cardio or subtracting brownies. It’s about establishing a practice of caring for oneself compassionately.
Fat acceptance means accepting bodies that don’t fit into an arbitrary categorization of what is “normal.” So, fat acceptance also means accepting disabled bodies, racialized bodies, and bodies that are gender-nonconforming. Fat acceptance means accepting those bodies’ rights to exist, to thrive, and to celebrate.
For me, fat acceptance is a rejection, too: a rejection of unhappiness. Because I can, in fact, be fat while also being happy and healthy.
We live in a toxic diet culture that glorifies an unrealistic commodified thin-ideal, even as it upholds systemic barriers which restrict access to better lifestyles for so many of us. Fat people who have the audacity to love themselves because of their fatness, instead of in spite of it, are not the real enemies here. Pointing fingers and blaming us for perceived personal failures is not the way to solve a public health crisis.
A better way forward is to learn how to treat each other’s bodies with mutual compassion, respect, and care—while also working to address the economic and social conditions making it difficult for many Americans to access health privileges.

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(Phlebotomy Tech, Creative Commons)