Comments for Health At Every Size® Blog http://healthateverysizeblog.org The Association for Size Diversity and Health Wed, 22 May 2013 00:19:28 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ Comment on the HAES® files: A Dietitian’s Road to HAES by Kris (@piratefoxy) http://healthateverysizeblog.org/2013/05/14/the-haes-files-a-dietitians-road-to-haes/#comment-4445 Wed, 22 May 2013 00:19:28 +0000 http://healthateverysizeblog.org/?p=1453#comment-4445 This was so interesting to read. I have a lot of interest in food and nutrition and diet after spending some years dealing with my late husband’s food needs (he had muscular dystrophy and was chronically severely underweight) and occasionally I consider getting some kind of formal training in the area of diet and nutrition, but the party line emphasis on weight loss as the major key to everything under the sun would, to put it frankly, drive me nuts. I’d probably get flunked out of my first class for bringing up all the studies that don’t agree with the ‘normal BMI is best’ rubbish. So I haven’t done much of anything because it seems like having the qualification would be important, but the people giving the qualification are teaching things that I believe are actively harmful. (It’s not like I’d just be sitting in a class that was boring, you know? They’d be indirectly actually doing harm. I couldn’t just sit there with that.)

At the moment I’ve ended up helping my mom out anyway (she has a form of bone marrow cancer) so I don’t really have the time to go back to school, but it does often depress me when I think about the possibility and how entrenched we are socially in the whole diet industry.

The thing that gets to me about the whole mess other than the mental trauma people go through because of the diet industry is that we get so hung up on weight loss ridiculousness that often we completely ignore any diet/nutrition-based changes that might help people with health issues if it doesn’t first start with ‘omg, lose weight!’ (Like I just learned that the specific type of psoriatic arthritis I have, there are some indications that too much dietary sodium causes increased inflammation. If that holds out, I could be horribly overweight and have no interest at all in weight loss and still benefit enormously from that information and appropriate changes to my eating habits because inflammation HURTS. And we know that chronic pain is super hard on the body, physically and mentally. But if that does end up being the case – that I should be watching my sodium intake more than most people – and I was very overweight, would a doctor even bother to tell me? I kind of doubt it.)

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