Hey! Are You One the 401k Readers Misled by Our HAES Theory?

In the decade since this co-authored article (with Lindo Bacon) supporting Health At Every Size (HAES) was published it’s had over 401k hits. I wanted it open access because I wanted it to have reach. And my investment paid off — great! It’s stood the test of time as a go-to repository of all the biomedical references you need to launch an informed attack on anti-fat healthcare.

We need to upend fat stigma and pay attention to social justice in the public health system. Period.

The idea was to provide a roadmap out of oppression. But we mistakenly signposted people along the same old highway inattentively re-labelled as a new route through.

Transformation needs a radically new way of thinking. We presented something that felt radical because it felt counter-cultural. It was certainly a head-on challenge to cultural ideas about fatness and ‘health’.

But it didn’t challenge cultural ideas about individualism so it didn’t steer readers towards inter-connection as the place of real healing and deep social change.

And it didn’t challenge cultural ideas about how knowledge is created so it presented Eurocentric values as if these were neutral. This is white supreamcy in action and enacts racism — even though we were vociferous about social justice .

At another level, we made a mistake in presenting theory.

Paraphrasing this — much of what gets taught in medical school about fatness is wrong and hazardous. But ‘tackling stigma’ can backfire. There are ways of protesting fat stigma and calling out pseudoscience that trouble white supremacy and there are ways of protesting that stabilise white supremacy.

In this post I explain where we went wrong and why understanding the error matters to social justice — including really uprooting fat stigma.

I get that it can be confusing to hear that the article is problematic. It can feel like an attack on the key agenda of ending dieting and fat stigma. It’s not — it’s surfacing how we stopped short of naming the deep pillars of white supremacy that uphold dieting and fat stigma.

When we’re invested in an idea it can be hard to make sense of critique. On which note…