How did you come to HAES?

bah_bug

Curiosity is stalking the cat, again. How did you first learn of HAES, and how did it come to be part of your life?

new_boots

I don't know where I first heard of HAES. I read some of the ideas in When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies years ago, but I don't think they used that term.

I guess what brought me to it is years of trying & failing to lose weight. I would develop good behaviors, then drop them when I didn't get skinny doing them. I quit tracking numerous times because I get obsessive about it. I have OCD so obsessions are a problem for me & numbers are a big trigger. (I am the queen of making spread sheets to track things.) That makes weight loss & weighing tricky.

When I started running I liked it so much I didn't want to attach it to losing weight & then drop it when it didn't work. There's lot of numbers in running! The last diet I tried was Weight Watchers, for the 3rd time, & I realized a few things that led to me dropping it for HAES:

1. I wasn't losing enough weight to make it worth the money.
2. Anxiety & Depression made the meeting difficult at times, especially if I missed a meeting. Then I felt like a failure & didn't want to go back.
3. My meetings were in the evening, so my eating became increasingly disordered as I tried to get the right numbers on the scale each week. I started not wanting to eat for a few hours before the meeting. Then I stopped eating at all that day. From there I started eating light the night before, then not eating at all. So on & so forth.
4. I had trouble keeping up my running schedule because I wasn't eating enough many days.

#4 was the big reason I decided to stop worrying about it. I just wanted to run. Too bad I quit for a while & now I've had to start over. :-/

ILoveMyHotFatBody

I learned about it in 2010 through Linda Bacon's book Health At Every Size. I was at the library looking for dieting books. I don't remember what I thought when I saw the title Health At Every Size... probably that it was a book that tailored diets specifically for fat people. And then I read it, and I was blown away.

It's scary to think I might never have known about HAES, if I hadn't, on almost a whim, checked out that book. Everything I know about HAES and fat activism today is because Linda Bacon's book led me to search. Aside from her book, I've never encountered these ideas randomly in my life.