Please correct me but I always thought HAES meant “you can choose healthy choices no matter your size”, presumably because past a certain point fat people might be like ‘fuck it no point in trying to be better’.

As with every other generic slogan, it probably means different things to different people

HAES is giving yourself permission to give up.

That’s one of those things that I’ve been hearing about for a decade or longer, but literally only from people refuting it and apparently claiming it’s a mainstream view that desperately needs to be refuted.

[1] has quite a good overview of the HAES movement. It is real.

[1] httpss://www.medicaldaily.com/health-every-size-obesity-weight-loss-science-383008

I wonder if the two can't be reconciled. It's probably ideal, from a health perspective, to avoid developing things like metabolic in the first place. But has it been demonstrated that, once you're already there, living the kind of aggressively orthorexic lifestyle it takes to get down to an ostensibly healthy weight does more good than harm?

Even without that, though, I'm sympathetic to HAES because it seems quite likely that, even if absolutely nothing else, focusing on body weight rather than lifestyle factors ultimately does more to discourage than encourage making healthier choices.

And in fact this study totally fails to refute that idea. All it does is it says that, among a half million people, the higher-BMI groups had more cases of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes, even when controlling for levels of physical activity. It says nothing about whether adding physical activity to get to a lower-BMI group could work as a treatment for any of those, nor whether there are any consequences of that level of physical activity.

There are many stupid movements. Do you think you’ll change the opinions of anybody with a study? Especially when the solution is losing weight

I do like the focus on health rather than weight though, I think that's valuable.