The doctor in the article mentioned Health at Every Size, a book from 2010 which claimed excess body weight is not, in itself, harmful. The movement itself is supposed to be older, and connected with "eating and moving right" without a fixation on a number. I can see the appeal. I lost all of my weight without owning a scale. While I had access to them, it couldn't be an everyday, fixated, thing as it had been when I was a teen.

Since then, we have observed so much more support to view overweight is a symptom of metabolic dysfunction, with most of the blame pointing to industrial food and its increasing presence.

HAES has a soothing purpose to stop the "diet obsession" but that's an obsession with fad dieting, not healthy eating. But they have distorted that concept to mean "okay if it's good for your mental health." Fads still appeal to people because it holds out the promise that after they "diet" away all the weight they can go back to the "normal" which caused the problem.

It is very difficult to pry away the mindset that got us here when it has a full-body hold on our minds. I can understand the appeal of not changing the way we eat, but we can't be lied to about it.

Still, if influential people are making so very much money making and selling industrial food, they will use some of that money to create "social movements" like this. Paying influencers, flooding popular airwaves, and boosting ads everywhere, aimed at making young people relax and choose the explanation they prefer.

Young people can stay active and show healthy lab numbers into their twenties, even thirties, but I've seen videos from people who were nearing forty when it all fell apart. Knees they can't repair until down to a safer weight, circulatory problems, cancer diagnoses, and after years of mental and physical pain. Under this influence insecure women seem especially willing to believe them. Some of then are under thirty and getting hormonal cancer problems. The kind fueled by overweight.

All from listening to HAES, the Health at Every Size "movement." Based on cherry picked studies that are decades old, and ignoring eating disorders, which are a real danger all by themselves. (The Youtube channel Sam at Every Size is a excellent resource on how this #HAES started and what it turned into.)

It seems reasonable, and kind-hearted, and we certainly shouldn't bully people in any case. But it's not fat-phobic (their word) or prejudiced or intrusive to recognize the health dangers of overweight, because what it means metabolically. It's a symptom, not a genome (as they claim.)

This is a bought and paid for overweight-normalization system that NPR got, even if it's a well-meaning attempt to sympathize with a global struggle. What started as body-positivity, to remove any differences as an excuse for bullying and worse, has become an excuse for people to grab, even if their issue is of their own making, as in this case.

Having listened to many people on Youtube, who now have an addiction of long standing and its serious health problems, it's terribly sad. Their mistake was believing "I'm big, so what?" and going on with their life. This led them into needing serious medical intervention.

And some of them can't stop, and die prematurely. What a terrifying position for anyone to be trapped in.

It's a chicken/egg situation. Back in the day, someone learned how to freeze vegetables to retain the nutrients, and it was a great thing. We'll pay for that. Good use of business practices. Now they sell meals made of unknown numbers of fillers, binders, flavorings, etc. Soon, we will be sold a bag of mock-brocc nuggets, or powdered corn with flavoring, which are plant-based, and so they have to be good for us. And told constantly that nothing that is wrong with us could possibly be caused by diet. I've met people who believe that. "It's just fuel, I pick fuel I like, everyone does..."

They mess with macros that are essential nutrients, like protein and fat. (Carbs are not an essential nutrient.) Pritikin founded a whole movement on low fat, and it didn't work long term, and probably killed many. He suffered from severe mental illness. But none of it was science! While all the paleo/primal/carnivore people who picked up the torch from Atkins, worked from a science-based perspective. That's not a depressed person seeing fat as his enemy and starving himself with low low fat, like Pritikin.

The Ozempic craze shows that their HAES strategy worked for a while. I'm sure they got back all that money. But it will stop now, since this phenomenon shows people never wanted to be overweight, and all that comes with it. They simply felt helpless to change.

And many of their HAES Influencers have died.