So I heard you like HAES A bit of a note for the mods first: This post gets into some of the details about certain legal entities/organizations, and I do name a few names. I try to keep them to an absolute minimum to not risk running afoul of Voat's anti-doxxing rule (though I don't know if it applies to non-Voat using public figures), but some of the evidence I dug up does have names in it. If you feel that's too risky, feel free to remove the link to the image, message me to do it or remove the post altogether. So on to the fun stuff: We’ve all probably heard the term "Healthy at Every Size," or HAES for short, thrown around by fatties, but I’ve noticed that very few people seemed to have quite exactly the same idea of what it was. I’ve seen some of us say that HAES originally started off as a good idea, where you should simply focus on exercise and proper diet, and that weight loss would follow naturally. I’ve seen others say that it’s a horrible excuse for ignoring mainstream medicine and insisting that doctors ignore a patient’s weight to spare their fee fees. I wanted to find out what it was, exactly, so a while ago, I started doing some digging. A while ago, I remembered seeing on Linda Bacon’s website that HAES had a trademark symbol next to it, and that she requested anyone else who uses HAES put either a copyright or trademark symbol after it. I decided that this was as good a place as any to start, so I went off to the US Patent and Trademark Office’s website (uspto.gov) and did a search for both “HAES” and “Health At Every Size.” Both are servicemarked terms (a servicemark is essentially a trademark, but applies to services, such as being provided with dietary advice, instead of physical trade goods, like, say, food). Both the HAES and Health At Every Size SMs were given to a group called the Association for Size Diversity and Health (asdah.org). I did some digging on them, and ended up looking at their public records. It seems that they’re a tax exempt organization based out of California, and are classed as a “business league” whose purpose is“community improvement,” “capacity building,” and “promotion of business.” According to the IRS, a business league is defined as “an association of persons having a common business interest, whose purpose is to promote the common business interest, [not profit].” In other words, ASDAH was a group that was supposed to be organized with the intention of furthering its members’ businesses, perhaps specifically the “HAES-style” approach to “healthcare,” but ASDAH itself was not meant to be concerned with profit.  Think of it this way: A business league of acupuncturists may pay to have articles published promoting the alleged benefits of acupuncture, air ads to the public promoting acupuncture, etc., and would be funded by acupuncturists in the area affected by the ads. The business league itself, however, would not practice acupuncture or benefit directly should its ads prove effective at getting more people to visit acupuncturists. It might, however, benefit from acupuncturists’ increased revenue, an increased number of practicing acupuncturists (who would presumably pay into this effective business league), etc. In other words, I get the impression it’s sort of like a collective advertising effort, but for “healthcare” practitioners. ASDAH explicitly states on its website that their goal is to promote HAES, and the organization offers a list of dieticians and other “professionals” who can help you practice HAES. In order to be listed, it appears that you have to sign their “HAES pledge.” At the time of my writing this however, clicking the link to sign it takes you to a page saying that they are updating their website software, and to check back later. I looked through some of the members’ pages, and found my next hint in the bio of a woman named Joanne Ikeda. It states that “Frances Berg and [Ikeda] coined the term ‘Health At Every Size.’” A quick side note, Ikeda is a Registered Dietitian – remember “dietitian” is the regulated term in the US, meaning that unlike “nutritionists,” she had to pass tests and get certifications in order to be able to call herself this without getting in trouble. I then looked up Frances Berg, and it appears she is the head of an organization called the Healthy Weight Network, a separate but similar organization based out of North Dakota. (I got the impression ASDAH was mostly a west coast, specifically California, based organization.) If you care to take a look at the Healthy Weight Network’s website (healthyweightnetwork.com), you'll see all the fatsplaining that we’re familiar with, like “dieting doesn’t work” and claims that the medical community is lying to you when they say obesity has severe health risks. They sell quite a few books talking about various "sub-topics" of health and diet, including a nearly 500 page book called “Underage and Overweight” (written by Berg), which appears to discuss childhood obesity and its ramifications, as they see them. I'll let you guess what their slant is. One of their more interesting publications was an academic journal called the “Healthy Weight Journal,” which appears to have become the “Health at Every Size” journal in 2007 (as best as I can gather). I looked through the Healthy Weight Journal, and that’s where I found the earliest mention of HAES, possibly the first. The journal frequently talks about a “revolution” in medical science, going back as far as I cared to read, but the earliest mention of “Health at Every Size” that I could find was in an article by Berg and someone named Gail Marchessault called “Naming the Revolution,” published in the Jan/Feb 2000 “Healthy Weight Journal.” In "Naming the Revolution," the two suggest the name “Health At Every Size” and the acronym “H@AS” (yes, H@AS, I don't know if that was a typo or stupidity) be used to refer to their attitude towards obesity/weight management/etc. The actual phrase “health at every size” was actually used earlier, but not in the proper sense. As in, you might encounter the phrase "we think people can be healthy at any size," but not "practicing Health At Every Size." I have no idea why they waited until June 2010 and June 2011 to file for service marks on "Health at Every Size" and "HAES" respectively, especially when ASDAH claims to have started in 2003, but apparently they did. Kind of unrelated, but the Healthy Weight Journal has actually published Linda Bacon a couple times, just to give you an idea of the sort of journal it is. (Linda Bacon is a psychology PhD that started writing studies/reviews about nutrition, HAES and fat activism, for who knows why.) I also saw quite a few familiar names while looking through all of these websites, so not surprisingly, it appears that the more “academically” inclined fat activists may work together fairly closely. I also thought it was interesting that the entire “fat activism” idea is actually fairly old, a lot older than I thought it was anyway, and they don’t appear to have changed significantly since the beginning. Aside from the fact that the ideas of HAES and fat activism appeared in all these journals long before HAES itself did, I also ran across a number of earlier pieces that people cited as inspiration. One of the earliest “inspirational pieces” I could find was a newspaper article from Nov 1967 written by a man named Lew Louderback called “More People Should Be Fat”. It appears that both Lew and his wife were engaged in fat activism (one of them was writing a book about it), fighting back against a society that they believed “worshipped slimness.” (Totally unrelated: Anyone else notice the fat girl look seems almost completely unchanged in the, what, nearly 50 years since the article published?) On a more sinister note, I also noticed that the Center for Consumer Freedom cited HAES-style research a number of times. The CCF is essentially a US lobbyist group that represents what we could call the “food industry.” Think snack cakes, soda, etc., not farmers. While I haven’t been able to look into their finances (I’d have no idea how to get access to see whether CCF has donated to HAES-style research organizations), it would not at all surprise me. “Big food” likely funds a very significant amount of research on the subjects of nutrition, obesity, etc. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the same people that engineer foods to be addictive and as un-filling as possible would also want to cover up, even normalize, the consequences of their products. So, to sum it up: HAES doesn’t seem to be something that was originally good, nor something that sprouted up “organically” from the festering fat folds of tumblr-dwelling fat activists. It very much appears to have been made by a group of dieticians, nutritionists and other “professionals” (many of whom are fat, surprise surprise) who wanted to change the approach modern medical science has towards obesity. Namely, they wish to discredit the prevailing body of evidence suggesting that it is massively (tee-hee!) detrimental to a person’s health, and make money by misleading fellow fatties about the consequences.