What woke me up to HAES was when a former friend died at age 30.  Cardiomyopathy, his doctor had been pleading with him to get thin. Before that I had been vaguely aware of the number of fats around me, but when I was digging around his journals with his mother at the funeral we found all this HAES and FA bullshit.  Thus started the journey down the rabbit hole.  Blows my mind people think like this.  Or that this many people are fats.