Understanding Weight Inclusive Care: A Paradigm Shift in Health and Well-being

I referenced the impact of the shift to a weight-inclusive approach, to my own life, in my last blog post. I thought I’d write a bit more about what this approach is all about, here. 

The weight-inclusive care movement is rooted in a desire to eliminate weight-based stigma & discrimination, and to dismantle diet culture. It aims to make health, related practices, and the world, more accessible for all bodies.

This approach challenges the conventional emphasis on weight loss as the key to health. It acknowledges the harms and futility of weight cycling and restrictive dieting on both physical and mental well-being.

Diets and other weight-centric interventions fail in the long-term for the vast majority of people (one source here). Further, they are likely to negatively impact our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with food. 

The weight-inclusive care movement shines a light on the ways societal factors – such as our environment, access to nutritious food and clean water, socioeconomic status, discrimination, and healthcare access – also profoundly influence our health.

It separates morality from health, instead championing individual autonomy & respecting each person's right to make their own choices about their body and health journey.

It emphasizes the importance of improved accessibility for people in larger bodies – both access to quality healthcare free of weight-based assumptions & biases, and to the world at large.

The core message is this: prioritizing sustainable health-promoting behaviors, like nourishing our bodies, moving in ways we enjoy, and nurturing our mental and emotional well-being, yields greater long-term benefit than focusing on weight loss.

Additionally, working toward communities and systems that care better for all of us, starting with those who are impacted the most by the societal variables listed above, will have a dramatic impact on our collective health.

I love this vision for the world. To me, it challenges us to look so much deeper than is easy or comfortable when it comes to humans and our inherent complexity. And it doesn’t excuse judgment or discrimination under any guises (i.e. “for the sake of their health”).

It is, at its heart, a movement rooted in kindness, compassion, and a deep desire to understand -- that transcends hierarchies.

This is deeply personal work. I am still in the middle of it, working to parse which decisions in my life have been made from places of integrity and alignment, and which I should’ve made differently.

I have done a lot of harm at different points in my life, even championing the maintenance of the social hierarchy maintained by diet culture (especially in college as a member of a large social organization).  

My own experiences steeped in diet culture and having worked so hard to fit in, are what convict me so fully that there has to be a better way. I was truly caught up in things that didn’t matter -- I’m sure this is still the case in many areas, though hopefully to a lesser extent! -- and it impacted my heart, my life, my health, and my relationships.

If you find yourself still in this painful place, I see you and I get it. And…you’re welcome over here, too.

If you’d like to learn more, I’d recommend looking into the following:

Podcasts: Weight for It with Ronald Young Jr.; FoodPsych by Christy Harrison, MPH, RD

Book: Intuitive Eating (4th Edition) by Evelyn Tribole, MS, RD and Elyse Resch, MS, RD

E-mail List and Trainings: The Center for Body Trust (https://centerforbodytrust.com/)