The History of Health at Every Size®: An Introduction

Image description: A short fat woman with long dark hair and tall fat man with short brown hair walk outdoors surrounded by pine trees on a sunny day. They are both wearing pants and lightweight jackets. Image courtesy of Body Liberation Stock.

by Barbara Altman Bruno, Ph.D., DCSW. Previously posted on the Health At Every Size® Blog and reposted here with author permission.

Health at Every Size® (HAES®) exists because of prejudice against extra weight/fatness. This prejudice has occurred quite recently in the history of humans, since a relatively adequate and reliable supply of food has only been available during the past two to three centuries.

Scrutiny of weight only became a growing social issue around the beginning of the 20th century. One of the contributing factors was the development of ready-to-wear clothes, which did not allow for as much individual size variation as had clothing that was hand-tailored. The size constrictions of ready-to-wear helped prompt Lena Bryant, founder of Lane Bryant, to comment that rather than trying to make one’s figure conform to fashion, fashion should conform to the figure.

Another factor was the development of reliable, portable and affordable scales, so that for the first time, people could measure their weight in private. Yet a third factor was improved eye care, which led to people scrutinizing each other.

One of the major experiments to validate many of the experiences of weight-loss dieters occurred in the mid-1940s. Ancel Keys wanted to study the effects of starvation on humans.(1) Keys wanted to find out the conditions and needs of populations in Europe after liberation. He recruited 36 young men, conscientious objectors, who were tested and found to be physically and psychologically healthy. He housed them in dorms at the University of Minnesota.

For the first three months of the study, the men were able to eat freely (about 3,500 calories a day). Their routines required them to walk about three miles per day and do other movement and chores. For the next six months, their rations were cut by half. Their diet consisted of what might be available to eat in European famine areas—mostly root vegetables, cabbage, and wheat—but they were given adequate vitamins, minerals, and protein. Within about two months, they lost half of their total body fat. They became irritable, lethargic, unkempt, uninterested in sex, and obsessed with food. They all lost a quarter of their starting weight.

One cut off a fingertip, two suffered severe enough mental breakdowns to excuse them from the full six months of semi-starvation.

At the end of this period, the men were given more food but remained miserable and ravenous, even after eating an average of 5,000 calories per day. Not until nine months after recovering their starting weights did their body fat and muscle return. Six of the men ended up with an average of nine and a half pounds more body fat than before entering the experiment.

Keys’ study, The Biology of Human Starvation, was published in 1950. During that same year began the Framingham study, which would eventually show that life expectancy was lowest for thin men, followed by the lightest and heaviest women. A U-shaped curve, wherein except at the weight extremes, weight makes little difference in life expectancy, has since been found in the Framingham study and many others. During the 1950s, the Cold War was in full throttle, and one of the fears was that Americans, enjoying postwar prosperity, were becoming “soft on Communism.”

Also in full throttle was psychoanalysis. In 1957, psychotherapists Helen and Harold Kaplan concluded that “almost all conceivable psychological impulses and conflicts have been accused of causing overeating.”(2) A few years later, Albert Stunkard would find no correlation between neurosis and overweight, but an inverse correlation between weight and class.

Many themes will repeat as the years and decades of HAES history go on.

1 Ancel Keys, The Biology of Human Starvation. University of Minnesota Press, 1950

2 As quoted in Bennett, W., and Gurin, J., The Dieter’s Dilemma. Basic Books, 1982, p. 29.

Copyright © 2017-2018 Barbara Altman Bruno All rights reserved.

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Pic of Barbara Altman Bruno; woman with short hair and glasses

Barbara Altman Bruno, Ph.D., LCSW, is a clinical social worker, size acceptance activist, and HAES pioneer. She has presented at clinical conferences, appeared in television, radio, magazines, newspapers, and demonstrations, and has written many articles, including well-being columns for larger people, guidelines for therapists who treat fat clients, a brief history of HAES, and a book, Worth Your Weight (what you CAN do about a weight problem). She is former co-chair of education for the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) and is on NAAFA’s Advisory Board.