When You Have Adapted a Health At Every Size Approach and Your Family is Still Stuck in Diet Culture

For many of my patients who have firmly joined the anti-diet camp and embraced a Health at Every Size® (HAES) approach to health, dealing with family members entrenched in diet culture can be a minefield that is tough to navigate. Let me say that I get it! I also have friends and family members who remain focused on thinness and weight loss. It’s hard!

Being Anti-Diet When You Have Family Members Stuck in Diet Culture

I notice that for many of my patients, it feels like HAES opens a huge chasm between their beliefs and the beliefs of their family members. It’s an entirely different worldview. In fact, the only parallel situation I have observed is the divide between patients who are liberal in their political beliefs and their conservative family members. There is almost no bridging the gap. They cannot see eye to eye and they feel no political discussion with these family members is safe.

If you feel the HAES paradigm has been personally helpful, you grow eager to share your knowledge with family members. You may want to help release them from their own diet prisons as well as transform them into HAES advocates and supporters for your health.

Set Realistic Expectations for Family Members

However, I recommend setting modest expectations. You have probably worked hard at recovery, meeting with a HAES treatment professional, reading, studying, and doing the work. You have spent countless hours on your personal journey breakup with diet culture. This has been a long and involved personal process.

Consider your family member: they have not invested the time or energy in this project that you have. They are probably still wedded to diet culture. They are not likely to be swayed merely by your testimonial that HAES has been helpful for you. After all, they still get diet messages everywhere they turn. They have been absorbing these messages for many years.

People rarely disavow diet culture immediately upon learning about HAES. I know this because I know the process you have been through. Even as a professional immersed in the eating disorder world, my own evolution to a firm HAES stance developed over a period of about 5 years. I see with my patients too that it is a process. Some aren’t ready to let go of diet culture and don’t return after a first session when I convey that I do not support the pursuit of weight loss. For those who stick with treatment, it can take many months to evolve into a HAES adherent.

Your exuberance about HAES may fall on flat ears. Remember this chasm between HAES and diet culture is just as vast as that between liberals and conservatives. So, I recommend taking a page from the people I’ve worked with who have a political divide in their family: set your expectations and Agree to Disagree. Use radical acceptance. Do not focus on proselytizing your family members. This can lead to conflict and disappointment.

Set a Healthy Boundary

You can let family members know that you have given up dieting. Do not expect them to do the same. You can offer them information about HAES by sharing some articles or favorite blogs or podcasts but do not expect they will read them. Be happy if they do, and offer to discuss these ideas if they want to. Be satisfied if they accept the recommendations. Practice empathy for their perspective; they are a victim of diet culture just as you once were.

Focus on setting a healthy boundary. You can ask them not to comment on your body or comment on your eating in your presence. This request is not hard for them to meet. You can also ask that they try to refrain from diet talk in front of you. Over time, you can remind them and train them.

I know from experience. Because I have been working on this with my own family and friends for years. I have a close family member who continues to be diet-focused but for the most part, knows they cannot discuss this in front of me. Recently, they told me (several times) about how a friend had lost so much weight and how great it was. I told them I did not want to hear about their friend’s weight loss. They told me, “Oh, I forgot who I was talking to.”

That’s how you train family members.

Read More

• To the Family Member Who Worries I Am Not Helping Your Loved One’s “Weight Problem”
• When Eating Disorder Providers Are Steeped in Diet Culture
• What Parents of Teens With Eating Disorders Need to Understand About Diet Culture

Get Help for An Eating Disorder in California

Contact us to get started with therapy for your eating disorder. Our specialized therapists can help.