Anna Jones runs a website advertising her nutrition counseling services to clients.
There’s just one wild catch: she explicitly refuses to assist her clients in losing weight — regardless of their personal intentions.
Let’s meet this body-diverse practitioner of The Science™.
Related: Diverse Fat Activist Gets Paid to Lie to Children About Nutrition for Corporate Profit
Via About Me (emphasis added):
The desire to lose weight is not a bad or shameful desire. It honestly makes sense considering how AWFUL people in fat bodies are treated. They are ridiculed, stigmatized, and bullied for the size of their body. If this has been your experience, it seems logical to want to further avoid this pain and trauma by losing weight.
There are a couple of reasons why I do not assist with weight loss. The first being, there isn’t great research that demonstrates a strategy for sustainable weight loss (meaning the weight is kept off) beyond five years and does not further harm your relationship with food. For this reason, I do not believe it is ethical to accept money for something that is not sustainable and may cause harm to you.
The second being- focusing on weight loss as the primary goal tends to negate the benefits of newly established health behaviors.
It appears, scouring her posts, that her blanket ban on helping her clients lose weight is rooted not in their best interest but in her personal crusade to make being morbidly obese cool and socially accepted.
Here, she describes the shame she experienced growing up “in a fat body” (the Social Justice™ phrase these people love; as if the body and the person are separate entities) and her advocacy for “taking up space” as a way to reclaim her sense of self-worth.
Via The Witty Avocado (emphasis added):
The weight stigma we experience can make us feel like we need to hide. That we need to be silent. That we lack willpower and motivation. That we cannot take up space.
We learn to hate our bodies. We learn that our bodies are wrong. THAT WE ARE WRONG.
The most ironic part is- those words, the resulting internalized weight stigma, is what has the greatest potential impact on our mental and physical health. Not the size of our bodies (correlation does not equal causation).
It took me years (and a lot of therapy, effort, and emotional energy) to unpack the weight stigma I had internalized from such a young age. Discovering intuitive eating, Health at Every Size®, and body neutrality allowed me to challenge that inner voice- to rewrite that obnoxious commercial jingle into something with a little more love and empathy.
If you, too, are in the process of challenging and unlearning your own commercial jingle of “I hate my body,” I want you to know that I see you. I grieve with you. I stand with you.
Please know that you deserve to be heard.
You do not need to hide.
The size of your body does not determine your willpower or motivation.
You deserve to take up space.
Most importantly, you and your body are not wrong.
It’s obviously a very noble endeavor to sacrifice your own clients’ well-being while taking their money to assuage your own deep-rooted insecurities that are entirely within your own control to solve with a little personal effort.
These are the heroes of our era.
Jones serves on the DEI board of the Weight Inclusive Toolkit Initiative (WITI), which rejects “weight-normative care” on the grounds that it promulgates fatphobia and racism, among other -isms.
Via University of Washington School of Public Health (emphasis added):
In response to a new 2022 Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirement, the Weight Inclusive Toolkit Initiative (WITI) Committee (a subset of the Weight Inclusive Education Initiative) was hired by Nutrition and Dietetic Educators and Preceptors (NDEP) to develop an educational toolkit. The problem being addressed by the WITI Committee is that the majority of nationwide nutritional sciences curricula are based in “weight-normative care.” This is an incredibly far-reaching population level problem, because this kind of healthcare is built on the premise that larger bodies are less healthy, and that weight loss is a reasonable, possible, and valuable goal for people in those bodies to become more healthy (despite reams of evidence to the contrary). Predicated primarily on the fraught Body Mass Index (BMI), this principle, and the ideas that flow out of it, perpetuates the health of the most privileged, while impeding the health of those who find themselves not identifying as: white, male, small-bodied, wealthy, etc.
