Linda Bacon > Quotes

“The only way to solve the weight problem is to stop making weight a problem—to stop judging ourselves and others by our size. Weight is not an effective measure of attractiveness, moral character, or health. The real enemy is weight stigma, for it is the stigmatization and fear of fat that causes the damage and deflects attention from true threats to our health and well-being.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“Once you consider the extent of the magical thinking that tends to be tied in to the fantasy of thinness, you can understand how threatening it is to consider the idea that you may never get the thin body you crave. It means that you never get to become the person you want to be. Wow! No wonder it’s so painful to let go of the drive to lose weight! Accepting your body is not just about physicality, it’s about accepting who you are, not continuing to wait until you become the person you imagine being.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“You only have one body and despite how well you live your life, it may never change. Can you afford to hate yourself for the rest of your life?”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“All you can do is present your truth. And then you can make choices about whom you want to surround yourself with. You are worthy of love. There are people who will enjoy you as you are, who will love and support you, even if you haven’t met them yet. Make it a priority to find them.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“In this, the largest epidemiological study ever conducted, the highest life expectancy is among individuals who are overweight by our current standards and the lowest life expectancy is among those defined as underweight. What’s more, individuals who fit into what is deemed the ideal weight range had a lower life expectancy than some of those who were obese.)”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“There’s one nutritional concept that seems to make a healthy relationship with food particularly difficult, and that’s the idea that some foods are good while others are bad.”
― Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“Yet today there’s simply too much noise around the issues of food, hunger, and eating for us to listen to our own bodies. We live in a world that’s decided to define food as “good” or “bad,” a world that encourages us to ignore our hunger and fullness signals in favor of continually seeking out that Holy Grail of thinness, or to use food to fill needs that have nothing to do with sustenance.”
― Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“Cross-cultural studies suggest that larger people are not subject to the same diseases in countries where there is less stigma attached to weight.254 Also, in the United States, there is a stronger relationship between BMI and morbidity (disease) and mortality (early death) among groups more negatively affected by body image concerns (younger people, Caucasians, and women).278279280281 Even more telling, when researchers looked at a nationally representative group of more than 170,000 U.S. adults, they found the difference between actual weight and perceived ideal weight was a better indicator of mental and physical health than BMI.282 In other words, feeling fat has stronger health effects than being fat.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“if you feel driven to eat for emotional reasons, you don’t have an eating problem. Nope. You have a caretaking problem. You’re not taking proper care of yourself.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“Your setpoint is: • The weight you maintain when you listen and respond to your body’s signals of hunger and fullness. • The weight you maintain when you don’t fixate on your weight or food habits. • The weight you keep returning to between diets.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“In other words, the best way to win the war against fat is to give up the fight. Turn over control to your body and you will settle at a healthy weight. And regardless of whether you do lose weight, your health and well-being will markedly improve. You will find that biology is much more powerful than willpower.”
― Linda Bacon

“Accepting your body is not just about physicality, it’s about accepting who you are, not continuing to wait until you become the person you imagine being.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“LIVE WELL PLEDGE Today, I will try to feed myself when I am hungry.
Today, I will try to be attentive to how foods taste and make me feel.
Today, I will try to choose foods that I like and that make me feel good.
Today, I will try to honor my body’s signals of fullness.
Today, I will try to find an enjoyable way to move my body.
Today, I will try to look kindly at my body and to treat it with
love and respect.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“Eating when you’re hungry helps maintain your setpoint and keep you at the weight that’s right for you, and denying your hunger leads to compensatory mechanisms that trigger fat storage and weight gain.”
― Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“Food is a wonderful source of pleasure—but it will get you into trouble if it’s the only source of pleasure you have in your life.”
― Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“Many factors other than your size, fat, and muscle tissue figure in resting metabolism. Some are genetic and immutable. You may have been born with the ability to burn a lot of energy quickly and effortlessly, while others have what’s called a “sluggish metabolism”and don’t use energy at a very fast rate. It’s interesting to consider the cultural value judgment in using the term “sluggish”; from a scientific perspective, the person with a slower metabolism is much more efficient, a trait that would have been highly prized in earlier times when food was harder to come by.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight

“In one study, women were told they were going to rate the quality of certain foods. Some women got a milkshake followed by three bowls of ice cream; some just got the ice cream. The restrained eaters who didn’t get the milkshake ate very little of the ice cream (trying to be “good”), but those who drank the milkshake also ate most of the ice cream. (The “what the hell” effect. . . i.e., “I drank the milkshake, I ruined my diet, what the hell, I’ll eat the ice cream, too.”) The idea that there will be a restriction in the future paradoxically motivated these women to act counter to their internal restriction, “to get it while I can.”
― Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“While it is clear that our food choices are a matter of personal responsibility, it is important to recognize that we do not make our choices in a vacuum. We select our foods in an environment toxic with government policies that encourage cheap prices for foods with low nutrient value, and in which billions of dollars have been spent to convince us to distrust ourselves, to overeat, and to eat foods laced with ingredients that raise our setpoints and damage our health.”
― Linda Bacon

“Blaming fatness for heart disease is a lot like blaming yellow teeth for lung cancer, rather than considering the possibility that smoking might play a role in both. And telling people they need to lose weight is a lot like telling someone with pneumonia to stop coughing so much—it may not be possible and won’t make the disease go away.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight

“Dieting activates “thrifty genes” that induce weight gain, both by increasing your hunger drive and decreasing your metabolism, and triggers other weight-gain mechanisms, many of which are beyond your conscious control. Also, some food choices that have become increasingly common bypass your internal weight-regulation system: Since their calories don’t register, eating them can result in an insatiable appetite, even when sufficient (or more than sufficient) calories are consumed.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“I value the sensation of hunger as a sign of the body’s wisdom, not as a commercial asset to be manipulated for market share. I value food as nourishment, not as a unit of sales. I value our bodies as gifts of life, not as product-consumption devices.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“But maintaining the primacy of the individual-lifestyle focus—without being transparent about larger influences—is an affront to people living in disadvantage, as it reduces their ill health to poor “choices”and blames them, all the while contributing to the stigma and judgmental thinking that fuels their oppression, worsens their health, and expands the health divide between the advantaged and disadvantaged.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight

“Several studies have shown that when people increase their activity they also increase their self-confidence, self-acceptance, and sense of personal worth and feel more comfortable in their bodies.”
― Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“Because statistics clearly show that when industry funds research, the published results are much more likely to show beneficial effects than research conducted without industry funding.”
― Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“Its laser focus on the limited parameters of weight, diet, and exercise blinded us to other factors that affect metabolism and health, including the lived realities of inequality.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight

“Instead of putting our energy into thinking about how we can improve the world, we obsess about how we can change our bodies.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“maintaining the right weight for you is about respecting your hunger and trusting your body to guide you in doing what’s best. And that’s hard to do if you’re regularly eating for reasons other than hunger and making choices that don’t give you pleasure.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“consider heart disease: To date, three different microbes have been discovered that are thought to contribute to clogged arteries. There is also a well-established association between periodontal disease and heart disease that is attributed to certain bacteria.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“Weight gain is relatively easy, but the human body is just not designed to support weight loss. This means that reversing weight gain habits will do a pretty good job of preventing weight gain, though they may not result in weight loss.”
― Linda Bacon, Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight

“The pharmaceutical industry, which has a vested interest in making us believe that fat is dangerous—and that they have a solution—wrote the BMI standards that are currently used.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight