Health At Every Size ®(HAES®) is a registered trademark of the Association for Size Diversity & Health (ASDAH).
What’s Health At Every Size? It’s a continuously evolving approach to health and well-being that “promotes balanced eating, life-enhancing physical activity, and respect for the diversity of body shapes and sizes.” As ASDAH also notes on its website, “Measures of body weight/size do not accurately reflect an individual’s health status and often lead to ineffective interventions rather than efforts that enhance health and wellness.”
HAES also recognizes the social determinants of health and ways in which stigma, prejudice, and discrimination influence health and access to healthcare.
The basic principles of Health At Every Size, as stated on the ASDAH website, are:
Weight Inclusivity
Accept & respect the inherent diversity of body shapes and sizes and reject the idealizing or pathologizing of specific weights.
Health Enhancement
Support health policies that improve and equalize access to information and services, and personal practices that improve human well-being, including attention to individual physical, economic, social, spiritual, emotional, and other needs.
Respectful Care
Acknowledge our biases, and work to end weight discrimination, weight stigma, and weight bias. Provide information and services from an understanding that socio-economic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and other identities impact weight stigma, and support environments that address these inequities.
Eating for Well-being
Promote flexible, individualized eating based on hunger, satiety, nutritional needs, and pleasure, rather than any externally regulated eating plan focused on weight control.
Life-Enhancing Movement
Support physical activities that allow people of all sizes, abilities, and interests to engage in movement, to the degree that they choose.
Health At Every Size (historically also referred to as Health At Any Size, or Health For All Sizes), helps people live well without encouraging or reinforcing size/weight prejudices or phobias, poor body image, or eating disorders, or the negative health consequences of dieting-related weight loss and regain.
Press endorses Health At Every Size, and promises that every book and product we publish or offer for sale celebrates size diversity or at least does not contradict it.
We won’t guarantee that all novels’ heroines and heroines are Big and Beautiful like Pat Ballard‘s, but they won’t be “fattist,” either, unless, possibly, that’s clearly written as a character flaw. Similarly, some nonfiction, such as Anne Richardson Williams‘s moving Unconventional Means, won’t deal specifically with size, weight, or physical health issues, but it also won’t reinforce negative attitudes about weight — or age or gender or ethnicity.
Other HAES related resources
12 Steps to Health At Every Size (Peggy Elam, Ph.D)
Fat Studies and Fat Friendly Books and Resources