Health at Every Size ® (HAES) is a weight-inclusive approach to both social justice and person-centred care that accepts and respects body diversity and rejects the pathologising of body size. As a HAES practitioner, I commit to providing respectful care at all times to my clients, recognising their humanity and individuality and working with them as they repair their relationship with food and their body.
The Health At Every Size® Principles are:
- Weight Inclusivity: Accept and 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 enjoyable movement, to the degree that they choose.
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Adapted from the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) www.sizediversityandhealth.org