Health At Every Size® means what, exactly?

Health At Every Size® (or HAES) is a movement that calls for an anti-diet transformative shift in how we understand bodies and health, specifically within the medical community, a field that has unfortunately evolved into one of the fundamental perpetrators of weight stigmatization.

Health at Every Size® commands an unlearning of the commonly accepted weight-stigmatizing rhetoric that pervades the medical community (and subsequently our cultural assumptions regarding health). Using the empirical literature that runs counter to long-held assumptions regarding weight and health, HAES- informed care decentralizes weight from conversations surrounding a person’s health to reduce the stigmatizing of fat bodies and its associated negative health outcomes.

HAES re-centers more causal, effective, and actionable determinants of health to support health promoting behaviors among individuals.

You can learn more about this approach and the evidence supporting it from its founders at the Association for Size Diversity and Health.