About the Association for Size Diversity and Health® (ASDAH®)
The Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) is a non-profit organization with an international membership started in 2003. Our members and leaders are committed to the Health At Every Size® (HAES®) principles.
The HAES movement is a continuously evolving alternative to the weight-centered approach to treating clients and patients of all sizes. It is also a movement working to promote size acceptance, to end weight discrimination and stigma, and to lessen the cultural obsession with weight loss and thinness.
Learn more about the HAES approach.
Download the ASDAH Annual Report.
What We Believe
Mission
ASDAH’s mission is to partner with service providers, educators and advocates to dismantle weight-centered health policies and practices, ensuring that people who live with multiple forms of oppression are focusing our work.
Vision
We envision a world that celebrates bodies of all shapes and sizes, in which body weight is no longer a source of discrimination and where oppressed communities have equal access to the resources and practices that support health and well being.
Committed to Respect, Integrity, Justice & Inclusiveness
Respect is:
- Operating from a basis of consideration
- Affirming and celebrating our differences
- Taking personal and organizational responsibility for understanding and being sensitive to different cultures, oppressions, and marginalization
- Taking responsibility and apologizing when we make mistakes, and constantly improving as we move forward
- Seeking not to tolerate our differences but to fully understand, embrace, and affirm them at every level of the organization
We put respect into practice by:
- Offering our support and our disagreement with thoughtfulness and sensitivity
- Continually educating ourselves individually and as a group about cultures, oppressions and marginalizations from an intersectional perspective
- Being aware of our own forms of privilege and their effects on our worldview
- Listening to concerns that are brought to us with deep interest and wholehearted contemplation, never belittling or making light of the concerns or those bringing them
Integrity is:
- Conducting ourselves and our work with respect for people’s dignity
- Committing to ethical behavior in all of our dealings
- Remaining true to our vision, mission, and core values in all of our decisions
We put integrity into practice by:
- Being up front and truthful in all dealings with each other, our members, and people or groups outside the organization
- Subscribing to the strictest codes of ethics in all of our work
- Truthfully representing the findings and limitations of our research, beliefs, and positions
- Making decisions for the organization based on their adherence to our vision statement, mission statement, and our core values
Justice is:
- Using privilege to support and center the voices of those with less privilege
- Creating equality in access to information and opportunities
- Using resources in ways that create fairness and equality
We put justice into practice by:
- Using our platform to center the voices of groups that are marginalized within discussions of health and body size
- Using our resources to support demands for justice by these marginalized and oppressed people and groups
- Championing total equality of access to non-biased information, healthcare, food options, and movement options
- Fighting for a world without size-based discrimination or weight bias
Inclusiveness is:
- Fostering and celebrating diversity at every level of our organization
- Understanding, respecting, and working from a platform of intersectionality
- Knowing that what we are currently seeing and hearing is not all there is to be seen and heard
We put inclusiveness into practice by:
- Fostering intersectional representation at every level, every stage, every facet, and every project of the organization
- Continuously asking, “who aren’t we hearing from?”
- Continuously asking, “who are we hearing from too much?”
- Never valuing expediency or improvement for the majority over creating improvement for everyone, including and especially those with the least privilege