How would you describe your relationship with your body and food?

If you are like most, the answer is usually “difficult”, “complicated” or just “bad”. We’ve grown up learning to criticize and hate our bodies from our parents, from school and from what we learn from the media. We have patterns of dieting, followed by patterns of weight gain and self defeat. We blame ourselves because we have been told from the time we were young that changing our bodies permanently is within our control.

This is simply a false belief. There are many factors that affect our body size and health including:

-Genetics

-Stress

-Trauma

-Food insecurity and poverty

-Racial and cultural oppression

-Nutrition and Exercise

Would you like to learn how to make peace and accept your body the way it is? To get out of the diet/restrict/binge cycle and to nurture your physical and mental health without intentional weight loss?

Imagine what is available to you if you stop spending energy trying to shrink yourself. Body Acceptance counseling will teach you fight against the harmful messages that have been instilled in you from a young age. You will learn to shift the focus of your worth from your body to your personhood. My approach to helping you with this is to recognize patterns of harmful eating and self talk that started as early as young childhood. You will learn to fight the messages that we all are inundated with about size, eating and health in order for you to care for yourself as you are. I follow a Health at Every Size approach to understanding and coping with health issues, chronic or otherwise. This means that it is not necessary to focus on weight loss as the answer to improving and/or coping with your health. We will talk about the ways you can support yourself physically and emotionally without a diet plan.