The Body Trust Project acknowledges that we have an ever-changing relationship with our bodies for a lifetime. With that in mind, the The Body Trust Project: A Nine-Month School for Unlearning includes:

Meeting once a month for 90 minutes of unlearning and exploration
Workbooks and curated resource lists to help you divest from diet culture and sink your roots more deeply into Body Trust
Love notes (in email form) to remind you of the process

It is possible to develop the resilience needed to live compassionately in a weight-biased world. Let's do this work together.

Unlearning diet culture and oppressive ideas about your body is for you just as it is for everyone else.

There is not a different set of rules for you.

It may be true that your concern and management of your body, appearance, size, weight, shape, or fitness has been the center of your inner world for longer than you ever wanted or dreamt was possible. Most folks take it on before the age of 10.

Social constructs of health, size, beauty, race, gender, age and ability all have a stake in how free, connected and embodied you get to be. They have impacted how whole you feel and how much of you is known, seen, held and supported.

The coping and rituals that have arisen from the body project may have protected you or made living in a culture of domination more manageable. It has likely been the way you have tried to mitigate weight stigma.

You are not too late.

You couldn’t have already done this. We are awakening to new paradigms together. And including ourselves in our desire for change in the world is not always our first instinct.

Self-loathing and shame don’t work as motivators. They don’t create lasting or meaningful change.

It is, in fact, our own unraveling and unlearning that changes us. It unburies us. It helps us believe in our own story again. Our stories are hardwired to the truth.

We know the world around you may not be awake to this body-inclusive, anti-diet paradigm. Your loved ones don’t get it and maybe aren’t willing to hold your story. They don’t understand your path and can’t support your way out.

Leaving diet culture behind isn’t always easy to explain, especially when you are still trying to figure it out for yourself and don’t quite have the language to talk about it. And yet, maybe it hasn’t felt right to go it alone either.

Reckoning with Your Identity as an Eater (April 26)

Claiming your identity as an eater can be fraught with fear, shame or confusion. We believe Body Trust is a birthright, and somewhere along the way this trust is disrupted. When this happens we often begin to navigate the world of food and eating with a dieting mind. Before we can reclaim Body Trust, there is a reckoning. We reckon with the lies we’ve been told, how we’ve been harmed. We reckon with hunger and fullness...with desire and pleasure. Until we come to terms with our identity as an eater, it’s hard to experiment and take risks with our eating.

Ending the Hustle (May 24)

Diet culture teaches people to approach the body and food with rigidity and perfectionism. The way society talks about nutrition and health, you’d think one meal or day of eating has the power to heal or kill you. Starting with unrealistic expectations and then being hard on yourself when you can’t pull it off is how the weight loss and cosmetic fitness industries make money off of your shame. We want to help you end the hustle. Because if we’re really honest with ourselves, are we, as a society, hustling for “health” or are we hustling for worthiness?

Boundaries Don’t Have to Suck (July 26)

The ways we learn to cope with food and leave our bodies has been about learning to survive because our boundaries, our bodies, and our own knowing has not often been respected. We need to find a way to inhabit our own being that can be protected in new ways. Reconnecting with your needs and boundaries is a Core Element of a Body Trust Practice. We will work to celebrate our yes’s and honor our no’s. In her book Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown writes, “Your strong and solid no makes way for your deep, authentic yes...by practicing saying no, you will cultivate a yes that is rooted in having agency, having power, and having respect for your boundaries.” Let’s say yes to all of this!

Pleasure as a Measure of Freedom (August 23)

What makes you feel good? What turns you on? How often do you r e a l l y like what you eat? Access to pleasure is often tethered to the question “how much is too much?” It’s common for people’s complicated relationship with food to come from a disrupted relationship with desire. Rediscovering, embodying, and allowing for pleasure is an act of resistance in a culture that has made indulgence a “dirty word”. Pleasure takes up space and says I’m here. Let’s explore how pleasure, in the absence of shame and guilt, heals.

Reclaiming Movement (September 27)

Many of us grow up experiencing the joy of active play, sport, dance and other ways of moving our bodies, only to have these activities co-opted by diet culture later in life. We begin to view our bodies as machines that must be tightly controlled, believing in the calories in vs. out equation we’ve all been sold, and seeing physical activity as a way to compensate for our food intake. Movement can foster attunement by providing opportunities to get below the neck and experience the body from the inside out.

Making Your Healing Bigger Than You (October 25)

This movement needs all of you, not just the part of you that wants freedom for everyone else. As Sonya Renee Taylor recently reminded us, our liberation is bound together. When we include ourselves in the process towards body liberation, we contribute to the movement. When we ground our healing in our story we increase our agency and our voice. Once we’ve developed deeper roots in our Body Trust Practice, it becomes easier to speak up and advocate for a body compassionate and weight-inclusive world. And when we speak for a cause, our commitment to the cause strengthens. We’ll talk about ways to continue with this work, and to lend your voice to radical liberation for all.

Your body is not a project, or a problem to be solved.

Welcome to The Body Trust® Project: A School for Unlearning

You are already whole.

School is in session on February 22nd! Will you join us?
(Registration open through March 22nd! Catch up by watching recording from 2/22.)

Meet Your Partners in Body Trust

Hilary Kinavey, MS, LPC

Dana Sturtevant, MD, RD

You are not too late.

So what do you get?

Monthly Topics

Entering the Wilderness (February 22)

Divestment as a Form of Self-Care (March 22)