For more than 25 years I’ve been sitting with people navigating disordered eating and with my own story of growing up in a culture that ties value to appearance. In this piece, I reflect on what I’ve learned from that work, from mentors, and from the voices of women I’ve sat in counselling rooms with. It’s about body respect, the power of cultural stigma, and what it means to view healing as a slow walk down an overgrown path.
I’ve been working with folks struggling with disordered eating for over 25 years now. Probably longer, if I count my own experience of growing up as a woman in a culture that equates “goodness” and value with looking a certain way.
Early in my career, my beloved supervisor, Heather Elliott, gave me permission to own and locate my experience of growing up in a society where women’s looks and the shape of our bodies are often what defines us in order to make sense of the type of relationship that I had with my own body, food and exercise. Prior to our work together I thought I needed to have a “perfect” relationship with my body before I was able to work with young women who had be conditioned to hate theirs. Heather and I explored how as a therapist I am not immune to the effects of culture, not immune to its demands. This permission allowed me to show up differently in the work, and allowed me to see myself as swimming in the same water, rather than needing to be ‘perfect’ etc (ie., having achieved a level of mastery where I was immune to the societal pressures discourses and norms and only then would I be a great therapist). The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes culture as something that is sedimented in our bodies, meaning that cultural norms, habits, and understandings become ingrained in our physical existence, influencing our perceptions and actions without conscious effort.
In my twenties, I worked in a live-in residential program for women struggling with disordered eating. I often found myself heartbroken. Every evening, residents and staff ate dinner together, and afterward we reconvened to the living room for the evenings support group. The idea was to offer support, a space where people could sit with the fullness of having eaten, to name and talk through whatever they needed to talk about.
I still remember the feeling I had while looking around the circle of women of varying ages, all living with problems of disordered eating severe enough to leave their homes, their jobs, partners, sometimes children, and friends, all in an attempt to reclaim their relationship with food and with their bodies. I remember my heart aching at the power of disordered eating and the intensity of the fear of “feeling fat,” “being fat,” or “looking fat,” a force strong enough to pull people away from their community and their relationships with themselves.
When I’ve written or presented on disordered eating in the past, I’ve taken inspiration from Katrina Brown’s original 1993 definition of the Weight Preoccupation Continuum. Her framing helped me see how these struggles are not simply “individual pathologies,” but cultural expressions as way of making sense of how bodies are positioned, feared, and controlled. Her conceptualization of disordered eating practices as existing on a continuum helps explain the way I see problems as beginning to slowly take up more space, more air and more room in a persons life. Its not black and white- disordered eating or not disordered eating. Rather its more grey, the line can be blurry and that people can move back and forth on the continuum towards what might be considered as a ‘healthy’ relationship with food/body/exersise and away from it. Positions on the continuum are not fixed. I find this hope-full, and this sentiment helps me remain hope-fulled and stay in the work. We can move and shift as our relationship with our body changes. That continuum still resonates today, and the more I’ve used it the way I use it has also shape shifted and developed as I lean deeper into the work.
I’m now using the continuum combined with a fat-positive, body-respecting lens. This combination more accurately reflects not only people’s struggles with cultural pressures, but also the diverse and valid ways bodies exist in the world. Rather than defining fatness through fear, denial, or pathology, a fat-positive and inclusive perspective recognizes that all bodies, including fat bodies, are worthy of dignity, respect, and care. The real harm lies not in body size itself, but in the systemic stigma, diet culture, and social pressures that encourage disordered relationships with food and body image.
Fatness is not an extreme on a continuum of illness but a natural human variation, experienced with joy, agency, and resilience. Problems such as weight preoccupations, food struggles, and pressures to avoid fatness are not opposites of fatness; they’re expressions of a culture that frames fatness as undesirable. The fear of becoming fat is a symptom of societal stigma, not a reflection of fat bodies’ worth. What requires healing is not fatness, but the oppressive systems that drive people to fear it.
If anything, this work has taught me that what needs healing is not individual bodies, but the cultural stories that teach us to mistrust them. Disordered eating doesn’t emerge in isolation it grows in environments that reward shrinking, control, and self-surveillance.
Body respect asks something different of us. It invites us to soften our gaze, to question inherited rules, and to imagine relationships with our bodies that are rooted in kindness, care and self-compassion.
Changing our relationship with our body and ourselves, then, feels less like fixing and more like tending. A slow walk back through overgrown paths. Learning new ways of listening to our bodies. New ways of caring. New ways of being with what hurts without needing to punish the body for carrying it.
And maybe body respect begins right there, in noticing we are already in relationship with ourselves. That our bodies are not problems to solve, but places to live. Places to return to. Places worthy of patience, dignity, and care.
As always, I’d love to hear how these ideas land with you. What does “body respect” look like in your own life or your therapy practice? Does the idea of seeing your body as home, a place to live, a place to land shift your relationship to it and how you might be invited to care for it?
