Body-Inclusive Therapy
Your body is not a problem to be solved.
You may have spent years receiving messages about what your body should look like, how much space it should take up, what you should eat, how you should move, or what you need to change before you can be healthy, attractive, confident, or worthy of care.
Those messages can come from everywhere: family, healthcare providers, relationships, workplaces, social media, and sometimes even therapists.
Therapy doesn’t need to be another place where your body is evaluated.
Body-inclusive therapy creates space to talk about your mental health, relationships, experiences, and goals without automatically making weight loss one of them.
Whether you use words like fat, plus-size, or something else entirely, you get to decide how you talk about your body. You also get to decide whether your body is something you want to talk about at all.
You do not have to become smaller before you are allowed to build a bigger life.
When the World Has a Lot to Say About Your Body
Living in a body that doesn’t fit society’s preferred mold can mean receiving a steady stream of opinions you never asked for.
It might be a healthcare appointment where every concern somehow circles back to weight. A family member commenting on what is on your plate. Worrying whether a chair will be comfortable or sturdy enough. Avoiding an activity because you don’t know whether the space, equipment, or seating will accommodate your body. Being treated differently while dating, shopping for clothes, traveling, exercising, or simply existing in public.
Over time, those experiences can shape how you feel about yourself and how safe you feel taking up space.
Body-inclusive therapy gives us room to explore experiences such as:
Weight stigma and discrimination
Body image and self-esteem
Shame and internalized messages about weight
Difficult or dismissive healthcare experiences
Anxiety about medical appointments
Family and relationship dynamics around weight and food
Dating, intimacy, and sexuality
Accessibility and navigating spaces that were not designed with your body in mind
Changes in your body due to age, illness, medication, disability, pregnancy, or other life experiences
Setting boundaries around comments, advice, and conversations about your body
You don’t have to love your body. You don’t have to feel neutral about it. You don’t have to reach some ideal relationship with it at all.
Your body can be complicated. Your feelings about it can change. And therapy can make room for all of that without deciding in advance what you are supposed to feel.
There is no required way to feel about your body in order to care for yourself and live a meaningful life.
What Body-Inclusive Therapy Means Here
Body-inclusive therapy starts with a simple idea: your body size does not determine your worth, and changing your body is not automatically a mental health treatment goal.
My approach is weight-inclusive and informed by Health at Every Size (HAES) principles. That means we can talk about health, food, movement, medical concerns, body image, or changes you may want to make without assuming that weight loss is the answer.
It also means I won’t congratulate you for losing weight without knowing the story behind it. I won’t assume gaining weight means something has gone wrong. And I won’t turn every mental health concern into a conversation about your body.
Instead, therapy can focus on what matters to you.
That might mean building confidence, processing painful experiences, setting boundaries, navigating healthcare, improving relationships, reconnecting with activities you enjoy, exploring your relationship with your body, or simply having a place where your size is not treated as an explanation for everything.
Your goals belong to you. Therapy should help you pursue them, not hand you a new set of rules for your body.
What We Can Work On
Your body may be central to why you’re seeking therapy, one piece of a larger story, or barely relevant to what brought you in.
Body-inclusive therapy means we can make room for it without assuming it needs to become the focus.
Your body does not have to be the most interesting thing about you.
We can talk about it when it matters and talk about everything else when it doesn’t.
We might work on:
Body image and the messages you have absorbed about how your body should look
Weight stigma and the impact of being judged, dismissed, or treated differently because of your size
Healthcare experiences, including medical bias, anxiety, avoidance, or advocating for the care you need
Relationships and family dynamics, especially when other people feel entitled to comment on your body, food, health, or weight
Dating, intimacy, and sexuality without treating confidence as something you have to earn by changing your body
Shame and self-criticism connected to size, appearance, eating, movement, or health
Life after dieting, including questioning old rules and beliefs about food, weight, and worth
Body changes related to aging, disability, chronic illness, medication, pregnancy, surgery, or other life transitions
Accessibility and self-advocacy in spaces that may not comfortably accommodate your body
Anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, stress, or anything else that brought you to therapy in the first place
You Don’t Have to Shrink Yourself Here
Taking up space is not a character flaw.
You do not need to arrive at therapy with a goal of losing weight, changing your appearance, learning to love your body, or becoming more comfortable with the way other people treat you.
You can want change in your life without wanting to change your body.
You can care about your health without making weight the measure of it. You can set boundaries with people who comment on your body. You can advocate for respectful healthcare. You can pursue relationships, intimacy, movement, travel, work, joy, and whatever else matters to you without waiting until your body meets someone else’s expectations.
And if your relationship with your body is complicated, that belongs here too.
You are allowed to take up space in your life exactly as you are.