Good question!

Broadly speaking, a Therapist will be professionally trained in helping your explore and heal from your past experiences. Whereas, a Coach will spend more time helping you to take action to create a future that is rich, fulfilling, and aligned with your values. Both are valuable (but different) forms of support.

Coaching is about helping you discover your own answers, rather than advice giving. I heard someone say once that “Coaching will give you some good questions for your answers and Mentoring will give you some good answers for your questions” – I think this describes it well! I am a professionally trained Coach but I will combine this with Mentoring if we both agree that my lived experience in a certain area may be helpful to you. 

If you are unsure if Coaching is the right kind of support for you feel free to book a free 30 minute chat to talk it through.

Body Trust® is a weight inclusive approach developed by Hilary Kinavey & Dana Sturtevant at BeNourished in Portland, Oregon. As a Body Trust® Provider, it is one of the foundations of my coaching practice.

It brings together many modalities within a social justice framework – it has roots in Health At Every Size®, Intuitive Eating, motivational interviewing, fat acceptance, shame resilience, embodiment, mindfulness and self compassion practices, and much more. 

It’s a radical and compassionate healing paradigm that I am proud to share with you as part of my coaching practice.

Weight inclusive approaches such as intuitive eating and body acceptance have been shown to have lots of benefits for overall well-being, so we are not ignoring health in our work together. I am happy to support you in engaging in health-seeking behaviours that feel accessible and nourishing to you. I will however, invite you to explore what health means to you, look at the evidence, and also challenge the narrow definition of health that is sold to us by Diet Culture.

I believe that health exists on a continuum and that our capacity to pursue health, and the resources available to us, is impacted by many socio-economic and cultural factors that are often outside of our control. I won’t push a health-ist agenda and I don’t believe that health is a moral obligation or that we owe health to anyone.

I understand the desire to know what will happen to your weight as part of this journey. I also understand the desire to want to lose weight – it’s understandable in the culture that we live in. I can’t tell you what will happen to your weight – only your body knows that, but I want you to know that there is room for ambivalence in our coaching work and I can hold space for your concerns about your weight. I will never judge you.

You may have spent years focusing on your weight so I will ask you to try something different in our work together. Instead of trying to control what happens to your weight I will invite you to turn your attention towards yourself with curiosity and compassion. I am here to help you have a better relationship with food, your body, and ultimately yourself – one that is less about control and more about trust. I believe that from this place we can build the kind of relationship with our body that we want to be for a lifetime – one that is flexible, nourishing, and compassionate.

I can not work with you if you are in active treatment for an eating disorder. However, I do work with individuals who are in “recovery” from an eating disorder and those who struggle more generally with disordered eating. I also sometimes work with individuals who are in the “recovery” process, have the support of a multi-disciplinary care team, but would benefit from working with someone with lived experience in a bigger body to help them unpack their internalized weight stigma and body shame.

I am not a Registered Dietitian so I can not offer you specific advice in relation to managing pre-diabetes, diabetes, PCOS, or other health issues. However, I am aware of many of the ways in which many of these conditions can impact our relationship with food and body and I am happy to work with you if your condition is fairly well managed and you have the support of other healthcare providers where needed.

If you have any concerns about whether I can support you please feel free to book a free 30 minute chat to talk it through with me. I might also be able to refer you to another practitioner who may be a better match for your needs.

Most of the folks I work with are in bigger bodies and they come to me because of my lived experience as a fat person. However, I aim to centre your lived experiences (rather than mine) in our work together and I am committed to educating myself on how the intersection of different identities impacts our relationship with our bodies. 

I also recognise that as a small-mid sized fat person I still have access to a lot of size privilege in comparison to folks in large fat, superfat, and infinifat bodies. I have worked hard to understand and listen to the lived experiences of people in larger bodies than me and try to be an active ally for the fat community across all sizes.

We are all impacted by Diet Culture so I am open to working with anyone who is interested in exploring a Body Liberation Practice, regardless of whether we share similar identities. If you want to get a feel for whether we would be a good fit please go ahead and book your free 30 minute chat. I may also be able to refer you to another Provider if we both feel they would be better served to support you.