Submitted

Two local women are setting out to de-bunk prominently-held cultural beliefs about health, weight, food and body.

Dietitian Erin Harrison and clinical social worker Tina Rader are proposing radically different ideas.

Informed by the Health At Every Size movement in the UK and U.S., Harrison and Rader have developed a concept dubbed InBodied Conversations.

They offer workshops and retreats, along with individual counselling focused on debunking notions linking health with weight loss, and body image with notions promoting body-hatred. They also challenge diet thinking, and help people advocate for their health with health-care professionals and the public in the face of weight-based discrimination.

Harrison and Rader believe it is the right of each person to have body trust. This means being intuitively connected to your body, hearing your hunger and satiety cues, treating your body with compassion and kindness, moving your body in pleasant ways, bringing joy to your heart, being able to hear your heart when it speaks to you, and having the skills to nourish and nurture your heart and body.

Harrison and Rader are Health At Every Size-trained facilitators who bring many years of clinical wisdom in the health-care field to workshops and retreats.

Their radical and revolutionary ideas liberate participants from the oppression of diet thinking, and food and weight obsession.

They promote a return to an attitude of kindness towards self and joyful body movement.

They invite participants to compassionately develop a more attuned relationship with food, body and self.  Well Now workshops will be held in Comox at the Core Fitness Studio Oct. 3-31 from 5-9 p.m.

Classes at the Campbell River Community Centre run Nov. 7-28, also from 5-9 p.m.

A Getting To The Heart of IT retreat is planned for January at a venue to-be-announced.

For more information and to register for fall courses contact: info@InBodied.ca or 250-218-7113.