Reclaiming Body Trust With Hilary Kinavey & Dana Sturtevant
Hilary Kinavey, MS, LPC and Dana Sturtevant, MS, RD are the authors of Reclaiming Body Trust: A Path to Healing and Liberation.
Together they co-founded the Center for Body Trust to offer programs that encourage movement toward a compassionate, weight-inclusive model of radical care to address body oppression, heal body shame and associated patterns of chronic dieting and disordered eating. The Center for Body Trust also offers programs for helping professionals and educators interested in adopting client-centered, trauma-informed, justice-based approaches to healing—including an intensive year-long Body Trust Certification Training. Body Trust is an invitation to return to a relationship with your body and yourself that you want to be in for your lifetime—flexible, compassionate, and connected. Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant have spent years creating programs to help people divest from diet culture and reclaim their body. Breaking free from the status quo is hard.
To learn more about Hilary and Dana visit their website and follow them on IG @center4bodytrust.
Body Trust is a process of reclaiming your body after you’ve been harmed by oppression, trauma, stigma, diet culture, gender norms, shame, difference, and othering, and then further distanced from your body by the attempts to mitigate that harm by trying to control food, your feelings, and/or your body.
The following is an excerpt from Reclaiming Body Trust: A Path to Healing and Liberation that Hilary and Dana have generously shared with our community.
“We are easier to control when parts of ourselves are fragmented.” - Desiree Adaway
When we are born into this world, most of us feel at home in - and trust - our bodies. We do not fret about the size of our bellies, butts or thighs, try to control our feelings, or worry about how the food we eat will impact our bodies. When we are born into this world, we are not aware of gender norms or racism, of what being trans or gay means. When we are born into this world, we are expressive beings, taking up space in unapologetic ways.
We embrace our bellies and dance like nobody's watching. We put on clothes and don’t worry about what people will think. We attempt to communicate with the adults in our lives when we have unmet needs: crying when we are hungry or dissatisfied. Screaming when we really want to be heard. When we are born into this world, we are clear about what we like and we have no problem letting others know when we do not like something. We don’t worry about being “too much” or “not enough”. We are connected to our own knowing. We just are who we are.
For many, this oneness with our bodies lasted a very short time, and for others it slowly changed with age. So, what changes? As we grow, our socialization begins, the earliest seeds being planted at home with the people we love and trust. We are exposed to the ways the culture and the people around us categorize whose bodies matter, and whose don’t. We overhear diet talk at the table, along with grandpa’s disparaging comments about fat people. We watch mom get dressed and say nasty things about her body. Fatphobia and the obsession with controlling food, weight, and/or health is often passed down from one generation to the next, sometimes as a form of protection from being “othered.”
I Am a Person Reclaiming Body Trust
I am reclaiming trust in my body. My hunger, my appetites, my longings, my skin, my bones, my size are mine for the taking. I take back my voice, my agency, my worthiness, my belonging in the world of beautiful and diverse beings. I live without apology for the straight lines and curves, living tissue and vulnerable heart that hold my living, breathing manifested story.
I feel where my body begins and I protect where it ends. The marketing, the expectations, the gaze of the “other” belong outside of me and are not for my internalization. I will no longer ingest the external and make it my goal or my standard. I will not trade my right to express my freedom, my dreams, my needs, my wants, or my beauty.
I listen for my appetites, all of them. I say yes. I say no. And I say not now. My body is wise. It knows me. It is me. I am it. My body is not an expression of glutton or neglect, nor is it ugly. My body is an expression of life, and of being alive. It is my companion for this unfolding story, replete with unexpected bumps and grooves, loves and losses--and as such, my body expresses my story with its textures, rolls, shapes, peaks, and valleys.
I will not betray you, body, for an endless diet or self-improvement project. I will not confuse thinness for health. I will no longer objectify myself, nor will I continue to invest in oppressive beauty standards. I am a person reclaiming my movement, my rhythm, my flow. I seek satisfaction and explore pleasure. I value my inner peace, my self-worth, more than the approval of outside stigma and hate-inflicting eyes.
I will count myself among the millions of other people who have come before me in their struggles to live compassionately in the bodies they have, and I will also count myself among the millions to come who will reclaim their body and rebuild that trust. I am not alone on the path. In fact, I am helping to transition the world with my courage, my fierceness, my bold and beautiful body.
Want to know more about Body Trust and how it can help end body obsession and move you toward more joy and freedom in the body you are in? Order the book and check out their programs at www.centerforbodytrust.com and watch the videos below!
Body Trust Embodiment
Body Trust Pleasure
Body Trust Pleasure and Satisfaction
Body Trust What Lights You Up?
MORE ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Hilary Kinavey, M.S., LPC, has supported people who are healing from disordered eating, body shame, and the impact of weight bias and other traumas. Her work, as a therapist, facilitator, educator, speaker, and writer, has been a study of what interrupts our sense of wholeness and how we can return to ourselves in a culture that profits from fragmentation.
Dana Sturtevant, M.S., R.D., is a registered dietitian who helps people divest from diet culture, explore what it means to be embodied, and move toward a more compassionate form of radical care. Her work as a speaker, educator, and trainer focuses on humanizing health care, advancing health equity, and advocating for food and body sovereignty.
Reprinted from Reclaiming Body Trust: A Path to Healing and Liberation by arrangement with TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022, Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant.
