Image description: Two fat women relax on a couch in a room with tan walls. Text on top is the name of the page.
Everywhere we go, we’re surrounded by diet culture, the cultural forces that cause us to feel bad about our bodies and want to shrink them into acceptability. Diet culture causes poor body image, encourages eating disorders and makes $71 billion in profit for the diet industry every year.
More and more often, people are pushing back against systems like these that arrange bodies in a hierarchy and call some of them “better” than others. Being anti-diet or recovering from dieting can be a lonely place, though, especially when everyone around you seems to still be jumping into every fad diet out there. Though diet culture encourages us to be vicious and toxic towards our own bodies and other people’s as well, it’s also an important bonding mechanism in our society. What are people supposed to do when they feel left out (or shut out) by diet talk?
As we move forward in our body acceptance journeys, support from people like us — along with experts to show us the way — is vital. Online support groups of every kind have sprung up to meet this need for community and support. (Many in-person and local support groups have as well, but due to the current COVID-19 situation, those have been put on hold.)
These groups include:
- Health at Every Size (HAES) and intuitive eating groups
- Meal support groups for eating disorder recovery
- Anti-diet, body positive and fat positive book clubs
- Eating disorder recovery support groups and group therapy that welcome people in larger bodies
- Fat-friendly fashion, fitness and hobby groups
- Diet-free support groups for people with chronic illnesses and medical conditions
I’ve created a living resource of over 95 support groups, programs, resources and courses that are Health at Every Size-aligned, body positive and/or fat positive. (This was previously a free resource located on this page, but trolls were using it as a list of targets, so I was forced to move it.) It’s one of the exclusive rewards over at my Patreon, and you can access it at any level of support, starting at $1/month.
Hi! I’m Lindley.
I’m a photographer, author, cat mom, subscription box creator, and fat activist.
I help people reclaim their bodies through photography. I capture images of people of all sizes, ethnicities and genders, not just the ones whose bodies are likely to be seen in magazines and advertisements.
I also really enjoy putting together resources like this — so much that I do it every week!
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Hi there! I'm Lindley. I create artwork that celebrates the unique beauty of bodies that fall outside conventional "beauty" standards at Body Liberation Photography. I'm also the creator of Body Liberation Stock and the Body Love Shop, a curated central resource for body-friendly artwork and products. Find all my work here at bodyliberationphotos.com.