Body Image and Weight Concerns

You may have spent days, months, or years trying to change the size and shape of your body.

You have likely altered your food so many times you've lost count. Perhaps you've joined gyms, started exercise programs, often starting over on Mondays. Your body feels like a constant project that you just don't yet have the right blueprint for.

Meanwhile, you're unhappy with your size and shape. It's impacting your life, taking up an enormous amount of time and energy — and it's still not working.

Is This Your Life?

• Frequently checking or avoiding your reflection

• Comparing your body with other people's

• Avoiding being photographed for fear of how you'll look

• Fear of gaining weight

• Choosing clothes primarily to hide or change how your body appears

• Putting off activities or social situations until your body changes

• Believing that on some level your weight is a measure of your self-worth

Callout: It's not just about a number on the scale, it's about how much of your life is organized around that number.

We take your weight concerns seriously. We help you understand what your weight is actually doing and what influences it. And at the same time, we help weight stop dominating your life.

Dealing With Weight

In our society, the message is that controlling weight is simple — adjust your food and exercise, and you can be the weight you want to be.

The reality is far more complicated. Weight is shaped by far more than food and exercise — hormones, stress, medications, sleep, illness, age, dieting history, and genetics can all be part of the picture.

Why Body Image Work Matters

You may wonder why we're talking about body image, but body image work is key when we're discussing weight. Body image is about how you perceive and experience your body. When you feel fat or feel too big, that experience is not simply the number on the scale — it is also your perception of your body.

That perception can shift even when the body itself has not changed in the way you hoped. Many people discover over time that a weight they once considered unacceptable later seems perfectly acceptable in retrospect. That tells us something important: how you feel in your body is not determined by the number alone.

That discomfort can change. When you're relying on a number on the scale to change how you feel in your body, relief can be very hard to reach. That is why we work with body image alongside weight concerns.

How We Work With This

Part of our work is helping you understand what may actually be happening with your weight. Weight fluctuations and shifts can create an incredible amount of anxiety. We help you understand what those changes actually mean, and that understanding can bring a surprising amount of relief.

We also help you reduce the amount of power your appearance has over your eating, your choices, and your life. That means becoming less dependent on the scale and learning how to care for yourself and your body without making changing its size the central project.

We also help you sort through messages about weight and health so you can make choices that support your well-being.

You Don't Have to Want to Like or Even Accept Your Body

You don't have to like your body, or even want to like it, to benefit from this work. But if you want to get back the time, energy, and attention this focus has taken from the rest of your life — we can help.