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About Body Recovery Group
BRG is a virtual recovery collective offering supplemental community and tools for anyone healing their relationship with their body, food, and/or exercise.
Body Recovery Group is dedicated to recovering and reclaiming our bodies from both internal and external body-related trauma. Internal trauma can include body dissatisfaction; negative self-talk; compulsive eating, exercising, or dieting; disordered eating; full eating disorders; chronic illness or disability; self harm. External trauma can include lack of access to things like housing or healthcare; accidents and injuries; medical procedures; weight stigma, fatphobia, or sizeism; physical, sexual, or emotional violence; prejudice or discrimination of any kind, whether it is overtly directed at the body or not.
BRG was born from and attempts to fill some gaps in traditional eating disorder treatment. It has evolved to reach more broadly in order to better address the intersectionality of both eating disorders and healing in general. In essence, BRG is based on the belief that the relationship one has with their body is a great place to start—and a powerful place to journey from and ground back to—when doing almost any healing, both individual and collective.
BRG's Story
Body Recovery Group was started by me, Regan, as a very personal project. I basically just started creating things that I wished I had in my own recovery. It started as a two-part endeavour. One: a weekly in-person support group in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa (New Zealand). Two: an Instagram/Facebook project to spread some awareness and education.
The social media had a few false starts, I wasn't sure how or what to do with it at first. It was more of a personal micro blog at one point, and elements of that have generally remained to some degree. At another point it was a sort of photography collection where I reposted photos of other Instagram advocates who were were also using their photography to spread awareness and education around body discrimination and liberation. One person who I reposted was not okay with that and called me out, which made me stop and reconsider what I was doing. I always try to put out there things that have helped me, and using social media to see diverse bodies was an important and powerful thing for me, but there's a line between witnessing and consuming, and acting versus performing, and I crossed that with my BRG content, and addressing that helped me see how I was doing it in my life too. I would love to never talk about how that happened, it still brings me shame and I of course would like to avoid that feeling, but I think it's an important lesson to share. And it's an important chapter of BRG's history. And I want to act with integrity when I do anything with BRG, so that's what I try to do.
After that, I focused on original content and the support groups. My baby Tāmaki group didn't do much with it's first few months (October to December 2019) but then I switched venues and for some reason it blossomed into a solid little group. It was amazing and I loved being in person, but I was dragging my body through every step and I realised I was going to hurt myself trying to keep up. So I switched to zoom, and at the perfect time because within weeks the world ushered in the age of Covid and we went into lockdown here. I added a second group for those back home in North America.
By the end of 2020 I was burnt out and kept going with the groups longer than I had the energy to. A few months into 2021 I should have shut the whole thing down but I had connected with a wonderful human named Maia who had a vision for doing more with BRG and I couldn't resist. We tried that arrangement for a while and they created some really great recovery focused content, but mid 2021 I didn't have the spoons anymore to support them, so we stopped.
Since then everything has been paused. That brings us to right now, February of 2022, and this revamped website and the hope that I will be putting out some social media content and blog posts. Fingers crossed!
About Regan
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Oh hello! A little about me: I am a young-ish, fat-ish, chronically- and mentally-ill human. I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and now live in Aotearoa. I identify as female, queer, and neurodivergent. I have a million things I love and I have a pretty small amount of spoons with which to love them, and recovery (in many forms) requires a bunch of the spoons I do have. (If you don't know why I'm talking about spoons, please google Spoon Theory.)
So I've devoted my life to doing the recovery thing, mostly out of necessity, and now (luckily) I am deeply in love with it and passionate about helping others with it. In 2019, I had been in recovery from anorexia for a few years and had never felt at home in any eating disorder recovery spaces I had been in thus far. I'm also in recovery from addiction and alcoholism and live with mental illness and chronic illness. Unable to work and struggling with so many disorders, I spent a lot of my time in various support groups and, again, never feeling fully safe or supported anywhere I went. I never could identify much in eating disorder spaces; now I understand that I likely have ARFID underneath anorexia which we're all just learning about now, and it makes sense that only focusing on anorexia was only partially helpful. I also felt pretty terrible in spaces for substance recovery or mental health where disordered eating and exercising was normal and encouraged. I started Body Recovery Group to literally make the support group I wish I had.
I also was learning more and more about different areas of privilege and social justice. Layers of privilege and ignorance were crumbling. It quickly seemed pretty nonsensical to just talk about our eating disorders as if they were these isolated singular problems we could just focus really hard on and fix. This wasn't new or news but it was to me.
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