Oh hello there!

Welcome to the Body Recovery Group website and blog!

The Body Recovery Group started as one in-person peer support group in Auckland (Tāmaki Makaurau) New Zealand (Aotearoa). In February I started an additional virtual group, primarily to serve people in North America (Turtle Island). Partly due to my health and party due to the Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, the Auckland Group shifted to virtual as well, and today both remain online. (EDIT: Both groups were put on indefinite hiatus in 2021.)

Body Recovery Group's primary purpose is to fill in a gap in the experience of those recovering from eating disorders, disordered eating, chronic dieting, compulsive exercising, and similar struggles.

The gap is this: we need to be talking about a LOT more issues than our food, exercise, and body image. To say we need to make recovery more intersectional is a monumental understatement.

Why are transgender people significantly more at risk for eating disorders? And if exploring gender identity can deepen recovery, why isn't it included in traditional treatment?

How does poverty and food scarcity affect our relationships with food, and why isn't that talked about in more mainstream conversations?

In what ways do social racism damage people's relationships to their bodies and systemic racism obstruct medical care for people of color?

Why did everyone I went to treatment with look like me?

Why do we talk more about our "issues with body image" than how the culture, people, and systems around us overtly encourage us to hate our bodies and covertly manipulate us into hating each others' bodies??

By not digging deeper to address these realities and to include everyone in treatment and recovery, we're holding EVERYONE back.

Personally, I felt stuck in my recovery until I started to look at culture, capitalism, fatphobia, medical biases (aka malpractice), and ableism. Once I opened up that can of worms, I was able to actually address and heal so much more of my own eating disorder and trauma.

That also led me to study further the social and systemic issues that haven't affected me personally (racism, homophobia, transphobia, to name just a few) WITHIN the context of recovery.

No matter who we are or what we've experienced, we ALL need to talking about ALL these issues, and we ALL need to be working to address them. At least that's how I feel. What's the point of me recovering if other people can't? With the Body Recovery Group, I want to chip away at the oppression our bodies live with. At the very least, healing issues with body, food, and exercise frees people up to help heal other collective issues.

So yeah, that's basically how Body Recovery Group was born! There's a little more to the story on the About page. I took a look at what I'm able to contribute to the world and put it to use. I have my experience of gaining and maintaining recovery, I have financial privilege which allows me to do this work and offer these services for free, and I have (I think) some natural talent at listening, holding space, facilitating, and putting things in words. Plus, I've got a bunch of passion (from both inspiration from the joys of recovery and anger at the bullshit oppression and inequality in our world) that is the necessary fuel for any of this to happen.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please feel free to reach out! Connect here via the website, the BRG Instagram account, the Facebook page, or by email.