Group Membership Community Guidelines

Hi everyone!

Please make sure to read through these guidelines for our community. These have been created with compassion, safety, and inclusivity in mind. If you have suggestions on changing or adding to them, please send me a note. I am always open to learning from you, and finding new and better ways to support everyone here. Thank you so much. 

1. Respect Every Body

We honor all bodies, sizes, and experiences here. Please be mindful of using inclusive language and avoiding assumptions about anyone else's body, health, abilities, or experience.

2. Compassion Over Criticism

This is a space for healing, learning, and figuring things out. Be kind and gentle when responding to others, and be mindful about offering advice that hasn't been asked for. Sometimes the most supportive thing we can offer another person is simply listening, believing them, or saying, "I get it."

3. No Diet Talk or Weight Loss Discussion

This community is rooted in body liberation and rejecting diet culture. Conversations promoting weight loss, dieting, or restrictive ideas about "healthy eating" are not aligned with the purpose of this space and can be harmful to people in recovery.

That absolutely does not mean we can't talk honestly about weight, desires for weight loss, fears about weight gain, health concerns, or the messages we're receiving about our bodies. Those conversations are an essential part of this work. What we won't do here is share weight-loss tactics, encourage someone to lose weight, or provide advice about how to pursue intentional weight loss.

4. Share from Your Experience

Your personal experiences are incredibly valuable here. Whenever possible, speak from your own experience rather than making assumptions about what is true for someone else. Using "I" statements can leave room for other people to have an experience that looks completely different from yours.

Sharing is truly part of the magic of this group. It's what helps us feel less alone and reminds us of our shared humanity, even among all of our differences.

5. Be Mindful of Triggering Language

Please avoid sharing specific numbers (weight, calories, measurements, etc.), detailed food rules, or detailed descriptions of disordered eating behaviors. You can absolutely talk about struggling with restriction, bingeing, body checking, compulsive movement, or other behaviors without including the specifics that might give someone else's eating disorder new material to work with.

The words "obese" and "obesity" are also not part of the language we use to describe bodies in this community because of their history and continued use within weight-stigmatizing frameworks. Following the work of fat activists, we honor fat as a neutral descriptor here, just as "thin" can be a neutral descriptor, while also respecting how each person chooses to describe their own body.

6. Confidentiality is Key

What is shared in this space stays in this space. Please respect the privacy and vulnerability of other members by not sharing their posts, stories, screenshots, or identifying information outside of the community.

7. Keep Posts Connected to the Purpose of This Community

Real life does not divide itself into tidy little categories. Food, bodies, health, relationships, work, identity, grief, mental health, chronic illness, politics, family, and approximately seventeen other things can all bump into one another. There is no expectation that every post here be narrowly about food or body image.

At the same time, please try to keep what you share connected in some way to the work we're doing together around food, bodies, health, healing, or navigating diet culture.

Venting and processing difficult things are absolutely welcome. For longer posts especially, it can help to pause and ask: What am I hoping to receive from this community by sharing this? You might be looking for reassurance, solidarity, shared experiences, ideas, a reality check, or simply a place to say, "This is really hard." Naming that in your post, when you can, helps other members understand how to support you and keeps our community conversations grounded in why we're all here. And sometimes you won't know what you need yet. That's okay too.

8. Help Us Know What You Need

When you post, you're welcome to tell us what kind of response would feel most supportive. Maybe you'd love advice or ideas. Maybe you want to know whether anyone else has experienced something similar. Maybe you want encouragement. Or maybe you really just need some "I see you, and this sucks" energy.

If you don't want advice or problem-solving, please say so. If you do want ideas, you can say that too. We can't always know what another person needs, so giving each other a little guidance can help us show up with care.

9. Make Room for Different Experiences

Everyone’s path to body liberation is different. We welcome and celebrate diversity in all forms, including race, gender, age, ability, and sexuality. It’s important to recognize that we all come from different lived experiences and may have different needs in our healing journeys.

10. Honor Both Vulnerability and Boundaries

We invite honesty and vulnerability here, but nobody is obligated to share more than they want to. You are always allowed to step away from a conversation, skip a post, leave a call early, or decide that you don't have the capacity to support someone else that day.

Community care includes caring for your own capacity, too.

11. Ask Questions with Curiosity, Not Judgment

It's okay not to understand something. It's okay to have questions or encounter a perspective that challenges you. Ask questions from a place of genuine curiosity and willingness to learn rather than asking someone to defend or prove their lived experience.

12. Practice Humility and Be Willing to Learn

We each enter this community with different privileges and lived experiences, myself included. None of us will get everything right all of the time.

When someone shares an experience of marginalization that we don't personally understand, our job is not to explain it away or immediately center our own experience. We can listen. We can notice defensiveness. We can stay curious. We can receive feedback and do better.

Discomfort isn't always a sign that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it's part of learning how to be in community with people whose experiences are different from our own.