We recognise that ableism pervasively shapes how people are viewed, how care is delivered, what is offered, who is excluded, and what is considered “valid”. Access is foundational and a shared responsibility (not an add-on, or an individual burden) and we are committed to making our work as accessible as possible. This means centring disabled people, challenging neuronormativity and ableism, restructuring systems, and offering information, resources, support, and care that actively reduces access barriers across a multitude of domains.

We actively reject the colonial, white supremacist, individualistic, and capitalistic foundations that many health, education, psychological systems, and narratives around food, eating, and body are grounded in. These have caused — and continue to cause — deep harm through discrimination, erasure, exploitation, and control, and we recognise the violent legacy of western colonial frameworks in shaping ideas about bodies, minds, health, and care.

Our work is grounded in cultural humility and safety, and we listen to, learn from, and stand alongside culturally and racially marginalised people — not as a gesture, but as an ongoing responsibility. We challenge eurocentrism, take accountability for harms caused, and are working toward systems that centre dignity, self-determination, collective care, and community-led ways of knowing & being.

Mainstream eating disorder care often demands compliance, erasure of identity, and submission to rigid norms. Liberating and anti-oppressive care challenges the norms, systems, hierarchies, and power structures that harm marginalised people, especially in how we understand and respond to eating, feeding, and body.

We stand against models rooted in control, compliance, carcerality, coercion, and conformity, and we centre autonomy, agency, and justice.

We firmly believe that neurodivergence, queerness, gender diversity, chronic illness, disability, and other marginalised identities are not problems to fix, and that diversity is not synonymous with deficit or disorder (though there’s an awful lot wrong with views that suggests they are).

We recognise the ways in which society, systems, and services pathologise marginalised people’s differences, particularly in the context of eating, feeding, and body, and we actively challenge this.

We recognise that care must extend beyond individuals, to our communities, systems, and the planet. Environmental sustainability is a core part of our values, and we understand that climate justice is inextricable from disability justice, food justice, and collective wellbeing.

Climate change and other environmental harms have a direct and growing impact on eating, feeding, and body experiences, particularly for those who are already marginalised. Disrupted food systems, environmental trauma, displacement, poverty, and resource scarcity exacerbate disordered eating patterns, heighten food insecurity, and deepen health inequities. For chronically ill, disabled, neurodivergent, trans, and other marginalised people, these impacts are even more pronounced.

Sustainability isn’t separate from justice; it’s an integral part of it. Our work is grounded in minimising harm, resisting extractive practices, and building futures grounded in interdependence, care, and survival. This is another reason that we hold our events online; doing so simultaneously supports accessibility, and reduces environmental impact by eliminating travel emissions, resource use, and unnecessary waste.

We don’t demand “being 100% committed to full recovery” to offer care, and we don’t exclude, blame, or shame people for their wants, needs, ways of surviving, circumstances, or experiences.

Rather, we stand for supporting people wherever they’re at — prioritising safety, autonomy, quality of life, and dignity — and we recognise that this means something different for every single person.

We reject weight-based health models and sociocultural pressures that perpetuate anti-fat bias, stigmatise and harm people in larger bodies, reinforce appearance-based stereotypes, and conflate weight/shape with “health” and “worth”.

We oppose diet culture, the moralisation of food and body, the policing of body, and so-called “support” that centres thinness. People of all bodies and sizes deserve respect, nourishment, and care.

We recognise that people’s experiences with food, eating, and body are shaped by various overlapping identities and factors, including race, gender, disability, neurotype, class, culture, sexuality, trauma, and more. We oppose “one-size-fits-all” frameworks, and acknowledge how marginalisation and systemic oppression affect relationships with food, eating, body, and access.

Inclusive care centres the experiences and needs of marginalised people. It is adaptive and responsive, creates space for complexity, honours lived experience, and doesn’t classify anyone as being “too much”.

Mainstream approaches to eating, feeding, and relationship with body are grounded in assumptions of cisheteronormativity, reinforce binary notions of gender, and demand identity suppression. They fail to adequately recognise the diverse experiences and needs of LGBTQIA+ folk — despite it being known that LGBTQIA+ people are at higher risk of eating disorders, body image distress, discrimination, lack of access to food or care, and healthcare trauma — and cause significant harm doing so.

Diversity is natural, the world is not binary, and discrimination has no place. We stand for care that makes space for and affirms identity, we name and address systemic harm, and we refuse to be complicit in the erasure of LGBTQIA+ people.

We value, uplift, and prioritise the voices of those who have lived/are living it (not just studied it). Psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and broader society have long erased lived experience, privileging hierarchy and credentials over the wisdom of those most impacted.

Care that ignores and devalues lived and living experience fails to understand people’s unique needs, missing the mark and causing harm. We listen to the person in front of us, recognising them as the expert on their own experience, and we centre community wisdom and collective insight. Lived experience isn’t just anecdotal; it’s essential.

Neurotypes are nebulous, neurodiversity is vital, neuro-affirming approaches support everyone, and no neurotype is superior to another.

We support, affirm, and validate different ways of sensing, processing, thinking, feeling, regulating, communicating, connecting, experiencing, & being; we refuse to pathologise neurodivergent people’s eating/feeding differences or experiences of body; and we reject neuronormative, ableist expectations.

And when we say “neurodivergent,” we don’t just mean Autism and ADHD (though they’re absolutely included). We mean all forms of neurodivergence: innate or acquired, lifelong or transient, static or dynamic, or a combo of all of the above.

Each person carries their own unique history with food, eating, and body (alongside a myriad of other experiences). We don’t reduce people to an eating disorder, a checklist of symptoms, or a diagnostic label. People are whole, complex beings, and no one can be distilled into two-dimensional checkboxes.

We reject “one-size-fits-all”, coercive, autonomy-stripping frameworks, instead working together to honour individual wants, needs, boundaries, and identities. Person-centred, humanising care recognises people as the experts on themselves, valuing autonomy, lived experience, and identity. It’s built through collaboration, curiosity, and consent — not assumptions or imposed goals — and centres dignity, relational safety, and respect.

We don’t adapt to unjust systems — we work to change them. Eating, feeding, and body don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re social justice issues, shaped by hierarchy, poverty, racism, fatphobia, ableism, patriarchy, inaccessibility, institutional violence, queerphobia, pathologisation, and the intersecting forces of colonisation, capitalism, and oppression.

Too often, care focusses solely on the “individual’s responsibility”, ignoring the systems that impact on, harm, and constrain them. We recognise that the problem isn’t just the person — it’s the structures surrounding them. The systems have a lot to answer for, and we aren’t afraid to name that and fight for something better.

We know that trauma shapes lives, bodies, and relationships to food, care, and self. We recognise eating disorders (not to be confused with eating or feeding differences) as trauma responses, not personal failings or pathology. Fatphobia, ableism, racism, violence, food insecurity, cultural loss, body surveillance, cisheteronormativity, medical harm, discrimination, and rigid societal ideals can all leave deep marks, and mainstream approaches often replicate these traumas through control, pathologisation, and erasure of autonomy.

We move at each person’s pace, never using food or access to treatment, quality of life, dignity, or care as punishment or coercion. We are committed to creating safer spaces, providing support that doesn’t recreate the harm it claims to heal.