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 is not just anecdotal; it is 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 solely 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 (and are committed to doing so). Eating, feeding, and body don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re social justice issues, shaped by hierarchy, poverty, racism, weight-centrism and bias, 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 are dedicated to naming that and fighting for something better.

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. Weight-centrism, anti-fat bias and discrimination, 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.