Your Body Is Not A Problem To Solve
An introduction to body trust — and why the war isn’t working
How much of your life have you spent thinking about your body as a problem?
Not necessarily in a dramatic, capital-C Crisis way. Just — in the background. The constant low hum of monitoring. The calculating. The way you check yourself in a reflection and feel something drop in your chest. The way you've tried, more times than you can count, to arrive at some version of your body that finally feels like enough.
If that resonates, even a little, here's the first thing I want you to know: that is not a personal failure. It is an entirely predictable response to living in a culture that has spent decades teaching you that your body is a project. A work in progress. A before photo, permanently waiting on its after.
Most of us have been at war with our bodies for most of our lives. And the war isn't working. (You may have noticed. The war has terrible benefits and no PTO.)
This post — and Episode 7 of The Inked Therapist — is about what it looks like to put the weapons down.
What body trust actually is (and what it isn’t)
Let's clear the misreads first, because body trust gets confused with several adjacent things.
Body trust is not body positivity. Body positivity, at least in its popular Instagram-caption form, asks us to feel good about our bodies — to look in the mirror and find something beautiful. That's a meaningful aspiration. But for a lot of people — folks living with chronic illness, with pain, in bodies that have been marginalized, pathologized, and harmed — “love your body!” can land as one more impossible standard. One more way to fail. “Love your body” can be just as exhausting as “fix your body” if love is a performance you're required to achieve and then keep achieving forever.
Body trust isn't asking you to feel a particular way about your body. It's asking something more fundamental: can you stop fighting? Can you start listening?
Body trust is not intuitive eating, though they're friendly neighbors. Intuitive eating (developed by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch) focuses on healing the relationship between hunger, food, and permission. Body trust is broader — it's about the whole relationship between a person and the body they live in. Eating is part of it. So is rest. And movement. And pleasure. And pain.
And body trust is absolutely not a diet. It is not a wellness protocol. It is not a self-improvement program wearing liberation's clothes — wellness culture is remarkably good at co-opting liberation language and selling it back to us with a subscription model. Body trust is the opposite move: an invitation to stop treating yourself as a project that needs improving at all.
So what is it?
Body trust, as articulated by the Center for Body Trust, is a practice of returning to the body's inherent wisdom — the intelligence that was already there before diet culture, medical authority, and internalized weight stigma layered noise over it. Bodies communicate. They have signals: hunger, fullness, fatigue, aliveness, dread, desire. Those signals were always meant to be information, not problems to override.
And one more thing the framework holds clearly, and that I think is essential: body trust is not an individual project. The reason most of us don't trust our bodies isn't that we're doing something wrong. It's that we live inside systems — diet culture, white supremacy, ableism, fatphobia, medical paternalism — that have actively worked to sever that trust. You cannot heal a systemic wound through individual effort alone, no matter how good your journaling habit is.
The systems that taught us not to trust our bodies
This is where I get political, because the topic is political, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.
Diet culture assigns moral value to bodies based on size — thinness as health, discipline, and worth; fatness as failure and disorder. It's a multi-billion dollar industry that profits directly from you not trusting your body. It needs you to believe your hunger is dangerous and that without external management, you'll lose control. It's so normalized that most people don't experience it as a system at all — they experience it as common sense. It is not common sense. It is a business model.
Medical fatphobia deserves its own naming, because so many people have been harmed in medical contexts without language for what happened. It's what happens when providers attribute symptoms to weight before considering any other explanation — when people in larger bodies are handed weight loss advice for, say, a broken ankle. The result: many people, particularly fat people and fat people of color, learn that seeking care means experiencing harm. So they stop going. Then their health deteriorates in ways that get blamed on their weight rather than on the system that drove them away. That's not incidental. It's structural.
Wellness culture has done something especially sneaky: it dressed diet culture in the language of health and self-care. Clean eating. Detoxing. Optimizing. Restriction, rebranded as nourishment. And here's the tell — “health” in wellness culture is almost never about actual health outcomes. It's about aesthetics, and about performing a kind of discipline that happens to produce a particular kind of body, while structurally excluding everyone whose body won't produce that shape no matter how much celery juice is involved.
For queer and trans people, there's a layer that mainstream body image content rarely holds: the relationship to the body can include both profound disconnection from a body that doesn't reflect identity and the possibility of a new kind of intimacy with the body as gender-affirming care becomes accessible. Body trust here is not a simple “just listen to your body.” It might mean trusting the body's signal that something needs to change — trusting your own knowledge of what you need, even when the medical system gatekeeps your access to it.
For neurodivergent people, interoception — the capacity to sense internal body states — can work differently in ADHD, autism, and related profiles. Some folks genuinely have a harder time reading hunger, fatigue, or pain signals — not because they're overriding their body, but because the signals themselves are quieter or less consistent. Body trust here includes building scaffolding where signals are harder to read, and refusing to treat a different interoceptive profile as a failure of discipline.
Every one of these systems does the same move: it locates the problem in the body rather than in the culture that created it. Body trust is the practice of putting the problem back where it belongs.
A decolonial lens: whose “expertise” are we trusting, anyway?
At Soma Roots Therapy, the work is explicitly decolonial — and body trust is one of the places where that lens matters most.
Colonialism didn't just take land. It imposed a hierarchy of knowledge: the measurable over the felt, the institutional over the ancestral, the expert over the embodied. The BMI — still used to gatekeep care today — was developed by a 19th-century Belgian astronomer studying European men, and was never designed to measure individual health, let alone the health of bodies across the full range of human diversity. White, Western, thin, able-bodied norms got encoded into medicine as “objective standards,” and everyone else's body got defined as deviation.
Meanwhile, most cultures across human history have held traditions of embodied knowledge — rest, food, movement, and ceremony as relationship rather than regimen. Colonization and its descendants (including, yes, grind culture and the wellness industrial complex) systematically devalued those ways of knowing and replaced them with surveillance: the scale, the tracker, the count.
So when body trust says you are the authority on your own body, that's not a cute affirmation. It's a decolonial claim. It's the reclamation of a kind of knowing that systems of power spent centuries teaching us to surrender. Returning to the body's wisdom is, quite literally, returning to a way of knowing that predates the systems that pathologized it.
This is also why body liberation work can't be separated from racial justice, disability justice, and trans liberation. The same hierarchy that ranked ways of knowing also ranked bodies. Undoing one requires undoing the other.
The Center for Body Trust framework
The Center for Body Trust was founded by therapists Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant, who kept bumping against the limits of individualized, weight-centric, pathology-focused treatment models. What they built instead is rooted in justice, collective care, and an honest reckoning with the systems that shape our relationship to our bodies.
I trained as a Body Trust Specialist through the Center for Body Trust in 2024, and it's one of the frameworks I reach for most often — clinically and personally. A few of its core threads:
Body sovereignty. The radical idea that you are the authority on your own body. Not your doctor. Not your dietitian. Not your aunt with opinions. Not the wellness influencer with the sponsored smoothie. You. Most of us have been trained to defer — to the scale, the food rules, the fitness tracker. Body sovereignty is reclaiming that your body's experience is valid data, even when it contradicts the expert. Even when it contradicts what you think you should feel.
Hunger — in all its forms — is not dangerous. Physical hunger is a signal from a body that needs fuel, not an obstacle to discipline. (Being proud of how long you went without eating is not a personality trait; it's diet culture doing a victory lap.) And hunger goes beyond food: hunger for rest. For connection. For pleasure. For movement that feels good. For space to simply exist without producing anything. All legitimate. All suppressed by a culture that prizes output over aliveness.
The body as a site of wisdom, not failure. What if symptoms are communication rather than malfunction? What if the weight your body settles at is where it actually wants to be? What if the exhaustion isn't weakness but your body telling you something true? This doesn't mean ignoring medical care. It means starting from curiosity instead of antagonism: what is my body trying to tell me rather than what is my body doing wrong.
Grief. The grief of years — sometimes decades — spent at war with a body that was never the problem. The experiences you didn't have. The things you didn't wear. The years spent waiting until your body was acceptable enough to begin your life. The framework doesn't bypass this grief on the way to liberation. It sits with it first, because the grief is part of the truth.
This is collective work. You cannot individually self-care your way out of a systemic problem. (If you could, the candle industry would have liberated us all by now.) Body trust in its fullest sense includes fighting for a world in which everyone's body is treated as inherently worthy — not just tending your own relationship to your body while leaving the systems intact.
What body trust looks like in practice
Body trust can sound very beautiful and very abstract. Here's what it looks like in a body, in a day.
It starts small. It often starts with a pause.
If you've spent years overriding your body's signals, the first practice is simply this: notice the signal before you decide what to do with it. You don't have to comply. You don't have to act. Just notice.
You're hungry. Okay — that's a signal, not a moral referendum. Where do you feel it? What does the body want?
You're tired. Also a signal. Not laziness. Not insufficient hustle. A body asking for rest. Can you hear it without immediately opening negotiations?
For people who've been overriding for decades, this isn't always simple — the signals themselves may have gotten quieter. A body learns that its communications will be ignored and starts speaking more softly. Part of the early work is rebuilding that sensitivity.
In therapy, this looks like slowing down. What are you noticing right now, in your body, as you talk about this? What happens in your chest when you describe that? What does your jaw do when you say that word? The nervous system holds information that doesn't always surface as narrative — a held breath, a hand drifting toward the belly, a stillness that isn't relaxation but bracing. Somatic work treats that information as primary data, not background noise.
In daily life, body trust can look like:
Eating when you're hungry without negotiating with yourself first
Resting without “earning” it
Moving your body in ways that feel good rather than ways meant to produce an outcome
Wearing the comfortable thing
Saying no to what depletes you — not because you have a reason the culture will accept, but because your body said no
Advocating in medical settings: “I've tried what you're recommending and it doesn't work for me — I'd like to explore other options.” Declining to be weighed. Bringing someone with you when you don't trust you'll be heard alone
None of this is easy. All of it is practice. Body trust is not a destination — it's a relationship you build, slowly, with a body that has been waiting for you to start listening.
What gets in the way (an honest list)
Internalized weight stigma. It doesn't evaporate because you intellectually rejected it on a Tuesday. It lives in the body — the quiet voice grading the meal you just ate, the reflexive mirror check. It's the predictable residue of decades of conditioning, and part of the work is learning to recognize it as the voice of the culture, not the voice of truth.
The health argument. This is the objection I hear most: doesn't this lead to worse health? Three things. First, the research on weight cycling — repeated dieting and regaining — indicates the cycle itself is more harmful than the weight. The war is making people sicker, not healthier. Second, the conflation of weight and health is far less evidence-based than most people assume; weight is one variable among many, not a reliable proxy for metabolic or cardiovascular health. Third, and the one I feel most strongly about: health is not a moral obligation. You are not required to optimize your health to deserve care, respect, or a full life. Disabled people deserve full lives. Chronically ill people deserve full lives. Health, where accessible, can be something you care for. It is not something you owe.
Loneliness. Practicing body trust in a diet-culture-saturated world is counter-cultural, and counter-cultural is lonely. You will sit at dinner tables where everyone is announcing what they're not eating. You will be offered a weight loss program at an appointment you made for your knee. Community — a therapy relationship, a group, an online space full of people doing this work too — makes it survivable. You were not meant to do this alone.
Grief, again. Yes, it appears twice in this post. That's intentional — grief isn't a stage you clear once. In body trust work it returns at different depths as the work deepens. If grief keeps coming up, that's not regression. That's the work working.
The invitation
Your body has been trying to talk to you. For a long time. Probably your whole life.
Body trust is the practice of turning back toward what it's saying. Not all at once. Not perfectly. Not by arriving at some final, harmonious, candle-lit relationship with your body where nothing is ever hard. By beginning — tentatively, incrementally — to treat your body's signals as information worth attending to. By practicing the pause before the override.
If something opened up while you read this, sit with it. Notice what it feels like, in your body, to consider that the war might be optional. Notice what tightens. Notice what wants to argue. Notice what, quietly, might be relieved.
If you're in Oregon or Washington and curious what slow, somatic, body-liberation-rooted therapy can look like, Soma Roots Therapy is accepting new clients for July. The work here is informed by the Center for Body Trust framework, among others — and it takes body trust seriously as a clinical and political commitment, not a technique with a worksheet. Reach out for a free consultation at somarootstherapy.com/reach-out.
Listen to the full conversation in Episode 7 of The Inked Therapist: “Your Body Is Not a Problem to Solve.”
🌿 Slow. Embodied. Rooted in liberation.
FAQ — Episode 7
What is body trust?
Body trust is a practice of returning to your body's inherent wisdom — treating its signals (hunger, fatigue, pleasure, pain) as valid information rather than problems to override. Developed and articulated by the Center for Body Trust (founded by Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant), it's a weight-inclusive, justice-rooted framework that names diet culture, medical fatphobia, and related systems as the reason most of us learned to distrust our bodies in the first place.
Is body trust the same as body positivity?
No. Body positivity generally asks you to feel good about or love your body. Body trust doesn't ask you to feel any particular way — it asks whether you can stop fighting your body and start listening to it. For many people, especially those living with chronic illness, dysphoria, or marginalization, that's a more accessible and more honest starting place.
Is body trust the same as intuitive eating?
They overlap, but they're distinct. Intuitive eating (Tribole & Resch) focuses on the relationship between hunger, food, and permission. Body trust is broader — it addresses your whole relationship with your body, including rest, movement, pleasure, pain, and the systems that shaped how you relate to all of it.
Does body trust mean ignoring my health?
No. It means starting from curiosity rather than antagonism — asking what your body is communicating instead of assuming it's malfunctioning. It also means knowing that weight is not a reliable proxy for health, that weight cycling carries its own documented harms, and that health is something you may care for — not a moral debt you owe anyone.
Can body trust work for trans and gender-diverse people?
Yes — and the framework holds that complexity rather than flattening it. For trans folks, body trust isn't a simplistic “just listen to your body.” It can mean trusting the body's signal that something needs to change, and trusting your own knowledge of what you need even when medical systems make access difficult. (This is part of why I practice gender-affirming care from an anti-gatekeeping stance.)
What if I have trouble sensing my body's signals?
That's real, and it's common — especially for neurodivergent people, whose interoception may work differently, and for anyone who has spent years overriding their signals. Body trust includes building scaffolding where signals are quiet or inconsistent, and it never treats a different interoceptive profile as a failure of attention or willpower.
What does body trust look like in therapy?
Slow, somatic, paced to the nervous system. We notice what your body is doing while you speak — the held breath, the bracing — and treat that as primary information. Sessions make room for the grief that often surfaces in this work, and the frame stays both personal and political: your relationship with your body and the systems that disrupted it.
Who created the Body Trust framework?
The Center for Body Trust, founded by therapists Hilary Kinavey and Dana Sturtevant. You can learn more about their work at centerforbodytrust.com. I completed my certification as a Body Trust Specialist through the Center for Body Trust in 2024.
