A place where all bodies are seen as wise and deserving of care.
After years of experiencing anti-fat bias in a wide range of “care” settings, our co-founder, Dawn Serra, dreamt of creating a place that centered fat and larger bodies, where your body is welcome exactly as it is.
We believe mental health is one piece of a larger puzzle that can lead you towards more ease, joy, connection, nourishment, play, and community – but only when that care is rooted in values of liberation, relationship, and resisting dominant norms.
the world is better when you feel supported
You are not alone.
Your life is complicated. Having a nourishing place to explore that matters.
It makes sense that you feel so tired, overwhelmed, anxious, isolated, or disconnected from your needs, wants, and desires. The world is an overwhelming, frantic, and even violent place to be for many of us.
We believe that connecting you more intimately with your body while identifying what is not yours to carry can lead you towards more joy, nourishment, and freedom.
We know how hard it is to move through the world in a bigger body.
It’s what led us to open Tend and Cultivate Counselling. Here’s a little of our story…
After years of medical gaslighting, encouragement to lose weight from doctors, a lifetime of dieting and weight cycling, and being steeped in diet culture and an eating disorder, our co-founder Dawn Serra discovered body positivity which led to fat activism.
Through her training in Body Trust® and finding fat community, Dawn vowed to create a place that would be a safe haven for people in larger bodies. A place where the comfort and pleasure of those in bigger bodies was centered, where instead of blaming your body for your depression, anxiety, or medical issues, your body was seen as wise and wonderful and what allowed you to survive and experience this life. A place where the complexities of food and movement and health and love could be understood and held with nuance.
Most of all, Dawn wanted to create a place where care for all the things people struggle with could be provided without their body ever being the problem (even when it feels like it IS the problem). She shared her dreams with her husband, Alex, for many years, and finally they decided to actually bring it to life.
—-
The frustrating truth is that mental health is rife with anti-fat bias. Nearly every training we’ve been through has had some kind of anti-fatness or diet culture built in. It can feel inescapable. So many budding therapists, counsellors, and social workers are indoctrinated into a medicalized version of mental health that sees size as a problem. The world of eating disorder recovery is atrocious – a place where people who are terrified of fatness are in positions of power and enact and reproduce violence against clients who are in bigger bodies.
Tend and Cultivate is pushing back against the anti-fat bias in mental health and wellness. Our work is not only about supporting you in your life, in your relationships, and in the community, but to also engage in activism through education, organizing, and political action. Our goal is to ensure all bodies, regardless of size, shape, race, age, and ability, can feel safe, welcomed, and believed.
While not all of our clients are in larger bodies, nor do all of our clients have complicated relationships with food and movement, we intentionally decided to highlight fat joy on our website. Throughout these pages, we want people in larger bodies to be seen living happy, playful, social, nourishing, connected, loving lives. Because we all deserve joy and that joy deserves to be visible.
