What Does Wellness Mean? A Health at Every Size Orientation

The word “wellness” has made it into many commercialized businesses. The industries of fitness, health, beauty, self-help, spirituality, and nutrition, all tout wellness as a motivating factor in buying products and services. 

According to Aubrey Gordon, “wellness bears a striking resemblance to diet culture” (pg. xxi, You Just Need to Lose Weight). Not only this, but there has been an undeniable emergence of what is being referred to as the “wellness-to-Q-Anon-pipeline.” So, it feels important to be explicit in naming what “wellness” means to us at Lunasa Counseling and Wellness.

We are mental health counselors who learned about the wellness model in our graduate program. The wellness model has eight dimensions: emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, occupational, social, physical, and spiritual. It is a model that encourages therapists to look at the entire person as a whole to understand and help them. The wellness model asks us to recognize both the resiliency of an individual and the areas of their life to which they could give more attention in order to add more fulfillment and resiliency.

As with any model, it is flawed and imperfect. This is why it is important to us at Lunasa Counseling and Wellness to be discerning in how we take in information. It’s even more important to us to avoid doctrines and dogmas. We see models like the wellness model merely as tools, not as the only way to “achieve” well-being. 

We see the benefit for some clients in using movement or nutrition to help regulate sleep, anxiety, or depression, for example. However, this approach depends entirely on the individual’s history with movement or nutrition. This approach might not be appropriate for a client with an eating disorder history, for example, and as such, it would not be a helpful tool to use with them. Thankfully, we understand that there is no One Right Way, and there are many, many tools we can use with different clients. 

We hold Health At Every Size values. Explicitly, we believe that fat bodies can pursue and experience health without needing to change the size, shape, or weight of that body. We believe that pursuing or “achieving” health is not a moral imperative. We are aligned with anti-diet values as we believe that fat people do not need to diet in an attempt to gain the social privilege afforded to thin people. It is not the fat body that needs to change but the oppressive system which dehumanizes fat people. We refer to this oppressive system as anti-fatness or anti-fat bias. It is important to note that fat liberation is intersectional and is grounded in feminism, disability-rights, queer-rights, and anti-racism.

The wellness services Lunasa currently offers include AcuDetox, seeing you and treating you as an entire person, and referrals to other professionals who we believe offer services with integrity and discernment. In the future, we hope to grow into the wellness aspect of our offerings while maintaining integrity with our values as an anti-diet, non-dogmatic group practice.

Some resources for further learning about fat liberation:

Your Fat Friend (blog)

Health At Every Size (website)

Intuitive Eating (website)

“You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People by Aubrey Gordon (book)

Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings (book)

What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon (book)

The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor (book)

Maintenance Phase (podcast)

Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture byVirginia Sole-Smith (book)

A Brief History of Fat Acceptance (website)