At Great Lakes Mental Health, we approach client care from a holistic, Health At Every Size approach. We believe diversity in body shape and size is beautiful and reject the notion that your body needs to change before you can be happy and healthy. Are there things you are planning to do or be when you finally lose the weight? We’re going to help you start to do those things now.

We strongly believe in providing clients with care based upon the latest science. Believe it or not, dieting is not supported by science. In fact, dieting increases the likelihood of weight gain over time. The science may surprise you, but it’s simple: Diets don’t produce sustainable reductions in body weight. They also make us miserable, cause weight cycling and teach us to blame ourselves for something that is outside of our control.

Therapists at Great Lakes Mental Health are committed to providing excellent care to all clients. We are knowledgeable about the experiences and obstacles commonly faced by people in larger bodies. We don’t help people lose weight. We help them live better lives.

Many people have complicated relationships with their bodies and with food. We help clients reject the dieting mindset and begin to heal their connections with their bodies and eating. So what can a client expect working with one of our therapists? We will help you develop more a positive, more realistic body image. We will encourage you to abandon the concepts of good and bad foods, and to begin to trust your body to regulate eating. We believe you should eat a wide variety of foods and enjoy them! We also believe exercise is an important part of living a happy, healthy, full life. This doesn’t mean we are going to advise you to go to the gym unless you really enjoy it (and many people do!). We work from the framework of joyful movement. This means we are aware that it is nearly impossible to stick to an exercise regimen that you don’t enjoy, or one that activates negative body image or associations with dieting. People of every size can benefit from regular movement-but it needs to be movement that is fun and does not feel like a punishment. It’s also okay if you aren’t ready to start an exercise plan. Everyone is in a different place, but everyone has space to feel better in the bodies they inhabit. Some of our clients do lose weight when they begin to develop healthier relationships with food and movement, but this is a side effect rather than a goal.

We will explore how your personal history of dieting, body image dissatisfaction and size-based discrimination has impacted you. For many people, this is a big task. We have been taught that our bodies are wrong and that it is our fault that we cannot “fix” them. This is particularly salient for many people of color. It takes time to un-learn the misinformation that we have been given by the diet industry and some medical professionals. We also recognize that many spaces are not fat friendly (check out AllGo), and that discrimination based on size is real. It can be very freeing for people to have an affirming place to openly discuss what living in a bigger body has been like for them.

Many people spend years dreaming about what will happen when they finally lose the weight. We believe in living life to its fullest, right now, in the bodies we are in.

As we do not recommend treatments that have not been supported by scientific research, our clinicians do not provide weight loss treatment or referrals for weight loss programs/products.