EDEN’s Background and Philosophy

EDEN was established in 1990 initially as an agency to provide community based services for people with eating disorders/difficulties. Our focus over the last 14 years has shifted from problem based service provision to prevention and health promotion that recognises the interconnectedness of weight issues in all their forms.

There are two broad areas into which EDEN service provision falls: working with individuals and working at the level of public health promotion and eating issues prevention. Our work with individuals is based on self-referral and aims to provide an environment in which people can share their difficulties, identify their options, and access support and resources. Our health promotion work is informed by EDEN’s experience working with individuals, combined with research evidence concerning the cultural origins of eating and body image difficulties. We recognise that focussing at the level of the individual around issues of eating, weight management and body image can be limited given a cultural context of confusing and contradictory messages and values about weight. EDEN believes that dieting is ineffective and potentially leads to weight and body image difficulties in all their forms. For this reason we work with individuals to develop body satisfaction and seek to create environments that are accepting of size diversity and which support body trust.

Mission Statement: To promote body trust and satisfaction, size acceptance and diversity on an individual and societal level.

We aim to:

• Support and resource individuals who contact us regarding their own or another’s eating issue.
• Resource and educate health professionals, community agencies, and schools.
• Work to create environments that support body satisfaction.
• Advocate for a view of health that is indexed to well-being rather than weight.
• Contribute to the development of public health policy concerned with issues of nutrition, weight, and activity.
• Raise awareness of EDEN’s approach so that it is well known, incorporated and accepted in NZ Education, Health and Social Sectors

About EDEN: EDEN’s Approach

EDEN believes in a compassionate, optimistic, and holistic approach to understanding and working with eating and body image issues in all their forms. We believe that an important component to wellbeing (and therefore the prevention of eating issues) is the development of body trust. Body trust is the ability to respond appropriately to our hungers. This includes eating in response to physical hunger and fullness, enjoying a wide range of foods, enjoying safe and sustainable physical activity and finding ways to appreciate and love our body whatever size and weight we are. EDEN understands body trust to be fostered in individuals when environments reflect back a dynamic acceptance of body diversity and a holistic view of health and wellbeing.

EDEN believes that westernised environments increasingly include messages about idealised body size and the ‘problem’ of fat. These have subtly infiltrated many of our institutions, commercial enterprises, communities and homes to the point where being fat is unquestionably bad and being thin is unquestionably good. In cultures and societies that do not value body diversity, that abhor fat and that value and promote weight management and weight loss practices, a climate is created where fat people often feel bad about themselves and everybody else becomes terrified of getting fat. Within this context people begin to link and understand their health, behaviours, identity, morality and value in terms of their body size. This linking is associated with dieting practices and the loss of body trust.

Dieting practices and the loss of body trust are related to the development of disrupted eating, eating issues/disorders, and often weight cycling (which is itself unhealthy) and can lead (ironically) to weight gain. The severity or extent of these issues can also be influenced by gendered expectations, family experiences, a background of abuse, major life stressors, unrealistic pressures to achieve, developmental or life-stage challenges (e.g., puberty, pregnancy, menopause), exposure to weight discrimination, poverty, racism, and disruption to normal eating patterns.

Eating and body image issues include a wide range of experiences and practices such as the clinically defined eating disorders anorexia and bulimia, eating past fullness, over-exercising, body dissatisfaction, purging, restricting, abuse of weight management medications, and yo-yo dieting and weight cycling (among others).

EDEN believes that the dominant paradigm in Westernised cultures views eating issues/disorders, body dissatisfaction and ‘obesity’/’overweight’ as problematic and distinct individualised phenomena. We challenge this thinking. What we view as problematic is not weight per se but weight loss and/or weight gain that is a response to environmental pressures, experiences of oppression, and fat phobia. EDEN honours the natural diversity of body sizes and shapes and accepts that there are a wide range of healthy bodies which sit outside of medicalised ideas around ‘healthy weight’. In EDEN’s view any attempts to alter one’s natural weight (regardless of initial weight) can lead to eating issues, body dissatisfaction and weight gain.

What sets EDEN apart from many organisations that work with eating and weight issues is our commitment to and emphasis on an integrated approach to health promotion, the prevention of eating issues, and supporting individual change. The challenge for EDEN is to promote body safe environments in which the danger and futility of dieting is made evident for everybody and health is not indexed to weight. EDEN’s approach rests on a commitment to working towards the creation of environments that reflect back a dynamic acceptance of body diversity and a holistic view of health and wellbeing.