About

The Seasonal Body is a project focused on the intersection of nature connection, disability justice, body liberation, and food justice.

This website is a hub for our work and writing, and also provides information about our available educational services (which can be provided anywhere remotely, or locally in Toronto, Canada). If you are interested in consulting, workshops, public speaking, or educational resources, click here for more details.

Using an anti-oppressive and intersectional social justice lens, our work is grounded in the lived experience of those impacted by our main themes (i.e. nature connection, food justice, body positivity, and disability). Our goal is to explore connections between topics such as ecotherapy, food security, environmental justice, eating disorders, body shaming, ableism, healthism, and more.

This project was founded by Julie Nowak (M.Ed.), an educator, activist, writer, and consultant who is dedicated to shifting our broken food system and promoting body liberation and disability justice within an intersectional social justice framework. Julie has a background in education, community development, public health, and the local food movement. Her inspiration for The Seasonal Body stems from her personal experience of finding healing from disordered eating through therapeutic farming, as well as living as a disabled person with multiple chronic illnesses after traumatic brain injury. Julie is a white settler living on the Indigenous territory of the Anishinabek, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and the Mississaugas of the Credit (a region of Turtle Island that is known today as Toronto, Canada).

As a concept, The Seasonal Body has a theoretical lineage influenced by several disciplines and frameworks, including the following: feminist food studies, ecopsychology, ‘Health at Every Size’®, fat acceptance, disability studies, healing justice and body politics. We seek to make connections between these different fields and movements in a way that is practical and accessible, and that centres the voices and experiences of marginalized folks.