Dismantling Your Internalized Ableism

In October (disability awareness month) we’re going to be having a course to help you not just detach from the ridiculous standards of diet culture, but to take it one step further and in turn making you a better ally for your disabled friends.

Week 1: Body Neutrality

This week you’ll recognize that both hard critiques for our bodies and hyper focusing on being “body positive” are both sneaky tools that ableism + capitalism use to get you to focus on how your abilities and aesthetics do or don’t measure up to their standards. We’ll provide prompts to get you thinking about things other than your body and it’s abilities or aesthetics and have you keep a running list of every time a prompt goes into analyzing your appearance.

Week 2: Disability is beautiful. And really freaking common.

This week you’ll learn a lot of facts about disability and its prevalence in our world, and how to respond when you see it. Included will be preferred phrasing + terminology, and how to address a person with a disability and ask about any potential limitations to be cognizant. You’ll also learn about a lot of rights that disabled people don’t have, and how you can be a better ally to help us achieve those rights.

Week 3: Wellness is a right.

This week we’ll learn about how the wellness industry is not focused on reaching any marginalized community, and how to change that. Fitness instructors have ZERO required training for any sort of disability accessibility training, and oftentimes in addition to not being accessible these same classes can cause short term disabilities.

Week 4: Disability leads to innovation

How many times do you text message or email a day? You can thank the disability community for that. These forms of communication were created as a solution for deaf people to be able to have their communication needs met.

Disability leads to innovation - it leads to innovation in our workouts, it leads to innovation in our workplaces and it leads to innovation in our world. The missing ingredient from making this innovation make the world more equitable for people with disabilities? Informed + brave able bodied allies! We need you (yes, literally you) to be informed, have the tools and resources you need to talk to your gym owner, fitness instructor, local businesses and help them realize they aren’t accessible for many people with disabilities. We’ll give you email templates, resources to help make spaces accessible, and people you can call to help make accessibility a reality in your community.