Love Your Tree | Image Gallery

In this time, more than ever, inclusion matters — and we would like to partner together with you and our community to celebrate diversity. Recovery Day, June 26, 2020, will kick off a body diversity creative arts campaign called Love Your Tree that will last through the end of the year. Love Your Tree is designed to encourage children and adults to think outside the media’s narrow definition of beauty and celebrate the natural diversity of healthy bodies in our world. It asserts that there are as many body types as there are trees in the forest, and all are beautiful.

This fun and powerful campaign helps people of all backgrounds develop positive body image, improved self-esteem and enhanced media literacy skills, all of which can serve as protective factors against the development of eating disorders.

Join the movement and share your Love Your Tree artwork today.

The Roots

Writer and activist Eve Ensler used the image of a tree in her one-woman play, “The Good Body,” to challenge society’s narrow definition of beauty and to invite an appreciation for the natural diversity of body shapes and sizes. Licensed Art Therapist Julia Andersen was inspired by Ensler’s message of body acceptance and her use of the tree metaphor. In 2006, Andersen and a team of mental health professionals developed the Love Your Tree program which utilizes art as an avenue to impart media literacy skills, positive body image and messages of self-acceptance to youth.

Over the course of a decade, the program has introduced thousands of individuals of all ages to the Love Your Tree themes during workshops and community exhibits as well as at educational and professional conferences.

“Eve, look at that tree? Do you see that tree? Now, look at that tree (pointing to another one). Do you like that tree? Do you hate that tree ’cause it doesn’t look like that tree? Do you say that tree isn’t pretty cause it doesn’t look like that tree? We’re all trees. You’re a tree. I’m a tree. You’ve got to love your body, Eve. You’ve got to love your tree.”

(Excerpt from The Good Body, 2004 by Eve Ensler).