My Story

I’m Robin Harris, a licensed acupuncturist who practices through a lens of body positivity in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland.

I have had the honor of working with bodies since 1998. I was a massage therapist for 12 years, and became a doula in the process in San Diego, California. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—and southern California was a bounty of beautiful weather and a cornucopia of integrative medicine and wellness culture. It was a great place to spend my twenties. I discovered much about wellness and learned a lot about myself through that journey, and I had many positive experiences on that path. The dark side of wellness culture, though, is that it is inextricably tied to diet culture. 

I grew up with well-meaning parents who were also a product of diet culture. I got the message early on to stay small from all our major social institutions: family, government, economy, education, and religion. I reacted to that message in a visceral way. This reaction led me to earn a bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies, complete 10 months of service in Americorps, help people feel better in their own skin early on in my career, empower women to take charge of their birth experiences, and ultimately make choices in my life that felt scary. But none of that meant I had escaped negative stories about my own body. 

For most of my life, I, like many of us, have been entrenched in diet culture. On the outside, this was a life of discipline and was seen as virtuous. On the inside, it was lonely, rigid, and full of restriction. I discovered Intuitive Eating in 2005. That road was long and lonely, and it often felt like I was the only one traveling it. At times it felt like I was standing still. Something in my gut told me that the dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch were right, their way was a way I wanted to go.

For 17 years, I had over-exercised, journaled every bite of food I ate, and I weighed myself every chance I got. That scale determined whether I felt good or bad about myself that day. While I had read the Intuitive Eating book in 2005, I had no support on the journey. I had discovered the exit ramp existed, but it was difficult to take my life in that direction. I was a beginner at Intuitive Eating, and it was hard. My formative years and external motivation had led me to completely disconnect from my intuition when it came to eating and moving my body. I followed rules, and rules and intuition never go together. 

In 2010 I completed a master’s degree program in Acupuncture at Maryland University of Integrative Health (MIUH), then called Tai Sophia Institute. My acupuncture training emphasized the fostering of intuition on every level, except when it came to food. As both the practitioner and the patient, there were more rules and guidelines around how we feed our bodies than anything else. I kept working at the Intuitive Eating program personally, and kept finding a disconnect between what my patients were talking about in the treatment room, and how they had been taught to nourish their bodies. It became increasingly difficult to reconcile the two. 

I sought professional help from an intuitive eating counselor for myself and cleaned up some loose ends from doing the work on my own. I was inspired to start the program to become an Intuitive Eating Counselor. I want to bring Intuitive Eating as an important component to Body Positivity to the acupuncture/wellness industry. In 2015 I started to find a community with podcasts and felt the support of strangers saying, “I’ve been there. I get it. It is a life that lacks joy.” If you see yourself reflected in my story, know that I am here to partner you on that journey.

My professional work with acupuncture and diet culture have collided over the years. I have not found a blueprint to help me navigate this piece. And, here I am, offering you my own way. I am creating a blueprint to merge the worlds of acupuncture and intuitive eating to help foster a more positive relationship with our bodies. Body respect is at the top of my goals for myself and my patients, and I look forward to building this road together as we learn to cultivate a less negative relationship with our bodies.