Northwestern Counseling and Psychological Services ended its annual Body Acceptance Week in Searle Wednesday night with a screening of a documentary on body image followed by a discussion panel.
The screening and discussion came at the end of three days of programming during the annual event led jointly by CAPS and the Women’s Center NU to promote positive views of body image and raise awareness about eating disorders.
The event Wednesday night began with Killing Us Softly 4, the most recent documentary in a series by Jean Kilbourne focusing on how modern advertising alters public perception of body image. The room then opened for discussion led by a panel consisting of psychology professor Renee Engeln-Maddox, Women’s Center counselor Shena Young, Northwestern Athletic Trainer Tory Lindley and Weinberg sophomore Jessica Smasal.
The documentary focused on how advertising sets standards for women incredibly high — standards that are impossible to achieve, said Smasal, even for the advertisement models themselves.
“There is no perfect,” she said.
Afterwards, the discussion touched on a variety of topics related to body image, from the prevalence of “fat talk” on campus to the sexualization of food in advertising.
“To me, it’s all about eating in a healthy way, treating your body as the place where you live,” Engeln-Maddox said during the discussion.
In fact, this kind of unhealthy relationship with food is one of the trends that Body Acceptance Week tries to combat. The Mindful Eating workshop held Monday, another event during Body Acceptance Week, tackled these issues.
“You can have a relationship with food that is more about enjoying the food and taking care of yourself with food rather than it being about good foods or bad foods, which foods you should or shouldn’t eat,” said CAPS staff psychologist and eating concerns specialist Eileen Biagi, the coordinator of Body Acceptance Week.
CAPS organized Body Acceptance Week this year in lieu of its usual line of programming, Eating Disorders Awareness Week. This year, the name was changed to try to be more inclusive of people who had body image issues, but didn’t identify themselves as having an eating disorder, Biagi said.
Other changes in the week of programming included an increased effort to reach out to men as well as women, following a recent statistic that stated three out of ten victims of eating disorders are male.
“It encourages people to think about what’s the message to ourselves if our action figures go from looking like regular men and boys to figures that look like they’re on steroids,” she said.
The three days of programming included Body Affirmation Stations scattered around campus armed with informational fliers and even customized, body-affirming fortune cookies.
Biagi said that, generally, student reaction to Body Acceptance Week programming has been positive, especially, she said, in response to Operation Beautiful. In this exercise, complimentary Post-It Notes are posted to the mirrors of women’s bathrooms, a place where, according to Biagi, women can be at their most self-critical.
“Instead,” she said, “they see these encouraging messages.”
According to Professor Engeln-Maddox, this kind of programming that exposes unhealthy trends in media is only the first step towards correction. There are many other underlying societal factors at play.
For Biagi, however, getting students educated and aware is what Body Acceptance Week is all about.
“I think that when we do programming like this it raises people’s awareness about that pressure to look a certain way and puts each individual in a position to say, ’Is that how I want to define beauty for myself?’” she said. “It opens up the opportunity to shift this cultural expectation, and certainly that’s one reason we do this.”