Love Your Body Week to teach UA community about body image issues, eating disorders

By RYAN REVOCK Published February 20, 2013 at 2:05am Updated February 20, 2013 at 2:05am

Love Your Body Week is returning to the UA campus and will feature an award-winning lecturer.

This year, the event is expanding from a daylong event to a weeklong one and is bringing back the Love Your Body Fair after six years without it, according to Gale Welter Coleman, co-coordinator for the event and nutrition services coordinator at Campus Health Service.

Lecturer and activist Jean Kilbourne will speak about body image issues and the media. The free lecture will be held at the Student Union Memorial Center on Feb. 27, and is titled “The Naked Truth: Advertising’s Image of Women.” Kilbourne’s professional workshop on the same day is open to anyone interested in learning about eating disorders for an admission fee; students pay $10.

The professional workshop can count toward continuing education credits for professionals and students and offers the chance to learn and network with local professionals, according to Coleman.

“The media pressure toward the thin ideal is so omnipresent that everybody has an expectation, or most have an expectation, of fulfilling a prescribed body image,” said Laura Orlich, co-coordinator for the event and counselor at Campus Health. “I think it is true for guys as well as women.”

The Love Your Body Fair, which will be on the UA Mall Feb. 26,
will have eight interactive student exhibits and eight interactive sponsored exhibits, according to Coleman.

Visitors will also have the opportunity fill out the 44-question screening form from the National Eating Disorders Screening Program and have it looked over by student volunteers at the fair. If there is an issue, the visitor can speak with an on-site professional at the fair, according to Orlich.

“We believe we are not influenced by advertising, but we are and we need to be aware of that because marketing has played such a huge role in our society in so many different ways,” Kilbourne said. “And the negative images of women affect all of us; they affect men as well as women.”

Schedule of events:

Tuesday, Feb. 26, Love Your Body Fair, UA Mall, 10 a.m.- 2 p.m.

Wednesday, Feb. 27, free presentation “The Naked Truth: Advertising’s Image of Women,” Student Union Memorial Center south ballroom, 6:00 p.m.

Wednesday, Feb. 27, Dr. Jean Kilbourne’s training for professionals 8:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m., preregistration required.