Hey kiddos! Hope you’ve all been having a great week. Hopefully your midterms are over? Yeah, mine either. But besides it being: A. Week 7 of winter quarter, and B. THE WARMEST BESTEST WEEK EVER, it is also C. Eating Disorder Awareness Week. CAPS and the Women’s Center worked with Multicultural Student Affairs to set up a bunch of programming for the week, and I just got back from the keynote presentation in Searle. It was called “Beauty Is?” and it was given by Dr. Cynthia Whitehead-Laboo, a professor from Emory University.
They even gave out body-positive fortune cookies!
Mine said, “Appreciate all that the body does. Your body is wonderful the way it is.”
One piece of the eating disorder awareness puzzle is talking about beauty standards—those ideals that we hold ourselves to, consciously or not. So, I want to share what I learned about American beauty standards tonight. It’s going to be super wordy, get ready, I hope you’re prepared for a lot of reading and a lot of big words…
– They suck.
– They’re not accurate.
– They don’t account for what’s considered beautiful in other cultures.
– They are malleable; they change from decade to decade and century to century. Totally untrustworthy.
– They manipulate people (men AND women) to feel a certain way about their bodies when they naturally might have felt something else, if left alone.
Okay, that wasn’t so complex (hehe). Obviously I wildly oversimplified a difficult issue, but that’s what Dr. Whitehead-Laboo was talking about: going back to the basics and reclaiming the word “beauty.” Make it mean what you want it to mean.
That’s not easy, though, so this is how we’re going to tackle that challenge: we’re gonna be cognizant of every self-negative comment that runs through our minds, process it, and think about if it’s truly how you feel, or if it’s something you’ve been socialized (to use a psychology word—thanks Doc!) to think.
As Dr. Whitehead-Laboo said at the end of her talk, “Fight like hell to love what you know.” Power to you!
Feel-Good Tip of the Week
Add another feel-good element to your workout. This morning I went for a run instead of going to the gym and I ran along the lake—amazing. I stopped for a second (or 5 minutes…) to catch my breath and look out at the water, and it gave me a new perspective for the day. Maybe it’s because I’m from the coast of New England and therefore made up of 80% Atlantic Ocean sea water (and 20% Ralph Lauren cable-knit sweaters) but any body of water just makes me happy.
Similar feeling: getting reading or some kind of work done on a cardio machine. Look! You’re exercising your body AND your mind (oh Jeeze… corny… whatever, you love it).
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