Their faces glow with a radiating confidence. They each admit the issues they have with their body but also smile as they embrace those issues. They each speak with words that seem to strike against the social norm, yet are fresh and bear a light mood.
These women are part of the committee that has planned Love Your Body Week—a week that senior Sara Adkins says is devoted to the health of students not only physically but mentally as well.
“We’re not trying to get people to change their bodies,” Adkins said. “We’re promoting health and well being and recognizing the good things about our body.”
Adkins started the Love Your Body Week three years ago, inspired by a project she had completed in a gender studies class. After looking into the Love Your Body Campaign—a national campaign that is typically one day out of the year—Adkins wanted to bring the same idea to campus but make the event into a week.
“I had been to a lot of events at UPS but none that talked about body issues or self-esteem. It seemed like there was a gap,” Adkins said.
After almost three years of planning this annual event, Adkins hopes this will be the biggest year yet. The planning committee hopes to make this a very visible event.
“We don’t want you to walk around campus and have no way to not know it’s Love Your Body Week,” Adkins said.
The week, April 11-15, will have themes for each day with several activities planned. Some of the key features of the week will be a female-only weight lifting class Tuesday, zumba and belly-dancing classes Wednesday, a hip-hop class Thursday and a yoga class Friday. All events will be free and the schedule of activities will be posted outside the Rotunda during the week.
Love Your Body Week is not only for women, though. There will also be a strong emphasis on men and the issues they must face with masculinity.
Adkins said, “In years past we’ve talked about men and masculinity. This year we’ve moved away from the panel discussions and the lectures. We’re geared more towards activities that promote being active.”
A Frisbee toss with the men’s Frisbee team on Wednesday will be the main event for promoting the positive self-image of men.
This week is all about empowering yourself, and even though these women seem to have a shining confidence, they confess that they’ve struggled with their body image themselves.
Adkins said that she had issues with her own body and these problems partially inspired her to start Love Your Body Week.
“Recognizing my body for what it is and owning it in a way that makes me happy and healthy has been the biggest thing,” she said. “It makes me feel empowered recognizing all the amazing things my body can do. That made me want to empower other people.” Senior Rachel Fairchild, who is also on the planning committee for Love Your Body Week, disclosed that she even battled with bulimia nervosa before she recognized the beauty within herself.
“I think that if I had peers that I could identify with and confide in I might not have had the same experience with my disease. [This illness] taught me that one needs to have a healthy mind and body,” Fairchild said. “I wanted to be involved with an event that promotes a positive body image. “
Freshman Annie Ryan said that even with planning this event, she still works on her perspective of her own body.
“In the culture we live in, it’s always a process to love your body. No matter how confident you are you have to keep working on it. We’re still working on it too,” she said.
Freshman Tosia Klincewicz, who joined the committee for Love Your Body Week soon after she arrived on campus, said that she has taken so many steps to improve her perception of her body but it was not until a unique experience this year that she fully accepted her body for how it is.
After going to a meditative “naked” yoga class with the cast from Vagina Monologues Ryan said, “It was the coolest experience of my life. We all cried afterwards.”
“That was a huge step for me,” Klincewicz said. “[I came to the realization that] more people need to love their body.”
Klincewicz and Ryan feel so passionately about getting everyone to create a positive self-image that they have created a Love Your Body theme house that they will live in next year.
From struggles with their own body to living in a house circling around the love they have for their bodies, these women have a strong sense of what they and other students can do to combat those negative body images.
“World peace begins with inner peace. A clear state of mind and confidence in yourself will help you achieve anything,” Ryan said when asked how students can overcome the negative perceptions they have of themselves. “The whole point of the week is to affirm everyone’s beauty.”
“I feel there are so many things that you can say that don’t have a real impact,” Klincewicz said when asked the same question. “I think that the most important thing is remembering that our culture doesn’t have a realistic expectation of women’s bodies.”
From these women’s perspectives, the goals of the week seem clear— show students the beauty already within themselves and celebrate it.
“Bodies are amazing. We don’t celebrate bodies,” said Adkins. “That’s one of the goals of this week—to celebrate bodies. We usually get down on bodies but bodies are awesome. Let’s celebrate bodies.”