Education on healthy body image

Women’s Education – Women’s Empowerment is the theme for this years Women’s History Month.

March is all about celebrating women and all the ways they contribute to a healthy, vibrant community! This year, Women’s History Month—an annual acknowledged month that highlights contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society—focuses on the education of women.

By remembering the struggles of women being allowed to study at a higher education facility, Women’s History Month can now celebrate equal opportunity. The gender gap has now reversed with more women enrolled in colleges and universities nationwide.

For one CAMPUSPEAK speaker, this month encompasses the empowerment of women an issue close to her heart and one on which she has based her career and mission. Stacy Nadeau encourages young women all over the country to focus on the positive to feel great about themselves in their own body, and to battle the negative societal norms that have been placed on women. In 2005, she was one of six women who posed on a Times Square billboard in their underwear. Stacy uses her experience as a Dove Real Beauty model to start teaching women the importance of a healthy body image.

“A Harvard study revealed that only 2 percent of American women felt comfortable calling themselves beautiful,” said Stacy. “That’s a statistic that saddens me. Women need messages that reinforce a more realistic concept of beauty.”

Stacy set out to educate college students about the harmful effects that negative body image can have. Men and women play a part in changing what society thinks women should look like, how they should act or even how they should think. We are all an important influence in the messages that young women receive.

No More Comparisons
In her keynote, Embracing Real Beauty, Stacy stresses the importance of stopping the habit of comparing your body to someone else’s.

“This is my time to encourage and help women feel great about themselves no matter what they weigh or look like. Women have surrendered to diets and insane eating habits to live up to social stereotypes for too long. It’s time that all women felt beautiful in their own skin,” says Stacy.

Stacy is making great advancements across the country. Not only does she speak to numerous students each year about body image, but she is also a spokeswoman for Fat Talk Free Week—a campaign that is intended to draw attention to the damaging impact of fat talk and the “thin ideal” on today’s women. Created by Delta Delta Delta, Fat Talk Free Week had 5,422 pledges in 2011 that promised to stop fat talk in everyday conversations.

Statements like “I’m so fat,” or “She’s too fat to be wearing that swimsuit” are out of the picture during Fat Talk Free Week.

When Stacy joined forces with Delta Delta Delta she was excited about the increase in education of healthy body image that young women were going to receive.

“My goal is to make women feel great about themselves by widening the stereotypical definitions of beauty. It’s time we open up the conversation about body image and self esteem. It is a crisis in pop culture and we can help make a change,” said Stacy.

Think of Stacy this Women’s History Month as you create programming that educates and empowers young women. Embracing Real Beauty is also a fantastic keynote for eating disorders, body image awareness, Panhellenic education and new student orientation programming.