UW-Milwaukee Hosts Event for National Eating Disorder Awareness Week

In today’s society, companies are shifting their target demographic to younger and younger girls, that experts say is dangerous for their health. Companies like Weightwatchers, a weight losing program, are now marketing itself to teenagers, according to Dr. Stacey Nye, director of the psychology clinic at UWM.

“Teens are still growing,” Dr. Nye said to the audience, “and putting a teen on a diet negatively affects their bodies and their brains.”

Across the nation, people participated in National Eating Disorder Awareness week and on March 1, The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee joined by showing a film, providing pizza, decorating T-shirts, and offering eating disorder screenings. The University Counseling Services, UWM Psychology Clinic and Aloria Health hosted the event with the showing of the 2007 film “America The Beautiful.”

The nationwide event raises awareness to inform society about the severity of eating disorders and how to help other and find resources for support on an illness. According the National Eating Disorder Awareness official website, anorexia is the “third most common chronic disease among young people, after asthma and type1 diabetes” and “eating disorders are beginning earlier in both males and females, which agrees with both formal research and clinical reports.”

The theme for this year’s awareness week was “Let’s Get Real” which is why Dr. Nye says the movie was perfect to show. The movie depicts the beauty standards in the United States, that Dr. Nye says are the opposite of what “beautiful” really is.

Aloria Health had its own table where people could get more information on their treatment facility that is located in downtown Milwaukee and also got to customize their own T-shirt. The shirts had the phrase “More than _____” where people could fill in the blank with something they are often categorized into like being daughters, having a mental illness and things of the like.

One student, Maddie Kane, a senior at UWM, said she was interested in coming to the event because she realizes the issue we have in our society. “I wanted to get involved in any way I could because I think that it’s really important to look at the way people are having a lot more self-esteem issues and the media is portraying certain images more and more,” Kane said.

After the showing of the movie, people were given the chance to respond to the movie or ask any questions they had about eating disorders in society. The panel who answered questions included Dr. Nye, Heather Hendrix, a nurse specialist at Norris Health, Ann Schmidt, a nurse specialist at Norris Health, Dr. JoAnne Graham, a UWM psychology professor, Becca Pearson, a community liaison at Aloria Health, and many more experts and graduate students in the field.

“I think things like this are really helpful to come together with other people who want to be aware and want to understand and get as must knowledge as we can to encourage people that we know to love themselves the way they are, and they don’t need to look a certain way,” Kane said.

Also, in the movie, the portrayal of make-up in advertising is evolving to target all women to look younger and even targeting young girls to look ‘prettier’ with the help of their product. Student Eliza Davies at UWM said that wearing make-up can sometimes be a double-edged sword.

“I think sometimes people get very obsessive over the contouring to the point where they feel naked or less when they don’t have on make-up that day,” said Davies. “I work as a server and I feel like I need to wear make-up in order to make an extra $35 that night. I have found that if I do wear make-up, I get tipped better.”

“Social media is really, really affecting people, specifically women but men too, to look a certain way and even act a certain way and present themselves a certain way and to post this many times a day and at these times of day,” Kane responded. “It’s just a lot to handle to keep up an image in our society, that it doesn’t mean anything except to a really small percentage of people who make a lot of money off of it. It’s just really scary that people fall victim to that so often.”