By Erin O’Sullivan

National Eating Disorders Awareness Week is February 23-March 1, 2014.

This year’s theme, “I had no idea,” is greatly symbolic of what inspires so many of this week’s volunteers to strive to bring attention and care to this far-reaching issue.

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, “In the United States alone, 30 million people will be impacted by an eating disorder at some point in their lifetime. These conditions…don’t discriminate by race, age, sex, or size.” And many more than those 30 million will suffer from negative body images and a lopsided, if not harmful, approach to health and fitness under the pressure of media and peers.

However, students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have been getting a different message—and the campus recreation department is helping lead the charge. For the second year in a row, UNC’s Body Beautiful Project will celebrate National Eating Disorders Awareness Week by encouraging “students and community members to value their bodies and celebrate social, physical, and mental well-being, through the promotion of healthy eating and exercise habits.”

While there are many issues that widely affect students today, Karen Cunningham, Director of Marketing and Special Events for Campus Recreation, says the decision to focus here was a clear choice. She sites The McLean Center at Harvard University as calling campus recreation an “irresistible magnet to those in the campus community with eating disorders and exercise addition.” For those diagnosed with an eating disorder, “as high as 90 to 95 percent use a fitness center.”

2013 Body Beautiful Campaign models.

Karen says that “because campus recreation has such a unique position for identifying problems, providing resources, and fostering personal relationships with students, we felt an obligation to act on the issue.”

In addition, UNC’s campus rec department was not only utilizing its unique position, it was also listening to and partaking in the broader campus atmosphere. Colleen Daly, UNC student and campus rec staff member, had co-founded a group on campus called Embody Carolina, which leads peer-to-peer training to help students identify eating disorders and serve as compassionate and effective allies to those with the disease. By the fall of 2012, Embody Carolina had made “eating disorders and positive body image an important focal point in the campus community.”

So Karen and Lauren Mangili, Associate Director of UNC Campus Recreation, turned to Colleen for ideas on how to get started and then looked to their campus partners for help putting those ideas into action. Together, they came up with the Body Beautiful Project, which launched during National Eating Disorders Awareness Week in 2013. The campaign’s celebration of “self-acceptance through social, physical, and mental health and promotion of positive body image and holistic health” adopted the tagline “Celebrate confidence. Celebrate health. Celebrate your body.” The initial reception was incredible, and “the campaign,” Karen says, “turned into a movement.”

Getting started

Even the best ideas, with all their relevance and immediacy, can be a challenge to get started—especially, when there seems an infinite number of ways to bring them to life. UNC Campus Rec took their first steps into action by focusing their efforts on initiatives that played to their strengths. “We have strong programs in both fitness and marketing,” Karen says. These areas would be their building blocks for a comprehensive and effective campaign.

They identified a handful of diverse “models”—students willing to lend their image and story to the posters, flyers, digital ads, building banners, social media headers, and web slideshows that would adorn campus. The diversity of the models wasn’t just physical either—the body and health issues they had overcome were vast and varied.

Camille had to redefine her relationship with her body after an ACL injury prevented her from returning to the basketball court.

There was Camille, the “tall girl” basketball player who had to redefine her relationship with her body after an ACL injury prevented her from returning to the court. Daniela, the retired gymnast, had to come to love her body again after her battle with lupus altered her physique. There was Kameron, who fought to make a total lifestyle change to embrace healthy habits of wellbeing, and Jagir, who despite losing his hair to an autoimmune disease, has worked to shape the positive mental, physical, and emotional well-being that body image encompasses. Everywhere UNC students looked, a peer whom they could relate to, who had battled issues similar to the ones they faced, was looking back.

The model’s stories, and the intentions of the Body Beautiful Project, were also shared through a two-page spread in UNC’s annual campus rec magazine and in posts on their Tar Heel Tone Up blog.

In addition to their high-tech work, UNC also utilized “grassroots promotional tools” by forming “street teams” and setting up promotional tables in high traffic areas during prime times. Doing so “allowed us to engage with our target audience face-to-face in order to spread the word of our initiative and to promote the corresponding week of events,” Karen says.

Making it happen

One of the main reasons the Body Beautiful Project was able to be so effective was because so many awesome campus partners joined forces with campus recreation and helped get an even louder, more multi-faceted, and stronger message out to the community than otherwise might have been possible.

The Project was kicked off with a video, entitled “Soul Within,” that was distributed across campus and featured “various student acapella singing groups on campus preforming a composed medley of songs— like “I am Beautiful” and “Stronger”—that encouraged confidence and positive self-image,” Karen says. Additionally, “group fitness instructors were encouraged to use the music during their class cool-down.”

Students take part in a H.I.I.T. training during the 2013 “Eating for Exercise: The Recipe for Fitness”.

During the Monday of the 2013 event, campus rec teamed up with Carolina Dining Services to host “Eating for Exercise: The Recipe for Fitness.” This event “featured an interactive nutrition and fitness workshop, as well as a 30-minute High Intensity Interval Training (H.I.I.T.) class, and a question and answer session with a nutritionist and a personal trainer. Nutritious food samples, healthy recipes, and suggested workout routines were provided to all participants.” A post-event survey confirmed its success, with well over 90% saying they would attend the event again.

Partners like the UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders helped provide comprehensive and engaging information. Both Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s activities helped students raise their awareness and knowledge-base with events like “Eating Disorders Myth Busters” and an Eating Disorders Information and Research Fair. Healthy activity was encouraged with a Hip Hop Master Class, and Embody Carolina training was offered, empowering students to use what they were learning to go out and make their own impact.

The Body Beautiful Project’s final event was held on Thursday of that week with the UNC Panhellenic Council and sororities hosted a dance competition to raise funds for eating disorder research and outreach, ensuring UNC’s time and efforts would continue to have an impact.

Continuing the movement

Student feedback for the Body Beautiful Project “has been overwhelmingly positive,” Karen says. Participation in all of the week’s events was high, and students responded positively to the displays around campus.

The 2014 campaign will see more marketing towards male students with posters like this one, showing the media’s changing presentation of “masculine” bodies over time.

In fact, she says, “the majority of students who interviewed for group fitness instructor positions that semester referred to the campaign as an example of what campus recreation provides to the campus community.”

To help keep the movement going, “all of the group fitness instructors completed a training to help them facilitate a safe and supportive class for participants, [and] the entire campus rec professional staff became Embody-trained,” Karen notes.

And that continuation is key, as the severity and pervasiveness of these issues can certainly not be dealt within a week. So, as we enter 2014’s National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, UNC’s campus recreation is ready to roll out “Phase II” of the Body Beautiful Project. The campaign will “take a more active role in promoting this mindset to the male population” and, demonstrating a desire to continue improving itself and its efforts, the campaign will strive to include “a more formalized assessment” of its work.

Reaching the NIRSA community

Karen, Lauren, and Collen, along with Liz Walz, Fitness Graduate Assistant, will be sharing their lessons and the message of the Body Beautiful Project with their NIRSA colleagues at our Annual Conference in Nashville. At Conference, Karen says, “people will be able to see—step-by-step—how we launched a big, university-wide campaign of this scale…Our ultimate goal is to be able to encourage other universities in launching their own Body Beautiful Project campaign by providing them with the framework and resources to do so.”

You can learn more about their session, “Body Beautiful Project: Promoting Holistic Views of Health and Positive Body Image,” including a full description and learning outcomes, and all of the over 140 ed sessions being offered at NIRSA 2014 here. The site allows you to search by interest topic; the Body Beautiful session, for example, can be found under the “Marketing/Public Relations” category.

Karen’s, and all of the UNC campus recreation department’s, investment and dedication to raising awareness, for not only the issue of eating disorders but the necessity of positive body image and holistic health, is palpable. The campus rec campaign that turned into a university-wide movement has truly affected and empowered the lives of UNC students.

One of the UNC models, Camille, who was impacted by the campaign, said it best: “Health is important to your quality of life. So you have to wake up every morning and tell yourself that you are confident and competent and beautiful, because you have to believe it first before anyone else does.”