Group of local girls get the skinny on body image
UMF junior Ally Day started the Talls and Smalls program.
By Samantha C. DePoy
Staff Writer

FARMINGTON – Thin is out. Wholesome and healthy is in. And by the way, those gaunt and gorgeous models featured in advertisements are all airbrushed.

That’s the message a group of female University of Maine at Farmington students will be pushing on teenage girls from around Franklin County at a workshop geared toward understanding and improving realistic body image perceptions this Sunday.

Sponsored by UMF’s Center for Human Development and run by volunteer college students, Talls and Smalls is the brainchild of Ally Day, a UMF junior from Portland.

While in treatment at a Portland clinic for an eating disorder earlier this year, Day heard from a staff member about a committee being formed to start a statewide media literacy campaign about body image.

Known as Turn Beauty Inside Out, the program is part of the U-Maine Extension’s Gender Project and works in a variety of different forums to make people aware that true beauty is defined by who a person is, and not what they look like.

Knowing that the Farmington-area where she attended college had an unusually high rate of eating disorders, Day thought it was imperative she start a movement locally and enlisted the help of friends and volunteers from an introductory Women’s Studies course at UMF.

Talls and Smalls will bring together girls in grades seven through 10 and any female adults they’d like to bring. The workshops, such as the one Sunday, Oct. 19, at UMF’s North Dining Hall, are to start a conversation about body image perceptions.

Another workshop in December will focus on nutrition and another will likely be held next February, during National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.

“The goal here is not just to change the way people think but to really change why they think the way they think,” Day explained. “The idea of these workshops is to really break down these barriers around body image and get people thinking.”

It’s also another way for the campus to connect with the community, Day said.

On Sunday, the teenagers, female adults and the UMF mentors will gather for three hours of bonding, food, facials, pop music and to talk about the reality of how media messages, like rail-thin models in ads, make girls feel insecure about their bodies, which often leads to eating disorders and mental health problems.

“I do think that the media markets on insecurities and we have to stop supporting that. The commercials that are put out make women feel guilty,” Day said. “We hope to give girls a reality check and get this discussion about body image out in the open so people just don’t accept what they see on television.”

Beauty, said Karenelise White, a volunteer for Talls and Smalls, is not something that is constructed by society or by the media. Instead, as fellow volunteer Liz Nunley verbalized, “It’s about how you feel about yourself.”

Fellow volunteer Abby Stanley said that after the workshops, she hopes participants have a different perception of beauty. “It’s about who you are, what you believe in and what you do,” she said.

The workshop is free and snacks will be provided. For more information, phone UMF’s Center for Human Development at 778-7034 or Ally Day at 778-7860.

sdepoy@sunjournal.com

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