WRtW January Event

So hey, it's been a while since I've gone to a Women Run the World event at Skirt Sports ... I missed the one in September due to travel and then I'm not sure if there was anything the rest of the year or not.

In any case, they're now every-other-month events, with the format switching up a bit.

January's event, to kick of 2018, was actually a film screening of Beauty Mark, a film about body image and loving your body, made by Diane Israel, a former professional runner and triathlete.

It also had a lot of great food*.

Beauty Mark is a very powerful film. It essentially chronicles Israel's journey through sport and eating disorders, the resulting screwed up body image, and how body image is so screwed up in so many of us.

I took some general bullet point notes through both Israel's comments and the movie, and I'll share most of them here:

- early badass woman in triathlon

- reading a book on mBraining - essentially, we have three brains - our head, our heart, and our gut, and in those, you can align those for creativity, compassion, and courage

- you come home to your body to serve others (must be well in body before can help others)

- she was 28 and her body was destroyed - trained so hard and didn't eat and was so, so skinny

- why so scared of fat?

- so many people (in fitness as pertained to this movie mostly) have a bad body image

- eating disorders - including exercise-induced bulimia, where you exercise your food off as opposed to throwing it up

- distorted body image

- grew up with unhealthy messages - needed to be perfect in father's eyes; wasn't the perfect boy the parents wanted; mother was beautiful and may have been a bit crazy but she was beautiful and that's all that mattered

- stopped eating as a way to quiet inner voices/control what she could (at age 12)

- Israel went on a journey in making this film, trying to better her own self-image, searching for enlightenment ... learning that there is no true destination, and that getting to live is the gift/reward

- be who you are and people will love you for being who you are

The full, fleshed out version of the film (we saw a 50 minute, edited, educational version) will be available on Amazon Prime in a few months. Given that so, so many of us have some sort of distorted body image, I would HIGHLY recommend watching it when it's available.






* Food was thanks to MAD Greens, Bhakti Chai, Ska Brewing, Jackson's Honest, and the best, Kim and Jake's, who provided not only cake, but gluten-free rolls which were AMAZING.