Embrace change and positivity at free screening event

On Saturday, Feb. 24, Amy’s Gift is offering a free film screening of the documentary “Embrace” for the general public at Augustana College.

The 90-minute film — starting at 2 p.m. at the Gerber Center, Gävle Room, 3435 9 ½ Ave., Rock Island — is a social impact documentary led by Australian Taryn Brumfitt that inspires us to change the way we feel about ourselves and think about our bodies. The film celebrates body diversity in shape, size, ethnicity, and ability, promotes positive physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health, and combats toxic messaging in media and advertising.

The Sydney Morning Herald called “Embrace” a “surprising, thoughtful, energetic and troubling film.”

Brumfitt is an internationally recognized speaker, on a mission for meaningful change. Through her award-winning films, bestselling books and international speaking engagements, she has spent the last 10 years empowering people around the world to discover what’s possible when you embrace your life and purpose, according to her website.

Nominated for the Documentary Australia Foundation Award for Best Documentary, “Embrace” has been seen by millions of people across the world and continues to create positive ripples of change.

The Feb. 24 Augie event is a kickoff to Eating Disorders Awareness Week (EDAW), which runs Feb. 26^th – March 3^rd. This year’s theme is “Healing in Community,” and the week is an annual campaign to educate the public about the realities of eating disorders and to provide hope, support, and visibility to individuals and loved ones affected by eating disorders.

In honor of EDAW, Amy’s Gift will be offering a table of eating disorders resources at the event and well as a Q&A with local providers following the screening.

Amy’s Gift is named for Amy Helpenstell, a Rock Island High alum and A.D. Huesing executive who died at 32 in 2003, due to complications from anorexia nervosa. She underwent a long and courageous battle with the disease, which began in high school. 

In 2007, the Amy Helpenstell Foundation sponsored a community survey on eating disorders in conjunction with the Robert Young Center for Community Mental Health. This one-of-a-kind survey included interviews with 800 residents throughout the Quad-City area and covered residents’ knowledge of eating disorders, perceptions of eating disorders and suggestions for recommended treatment of eating disorders. View those results.

The survey showed the community was surprisingly accurate in their knowledge of eating disorders as they are clinically defined. However, whereas the perception of eating disorders was as a predominantly mental rather than physical disorder, over half of the respondents identified their preferred treatment site as a family doctor’s office or hospital, according to the Amy’s Gift website.

Raising awareness

One of the central initiatives of Amy’s Gift (formerly known as the QC Eating Disorders Consortium) then became to raise awareness at the primary reference source for treatment: the family practitioner. Several focus groups with local doctors have been held to gauge their comfort with diagnosis, treatment and referral for patients with eating disorders as well as school officials to discover where training and education were most needed.

These focus groups culminated in an effort to provide annual, local continuing education events on eating disorders for practitioners, school officials and the general public as well as a detailed website with local resources and links to national organizations for professionals and patients alike.

Stephanie Burrough, project coordinator for Amy’s Gift, is community relations specialist at the Robert Young Center, acting as an advocate and organizer for various mental health programs and training events throughout the year. She is also a member of the Trauma Support Team with Challenge to Change and the BE REAL Ambassador Coordinator for BE REAL USA.

An estimated 9% of the U.S. population, or 28.8 million Americans, will have an eating disorder in their lifetime, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders.

Burrough said Monday that “Embrace” has never been shown in the Quad Cities, and said Brumfitt in 2022 put together another documentary and a program for junior high students called “Embrace Kids.”

“That was another reason I wanted to do this documentary, I wanted to kind of start introducing this idea of body positivity at the community level and then I might do a double feature in the future, as a fundraiser,” Burrough said. She’s been working with Allison Mirell-Heaton, a counselor at Augustana who’s on the Amy’s Gift advisory committee.

“When we were talking about ways that we could just create an event to speak to the college students, but also the community, this is what we had discussed,” Burrough said. “So we’re excited.”

The missions of Amy’s Gift and BE REAL overlap somewhat, she noted. Amy’s Gift works to inform the community about eating disorders, awareness about prevention and resources, while BE REAL ties directly into mental health issues and eating disorder issues, aiming mainly to help adolescents.

“When children grow up with that unhealthy relationship to their body, it can develop into mental health issues and some of those mental health issues are eating disorders,” Burrough said. “So one of the primary focuses of BE REAL is to make sure you have access to the resources in your community. And one of the interesting things about eating disorders is they’re so specific that you do need to have people who are trained or specialized in eating disorders.”

Amy’s Gift offers resources but not direct treatment, she noted.

“We make sure that they know who the different individual providers are that treat in the area,” Burrough said.  It also offers a regular eating disorders support group, that meets the first and third Wednesdays each month, 6-7 p.m., at the Trinity Enrichment Center, 4622 Progress Drive, Davenport (Call to take part at 563-742-5800).

The Alliance For Eating Disorders Awareness has a free Helpline (866-662-1235) – staffed by licensed therapists – available Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., for clients and providers.

Personal struggles

Burrough personally struggled with an eating disorder while transitioning from Moline junior high to high school. Perfectionism played a role as did unrealistic body image goals.

“I thought if I could just look a certain way, in my mind that would mean that I was succeeding,” she said. “So many people who go through eating disorders and it can look like I’m talking about perfectionism, but it also can look like any other eating disorder where food becomes this place where you focus your emotions and it becomes a coping mechanism that’s not healthy.”

Burrough was lucky to see a doctor who pointed her in the right direction.

“The provider kind of knew with the weight that I lost, just started really asking the right questions. And I was very lucky because at the time I had the provider who did, who asked those right questions and I was sent to a therapist who had experience with eating disorders,” she said.

“It is one of the reasons why I really love the fact that I work at Robert Young. And I get to talk about mental health and I get to make sure that people who need resources can get them and it really does give me a meaningful purpose,” she said of her job.

Despite global improvements in the body positivity movement, Burrough said there remains a big societal pressure for girls and women to look fashion-model thin – fueled and fed by mass media and social media.

“Mostly because the number of images that young people are encountering on social media, it’s taking up a lot of space in their brain and it’s not being vetted in a healthy way,” she said. “As we know, Congress has recently called people like Mark Zuckerberg to the stand and said, you have algorithms that are basically feeding off of children and that they are feeding into eating disorders, they are feeding into mental illness,” Burrough said.

“This conversation about body positivity has to be had and it has to be had continuously, not just in this place where I’m doing this documentary, not just in one room, where we watch a movie and we recognize what we already know on some level. We need to literally carry it around with us all of the time.

“That’s what we need to be more vigilant about teaching our children. And we also need to be more vigilant about teaching moderation and awareness when engaging with social media platforms,” she said. “Yes, of course, there’s some body positivity that has been coming into the global conversation. And I do think that there’s more diversity in general than there was probably even 10 years ago.”

BE REAL notes that most students spend more time on their phones during a typical weekday than they do in school, Burrough said.

Healthy eating also is not the same for everybody, as each person’s body has different needs, and a positive regimen has to be established tailored to those needs, she said.

“You want to be listening to your hunger cues and your satiation cues and you want to be taking care of yourself,” she said. “And you want to be taking care of yourself with what you have available.”

Amy’s Gift is a QC Eating Disorders Consortium that offers provider training and resources for eating disorders to the region. For more information, visit the Amy’s Gift website HERE.

For help in finding local eating disorder treatment referral information, information on upcoming local eating disorder trainings, locating a professional speaker to provide information on eating disorders, to get an information packet with details on local resources from Amy’s Gift, contact Stephanie at (563) 742-2445 or email .