After a year of decreased involvement in Staples clubs due to COVID-19, students had high expectations going into the 2021 Club Rush event. On Oct. 7, during all three lunch waves, the gymnasium was diligently set up with an array of tri-fold posters to promote student run clubs and encourage interested people to sign up. .
Reshaping Reality will soon throw their ‘Middle Schooler in the Mirror’ event for middle and high school families. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and multiple rules and regulations being in place, the event will be held over Zoom on May 6, rather than the traditional in-person gathering. “We talk about the challenges that kids start to face in middle school in regards to body image, eating disorders, dieting, social media, cliques, and other issues,” Reshaping Reality Co-President Kylie Race ’21 said. “We share our perspective as [students] who have gone through the same experiences, and use facts and statistics to get our point across.”
This week, hundreds of monuments and buildings around the country glow blue and green, National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA)’s trademark colors, in honor of NEDA week. As Co-President of Reshaping Reality, a club designated to promote positive body image among young people, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t bring light to a serious issue within our community that seems to be invisible: the promotion of calorie counting in health classes.
A freshman in my club recently mentioned that in her health class students were required to download an app that records everything they eat in a day, which then calculates their caloric intake. Having personally struggled with such apps in middle school, this was immediately a concern of mine.