Lancaster University Students’ Union (LUSU) have announced a new event to support their positive body image campaign called ‘Love your self(ie)’, which will be taking place during Week 6.
The campaign encourages students to complete a feel-good task every day of the week, with examples being: call someone you love and ask about their day, dance to your favourite song, find out a friend’s favourite film and watch it with them, surprise somebody or even just take 30 minutes out of your day to do something for yourself.
SCAN spoke to VP (Campaigns and Communications) Rachel Harvey, who said that the purpose of these tasks are to make you feel good, “much like a ‘nice nomination’.” She also revealed there will be sticky notes appearing around campus with messages to make students feel good, with the idea being “to make people feel good about the way they look without changing a thing… ‘Love your self(ie)’ coms from a study which showed that selfies are good for your self-esteem… being in control of the camera and the way you look allows you to feel empowered and in control of how people see you.”
There will also be a ‘Safe Selfie Space’ photo booth on Wednesday, Week 6, so that people can take selfies with their friends, or in fancy dress; and to tweet it with the hashtag #loveyourselfie. “We will be asking people to tweet a thing they like about one of their friends, for example, ‘@RachelMayQuin #loveyourhair’, we’ll then ask people to follow it up with something like they about themselves, as one of the hardest things to do is to say something positive about yourself… though people don’t have to say anything about themselves if they don’t want to”, Harvey added. “There are statistics to show how people feel about the way they look, [feel they] should look and want to look, [as well as] about eating disorders etc. – but this week is not primarily an awareness raising campaign, it is a feel good campaign.”
‘Love your self(ie)’ is a week long campaign that will take place throughout Week 6, and more information about the schedule will be available on the Facebook event page.
