Body image movie coming to Big Flats on Nov. 7

A documentary about body image activist Taryn Brumfitt’s fight to encourage women to be more accepting of their bodies will be shown at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 7 at Regal Cinemas’ Arnot Mall 10 movie theater in Big Flats.

Taryn Brumfitt

Tickets for “Embrace: Your Body, The Movement, Global Change” are $11 and can be purchased online at https://gathr.us/screening/17974. The 90-minute movie is not rated. A minimum of 60 tickets need to be sold for the movie to be shown.

"It's one of the best films I've seen on body image,” said Carolyn Hodges Chaffee, MS, RDN, CEDRD, the owner and director of Upstate New York Eating Disorder Service in Elmira, the sponsor of the Nov. 7 showing of the movie. “You leave the movie feeling very positive about all shapes and sizes. There have been several films on body image, but this is one of the first that actually accomplishes a positive feeling toward all."

Brumfitt founded the Body Image Movement after a before-and-after photo in 2013 on Facebook of Brumfitt sparked controversy. The before photo showed Brumfitt at a bodybuilding competition in 2012, and a second photo showed her sitting naked later that year after she had gained weight.

She told Cosmopolitan magazine: “I loved how I looked in the second shot — I saw a sexy, confident woman. I thought it would be good to share the photos with my friends – to make the point that you can feel good about the ways in which your body changes.” The photo has had more than 3.6 million views and about 20,000 people shared it, she told Cosmopolitan. Since then, Brumfitt has been on a worldwide quest to redefine and rewrite the ideals of beauty, she said.

“Our job is to harness and facilitate positive body image activism by encouraging women to be more accepting of who they are, to use positive language regarding their bodies and others, and to prioritize health before beauty,” she wrote on her website (bodyimagemovement.com). “Our goal is to reach as many women as possible around the world and speak to them about how we can learn to fully embrace and love our bodies.”

Upstate New York Eating Disorder Service is home to the Nutrition Clinic and Sol Stone Center. 

The Nutrition Clinic is an outpatient clinic committed to helping eating disorder patients make permanent, healthy lifestyle changes.

The Sol Stone Center is a nationally recognized partial hospitalization program that specializes in treating people who have been unresponsive to outpatient care and/or people discharged from inpatient or residential settings.