The Women's Outreach Center, along with Society for Women Students and Supporters, celebrated the nationally recognized Love Your Body Day on Wednesday.

"We are bombarded every day by images of what we are supposed to look like," said Women's Center Director Hannah Brenner. "By having a day each year called Love Your Body Day, it's just a time to stop and appreciate ourselves for who we are."

The two organizations co-sponsored a booth in Oklahoma Memorial Union food court that distributed information and showed two videos, "Slim Hopes" and "Still Killing Us Softly," which discussed the way media portrays women.

"Most women, if they don't suffer from an eating disorder, have some sort of dissatisfaction with their body, with how they look," Brenner said.

She said the media perpetuates a lot of self-hatred for women's bodies.

Based on the National Organization for Women Web site, statistics the Love Your Body Day table gave out included the following:

*80 percent of fourth-graders have been on fad diets.

*The body type of a woman portrayed by advertising is only possessed naturally by 5 percent of females in the United States.

*The average weight of a model is 23 percent lower than the average women.

*The diet industry, which was non-existent 20 years ago, is now a $33 billion industry.

To commemorate Love Your Body Day, a women's health and hormones seminar was held in the Heritage Room at the union, co-sponsored by the Union Programming Board, the Women's Outreach Center, the Center for Student Life and the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority.

Deanna Herrin, a national vice president of Arbonne International, a skin care company, gave an informational speech about the effects of estrogen and progesterone on a woman's body.

"Hormones are a very, very important part of our lives as women," Herrin said.

Herrin promoted natural progesterone creams and said that synthetic progesterone is unhealthy for women. Natural progesterone cream has been used to combat such problems as PMS, hot flashes, mood swings, fibrocystic breasts, depression, endometriosis, and decreased sex drive.
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