Dr. Renee Engeln is a Psychology Professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. On February 9, 2016, she visited Merrimack to give her "Fat Free Talk" to students in Cascia Hall as part of Merrimack's first Love Your Body Week. She has done an abundance of research on fat talk at Northwestern.

Dr. Engeln showed her audience various conversations that most have with their friends. The conversations most often go like this:

"Oh my God, I am so fat. Look at my thighs."

"What? You're perfect, look at me I have thunder thighs."

"Uhh let's just stop talking about this."

This is a regular pattern, and I thought this talk was very informational because at least once or twice in our life we have fat talked with our friends. At one point Dr. Engeln told us, "The more you compare yourself to the women in Cosmo, the more you fat talk." Which is true because the women in those beauty magazines are airbrushed and altered. She advises people not to listen beauty magazines such as Cosmo and others of that sort.

She brought up the book "Fat Talk" by Mimi Nichter and how Nitchter found out that girls in grades 7 and 8 were talking about dieting. This I found shocking because girls shouldn't worry about dieting in those grade levels. Going off on that, Dr. Engeln pulled up a picture of a shirt that said along the lines of this, "I'm too pretty to do homework, so my brother does it for me." This shirt was being sold in a popular retail store, JC Penny. That practically shows that in this society, little girls are taught to grow up to think that pretty is the only thing they should know how to do.

After bringing up the shirt, she went back to her main focus of the event. She did research on how college women react to hearing about fat talk. Dr. Engeln said that about 60% of the women like knowing that they are not the only ones who feel bad about their bodies. Another percentage I miss was about how other women said that they should not be talking about fat talk at all.

What I found interesting is fat talk is very contagious. Once someone says that they look fat, another will commentate on that and also say they look huge. No one outgrows it, which is true. She asked us if our moms or grandmothers have fat talked either about themselves or someone else, everyone raised their hands, including myself.

Like I said, everyone fat talks. Even the most skinniest girls do. How do we eradicate this phenomenon? We don't exactly eliminate this problem because we cannot control everyone, but we can control what comes out of our mouths as individuals. We can say positive things.

However, Dr. Engeln warned us that positive sayings such as "You are beautiful, never forget that" can be harmful because if you keep using this phrase some girls will not believe they are beautiful. She said we can still love our bodies but love them in a different way such as instead of saying "I love my body because I have a great figure" say "I love my body because it allows me to dance and so on.

Overall, I am glad that I went to this talk. I knew a lot of the information she said going into the talk but she went more in depth with fat talk which I liked because I love presentations on societies view on the ideal body type and why we should not go off of what our culture deems to be the right body. Remember that your body allows you to do many things such as learn and do the things you love; don't hate the body!