Today, Kathy welcomes Denise Hamburger, and they have a conversation on body confident schools and the work she is doing with the non-profit Be Real.
Denise’s experience with her own body dissatisfaction inspired her to help the next generation grow up with a healthier relationship to food and their body. Going back to school in her second act, she found a robust field of academic research on body image problems with tools that had not yet found their way to the teachers and children who needed them. She trained on three body image curricula and began to guest lecture to middle-school and high-school students in their health classes.
Once in the public schools, teachers were asking for resources to help with the widespread body image issues they were seeing every day. With the help of the Illinois State Board of Education, Denise created a workshop for teachers’ professional development called Body Confident Schools. In 2019 and 2020 Denise presented this workshop to over 400 health teachers, social workers, and school administrators in Illinois.
In her first career as an environmental lawyer, Denise wrote Pollution in the United Kingdom, published in London in 1993. For the last 25 years, she has been actively involved in school-based nonprofits, working to create quality educational opportunities for all children