Friday Guest Post: Too Fat? Post by Irene Roth

Too Fat? Too Thin?
The Healthy Eating Handbook
Dr. Melissa Sayer
Crabtree Publishing Company

This is a wonderfully crafted and highly informative book about how
adolescents can maintain a healthy body image and ensure that they
refrain from comparing themselves with celebrities or people in the
media.

This book is especially needed in our culture. Adolescents are
bombarded with images of how they ‘should’ look in order to be
accepted by their peers. Although girls seem to be targeted the most by
advertisers, boys are also feeling the negative affects of advertising.
Because of this, most adolescents’ struggle with negative body image
problems in the hands of advertisers who are all too ready to sell
products much to the detriment of an adolescent’s self-image and self-
esteem.

This book is like a breath of fresh air for adolescents. The book is
divided into four main chapters with several subheadings in each
chapter. Chapter 1 encourages the reader to re-evaluate his/her negative
body image, ending with a positive exercise about body image. Chapter
2 discusses about how an adolescent’s body shape changes throughout
puberty and how adolescents should strive to eat healthy and exercise
and not worry about any other fad diets. Chapter 3 discusses eating
disorders that some teenagers are prone to, and Chapter 4 talks about
how an adolescent can be healthy by eating a balanced diet and
exercising.

This book could be very useful in the classroom to teach adolescents
how to accept their bodies and strive to be healthy. Too Fat? Too Thin? has a few
quizzes that the reader could take to evaluate body image and to get on
the positive track. There is a glossary of terms and further information
on eating disorders, exercise, diets, obesity, and calorie counting.

Thus, I think this book has a lot of educational potential. If only
educators would use this book in the classroom, we may have fewer
adolescent with eating disorders with negative image problems. But
most of all, we may have less obesity and more health conscious
adolescents.

~ Irene Roth
To read more from Irene, please see her blog: www.adolescentgirlsblog.wordpress.com