Afraid to Eat: Children and Teens in Weight Crisis - Softcover

Frances M. Berg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0918532523 ISBN 13: 9780918532527

Publisher: Healthy Living Inst, 1997

Synopsis

Documenting the overwhelming physical and mental effects of the pressure to be thin, this book examines the way weight obsession destroys America’s youth. It describes four major weight and eating problems—eating disorders, dysfunctional eating, size prejudice, and being overweight—and shows healthy ways to change. A valuable resource for parents, teachers, and health professionals, it explains new ways to nurture children and prevent weight problems.

About this title

Review

Afraid to Eat, by nutritionist Frances M. Berg, an internationally known authority on weight and eating, challenges America's obsession with weight and documents the terrible harm done by the quest for thinness. Afraid to Eat presents a convincing and terrifying message: diets don't work; in fact, they are killing children. The statistics are terrifying, riveting, angering. One in five teenagers is overweight. By age 11, most girls are no longer eating normally and many have potentially fatal eating disorders. Two-thirds of teenage girls in the U.S. have abnormal eating behavior, and half are severely undernourished. More and more teens are smoking for weight control. And the majority of children and adolescents have become afraid to eat.

Berg examines four major problems: eating disorders, dysfunctional eating, size prejudice, and being overweight. She discusses the forces that have contributed to these problems, and provides workable approaches to helping children learn to eat normally and attain the Canadian "Vitality" model of wellness: eating well, living actively, and reducing stress.

From the Author

A question I'm often asked is: Why did you write this book? The easy answer is that I was growing more and more concerned as I read the appalling research on kids' eating problems, and as I watched that research personified in the gaunt, vacant-looking girls I was seeing everywhere at high school basketball games, hanging out in malls, in school hallways, wherever kids gather.

Someone has to do it, I kept thinking uneasily. Someone needs to tell parents and teachers what's happening, and why we can't do this to our kids. But no one did. And when I'd tell other writers in the field of my concerns, they'd say: it's you. But I didn't want to take a year out of my already busy life.

There were personal reasons, too. I'd experienced acute pain in the seasonal dieting of our two wrestling sons. And yes, I can understand the desperation to lose weight, because I recall only too well how, as an overweight teenager, I lived through the miseries of gazing into the mirror wishing I could pull off a hunk here, and here, of watching my best resolutions dissolve into uncontrolled eating binges.

Then by a lucky accident I lost my excess weight. And I realized that the answer is not dieting or struggling with weight loss, but moving ahead to eating well, living actively and feeling good about yourself and others. It's Health at Any Size, the theme of both this book on children and the companion book, "Women Afraid to Eat."

About this edition

• Publisher: Healthy Living Inst
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0918532523
• ISBN 13: 9780918532527
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 320