Fridays with Irene: Too Fat? Too Thin? The Healthy Eating Handbook

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. The books 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

Irene Roth writes fiction and nonfiction for teens and tweens. In addition, she writes reviews for Blogcritics Magazine, Booksneeze, Tynsdale Publishers, The Muse, and is review editor for Humane Medicine International. She has written over 200 reviews, articles, and stories, both online and in print. Irene is a members of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), CBI Clubhouse, and the Children’s Writer’s Coaching Club. Visit her websites at: http://irenesbookreviewsmyblog.wordpress.com