Maggie, aged 14, goes on a diet

Gretel Hallet, is a Trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich - perfect for beginners to experience the core principles of Beyond Chocolate and equally great as a refresher for any Beyond Chocolater. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate or her workshops, get in touch with Gretel.

A book encouraging young children to lose weight will be released in the US later this year.

‘Maggie Goes on a Diet’, by Paul Kramer, tells a story of a 14-year-old overweight girl who - according to the blurb - “is transformed from being extremely overweight and insecure to a normal sized girl who becomes the school soccer star”.

Maggie is shown as a chubby girl looking into the mirror. Staring back is a slimmer version of herself, holding up a tiny pink dress.

Aloha Publishers LLC, pitch the book on their website as an inspirational tale for children.

They add: “Through time, exercise and hard work, Maggie becomes more and more confident and develops a positive self image.”

There is so much wrong with this book that I hardly know where to start.

The eponymous heroine of this book is not apparently celebrated for anything that she is or does before she goes on the diet – losing weight is credited with making her more confident and giving her a more ‘positive self-image’. Not only that, but she becomes the star of her school soccer team. I know of no earthly reason why a chubbier child can’t have confidence in him/herself and/or be a star on a soccer team. Dieting isn’t guaranteed to suddenly change a diffident, shy, un-sporty person into a self-confident, successful sporty one. What it is guaranteed to do is set poor Maggie up for a lifetime of self-loathing, yo-yo weight gain and loss and associated health problems in the future. Maggie may well be a thoroughly delightful young lady who loves her family, is good with smaller children, has a reading age higher than her own age, enjoys cycling round her neighbourhood, has a wonderful singing voice – you name it, but Maggie isn’t praised for any of the things that are truly praise-worthy in her character. The only focus this book has is on the fat that Maggie has on her body and how that isn’t acceptable and how she must get rid of it.

And who decides what's overweight anyway? We are all different body shapes and sizes and what may be too much on one person is just right on another. Also as we grow up, the distribution of fat on our bodies changes and that's a natural process that shouldn't been messed up by dieting.

Maggie is FOURTEEN YEARS OLD. 14 years old. Still two years away from even the earliest age she can be considered an adult in England. At her age I was a slightly feral rather tomboyish girl who enjoyed competing with boys at climbing trees and never wore dresses, particularly NOT tiny pink ones ... I know we can all look back at our childhoods with rose tinted spectacles, but really a child of 14 shouldn’t be put on a diet – I don’t often use imperatives, but this is one I’d use very happily. A 14 year old girl should NOT be put on a diet or be made to be worry about what she looks like either – if I had my way, no woman would worry about it either. If Maggie wants to play soccer, then let her play soccer, regardless of her size or gender. Encourage her to play and enjoy playing – and don’t whatever you do mention her shape, size or weight because it really doesn’t matter.

This book is aimed at teenage girls. As any eating disorders organisation would tell you, concerns about weight start younger and younger with children barely out of nursery school worrying about being fat. I support books for teenage girls that explain puberty, sexual relationships of all sorts and how to cope with the stresses of exams – but under no circumstances would I support a book aimed at getting girls of 14 to go on diets. I really think that the current obsession with obesity has gone much too far when it causes publishers to think that books like this will be successful.

I hope for Maggie and all the other Maggies out there that this book will be a massive flop and that they can enjoy their childhoods unencumbered by worries about the fat on their bodies – and by how they look in general. I hope that teenage girls can learn how to become women without the attendant obsession with body shape and size and current belief that we all need to be on diets and re-shaping our bodies with frequent exercise. I hope that girls of all ages can learn how to enjoy moving in whatever way suits them best without linking it to weight loss. I hope that girls can enjoy their food without worrying about calories, fat etc.

I am very glad that I never encountered a book like this when I was 14 years old.

Body confidence for school girls

I’ve been thinking about offering Beyond Chocolate sessions in secondary schools. I feel angry and terribly sad to see so many lovely young women (these days from 10 upwards it seems… or even younger) who are critical of the size of their bodies, who talk about calories and what they should or shouldn't eat… My daughter who is almost 12 and started secondary school this year often comes home with tales of this friend who is anorexic, that one who hates how she looks, the other who is on a diet or isn’t allowed chocolate or sweets because her mother has said she needs to be careful, of how they count calories one minute and then pig out on sweets and chocolates the next.



Having worked with hundreds and hundreds of women who tell me how their dieting misery started when they were children, I know where these girls are headed and what they will be dealing with when they grow up. I despair that nothing has changed since I was that young girl, or maybe it's become even worse - mother's botoxing their daughters was unheard of in the 80's! What I’ve seen over the years is that when we step on to the diet treadmill aged...8, 9 10, 12... we’re there for life and we are far more likely to be overweight and miserable by the time we reach our early thirties than happy and relaxed about the way we look and eat! The diets create the problem. I wonder, if you were one of those young girls who went on a diet before you even reached your teens... what do you see when you look back at photos of yourself? In so many cases I wonder if you look back and think "I looked ok, maybe a little bit of 'puppy fat' but certainly no more than that". And even those of you who look back and do think you were overweight, did going on a diet back then solve all the problems or are you still yoyoing 30, 40 or even 50 years on? Sadly putting girls on diets doesn't help them manage their relationship with food and stabilise their body weight - it causes the problems we see on our workshops day in day out.

Telling growing young women to watch what they eat, putting them on diets, supporting their expectations that they should all look like the slimmest girl in the class is guaranteed to start a lifetime of misery. As they strive to look right; long slim legs - perfect for leggings, flat tummies, smallish (but not too small) breasts, slender arms, long straight hair... they are trying to fit into a mould rather than celebrating who they are and where they come from. I’d love these girls to look at pictures of their mothers and grand mothers and great grandmothers… what did they look like? What ‘stock’ do they come from? Women come in all shapes and sizes, not just the long lanky shape. There’s nothing wrong with being slim, with having slender thighs and a taught flat tummy, it’s just that not every girl has the potential to look like that, unless they starve themselves… and even then… And the fact that the long slim look is the 'in' one at the moment is just about fashion and trends. In the 20th (and so far the 21st) century the particular image of beauty we are sold has little do do with what is actually beautiful. After all there is no objective, 'definition' of beauty. Beauty comes in all shapes, sizes, colours... in many different guises. It's tragic that the media seem hell bent (except for a precious few) on presenting just one embodiment of beauty.

I’d like to talk to school girls about what is really beautiful. I'd like to get them thinking about how they feel about their bodies and why they feel the way they do. I'd like to introduce them to the idea that feeling good about themselves starts with valuing who they are, beyond how they look - that kind of beauty radiates outwards. I want to talk to them about what food means to them, why they choose to eat when they do and how they choose what to eat. I’d like to empower them, to give them tools and the confidence to make choices that feel good to them and to celebrate the diversity of shapes and sizes among them rather than condemning them to a lifetime of counting calories, depriving themselves and hating their bodies.

It’s time to offer these young women something more positive, intelligent and useful than their mothers were given. I’m working on it!