A new diet book with an overweight girl as the central character won’t hit book stores until October, but it’s already causing heated debate. The book, Maggie Goes on a Diet, by Paul Kramer, is said by the author to be inspirational for overweight children to make the right eating choices. However, others view it as potentially harmful to a child’s self-esteem.
Appearing on Good Morning America, Kramer explained his motives behind the book by stating, “My intentions were just to write a story to entice and to have children feel better about themselves, discover a new way of eating, learn to do exercise, try to emulate Maggie, and learn from Maggie’s experience.” Kramer said he believes that “children are pretty smart, and they will make a good choice if you give them that opportunity.”
Kramer’s book begins with the central character, an overweight Maggie, being ridiculed and made fun of in school, which causes her to comfort herself by eating. After deciding to make a change, Maggie starts eating healthy and exercising, leading to her becoming healthy, happy, thin, and self-confident, in addition to becoming a soccer team star by the story’s end.
The book is designed to target young readers who range in age from 4 to 12 years old (depending on which online book seller you choose to visit). Some nutritionists and child psychologists believe that children who read the book might buy into the “thin is beautiful” myth at a young age, and end up developing eating disorders. Concerned parents, weight loss professionals, and other detractors have made their opinions known on the internet via forums and comment boxes.
Without ever reading the book, negative comments such as, “Terrible reflection on our society,” “Boycott the book,” and “This is awful,” are cropping up everywhere. Many feel that a children’s book should not be aimed at making them believe they won’t gain acceptance or popularity if they are overweight.
Yet Kramer defends, “Maggie is accepting that kids are mean, and kids can be mean, and she has decided to do something about it—to take things in her own hands, try to change her own life, try to make herself healthy by exercising. She does want to look better. She does want to feel better, and she does not want to be teased.”
In an interview by ABC, Joanne Ikeda, the co-founding director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Center on Weight and Health noted that targeting a child’s imperfections is not the way to help them develop good eating habits. She pointed out, “In real life, dieting down to a smaller clothing doesn’t guarantee living happily ever after. Body dissatisfaction is a major risk for eating disorders in children all the way up through adulthood.”
Ikeda also acknowledged that she is afraid the book sends the wrong message that “if you don't look like Cinderella, you’re a failure. I wouldn’t want a child to read this because they might, in fact, try to do this and fail. What is that going to do to their self-esteem?”
Kramer admits that he knew he was taking a risk when he used the word “diet” in the book’s title and commented, “If I entitled the book Maggie Eats Healthy, somebody in a bookstore is really not going to identify with someone who has been overweight, who has health problems. Diet is a kind of a misconstrued word, and it has many, many meanings.”
With obesity rates being estimated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at a staggering 17 percent for children and adolescents, nutritionists and pediatricians encourage overweight children to eat a healthy balanced diet and to exercise regularly rather than follow a ‘diet’ or weight loss plan. While Kramer’s motives for writing the book were obviously to help overweight youngsters, Ikeda stated that his efforts were, “well-intentioned but very misguided.”
In her study of severely overweight women, Ikeda found that the heaviest women had actually started dieting before they were age 13. She pointed out that yo-yo dieting and weight fluctuations can be dangerous and contribute to increased risk of obesity, coronary heart disease, and hypertension.
Whether Kramer’s book Maggie Goes on a Diet will be beneficial or harmful to children remains to be seen, but he contends that “people are judging a book by its cover instead of waiting to read the book when it comes out.”
Is this a book you would buy for your child?
Soure: HealthNews
