When Girls Feel Fat: Helping Girls Through Adolescence

by Sandra Susan Friedman

Who hasn't heard a young girl wail, "I'm not going to school today. I feel so fat!" But as therapist and teacher Sandy Friedman explains, feeling fat is simply a code for expressing stressful or negative feelings. Feeling fat often really means a girl is feeling inadequate or ugly or bad. In When Girls Feel Fat, Sandy Friedman helps parents, teachers and girls themselves to understand and cope with the difficult process of adolescence. This book gives parents empathetic, clear and proven strategies to deal with conflict, to recognize that "worries about weight" can lead to more serious eating disorders, to maintain a connection in the face of "tuning out" and to cope with the grungies - Friedman's term for the voice of self-deprecating negative feelings. In the face of today's "feeling fat" epidemic among girls as young as seven, When Girls Feel Fat is a timely and practical book that will help all parents guide their daughters into healthy, confident womanhood.

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2000

Reviews

[Emelie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm really surprised at the 3 star rating of this book. I thought this was an incredible resource- even though I'm not the target audience, just a health care paraprofessional. I found the insights into society really enlightening and uncomfortable- after all, this book taught me new things about the world I grew up in, and helped me even realize how my childhood & current culture influence how I feel.

There are a few gripes about this book, but not enough for me to knock a star off. It is very concentric on the US, which I expected, but it's also focused on able-bodied girls with little mention to girls with disability. I suspect that topic needs a book in and of itself. And, while this might be my bias, I grew up with a different experience from some of the examples mentioned in the book- not a lot of friends, overweight and bullied in elementary school, didn't really fit in. It would be interesting to read about how to help girls like that in middle school and high school so they're set for college. But, again, as far as the majority goes, this is helpful. And like I mentioned, though I didn't have much of a stereotypical childhood, I still found truth in the pages regarding my adolescence.

I can't comment on how this book holds up for WoC, as I am not one and acknowledge that I'm nowhere near knowledgeable enough to speak up, so if there are WoC who have read this book and want to offer opinions- I am all ears!

Overall, though, I really think this is a great book. I recommend it and saved a lot of the resources to my "want to read" list. Hopefully there will be a new edition soon, since this one is about 17 years old!

[Jeni · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sexist and a bit smarmy. not well thought out.