Book Review: Be Healthy! It’s a girl thing: food, fitness and feeling great
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Be Healthy! It’s a girl thing: food, fitness, and feeling great, guarantees to peek the appetites of young girls seeking recipes that targets nutrition, physical fitness, and positive self-assurance. Delectable entrees are featured in the seventeen chapters that incorporate the lowdown on food basics, illustrate how the human body is energized, offer tips for proper shopping, expose the facts about food labels, encourage physical activity to boost self-esteem, and draw up the Cactus Plant that will lead one into a healthy eating pattern. The text is spiced with humor and lighthearted language. Readers will quickly savor the rich content presented in brief portions and be energized with eye-catching labels, tempting factoids, and appealing black-and-white pictures and drawings. Sandwiched in the hardback/paperback are additional tools to assist young lasses making wise choices including menus, snack suggestions, recipes, websites, agency contacts, shopping lists, and charts listing vitamins and minerals. Authors Lillian Cheung (nutrition consultant) and Mavis Jukes (attorney and writer) have collaborated with other professionals in fields of nutrition and physical activity to relate accurate information. They not only encourage adolescents to link frequently with family and friends, but also advocate speaking to issues affecting their physical development—cafeteria choices or intramural sports programs. In a fast paced world, students, parents, and school staff will want to seize the opportunity to use the fun and entertaining guidelines in this book to stay healthy and fit.
Mavis Jukes has twenty years of writing experience and ten years of teaching experience, and is a member of the California bar. She has written many books for kids and teens, including three other health-related titles.
Lilian Cheung is a doctor of science in nutrition and a registered dietitian. She is the Director of Health Promotion and Communications and a lecturer in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. She has advised national media outlets (magazines, newspapers, and television) and government agencies, including the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for disease Control and Prevention.
Be Healthy! It’s a Girl Thing: Food, Fitness, and Feeling Great does just what the title says. This book provides a general overview of what’s important for young girls to eat healthy, exercise, and living a fit lifestyle. It is divided into chapters, and each has many small sections, which make it not only a fast read, but an easy reference book as well.
According to the Mayo Clinic, “Eating disorders are serious conditions related to persistent eating behaviors that negatively impact your health, emotions and ability to function in important areas of life.” In Michael Pollan’s article “Our National Eating Disorder” he argues that America as a whole has an eating disorder. His claim is supported with multiple pieces of evidence and I believe they are true. Looking deeper, Pollan’s arguments are that America’s eating habits negatively affect our health, emotions and, ability to function in important areas of life.
Childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions with the one of largest subpopulations being African American girls. According to the (The American Public Health Association [APHA], 2003) nearly 22 percent of African American girls ages 6-11 years of age are overweight. Childhood obesity is a considerable predictor of obesity in adulthood and can lead to deleterious consequences if left untreated. Improving the health needs of this vulnerable populations needs to be paramount not only for the overall wellbeing of the individual, but to avoid placing additional burden on the health care system. Health promotions such as educational programs focusing on health risk or behaviors are successful in improving health behaviors (Bellows, McMenamin, & Halpin, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to provide an individual health promotion for an 8 year old African American female who is the 95 weight percentile for weight. Guiding change is a key component that a nurse display in order to combat childhood obesity (Berkowitz & Borchard, 2009).
“More than a third of the county's children are overweight or obese.”(Gustin, 1). As shocking as this is, it's true. One of the big reasons that children and teens are overweight is because of the foods that they eat. They are fed these fattening and unhealthy foods by the school system. Their futures can be changed if we change our choices. Having more nutritious lunches can have a positive impact on the health of American teens.
Among women in the U.S., is a constant reminder with the underlying message being “be skinny or die trying”. There is a plethora of diet plans, pills, and meals, and women seem to get the idea that they need to change some sort of physical attribute about their body. Most grown women are aware of anorexia and the effects it can have on the body. Nonetheless, the problem lies within the four walls of the women’s homes. Contained by those walls are the daughters of the women, and they, unlike their mothers’ don’t understand the actual effects of not eating enough. All the young teens understand is that they are not as skinny as the other girls they are surrounded by on a daily basis. –Research shows that by the age of 7, many children have already decided that it isn’t okay to be fat. – The datum that it has already crossed the minds of seven year old girls to want to be thinner, should be an automatic red flat to the media, and society, to tone down the signals they are sending young girls in America. -69% of girls in 5th-12th grade reported that magazine pictures influenced their idea of a perfect body shape.- Social media and other forms of media cause more problems with anorexia than people assume. In a particular instance, the clothing store, Urban Outf...
After a long afternoon, those students who stay after school rely on the school provided snack to get them through dinner. It is very important that this snack is nutritious so that they receive the energy needed to get them through the evening. The CATCH Kids Club is an after school program which focuses strictly on improving nutrition and physical activity in elementary school students’ lives (3). This particular program focused on training after school-care staff and teaching them the tools necessary to teach children about nutrition after hours. The focus was on setting up lessons and plans providing an outline of what the snack was and the physical activities that were going to be done during that time (3). Recently, there has been a federal law change that says schools must provide a drink, whether it is milk or juice and a larger portion of fruits or vegetables for after school programs as well as before and during school hours. Milk and juice provide greater nutrient intakes as well as vitamins (4). Milk, in particular, provides a significant amount of calcium and helps build strong bones and teeth. Likewise, larger portions of vegetables and fruits give children vitamins, minerals and fiber that will keep them energized throughout the day
The majority of foods in the schools around the United States are junk food. The food a child consumes at a school is usually fattening and can lead to diseases mentioned before. Another problem with a child not eating properly is not receiving the vitamins and minerals he/ she desires. A change that was made to provide healthy lunches is to give the students one cup of fruits and a decent meal size. Schuna has done research as to why the lunches are a major health concern and she discusses ways to resolve and/ or prevent these health issues.
Students all around the nation refer to lunch as their favorite subject of the day, not only does it provide a social hour, but it also supplies a day 's worth of energy in one meal. However, it centers around one of the most problematic issues school systems face today. Children are constantly reminded that it is essential for them to take care of their bodies and fuel it with needed nutrients, but, ironically, schools are the guilty of distributing some of the worst meals students could possibly consume on a daily basis, simply because they are economical and easy to distribute on a budget. Although, schools do claim to exerting an effort towards giving students healthier foods. Nevertheless, many nutritionists would not consider a diet soda,
In today’s fast-paced society, people have less time for food preparation and eating healthy meals. The ever-increasing numbers of fast food restaurants with full parking lots and grocery stores’ freezers filled with frozen meals make it apparent that nutrition is a problem in this country. Obesity has become a growing issue, showing up in a great deal of adults and an increasing number of children. People develop their food choices and eating patterns while growing up, so, as adults, they find it is difficult to break these habits or make dietary changes. In response to the obesity epidemic, fad diets and weight loss schemes have become abundant in our society, but they are clearly not working. The seemingly overlooked solution to this growing problem is nutrition. Several benefits of keeping a nutritious diet, as opposed to an unhealthy diet, are weight control, increased energy, and overall wellness.
Fitness magazines portray healthy weight maintenance by containing healthy meal plans and fitness regimens to help one achieve their goals. Oxygen, Self and Shape contain healthy recipes to encourage healthy eating. Majority of the recipes and articles appeared to be a source of encouragement for women enabling them to b...
Lifestyle choices are and should be subject to scrutiny. People should be able to defend who they are. Indeed, the author even critiques the lifestyle of healthy and skinny people. Offering no real solutions, Mary Ray Worley is another angry soul shouting into the wind, telling the real world that she will not conform. Although she does have some valid points in her article, she needs to support her claims with facts instead of her own opinions.
School meals can contribute to beneficial health, dietary patterns and provide a model for healthy meals and opportunities to model
Childhood obesity is a health problem that is becoming increasingly prevalent in society’s youth. For a number of years, children across the nation have become accustomed to occasionally participating in physical activities and regularly snacking on sugary treats. In result of these tendencies, approximately one third of American children are currently overweight or obese (Goodwin). These grim statistics effectively represent all the lack of adult interference, in regards to health, has done to the youth of America. The habits of over consuming foods and under participating in physical activities are all too common in the children of today. Children cannot solve this issue alone, though. These young people need to essentially be given the opportunities to make positive health decisions and learn about good, nutritional values.
Years of research has been put forwards into societal perceptions of adolescent girls. A survey of 14 461 girls aged 15-19 found that 42.1% of the females were concerned about body image which was the third major issue of personal concern (Craike. et al., 2016, p.2). It has been concluded that majority of adolescent girl’s perceptions of themselves are negative in the sense of their body image, which resolves in girls going on dieting fads to reduce their weight. Some fitness training interventions aim to improve body image by encouraging individuals to focus more on the functionality of their body and less on their appearance (Groth et al., 2011, p). Furthermore, individual’s dissatisfaction with their body leads to negative attitudes about eating, becoming obese and mental problems relating to eating habits (Craike, M. et al., 2016, p.2).
High school girls have experienced the peer pressure of losing weight and becoming thin like those “cheerleader popular girls”. Several researchers have demonstrated the importance of friends, suggesting that the weight-related attributes and behavior among friendship groups may predict body image, dieting onset, chronic dieting, and eating disorder symptoms, even after controlling for various family, friends, and individual factors (Eisenburg, Neumark-Sztainer, Story and Perry, 2005, p. 1116). High school girls often feel isolated because of their weight and rely on their friends for advice. Some of those friends suggest dieting or other ways to reduce weight and those girls take it very seriously and develop eating disorders and unhealthy weight. However, eventually, these girls realize that becoming thin and losing weight is not as important as others make it out to be. These girls are often pressure indirectly to lose weight to “fit-in”, which cause growth developmental problems and causes a disturbance in brain development.
I am writing to you on behalf of me and my fellow grade nine students at Tiller Junior High School who help operate the canteen. It has been brought to my attention that there is a vast selection of unhealthy snacks. I would like to help everyone stay healthy and fit. I have done some research and gathered information for you on healthy eating in school, as well as a program to introduce to help kids stay physically and mentally healthy.