Our schools’ obsession with healthy eating is driving girls as young as SEVEN to diet
CHARLOTTE lamb loves riding her bike, playing with dolls and her favourite game is lining up her soft-toys and pretending to be a vet. But last year when she was baking with her mother, this tiny slip of a girl — then still only seven years old — made a shocking declaration. She was on a diet. Her mother Lisa, 40, a PE teacher from Oakham, Leics, said: ‘We were making cupcakes in the kitchen when Charlotte announced she would only be having one, not two. Why? Because she didn’t want to get fat.
‘Since then, she’s even pinched her tummy and tried to jiggle it around to show me why she needs to lose weight, although there’s nothing of her. Of course, I immediately reassured her that she was fine as she was. But inside I was horrified as I have, on purpose, never mentioned the word “diet” in front of my daughter.’
Even more heartbreaking and frustrating for Lisa is the fact that Charlotte’s comments had a very familiar ring to them.
Her older daughter Abbie, aged nine, had also started asking her not to put cereal bars in her packed lunch because girls who spotted them at school would tease her and point out she should not be eating them. Before going out to play, the Year 5 pupil has also taken to checking her outfits and changing if she feels her tops are not long enough to hide her tummy and bottom.
Lisa says: ‘ The pressure to look skinny is so much a part of their everyday lives that kids nowadays aren’t proud they are growing up.
‘The terrifying thing is that as children naturally grow bigger, they are afraid it means they are getting fat.’
Charlotte and Abbie may still be in primary school, but as a Government report revealed last week, they are far from unusual.
Research from the Equalities Office found that one in five girls aged between five and 11 have already tried to slim down.
Indeed, no sooner have little girls learned to name the parts of their bodies than they are criticising them.
It’s also becoming clear it’s not fair to lay all the blame at the feet of mothers for passing on anxieties about their own bodies to their young children.
In a bid to tackle obesity, primary schools across Britain are now giving pupils lessons in healthy eating.
But it seems the message that many youngsters are taking away from such classes is not just to eat ‘good’ foods and avoid ‘bad’ ones, but that it might often be safer not to eat at all.
The rules surrounding good and bad food are treated with such seriousness by teachers that they are often rigorously enforced by the youngsters themselves.
While carrying out research for my new book, Girls Uninterrupted: Steps For Building Stronger Girls In A Challenging World, I have seen how school lunchtimes are being turned into contests to see who can eat the least. Yes, even in junior schools.
This a brutal world in which girls feel entitled to chide others for eating ‘ fattening foods’ — one eight- year- old I know was sagely advised by a classmate that she should cut her cheese intake if she wanted to keep her figure.
Girls are regularly sitting in judgment on the plates and lunch boxes of others.
In the school dining halls of today, forgoing desserts — and loudly announcing this self- denial to your peers — is seen as a badge of honour within a classroom hierarchy where the slenderest girls perch on the top.
Here, skipping games are not just for fun. They are also meant to shed calories. Little by little, fat has become the most feared word in playgrounds up and down the country.
Educational consultant Christine Calland, who goes into schools to talk about body image, says she has seen a noticeable fall in the age when young girls start dieting in recent years.
Christine, who is co-author of the book, Body Image In The Primary School, says it’s not true to say that the obsession with being slim is the fault of parents.
‘Teachers have told us of a culture in schools in which it is considered that only “greedy” girls eat lunch.
‘Girls’ schools in particular seem to foster a culture of competitive dieting. We have held workshops where girls from mixed schools arriving at all-girls’ secondaries are shocked to find that practically everyone in Year 7 there is on a diet. These messages are so much part of the culture now that the pressure girls come under is often from each other.’
As a primary school PE teacher for whom healthy eating and exercise have always been a way of life, Lisa says she set out from the start to consciously shield her two daughters from any negative messages about their bodies.
She insists that although she has never mentioned her own weight or left celebrity magazines around the house, Charlotte and Abbie still managed to pick up the message loud and clear that there is only one acceptable way for a female to look.
Lisa says: ‘I always wanted the girls to have a childhood where they didn’t have to worry. But, sadly, it’s in the air they breathe.
‘It’s the girls who are naturally slim who tend to make the remarks because they know that it will get a reaction.
‘As a mum you can tell your girls until you are blue in the face that they are fine the way they are.
‘But if they’ve already been told they are fat at school, it seems impossible to get through to them any more.’
The general anxiety about healthy eating in schools is also contributing to the problem, believes Lisa.
‘Abbie has come home quoting to me about food groups and what she can and can’t eat, but I can’t help feeling that she now worries too much,’ she says.
‘As a PE teacher, the terrifying thing is that I can see how, as girls grow older, it turns into a game of daring to see who can eat the least.’
Former teacher Christine Calland of the educational consultancy notjustbehaviour.co.uk, which offers training courses on children’s development, agrees.
She says: ‘Youngsters are getting too caught up in the idea of good and bad
‘There’s a culture where only greedy girls eat lunch’ ‘It’s the slimmest girls who make cutting remarks’
foods. On the one hand, there is this concern about obesity. On the other, there is the worry about eating disorders.
‘However, they are really two sides of the same coin. Both are about a poor relationship with food.
‘A better angle would be to talk more generally about healthy bodies and to teach children to look after themselves.
‘At the same time as teaching children how to eat well, we also have to teach them how to have the resilience to cope with attacks on healthy body image.’
Much tougher to deal with, however, is the idea that thin has come to mean pretty, pretty has come to mean popular and popular means powerful.
Without doubt, some of this is coming from children’s television shows in which thin is equated with being liked.
On average, females on television are 15 per cent thinner than the average. But it’s not just the adults. According to a study in the Journal Of Children And Media, 87 per cent of girls aged between ten and 17 who appear on the Nickelodeon and Disney children’s channels can be classed as underweight.
A further study showed that heavier characters on children’s TV programmes are more likely to be seen as unpopular, unattractive or are often the target of jokes.
The worrying thing is that the fall out from the desire to be slim lasts much longer than primary school.
As children grow older, the anxiety also affects their life chances and their health.
The Government’s Body Confidence Progress Report 2015 found one in six GSCE students sometimes avoided going into school, as they felt bad about their looks.
Girls may end up turning to risky coping strategies like purging, using alcohol and drugs, crash dieting, and smoking to control their appetite. Some even turn to self-harm, the report revealed.
Poor body image has also been linked to girls ducking out of sports activities — with lifelong consequences for their health.
The research found that 23 per cent of girls aged between seven and 21 don’t exercise because they are unhappy how their bodies look.
One of the most insidious and least-recognised effects of this selfconsciousness is the way it silences our girls. By the time they are ten, 13 per cent of them avoid speaking up to give an opinion.
The reason? They don’t want to draw attention to themselves because of the way they look.
Ominously, such worries are also spreading — with young boys also saying they feel puny and should have defined muscles from the ages of eight and nine.
All this has created a climate of fear among parents who don’t know what to do or say to their junior school-age children to stop them sliding into eating disorders.
My own daughter Clio, then aged nine, came back from a play- date with a girl the same age we had met on holiday to tell me that one of the afternoon activities had included being put on pair of bathroom scales by the host mother.
It turned out that after a fractious lunchtime at which Clio’s friend had refused to eat her lunch on the grounds that she wanted to stay slim, the woman in question had taken both girls up to the bathroom to compare their weights.
It was a desperate bid to prove to her child that she needed to eat because Clio, who is several inches shorter, still weighed more.
By rights, I should have been extremely angry. The only time that Clio has ever been weighed is as part of a routine health check when she started school.
But I did understand the mother’s panic and I knew that Clio was protected from any damage because, from an early age, she has been told people come in all kinds of shapes and sizes.
She has also been told she should have more aspirations in life than simply being thin.
No parent wants a world where their child is obsessed with their weight from a young age. But we all have to accept that is what we now have.
We must realise that everyone needs to start training their children early if we want them to have uninterrupted childhoods where they are not dogged by selfconsciousness the moment they’re old enough to recognise themselves in the mirror.
In a world where children say they are more worried about getting fat than their parents dying or the outbreak of nuclear war, my view is that our daughters also need help to work out why so many of their gender think this way.
They need to know that, in the words of the late Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, there are over three billion women who don’t look like supermodels and just eight who do.
If lessons preached by our schools about healthy eating don’t go hand in hand with messages that not everyone has to fit in with the same narrow ideal of slenderness, then our children will keep believing they are failing — before they’ve even begun.
TANITH CAREY’S Girls Uninterrupted: Steps For Building Stronger Girls In A Challenging World (Icon Books) is out now priced £7.99.