Integrating eating disorder prevention
and intervention skills into your practice
2003: Salal Books, Vancouver, BC
ISBN # 0-9698883-4-1    176 pages    $35.00

Girls with girlpower:

  • Can ask for what they want
  • Are able to say no
  • Have a wide range of feelings
  • Can express their feelings and opinions constructively
  • Have self-esteem in areas other than ‘looking good’
  • Have connections with others that are based on honesty

Before puberty most girls have girlpower — they are connected to themselves and to their bodies. Something negative happens to as girls go through adolescence and experience major changes in their bodies and their lives. Society pressures them to value themselves solely in terms of how they look, and advises them to withhold their feelings and opinions in order to ensure that they do not hurt anyone else. They lose their girlpower as they disconnect from their bodies and their selves. Girls internalize this loss and express their feelings indirectly by encoding them in a language of fat.

Nurturing Girlpower is based upon the belief that disordered eating, eating disorders and the other health and social risks that girls face are coping mechanisms they develop in order to deal with feelings and situations in their lives for which they have no other means of expression. Highest among these are the challenges of adolescence and the changes in their bodies and their lives. Preventing eating disorders (primary prevention) means promoting and sustaining healthy development. This is nurturing girlpower. Intervention (secondary prevention) means stopping the behaviors that girls might be experimenting with before these develop into eating disorders. That means restoring girlpower that has been lost.

Nurturing Girlpower provides an underlying framework that is based on contemporary theories of brain sex and the differences in male and female development and the impact of socialization on girls. It also provides a comprehensive framework on eating disorder prevention that addresses the challenges of adolescence. It presents information, skills and strategies that address the changes in girls’ bodies and their lives. These include teaching girls about the grungies (their negative voice), body image and body awareness, communication skills, dieting and fat prejudice, why girls are fat, stress management and media awareness and activism. It will help you enhance your individual practice, assess prevention in your schools, and develop prevention strategies for groups in your community.

Nurturing Girlpower provides you with background information on eating disorders and demystifies them so that you can relate to the girl instead of her behaviors. It provides you with counseling skills so that you can intervene with girls who are experimenting with eating disorder behaviors without fear of saying the wrong thing or making it worse. It will help you support girls who already have eating disorders.

Nurturing Girlpower is designed for use by women (and interested men) with different orientations and levels of experience. The manual provides 15 Tools to develop prevention and intervention strategies and to teach skills, 20 Exercises that help you learn about yourself and can be used in your work with girls, and an extensive up-to-date resource section that includes books, magazines, videos, programs and websites.

“Sandra Friedman’s work provides an accessible, sensible way in which to understand the fears and frustrations of young women, and shows how to work with them toward a society in which individuals are valued for who and what they are, rather than how they appear. Ms Friedman encourages each of us to address our beliefs and prejudices in ways that bring relief and comfort, as we develop a deeper understanding of what it means to be female in North American culture. Her ability to integrate theory and practice in ways which are readily understandable encourages us to see the challenges of living in an image obsessed culture as opportunities for growth.”

Merryl Bear, Executive Director
National Eating Disorders Information Centre
Toronto, Canada

“Nurturing girlpower was a wonderful and informative read. All parents and schools should read it cover to cover to understand the complexity of adolescence and how a young girl can fall prey to the insidious illness of an eating disorder. The manual offers hope and inspiration that there is a chance to live in a world where we value one another by more than just our physical appearance.”

Jennifer Kelman, CSW, Executive Director
Healing Connections Organization, New York, NY