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. Based on her successful school discussion program, "Girls in the '90s", Sandy Friedman's friendly guide demystifies the relationships between girls and their body image, friends, parents, sexuality, eating disorders, school and the media. She explains that feeling fat provides a key to opening discussion about what happens to girls growing up female in a male world, a symptom of a process that puts tremendous pressures on them to grow up perfectly, be accepted by others and still remain true to themselves.

When Girls Feel Fat 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. Through cases from her private practice, discussion groups with girls and women and classroom program feedback, Friedman draws on a wealth of useful experiences and coping techniques.

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 helpall parents guide their daughters into healthy, confident womanhood.