Book used as a weight-loss tool for girls

PHOENIX – Here’s a novel approach for motivating girls to lose weight: Have them read a novel with an overweight heroine.

That’s what Duke University scientists did, and it worked.

Researchers had 31 obese girls, ages 9 to 13, read “Lake Rescue,” a book in the Beacon Street Girls series by Annie Bryant. It’s about a group of kids who go rock climbing, hiking and canoeing on a class trip to the mountains. One character in the book is an overweight girl who is ridiculed by her classmates, but on this adventure, she learns to make healthy food choices and that physical activity is fun.

The researchers gave 33 obese girls a different novel called “Charlotte in Paris,” a book from the same series that didn’t have an overweight heroine. And 17 girls didn’t read either book. All were participating in the Duke Healthy Lifestyles Program, a comprehensive intervention for overweight children and adolescents.

At the end of 6 months, the girls who read Lake Rescue had experienced a .71 drop in their body mass index percentile (BMI), a number that incorporates, age, height and weight. Those girls who read the other novel had a .33 percentile drop in BMI and those who didn’t read a book had a .05 percentile increase. These differences were small but statistically significant.

Reading Lake Rescue was a way to teach girls about healthy eating and appropriate physical activity without preaching to them, says Alexa Russell, lead researcher on the Duke study. She is presenting her findings here this weekend at the annual meeting of the Obesity Society, an organization of weight-loss researchers and professionals.

The book features “a character they could relate to because she had self doubts at first, but she learns to accept herself and test her limits. That may be a better way to reach kids rather than sitting them down and telling they must do this or that,” she says.

Pediatrician Sarah Armstrong, director of Duke’s Healthy Lifestyle Program, says, “many of these children have had trouble slowing down their weight gain, but the girls who read this book were able to not only slow the gain but in some cases lose small amounts which was viewed by families as a very important first step.”