Customer Reviews

GirlForce

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book divides girls into three distinct groups, Air, Fire and Earth, and though the author acknowledges that most will fit into more than one category in different aspects of their personality and body type, it is difficult to figure out exactly which advice to follow if you are in this position. The advice is often contradictory among types, so if you fit into more than one type, it can be confusing at times trying to pick and choose the appropriate tips. The book's main message of loving yourself just the way you are and valuing individuality is admirable, but at the same time, it categorizes you into these "body types."

Most of the advice fits with what most experts believe about exercise, nutrition, and general health. It is presented in a very accessible way, in an attractive and lively format that targets its audience. The three girls that are pictured throughout the book are meant to represent each of the three body types, Air, Fire and Earth, but there isn't much variation among them. The "Earth" girls are supposed to be more full-figured, but the Earth girl pictured is only slightly heavier than the other two girls, who are both very slim. The Earth girl looks like she's about a size eight (though I suppose to some people, this would be considered large--it's all relative). This lack of variation among these three conventionally attractive models doesn't fit with the book's message of accepting yourself just the way you are, and valuing individuality.

In keeping with its focus on Ayurveda, the ancient medical system of India, the book provides introductions to yoga and meditation as ways to promote health and combat stress. These are presented in an easy to follow format, and their benefits to teen girls are clearly described. The Ayurveda approach is not going to be universally appealing, but to the right person, it could really resonate and encourage improved health practices. The book is billed as "A Girl's Guide to the Body and Soul," and does stress the mind-body connection.

Though most advice does fit with current Western medical research and is actually very much common sense, some does not. In the chapter on nutrition, there is good general "eat right" guidelines, such as avoiding unhealthy fad diets, processed food and junk food, but the focus is on eating a certain way based on your body type, including healthy foods to be avoided. These "nutritional balancing guidelines" for each body type advise that you avoid not only unhealthy foods, but also healthy foods, for example, "cold," "raw," "low fat," and "low cal." These are all supposed to "imbalance" Air types, though this concept is rather vague to me as the reader. The book advises you eat "less" of these "imbalancing" foods, not omit them entirely, but lots of very healthy foods are listed in the "less" category, and these are foods I'd want my kids to eat as much as they like, such as spinach, apples, and carrots.

The exercise chapter also contains some solid, common-sense advice in keeping with most experts, but advises different approaches based on body type. Air types are supposed to exercise lightly, Fire moderately, and Earth heavily. A varied workout, where some days are light, some moderate and some heavy, is not discussed, though the author does advocate the standard 30 minutes, five times per week exercise guidelines with flexibility in fitting this into each individual's schedule.

The beauty chapter contains many helpful tips, and refreshingly focuses on the beauty that you have inside, but as one other reviewer noted, the advice on "popping zits" is ill-advised. As the daughter of a dermatologist, I cringed when I read this advice. A pimple should never be popped; this will prolong it and potentially lead to acne scars. Also given my upbringing, I was disappointed to see that sun protection is only advocated for the Fire types, who tend to have fair skin. Even if your skin is not fair, sun protection is important to avoid skin cancer as well as premature aging of the skin. Natural homemade beauty preparations are discussed, and the author is big on essential oils (which are also used for self-massage, a method of stress relief).

The fashion chapter has some good advice, but leans more towards older teens in my opinion. For example, the Fire girl "knows how to put together a sexy outfit for partying." My daughter's twelve years old, and I don't relish the idea of her putting together a sexy partying outfit! Though this is in keeping with the early growing up that many pre-teens seem to do these days. Along these lines, there is advice in the back of the book, the Q and A chapter, which answers "uncomfortable" questions. Here's what the author has to say about sex: "It's good common sense to hang back (even if all your friends are having sex) until you feel it's cool for you to engage in a loving partnership." Every parent needs to make their own choices on how to approach this topic with their child, and every parent has their own value system and beliefs to impart. I include this quote so that potential readers will be aware that this is the sort of advice being dispensed in this very sensitive area.

The book includes three quizzes, a popular teen magazine feature where girls learn what body type they are, how stressed out they are, and how much self-esteem they have. My daughter loves taking these types of quizzes, as do her friends. Overall, I am pleased with the format of this book, and agree with most of its advice, but I have reservations about using it with my twelve year old due to the sometimes mature content (for my daughter specifically, that is) and the advice that does not fit with my beliefs.

This book was fun to read. It starts out right away with the body type quiz. No lenghty blah blah. I liked that. After you did the quiz and determined whether you are an air, fire, or earth girl, you can go on and read the specific sections discussing that body type. The section "Eat right for your body type" lists foods that work best with your body type and help balance it. Then, there are exercise guidelines for each body type with lists of exercises that work best for your type. The book also includes a group of five yoga poses that are beneficial for your body type. Each body type also has a section on beauty tips, style tips, and how to control and decrease stress. Chapter 7 includes a self-esteem quiz and follows up with tips on how to increase your self-esteem dependend on your personality type. After a chapter about relationships, again tailored for each body type, is a chapter on how to put it all together, giving example routines for what a typical day for each body type could look like.
Overall, the book is written in a very entertaining, motivating tone. The author stresses how important it is to first of all love and accept yourself as you are. She wants the reader to understand that each person is beautiful, unique, and different in their own way, and why that's a good thing. The author gives advice on how to improve your life without preaching. She merely makes some good suggestions, but it is up to the reader to incorporate these suggestions into their daily life. Whether or not you believe in Ayurverda, the advice in the book basically comes down to this: Eat healthy, exercise, take care of your body and mind, and you will feel good about yourself, which in turn makes you attractive to other people.
There are only two little problems with this book, but they are really minor things. The author loves to use the word "GirlForce" whenever she talks about the positive spirit within each of us. The word is also printed in bold letters, and after reading the book for a while, it became a little annoying. Also, the binding of the book isn't the greatest. The book basically fell apart after reading it for two days. Other than that, it's a fun little book.

Girlforce: A Girl's Guide to the Body and Soul by Nikki Goldstein is an introduction to ayurvedic teachings, designed for and to appeal to young girls. The pages are colorful, with a lot of photographs of girls smiling, laughing, and enjoying life. It is full of powerful and positive advice, from keeping a journal to exercising. Everything from dietary suggestions to yoga poses to make-up choices are addressed.

I'm not quite sure how old the reader is supposed to be. Judging by the images, I would have guessed high school age but at the end of the book a sort of question and answer section suggests that the target audience is middle school or very earl adolescence. This sort of ambiguity was confusing to me, as is Goldstein's choice not to use precise ayurvedic terms. To say that the girls reading this book are a certain body type is fine but it would be more beneficial to have at least introduced the dosha terms (vata, pitta, kapha) so that the reader could, when she gets older, continue growing in the ideas and teachings of ayurveda. While she goes to the trouble of explaining that yoga means "union" and that the different yoga postures are called "asanas," I couldn't find any reference to doshas anywhere.

However, there is a website that is clearly designed to further market the book. I think it would be a wonderful idea for the author to explain the different types that she describes (air, fire, earth) in relationship to the traditional doshas.

Over all, this is a good resource and likely to appeal to its target audience. I especially appreciated the self-massage and dietary suggestions. Goldstein repeatedly encourages the reader to be balanced in all things. When the dietary choices are mentioned, she never tells the reader to exclude anything but to consider consuming certain foods in moderation. There are a few sections that offer resources to help those young girls whose personal lives may be atypical.

This is a fun resource that allows young girls new to ayurveda to learn without feeling threatened or encouraged to do anything foolish. I would have liked to see some images of girls who were not all super slender and commend the publishers for at least including a rainbow of races. My greatest complaint is that traditional terminology is rarely used which, as a teenager, I would have found insulting and why I often preferred to read books that are less pretty and more informative. I hope that Goldstein will create a home for the traditional terminology somewhere on her website and that the publishers will be less size-ist in the future when they are choosing models for their books.

GirlForce was an outlook on the body types, mental types and dietary types that define the female race.

I myself found that I am a fire type and using the author's ideas in diet, physical appearance and mind set for the fire type, I feel more relaxed and somehow renewed.

I found the book to be inspiring and energetic sometimes, but sometimes dull and parts of the book I had to struggle to get through. mmyf

Embracing yourself is something for everybody, not just girls. So if you want to live with a girl force attitude, read this book.

Unfortunatley us parents try to make human attempts to help our children in their growth to adulthood. We all have that urge to make it better for them, and give them what they need to be the best they can be. However, this book will only discourage and make your daughter wonder if she is ever going to achieve anything at all. My child had a hard time with the parts that told her according to her supposed body type meant she had to give up certain foods & or lifestyles. It was very depressing to see my child struggle with this. No book should make your child think less of themselves. SO I do not recommend this for any daughter.

There are some books that are worthless just by virtue of being complete and utter drivel. There are other books that are worthless by virtue of using possibly-sound advice to promote their complete and utter drivel. GirlForce is one of the latter.

I would imagine in this day and age, when India very likely has the best educational system in south or east Asia, the popularity of Ayurveda in the western countries where so many Indian doctors go to work has to be something of a national shame. For the Choprawoo crowd and their masters in the Transcendental Meditation movement, this is nothing more than an indoctrinational tool meant to play off American girls' worries and fears about forging their way in a society infested with both overt and subtle sexism, as well as a wideranging backlash by male chauvinist pigs against the last forty years of feminist advances. Eastern thought has long provided a refuge for the intellectually lost in the face of Western patriarchy; what's forgotten, though, is that Eastern woo is just as much garbage as the Western cultural prejudices seekers try to escape from.

On a slightly different note, whenever I see an allegedly non-fiction book without an index, that almost always pegs my propaganda meter -- does the writer or the publisher have something to hide that they can't be bothered to make their allegedly-important writing fully accessible to a casual browser? GirlForce has no index and a bare-bones table of contents. For a book of this genre and age group, that's completely and utterly unacceptable.

Forget whether there's any sound advice in this book; it's mixed in so thoroughly with Ayurveda pseudoscience that you're far better off buying your daughter something else that isn't a religious tract. Try The Guide to Getting It On, for example, for sex ed, one of Danica McKellar's math books for "math is hard" syndrome, or some of the American Girl teenager books for social matters; alongside that, teach your daughter to be a good skeptical thinker with the likes of Carl Sagan, Martin Gardner, and James Randi, and a good feminist with books by people like Jessica Valenti. Remember, a spoonful of sewage in a bottle of wine just makes a bottle of sewage.

As a dad, I was very skeptical of this book, thinking it would be another silly system of wannabe yoga or new age, air-filled mysticism. But after seeing how my daughter interacted with this book (and how it sparked conversations about self-concept, appearance vs. being comfortable with one's body, and how we use type-models as a springboard for understanding who we are), I appreciate Nikki Goldstein's attempt to provide a positive book for girl's empowering themselves (as cliché and camp as "empowerment" might sound now). I also appreciate his as a teacher who can see his students (my students are at-risk students who have had their self-esteem either crushed or have hurt it themselves through repetitively making bad decisions) using this as a self-awareness exercise. Her book is based on a philosophy of India (that's been around for centuries, okay, it's not exactly anything new), Ayurvedic medicine. What's new is that Goldstein does for philosophy and spirituality (as dumb as this might sound) what Danica McKellar does for mathematics in Math Doesn't Suck: she makes it understandable, cool, and puts celebrating the self, exercising, making healthy food choices, beauty tips, etc., in a context that is both worthy and exciting for preteens and teens. (This might be neat for younger girls who want to see what their older sisters are into, but I don't see this working for college age young women, necessarily. But I'm a nearly-40 dad who likes hunting, hot chips - yeah, "chips" NOT "chicks," okay, and Larry the Cable Guy; what do I know?) This is the first self-help book I would recommend for a teen audience.

Being that this book is for teenaged girls, I didn't think I'd get terribly much out of it and I'd loan it to our neighbor's daughter who is 14. I took the quiz that comes at the very beginning to determine my element, which ended up being "Earth." The descriptions for my element type were SPOT ON descriptions of myself both as a teenager and even in adulthood! The advice and recommendations for my type would have been most helpful had I known about them earlier on in adolescence. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. It reads much like a teen magazine would: it's brightly colored with lots of pictures of teen girls with various body types and "looks."

My neighbor and her daughter also took the quiz and they were "air" and "fire" respectively. Just as it was spot on with me, the descriptions for them were right on target. They really enjoyed the quiz, descriptions, and recommendations as much as I did. It's one of those types of quizes that you can read out loud to each other, much like you would in a teen magazine. I felt so young again and had fun reading it with them!

I particularly enjoyed the advice on what to eat and what yoga poses suit your element type the best. Everything made total sense and I'm glad a book like this exists. I will certainly keep this book for when my two younger daughters become teenagers as I'm sure it will help me with them as it will help them know themselves better.

My only complaint about this book is that the binding came undone during the first hour of use and I did not break the spine or bend the pages backwards. So the book's contents and its cover are two separate pieces, which is a shame.

I am all for creating resources for young teen girls to have positive BELIEVING MIRRORS that they are more than a pretty face (well, what current society claims is a pretty face) or a tiny body (again with social programming of standards). Any resource that peeks their interest to think or ponder more deeply below surfaces is on the more healthy track. Parts of this book border on telling a young girl to follow "this" rather than about affirming her intuitions.

GirlForce by Nikki Goldstein embraces the concept of Ayurveda, an Indian medical system that's about 5000 years old. Ayurveda states that girls (well, people, but as you can see from the title the book focuses on girls) can basically be broken down into three categories based on their body and mental types: Air, Fire, and Earth.

After an explanation of Ayurveda and GirlForce (our "fuel" to get through life), we take a quiz to find out which type we are. Once this is taken and our Body Type is identified, we are free to use the book as a sort of guide to living our lives in a healthy, stimulating way.

Nikki Goldstein offers advice on what foods, exercises, yoga poses, beauty products, clothes, and accessories best suit each Body Type. She also discusses stress, self esteem, and personality traits. At several periods she says that there is no need to follow your Body Type instructions exactly- if you want to mix and match, and add a few of your own things too, that's fine as well.

Usually I'm not a fan of anything that confines people to categories, but GirlForce is so flexible and fun that I didn't mind it at all! The concept of Ayurveda was intriguing and I'm eager to try out some of the systems that it promoted.

Although GirlForce could be conceived as corny or cheesy, once you get past that aspect, it's very enjoyable! This is a great read for teenage girls.