Controversial fitness star Ashy Bines has been slammed by parents online after releasing a child-focused fitness programme, titled Ashy and Friends.
Experts have claimed the new programme, created for ‘1-6-year-olds’ could give children body image issues and anxiety later in life.
Pitched as a tool for teaching children about healthy eating, exercise and nutrition, but it has since been shut down by critics as dangerous.
The 29-year-old fitness star, who is a mother-of-one, launched the program for children between 12-months and 6 years partly to target child obesity.
‘Our society is becoming less active, less healthy and more overweight every year,’ Bines wrote on the Ashy and Friends site. ‘More than ever it is critical to inspire a love of health and fitness in our children.’
Christine Morgan, CEO of The Butterfly Foundation, expressed serious concern about children as young as 12 months being exposed to dieting and weight loss messages.
She told Kidspot that messages around health and nutrition should be targeted to parents and not to children.
‘I’m concerned about messaging of dieting that has behind it ‘lose weight, lose weight, lose weight,’ she said.
‘People call it health management or healthy eating but the messaging behind it is ‘don’t let yourself put on weight’. So there’s an immediate subjectivity that if someone puts on weight that’s bad and if they lose weight, that’s good.’
She adds, ‘Now, when you’re a little person, you think in black and white. You don’t think in shades of grey. You’re starting to buy into a whole message that fat is bad and skinny is good and that’s absolutely problematic because you can’t interpret it at that age.
‘I would have thought at a young age, for kids, food is about energy in order for them to live their lives – to fuel their little bodies and to fuel their growth. They have got no capacity to understand macro-nutrients or micro-nutrients. That’s what parents are there for and for parents to make healthy food choices for them and for parents to encourage them to play outside for healthy exercise. That’s where it should start and stop when it comes to any concept of food or diet or exercise or body shape and size.’
Bines has not yet responded to the negative backlash.
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