Sonja Bakker has had enough
Sonja Bakker is taking a year off after all the commotion surrounding plagiarism on her Instagram page. It turns out that not all the recipes in her cookbooks were her own either. Diet guru Sonja is emotionally exhausted by the whole affair and needs time for herself, she tells RTL Boulevard.
Breakfast cakes, drinkable yogurt and Liga biscuits: thanks to Sonja Bakker’s diet books, they were flying off the shelves. The weight consultant from North Holland became hugely popular around the turn of the century thanks to her weight-loss method and the books she published about it. And people are still following the Sonja Bakker diet in droves. Sonja published recipes and weight-loss tips via her website and Instagram page.
Growing concerns
Her weight-loss method is not without controversy. The Netherlands Nutrition Centre, for example, warns that her menus prescribe much less bread, fruit and dairy than is good for you. And the weight-loss method for children also did not align with what the Netherlands Nutrition Centre recommends as healthy nutritional advice for growing children.
Not giving a damn about plagiarism
Last month it became clear that recipes Sonja posted on her Instagram were copied directly from food bloggers, including the photos and without attribution. This prompted Instagram to remove Sonja’s account immediately. According to Sonja, the plagiarism was the work of one of her employees, and because of working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, she had been unable to properly supervise her team’s work. To top it all off, recipes from her latest book also turned out to be one-to-one copies of recipes from Allerhande and other food bloggers.
Cut and paste
That is not the only controversy surrounding Sonja. At the very start of her career, she was accused of plagiarism by Bea Pols, a classmate from the weight consultant training course. Bea says that Sonja cut and pasted entire chapters of her books from motivational texts Bea had written for her clients. The court ruled that although the texts were highly similar, this might also be because both women were quoting from the same course material.
On-again, off-again
It has all become too much for Sonja. She received a lot of negative reactions to the plagiarism allegations, including death threats. Anyone who follows the gossip magazines even a little knows that it has not been an easy time for Sonja in any case. Sales of her cookbooks are no longer what they used to be, and she is in an energy-draining on-again, off-again relationship with someone named Barry. Sonja is taking a time-out: she has taken her website offline and told Nu.nl that she will personally help people lose weight directly, rather than through email and books.
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Source: Nu.nl, RTL Boulevard
