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Thinking You Are Fat is Worse Than Being Fat
Teenagers who think they are fat have a lower quality of life than adolescents who really are obese, a new survey reveals.
German researchers polled almost 7000 boys and girls aged between 11 and 17 years old. They were weighed, but were also asked about their own self-assessment of their weight, ranging from "far too thin" to "far too fat." In addition, they all completed a questionnaire about quality of life.
The scientists found that around three quarters of adolescents are of normal weight, with 18% being overweight and 7% underweight – but almost 55% of girls, and 36% of boys, think that they are "too fat."
And they found that if teenagers think they are too fat, they forfeit a lot of their quality of life, whatever their actual weight – particularly among girls. On the other hand, if they consider their weight "just right," their quality of life is the same as if they were of normal weight, even if this is not true.
The researchers say that the proportion of teenagers who think they are overweight has been increasing more rapidly in recent years than the proportion of those who really are overweight.
Researcher Johannes Hebebrand points out that adolescents are exposed to considerable social pressure to be thin. He thinks that it is remarkable that as many as 40% of the adolescents thought that their weight was right, in spite of the ideal of slimness and the stigma of being overweight.
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Deanne Jade, founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders, says that although eating disorders are never caused by just one thing, the media does have a role to play.
“It’s very persuasive and the media is in our life all the time, probably from the moment we get up to the moment we go to bed,” she says. “And the media does give us images of how we have to be in order to be attractive to ourselves and other people.”
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