I think we can all agree that body dissatisfaction is not a good thing, as it frequently leads to disordered eating, such as in anorexia nervosa. On the flip side, however, is the risk that people will be so comfortable with their bodies that they start viewing overweight and obesity as “normal.” As more and more people get heavier, the statistically “normal” weight goes up, too, but that is not the same as the healthy “normal.”
The BBC reports today that Britons are doing a worse job of identifying themselves as overweight or obese. According to British researchers, 81 percent of Britons in the overweight and obese ranges of BMI (more than 25) correctly identified themselves as overweight and obese in 1990, but only 75 percent did so in 2007.
The same study showed that women in the healthy range of weight were less likely in 2007 than in 1990 to categorize themselves incorrectly as overweight. The implication is that we should be seeing a lot less anorexia. My casual observations of the student population here in California, where anorexia was a huge problem in the 1990s, is that anorexia is becoming much more unusual, but I have not seen data to date supporting this observation. Researchers?
What I do see is that very large women are wearing clothing styles that ten years ago would be restricted to those who were very slim. This suggests that body dissatisfaction must be way down. It would be interesting to take a closer look at this trend. Ben-Tovim and Walker (1991) developed a Body Attitudes Questionnaire that would be perfect for this [1].
I just put “body dissatisfaction” into Google, and it returned over 350,000 pages. Looking at the first few pages, all I saw were concerns about eating disorders, nothing about overweight and obesity or whether rates of body dissatisfaction are going down.
I’m not saying that heavy people should hate their bodies, but how about some common sense? Being heavy, and I’ve certainly been there, is not a situation that should lead to complacency. This is health, not keeping up with Angelina Jolie. Just as it’s not okay for a thin woman to believe she’s overweight, it’s not positive for heavy people to believe they’re “normal” in weight. Otherwise, where is the incentive for change?
1. Ben-Tovim, D.I., & Walker, M.K. (1991). The development of the Ben-Tovim Walker Body Attitudes Questionnaire (BAQ), a new measure of women’s attitudes towards their own bodies. Psychological Medicine, 21(3), 775-784.
