Does Feeling Fat Make You Fat?

It’s easy to spot ads on television and in magazines featuring extremely thin people portraying the ideal body.

Despite this pressure to be skinny, more people in the United States are overweight than only a few years ago. Currently 2 out of every 3 people in America is either obese or overweight.

Interestingly, a new study released this month finds that teenagers of normal weight who believe they are fat are more likely to grow up to be overweight.

Koenraad Cuypers and colleagues at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology looked at data from the HUNT (Nord-Trondelag Health Study) to look at obesity with a completely new approach.

This is the first real study to look at the link between perceived weight and actual weight in regards to teenagers and young adults.

There are many reasons a person may believe they are fat even if they are a normal weight, or underweight, which in turn leads to fatness in adulthood.

One reason for teenagers may be psychosocial stress, which has already been linked to gaining weight.

Some teenagers who believe they are fat may also start skipping meals, which has also been linked to obesity and weight problems.

Following an unsustainable diet can also cause weight problems because the body works to get back to its pre-diet weight.

Researchers in this study wanted to see if exercise and activity could make a difference in this link between actual obesity and perceived obesity.

They found that exercise does not compensate for the effect of believing you are overweight in your teenage years.

The HUNT1 study, mentioned above, ran from 1995 to 1997 and included almost 12,000 male and female teenagers of normal weight.

In the HUNT3 study, these same participants were involved in a follow-up study from 2006 to 2008, at which point they ranged in age from 24 to 30.

About 50% of the participants were still a normal weight as an adult, although researchers found a clear difference between these participants and the overweight.

59% of the females who believed they were fat as a teenager went on to become overweight as an adult.

This was measured using BMI. When wait circumference was used to measure their level of obesity, the number jumped to 78%.

Only 31% of teenage girls who did not believe they were fat went on to become overweight using the BMI method. This number also increased using waist circumference to 55%.

Overall, the teens who felt they were fat in the original HUNT1 study had an 0.88 higher BMI on average than those teens who did not feel this way.

They also had an average of 3.46cm larger waists using the waist circumference method.

While this is the first study to look at teenagers and follow-up in adulthood, other studies involving only normal weight adults of both sexes also showed a weight increase over time in those who believed they were too heavy.

Additionally, this study found that girls of normal weight were more likely to feel they were overweight than boys. 22% of the girls and only 9% of the boys felt they were too heavy in the HUNT1 study.

This may be explained by media influences, as girls feel more pressure to be thin and have a perfect body.

According to Cuypers, society and school systems must address this relationship between obesity and perception and the media must avoid emphasizing skinny models as ideal, because it is far from it.