Study: Wanting to Lose Weight Leads to Unhappiness
Dr. Peter Muenning was one of the researchers behind a study released this week which found that one's health is adversely affected by wishing one was thinner. The study will be published in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The summary:
In a secondary analysis of the 2003 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data set, researchers looked at a sample of 150,577 [note: study claims 170,577 - Paul] participants to examine the impact of desired body weight, independent of actual BMI, on the number of physically and mentally unhealthy days subjects report over one month. After controlling for BMI and age, researchers found that men who wished to lose 1 percent, 10 percent and 20 percent of their body weight, respectively, reported 0.1, 0.9 and 2.7 more unhealthy days per month than those who were happy with their weight. Among women, the corresponding increase in numbers of reported unhealthy days was 0.1, 1.6 and 4.3. Additionally, the desire to lose weight was more predictive of unhealthy days among women than among men, and among whites than among blacks or Hispanics.
Dr. Muenning was kind enough to send me a copy of the APJH article, too.
The basic goal was to determine if the so-called "fat-related" diseases (hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol) were really caused by fat or if they were caused by stress. The study suggests that this is worth exploring in part because of the stigma around being fat: a referenced 1991 study found that 89% of people who used to be fat would rather be blind than fat again. There's also a bit of discussion on how the BMI is a poor indicator of health (yay!)
The participants in the 03 survey were a representative sample and the study excluded people with a BMI of under 23.
The 2003 BRFSS sample included 247027 participants who answered the question, “How much would you like to weigh?” Of these, 60588 participants had a BMI of less than 23kg/m2 and 15862 wished to gain weight, which left a total of 170577 participants in the final analysis.
The participants were asked about "unhealthy days", which accounted for both physical and mental health. From the results:
Approximately 66% of the US adults wanted to lose weight, and about 26% of the population were happy with their current weight. Approximately 74% of women and 58% of men wished to lose weight. Non-Hispanic Whites were more likely than were any other group to want to lose weight. However, a majority of all races and ethnicities reported wanting to lose weight. ...
Despite their higher mean age, persons who were happy with their weight experienced fewer physically unhealthy days (3.0 vs 3.7) and mentally unhealthy days (2.6 vs 3.6) compared with persons unhappy with their weight.
The data is pretty interesting. Like:
Among those who wished to lose 50% of their weight, however, non-Hispanic White men suffered approximately 8 excess mentally unhealthy days per month, and non-Hispanic White women suffered approximately 6 excess mentally unhealthy days per month....
That was pretty surprising and interesting to me. While whites were the group most affected by poor body image, in this subgroup it's men who felt worse. But overall, women were more affected than men. The results suggest that this might be due to social norms, which makes sense to me.
All in all the results are quite fascinating, and it's really encouraging to see research like this out there.
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Posted by paul on February 2, 2008
By what are they measung "healthy and unhealthy" days?
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"A diet counselor once told me that all overweight people are angry with their mothers and channel their frustrations into overeating. So I guess that means all thin people are happy, calm, and have resolved their Oedipal entanglements."
Oh, this is huge. HUGE. Definitely one for Big Fat Facts!
The study seems a bit like a tautology to me, at least with respect to mentally healthy days. If you're happy with your weight, aren't you more likely to be --- well, happy?
As for physically unhealthy days, that was interesting to me. Especially considering the 'numbers' floated in the face of every fat person --- how paying for our health insurance is going to bankrupt the country by 2010 or some such nonsense (by the way, last time I checked, *I* paid for my health insurance...and a pretty penny, too. If we are under some universal healthcare system, however, the protection of being able to plea we pay for our own private insurance, and sometimes more if we have a higher (bullshit) BMI. Then watch the regulations start to pour forth... ).
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Not only will I eat your baloney, I'll bust it, too.
Surely this is a no-brainer, as they say; people who are dissatisfied - for WHATEVER reason - are less likely to be content and happy? I doubt it takes a PhD and a huge grant to work that one out, and as for the attempts to quantify it, I'd have thought there would be too many variables to adequately control for, not to mention that as with so many epidemiological works they rely too heavily on the oft-discredited notion that corellation equals causation.
However as you say I'm glad that research into the psychological effects of the War on Fat People is even being carried out; it makes a refreshing change from the 'five pounds over the correct weight will result in 2.7384 days off your life' type crapola that the media so love.
And it throws up some very interesting points for consideration. I'm partly thinking of the fact that according to this, the vast majority of people want to lose weight, even though (medical definitions aside) visibly fat people remain in the minority, but more to the point, that 89% of ex-fatties would rather be blind than go back to being fat - which is absolutely, terrifyingly, screwed up. Even more so when you consider that statistically speaking, most of them WILL indeed end up fat again within 5 years.
This study makes perfect sense to me. The pressure to "diet" and be thin is overwhelming and society's expectations of the "perfect" body make achieving that end impossible.
I will never - I repeat - never be a size six. It. Just. Ain't. Happenin'. I will always be big, and spending my life trying to change the fundamental skeletal structure of my body would lead one to be unhappy and depressed because it's impossible and the standard of "health" (model-thin) is naturally found in less than 1% of the population.
You can be "fat" and you can be healthy.