Feeling Fat May Make You Fat, Study Suggests

More excusinators working overtime.

They're everywhere -- in magazines, on the Internet, on television -- people with super-thin bodies who are presented as having the ideal body form. But despite the increasing pressure to be thin, more and more of us are overweight. Now, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have found that normal weight teens who perceive themselves as fat are more likely to grow up to be fat.

"Perceiving themselves as fat even though they are not may actually cause normal weight children to become overweight as adults," says Koenraad Cuypers, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Cuypers and his colleagues at the Department of Public Health and General Practice in NTNU's Faculty of Medicine have looked at data from the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study (HUNT) to examine the obesity problem from a new angle: Theirs is the first study to look at the relationship between perceived weights and actual weights in a longitudinal study of teenagers and young adults.

A perpetual struggle for the ideal body

There are likely many different, and complex, reasons that explain why thinking you are fat as a teen- even if you are not -- may lead you to become fat when you are grown.

One explanation may be related to psychosocial stress, which can be associated with gaining weight around the waist. Under this scenario, the psychosocial stress related to having (or not having) an ideal body type, along with the perception of oneself as overweight, can result in weight gain.

Just like thinking you are smart makes you smart.

More evidence that this is bulls**t?

Re: this research - thinking it is meaningful does not make it meaningful.