Those 'you're too fat' admonitions from family and taunting in school about weight in the pre-teenage years can lead to a girl being obese by her late teens, says a new UCLA study.
Girls told they were too heavy or fat at the age of 10 were 1.66 times more likely to be very heavy by the age of 19 and the more a girl is told she's fat the potential to be obese increases, states a study to be published in June in the journal JAMA Pediatrics and which has been published online.
"Simply being labeled as too fat has a measurable effect almost a decade later. We nearly fell off our chairs when we discovered this," said A. Janet Tomiyama, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of psychology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science.
"Even after we statistically removed the effects of their actual weight, their income, their race and when they reached puberty, the effect remained," she said in a release about the study.
The study included 1,213 African-American girls and 1,166 white girls residing in Northern California, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C. Of the two groups 58 percent had been told they were too fat at age 10.
"That means it's not just that heavier girls are called too fat and are still heavy years later; being labeled as too fat is creating an additional likelihood of being obese," states the study.
Just being called fat during those pre-teen years can lead to behaviors that lead to obesity later on in life, explains co-author Jeffrey Hunger, a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara.
"Being labeled as too fat may lead people to worry about personally experiencing the stigma and discrimination faced by overweight individuals, and recent research suggests that experiencing or anticipating weight stigma increases stress and can lead to overeating," he said.
