Women who frequently engage in fat talk—talking negatively about their body size and shape—face greater appearance dissatisfaction and are more likely to create an internalized ultra-thin ideal of beauty than women who rarely or almost never talk. about the thickness.
In other words, the greater frequency of talking about a woman's fatness makes her even more dissatisfied with her appearance.
However, in a study by Rachel H. Salk of the University of Wisconsin and Renee Engeln-Maddox of Northwestern University, as many as half of the participants said they believed that talking about being fat actually improved how they felt about their appearance.
This is exactly what worries the researchers - to think that talking about fatness in a negative way represents a good strategy for dealing with appearance problems is misleading because it actually worsens the distortion of the perception of one's own appearance and body models and ideals.
Thin people also talk about fatness
The researchers found that as many as 90 percent of college-aged women engage in discussions about fatness in the manner defined in the first sentence of this text. "A woman's most common response to a fat story was to deny that her friend is fat," Salk and Engeln-Maddox said, "which often leads to a two-way conversation in which both healthy-weight friends deny that the other is fat while simultaneously saying for themselves that they are fat."
It is interesting that talking about fatness is not related to body mass index at all. In translation, what kind of shape, weight and size a woman has does not play a role at all in increasing the frequency of talking and complaining about her appearance in front of friends.
"These results serve as a reminder that for most women, when talking about fatness, it's not about fatness itself, but about feeling fat," the researchers added. The research article was published in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.
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