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Have you ever said, “I really shouldn’t eat that dessert”? Have you ever deflected a compliment about your appearance by saying, “Oh, I’m nowhere near as thin as you”? This casual banter can be more harmful than you think.
That’s the conclusion of arecent paper, “Is Fat Talking a Causal Risk Factor for Body Dissatisfaction?” “Fat talking” is an expression used to describe the very common dialogue among women (and some men) about how their bodies compare to others, why they shouldn’t eat what they’re eating, and how fearful they are of gaining weight. For this article, the authors looked at 23 years of studies that measured fat talking. They were trying to understand the link between fat talk and body dissatisfaction. Is it that people who are dissatisfied with their bodies are more likely to engage in fat talking? Or does engaging in fat talking increase the risk people will be dissatisfied with their body? In that case, if you decreased fat talking, you could decrease body dissatisfaction--a worthy goal, since body dissatisfaction is linked to problems such as eating disorders and low self-esteem.
So what did the results show? Fat talking was most strongly correlated with body dissatisfaction for adolescents and adults, as opposed to for younger children. There was some indication of a cause-and-effect relationship between fat talking and unhappiness with one’s own appearance--that fat talking precedes changes in body dissatisfaction. In the one study that directly assessed this, exposure to others’ fat talking led to an immediate increase in body dissatisfaction. In other words, the more you do things such as compare your eating and exercise habits to other people and the more you evaluate other people’s appearance, the more likely you are to be unhappy with your own body. Now, people might know this intuitively. But the article is still a good motivator to be mindful about fat talking and to be conscious of its possible impact on yourself and others.
When people are obese, they are often told by their doctor to diet and lose weight. But when treated for an eating disorder--whether it’s binge eating, anorexia or bulimia--patients are told not to diet. What is the overweight person who binge eats supposed to do? Abby Ellin writes about this conundrum and of the effort of professionals to incorporate knowledge about eating disorders into treatment for obesity.
Whether they are underweight or overweight, both groups tend to go back and forth between severely restricting their food intake and overeating or bingeing. The treatment for binge eating is geared towards avoiding dieting, not focusing on weight, and on regularizing eating in order to break the restriction-binge cycle. At the same time, a common approach to obesity has been the diet--focus on calories, portion sizes, weight loss. This makes for mixed messages for the overweight person who also binge eats. Recent changes in the upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders includes the diagnosis of Binge Eating Disorder and will hopefully allow for more common ground in the treatment of eating disorders and obesity, according to Ellin’s article.
So where is the common ground? For both underweight and overweight people with eating disorders, low self esteem and body dissatisfaction is common. Both place excessive emphasis on appearance and body size, says one expert quoted in the article. Both groups also suffer from weight stigma and bias. Shifting the focus away from weight and dieting is helpful treatment for both groups. “The focus should be on behaviors, not weight,” said Dianne Neumark-Sztainer in the article. She is a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. “We know from our research that talking about weight and diets is not effective, and for many leads to weight gain over time.”
On a societal level, it would help to reduce weight stigma and to lessen cultural pressure to be thin. On an individual level, it helps to resist checking the number on the scale and to focus on changing individual behaviors:eating regularly, learning to respond to feelings of hunger and fullness, and coming up with non-food-related strategies to cope with troubling emotions will help.
I’m in the middle of reading Salt Sugar Fat, a book by Michael Moss that reveals how manufacturers of processed foods develop and market the products they sell. It’s shocking to read about the effort that goes into creating foods that will be enticing on multiple sensory levels. One of marketers’ goals, Moss explains, is to turn people into what they call “heavy users” of their product, whether it’s a drink like Coke or Pepsi or a snack like Cheetos or Lay’s potato chips. The reason? It’s cheaper for marketers to get heavy users to buy more of a product than it is to try and find many more occasional users.
In this interview posted on The Atlantic's website, Moss describes in detail the allure of the potato chip: the intial flavor burst of salt you taste, the “mouthfeel” of the fat, the sweetness that gets released when you bite it, the crunch, the meltiness in your mouth. Just reading his description makes you want to eat some chips. The experience is seductive, and it’s scientifically designed to draw you in and keep you eating without registering how much you consume.
As you read Salt Sugar Fat, you get a sense of what you, the individual eater, are up against when you want to enjoy food but eat healthfully and moderately. A huge industry is devoted to tempting you into eating processed foods -- not just to eat them, but to eat a lot of them, and to eat them mindlessly. Reading about it makes me not only more mindful about trying to fight this manipulation, but also more forgiving of myself and others when the fight is difficult.
A recent advertisement for the Dove brand of personal care products is sending mixed messages. The ad, centering around a three-minute video, documents an FBI-trained sketch artist making portraits of several different women he cannot see. He draws each subject -- none of whom, apparently, are models -- twice. One portrait is based on that woman’s description of herself, and the other is based on another person’s description of that same woman.
The result is striking. Drawings based on each woman’s description of herself always look worse than ones based on another person’s description. The ad highlights the way that women tend to see themselves, and then describe themselves, in terms of their physical flaws and what they don’t like about themselves. In this way, the video offers an empowering message to women, explicitly stated onscreen at the ad’s close: “You are more beautiful than you think.”
Despite this explicit encouragement, the ad has been criticized by some eating disorder professionals and other online commenters. They point out that though the women in the ad -- like other women in Dove’s Real Beauty campaign -- don’t appear to be fashion models, they are, objectively speaking, thin and attractive nonetheless. Absent from the ad are women with a face or body not considered typically attractive; perhaps the relatively unflattering portraits inspired by their self-descriptions would simply be an undistorted reflection of their appearance. What is being communicated to these women? Critics make a strong case that this ad promoting “real beauty” is simply another message that it’s fine to be happy with your body as long as it falls within a particular narrow range of acceptable weight or shape. The ad also accepts as a given that being looked at is intrinsic to a woman’s existence. Of course, though, an ad focused on what women’s bodies can do, rather than how they look, probably wouldn’t sell much soap.
Trying to learn from past actions is a challenging task for many people. How can you reflect on something you have done and think about how you could do it differently without devolving into destructive self-criticism? In Top Dog, a book about the science of winning and losing, authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman address this question.
It turns out there is a term for these what-if thoughts--counterfactuals, called so because the behavior involves looking at something that did not actually happen. According to research at the University of Illinois, 3% of humans’ thoughts are directed at thinking about things that almost happened or could have happened. Another 6% is spent contrasting the present against the past, or the present against the future. Another 3% is devoted to comparing ourselves to others and to self-evaluation, either negative or positive.
I’ll take the precision of these numbers with a grain of salt, but they do suggest that a significant portion of some people’s thoughts is spent thinking about “coulda, woulda, shoulda” as well as comparing oneself to others. So the question arises: How can you use these thoughts in a constructive way? If all you do is ruminate about what you should have done, you’ll never get anywhere. At the same time, if you refuse to reflect on your past behavior, you’ll never learn and change.
The answer is found in researchers’ distinction between additive and subtractive counterfactuals. A subtractive counterfactual is pure regret, while an additive counterfactual involves looking back but at the same time generating some constructive ideas for the future. Researchers who have studied counterfactuals with sales pitches, negotiations and athletic performances have found that those who look back with additive counterfactuals tend to improve with practice, while performance declines for those who look back with subtractive counterfactuals. This makes intuitive sense, as with an additive counterfactual, you are including a thought about something you can do to improve your performance.
What’s the implication of this research for you? When you start thinking about the past, notice how you’re doing it. If it’s all regret without any actionable ideas, you are ruminating and you should try to stop or to redirect your thoughts. If your counterfactuals are additive, keep up the good work.
Some people thrive under pressure; others buckle. What accounts for the difference? In this week’s New York Times Magazine, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write about differences in the ways that kids cope with stress, but the research has something for adults too.
They describe research that identifies variants of a gene known as COMT that distinguishes between “warriors,” who cope well with stress and “worriers,” who don’t. Kids with the “worrier” version of the gene do better with cognitive tasks under low pressure, but in high pressure situations, they don’t do as well. In contrast, kids with the “warrior” version do not perform as well on workaday tasks, but then will rally when the pressure is on.
One way of thinking about these results is to understand that the children are interpreting a particular situation as either a threat or a challenge. “Worriers” are more likely to interpret the physical symptoms that they feel in a high-stakes situation to mean that they are in a threatening situation, and that response ends up being detrimental to their performance. A “warrior,” on the other hand, might experience the same symptoms and view the experience as a challenge that he or she can rise to.
All is not lost for the worrier, though. Practice and experience can erase the difference. In a study with Air Force pilots, inexperienced warriors performed better than inexperienced worriers. But among more experienced pilots, the worriers outperformed the warriors. Acclimating to stressful situations through practice, in other words, can help with performance. This repetition appears to help worriers relabel the scary situation into a challenging one.
Most people who have taken the SAT or a similar standardized test will have an idea of whether they fall on the warrior or worrier end of the spectrum. If you’re a warrior, lucky you. If you’re a worrier, don’t avoid stress; instead, try to experience it in manageable doses. Try to learn ways of reframing anxious situations and reminding yourself that the anxiety you feel may help you be more focused and alert and better able to meet a challenge.
