Study Links Weight Stigma and Cultural Attitudes to Well-Being

Ole Miss doctoral psychology student Ana Clara Vieira Zaidan and Joseph Wellman, associate professor of psychology, surveyed more than 1,800 people from Mexico, Portugal and the United States about how weight norms influenced their overall well-being.

Instead of looking at individual acts of discrimination against people who are overweight, their study sought to gauge how a culture's expectations can leave some overweight individuals feeling stigmatized.

Perceived discrimination was associated with psychological distress in all three countries, but women in each country were more likely to report perceived weight discrimination than men, the researchers reported in the International Journal of Obesity.

"The more that people perceive their culture to hold negative values of fat, the more that they experience this distress, and we believe that to be specifically because they're not meeting those cultural standards," Zaidan said. "The more we saw gender differences in the negative cultural value of fat in our study, the more we saw those gender differences also in the psychological distress outcomes."

If you believe your society's ideal citizen lives in a small body, then living in a larger body can make you feel like an outsider to your own culture, she said.

"We know that not conforming to norms tends to be a stressor for individuals, and that is associated with poor well-being outcomes," Zaidan said.

"We were thinking that in places where we see more ingrained gender norms, especially when it comes to body weight, we would see those differences more exacerbated in those countries. And that was true."

While many studies have focused on how members of a society view people who are overweight, few studies have asked this question of people who consider themselves to be over what their culture would consider to be an acceptable weight, the researchers said.

"Our question is different from, 'How do I think overweight people are treated in my culture?'" Wellman said. "The question is instead, 'How do I think about myself? How does my culture think about me?'"

Their findings suggest that more women in Mexico and Portugal view their culture as devaluing or holding stronger negative views about overweight individuals than men, whereas both men and women in the United States viewed the culture's attitude towards weight similarly.

"For men and women, even within their own culture, they perceive a different level of negativity toward being overweight, and that might be because of those social norms that we have for women versus men when it comes to upholding a certain body type," Zaidan said.

In each of the nations studied, however, the researchers found a significant association between perceived negative cultural value of fat and anxiety, depression or stress.

"While we can't say that's causal, we can see that there's an association and a correlation there," Wellman said.

Previous studies have found that weight stigma does not lead to losing weight, and in many cases can hinder people who are trying to do so.

"The more that our culture keeps on emphasizing this negativity – the more the media talks about it in this way, the more that individuals perceive their culture to view them this way – the more negativity individuals with higher weight are likely to experience and the more psychological distress and issues with emotion regulation they may experience," Zaidan said.

"The work that we've done, and a lot of the work that other people in the field have done, shows that the negativity toward being overweight itself is not helpful for anyone in any way."

Top: Ole Miss psychologists studied how a culture's expectations of body size relates to the well-being of individuals who are overweight. They found that in the United States, Portugal and Mexico, social pressure to conform to a culture's perception of health can leave some people feeling stigmatized. Graphic by Cole Russell/University Marketing and Communications