Overweight? Look again

Teenage girls see pounds that aren't really there

Adolescent girls tend to see themselves as heavier than they really are, a perception that can lead to a variety of unhealthy behaviors, according to a College of Health and Nursing Sciences researcher.

P. Michael Peterson, associate professor of health, nutrition and exercise sciences, has conducted his research among 215 high school students. He says he has found unhealthy perceptions of body image and a resulting dissatisfaction with their bodies, particularly among teenage girls.

The high school girls in the study, on average, see themselves as 11 pounds over their ideal body weight, while boys perceive their current and ideal body images as almost the same.

"The adolescent infatuation with the cultural icon of thinness has contributed to an array of unhealthy behaviors," Peterson says, adding that such behaviors include poor eating patterns, preoccupation with food and self, extreme dieting, low self-esteem, drug and alcohol abuse and general physical and mental ill health.

Understanding how adolescents perceive their bodies can have practical consequences by enabling health professionals to address questions of body dissatisfaction and thus help young people avoid poor health behavior and reduce the risk of associated illnesses, he says.

Peterson, whose research was published last year in the American Journal of Health Behavior, tested the high school students at two different times by showing them a range of silhouettes based on body mass index, a standard measure of body shape that relates height to weight.

For convenience, he translated the body mass index figures into pounds and then adjusted weights to standard heights of 5 feet, 5 inches for a girl and 6 feet for a boy. He asked the students to do three things: pick the silhouette that most closely matched their perception of their current appearance; select the silhouette that represented their ideal body image; and then list their actual current weight and height.

Peterson found that, on average, the girls in the study perceived themselves as heavier than they really were and that they wanted to be thinner.

The girls saw themselves as weighing an average 141 pounds (assuming a height of 5 feet, 5 inches), more than their self-reported actual average weight of 133 pounds and far more than their desired weight of 130 pounds. While they were actually only 3 pounds heavier than their ideal weight, they perceived themselves as a much heavier 11 pounds above that ideal, Peterson says.

Among the boys, the study revealed that they perceived themselves as heavier than they were but that they also wanted to be heavier.

Peterson says the boys actually weighed an average of 172 pounds but perceived themselves, on average, as weighing 185 pounds. That perception was very close to their desired weight of 182 pounds, more than they weighed in reality but much closer to their ideal, he says.

"Males' current and ideal body image perceptions were almost identical," Peterson says. "In contrast, females tended to overestimate their body size. As a result, they pursue an ideal that's much slimmer than their perceived current one and so feel dissatisfied."

Possible reasons for the differences between the sexes are complex and difficult to pinpoint, he says.

"There isn't an easy answer," Peterson says. "Girls are socialized to see themselves in a certain way. The research literature talks about having less curves being more desirable and that you gain power in society by having a skinnier image. A lot of these things affect girls' perceptions of themselves."

He says the study used a set of test images that were much more sophisticated than those used in previous surveys, giving the teenage subjects a more finely graded set of choices and giving the researchers a way to evaluate the responses more accurately. Instead of viewing the usual number of seven to 12 silhouettes designed strictly according to size, Peterson's research subjects were able to choose among 27 images. The silhouettes were designed by the Canadian Dietetic Association.

The study was supported by a grant from the Jesse Ball du Pont Foundation and the American Cancer Society.

--Neil Thomas, AS '76