It's no surprise that overweight women have issues with their body image. But you might be surprised to hear that even thin women -- ones with healthy body images -- still break out in a cold sweat when they think they might be gaining weight. And nearly all women wonder sometimes: "Am I fat?" Is it any wonder we have so many eating disorders in our society?
The long-term goal of research at Brigham Young University is to eventually find a biological marker to help women with eating disorders. But on its own, the study shows what any woman might tell you: Women are concerned about their body shape.
The study showed that thin women who were shown a picture of a fat woman and told to imagine themselves looking like the image showed distress on a brain scan.
"This is a game -- it's not even a picture of them. Yet these women are having this personal response. It hurts their feelings, is what this brain region shows," said Mark Allen, a neuroscientist at BYU.
Men showed no such response. Allen summed up their reaction this way: "There's a picture of a fat guy. So what?"
That may be because men's body images are more tied to being muscular, not thin, or because men don't define themselves by their bodies, the study notes.
Allen, BYU psychology professor Diane Spangler and graduate student Tyler Owens showed computer-generated images to 10 women and nine men, ages 18 to 30. The participants had normal weights and scored "very low" on a diagnostic test that measures body image problems.
That's why it was surprising -- to Allen -- that the pictures of the overweight people activated the women's medial prefontal cortex, the region of the brain that processes identity and self-reflection, as seen in a functional MRI. The activation wasn't as extreme as seen in bulimics, whose brains were activated in ways that suggested they were disturbed, Allen said. Allen said the women without eating disorders had answered no to the following type of questions: Are you concerned with gaining weight? Do you feel bad when you gain weight? "They're answering no to all these questions but their brain is saying, 'Yeah, it kind of bugs me.' Their brain is saying, 'I don't want to get fat.'" "Maybe subconsciously they have some bit of pathology, something unhealthy in the way they process information about themselves and body weight," he said. The study is being published in the May issue of the psychological journal Personality and Individual Differences . It dovestails with a study by Arizona State University, the University of Cologne in Germany and Erasmus University in the Netherlands that evaluated women's self-esteem as they looked at ads featuring plus-sized models. Women with normal body mass index experienced lower self-esteem, worrying they were overweight. In separate research, Allen and Spangler are comparing the brain images of women without eating disorders to those with disorders to see if therapy works to change the brain. With a 50 percent relapse rate among people with eating disorders and no way to predict who won't recover, the researchers are looking for a biological marker that could help therapists target their care.
