Talk’s a fat lot of good

WOMEN are engaging in “fat talk” in more than a quarter of all social interactions, new research has found.

And far from being cathartic, making negative comments about their bodies is only leading them to feel worse.

The study of 135 women aged 18 to 40 will be presented by Cairnmillar Institute’s Jacqueline Mills at an Australian Psychological Society conference on the Gold Coast on Saturday. It found over the course of a week, 27 per cent of participants’ social encounters involved some sort of “fat talk”, where they spoke disparagingly about their own or someone else’s appearance.

Dr Mills said the majority cited positive reasons, such as wanting to make a friend feel better about themselves, but it actually had the opposite effect.