NEWS ‘Fat talk’ health danger
MOTHERS who talk with their teenage daughters about being fat make it more likely for them to have eating problems, a new study has found.
Known as “fat talk”, such mother-daughter discussions involve mutual disclosures of appearance-related dissatisfaction and concerns about weight.
Comments can include statements such as: “My legs are too big and jiggly” and “I want to get more toned”, “I don’t even want to say how much I weigh” and “I want to lose weight”. The more mothers make such comments, the worse the effect on their daughters’ eating habits, the Eastern Michigan University study of 100 teenage girls and their mothers found.
The girls had an average age of 14 and a BMI of 23, and their mothers were on average 44 and had a BMI of 30.
This put many of the women in the overweight category and their daughters in the healthy weight category.
“When daughters’ disclosures of body image concerns are reciprocated by their mothers, such a process may permit the transmission of maternal body image concerns to their daughters and further escalate their daughters’ eating problems,” lead researcher Dr Chong Man Chow said.
“It is through fat talk that mothers and daughters reinforce the internalisation of the sociocultural standards of attractiveness, which in turn leads to more dieting, bulimia, and food preoccupation behaviours among girls,” he said.
Dr Man Chow and his team also found daughters who engaged in fat talk with their mothers had more depressive symptoms such as feelings of despondency and dejection.
In contrast to the effect on eating behaviour, girls felt worse when their mothers talked about being fat less often rather than more often.
Dr Man Chow suggested this might be because girls might feel a lack of support when their “fat talk disclosure was not reciprocated by their mothers”.
While researchers found the amount of fat talk women and girls engage themselves in is linked to their eating behaviour, listening to fat talk doesn’t have the same effect.
Dr Man Chow suggested this was because listening to fat talk “does not require them to actively and openly criticise their own appearance,” he said in Body Image journal.
Fat talk doesn’t have the same effect on mothers’ levels of depression or eating habits, with both stabilising after adolescence.
Dr Man Chow said one way forward was the “encouragement of positive body talk” between mothers and their daughters.
“While families should be encouraged to develop emotional bonds and engage in mutual support, body related conversations should be limited between parents and children,” he said.