Do you often hear your parents, siblings or friends call you 'fat'? Now, that's something to worry about as a new research claims that simply being called 'fat' makes young girls more likely to become obese.
The study looked at 1,213 African-American girls and 1,166 white girls living in Northern California, Cincinnati and Washington, DC, 58 percent of whom had been told they were too fat at age 10. Overall, the girls labeled fat were 1.66 times more likely than the other girls to be obese at 19, the researchers found. They also found that as the number people who told a girl that she was fat increased, so did the likelihood of her being obese. This means that being labeled as too fat is creating an additional likelihood of being obese, said co-author Jeffrey Hunger, a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara. It may lead people to worry about personally experiencing the stigma and discrimination faced by overweight individuals. "Recent research suggests that experiencing or anticipating weight stigma increases stress and can lead to overeating," Hunger added in a paper published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.