Perceptions: Watch Your Weight, Sure, but Don’t Worry About It

Worrying about weighing too much may be bad for you, no matter how much you actually weigh.

 

Using results from a telephone health survey run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers analyzed data on more than 170,000 men and women nationwide. Among other information about health and lifestyle, all reported height and weight, how much they would like to weigh and how many days in the past month they had felt physically or mentally unhealthy.

The study, to be published in the March issue of The American Journal of Public Health, found that men who wanted to lose 1 percent, 10 percent and 20 percent of their body weight reported 0.05, 0.9 and 2.7 unhealthy days a month, respectively. Women with the same weight-loss desires reported 0.1, 1.6 and 4.3 total unhealthy days a month. The results held even after controlling for age and body mass index.

The authors acknowledge that their findings depend on self-reports, and that women tend to say they weigh less than they do, while men claim to be taller than they are. But controlling for many variables — like diabetes, hypertension and smoking — did not significantly alter the conclusions.

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