Fat fear always haunts women

A recent study shows that even women who don't care about their appearance still don't want to be overweight.

Subconsciously women are always afraid of being overweight, even if they don't care much about appearance.Photo: sheknows.com .

Livescience said Brigham Young and US scientists recruited 10 women and 9 men of normal weight between the ages of 18 and 30 to conduct an experiment. They divided volunteers into two groups according to male and female criteria. Both groups saw images of people of the same gender with a big and slender appearance. For each image, the research subjects are asked to 'imagine someone telling you that you look like her or him'. During the test, participants were given a brain scan using magnetic resonance imaging.

The results showed that when women observed images of fat people, the frontal lobe image had a prominent peak. The frontal lobe is the brain area involved in the self-assessment of human values. Experts also found that the frontal lobes of women with anorexia and gluttony were active when they observed images of fat people.

The same thing does not happen when women imagine they have slender bodies. In men, even if they imagine themselves to be fat or thin, the activity in the frontal lobe remains unchanged.

Mark Allen, a Brigham Young University neurologist, said that previous studies by his colleagues and colleagues showed that male bodybuilders have similar reactions to women with hypertension. eat.

'This is quite interesting because they have the same social and cultural attitudes as young women - interested in keeping in shape. So they are really affected by the image of big fat people, ' Allen said.

The team thinks that it may be because of today's social pressure that women feel the need to be slender, not because of biological differences.