Body Obsession

Doctors have long considered body dissatisfaction the strongest predictor of an eating disorder. But while only 3-8% of women have eating disorders, most women don’t, although most women say they’re not happy with their bodies.

Researchers at Ohio State University finally came up with an answer: body surveillance determines which women with body dissatisfaction were most likely to suffer from eating disorders.

Women who think of their bodies as objects and constantly check the mirror to see how they look tend to ignore normal feelings of hunger, say researchers of the two studies reported in the Journal of Counseling Psychology. One study involved 304 college women and the other 373 women aged 17 to 58.

The women with eating disorders said they ignore hunger because they’re worried about how they appear to others. Having an anxious, nervous, or insecure personality was also a factor, and so was having a family member or friend with an eating disorder.