Public perception of overweight

doi:10.1136/bmj.a347

Published 10 July 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a347
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a347

Editorials

Public perception of overweight

Underestimation of weight status hasimportant implications forpublic health programmes

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The mismatch between self perceived and self reported weighthas been documented for decades; women typically view themselvesas heavier than they really are, whereas men often underestimatetheir weight.¹ We do not know whether people’s perceptionof their weight has changed with the rapidly growing obesityepidemic, in which more than 300 million adults worldwide areoverweight.²

In the linked study, Johnson and colleagues look at adults’changing perceptions of weight in the United Kingdom over eightyears and find that heavier people were less likely to thinkthat they were overweight in 2007 than in 1999.³ The authorsattribute the declining concordance between self reported andself perceived weight to the greater stigma of being overweight,which may discourage people from identifying themselves as overweightor obese, and to changing societal norms, which may have increasedthe threshold at which people think of themselves as overweight.This shift . . . [Full text of this article]

Sara N Bleich, assistant professor of health policy and management

¹ Department of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA

sbleich@jhsph.edu

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