YOU'RE not fat, I'M fat!

Do you do “fat talk” with your friends? Those discussions which start with someone saying something like “I think you look great, I wish I could be that slim”?

If you do, you're not alone. A study by US researchers Rachel Salk of the University of Wisconsin and Renee Engeln-Maddox of Northwestern University suggests that more than 90% of college women engage in such “fat talk”.

The researchers define fat talk as “women speaking negatively about the size and shape of their bodies”. And they come to some interesting conclusions:

• More than half of the participants who engaged in fat talk believe it made them feel better about their bodies. In other words: It helps them cope.

• Fat talk generally makes women more dissatisfied with their bodies and more likely to have internalised an unrealistic, ultra-thin body ideal.

• The frequency of fat talk is not related to someone's actual Body Mass Index (the generally accepted measure of an individual's weight health). In other words: Overweight respondents did not do more fat talk than others.

“The most common response to fat talk was denial that the friend was fat,” the researchers note, “most typically leading to a back-and-forth conversation where each of two healthy weight peers denies the other is fat while claiming to be fat themselves.”

This ties in with separate research by Tracy Tylka from Ohio State University and Casey Augustus-Horvath from the Laureate Psychiatric Clinic and Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which indicates that the most powerful influence on women's appreciation of their bodies is not an objective measure such as their BMI, but rather how they believe other people view them.

"Women who focus more on how their bodies function and less on how they appear to others are going to have a healthier, more positive body image and a tendency to eat according to their bodies' needs rather than according to what society dictates," Tylka says.

So what should you learn from this?

• Firstly, don't assume you are overweight. Use a tool such as Slimtrack's BMI calculator to find out if and by how much you might be overweight. And be honest when you measure and weigh yourself!

• If indeed you are overweight, make work of losing the unwanted kilograms – not just to look better, but also because you will be healthier. Record what you eat and drink by using Slimtrack's Food Diary and record your physical activity by using Slimtrack's Exercise Diary.

• Stop talking fat! Rather try to benefit from other slimmers' experience by joining constructive conversations such as those you would find on Slimtrack's Members' Forums.