A Little Extra Weight Doesn’t Bother Us So Much, After All

It’s hard to escape the culture’s tyranny of thinness. Witness the TV shows “Ally McBeal” and “Sex and the City,” the pages of any fashion or celebrity magazine or even the sweaty confines of a gym. We are obsessed with de-fatting the body, so dedicated to sweating, massaging, liposuctioning and Spinning our bodies into shape that our devotion borders on the religious.

Yet despite all the fat loathing, Americans hold surprisingly untyrannical perceptions about which bodies are most attractive. They prefer physiques that are not wisp-thin but look well-fed, healthy and moderately fat, according to recent studies conducted by researchers at the University of Florida College of Medicine.

“I was interested in finding out what people of varying ages considered to be the ideal body size and also what body sizes they felt were socially acceptable in the normal world,” said psychologist Colleen Rand, principal researcher of the studies, which have been published in the last two years. “The focus in our society is constantly on how you don’t have a perfect body. But I wanted to look at the body differently by asking, ‘Is your body OK?’ ”

Rand and her colleagues surveyed 1,317 people, including 303 elementary school-aged children, 427 adolescents, 261 young adults and 326 middle-aged adults. Using line drawings of bodies at various ages (from babies to middle-aged adults) participants were asked to circle their ideal body size, body sizes that “look OK at the mall, school or the beach,” and a body equal to their actual size. The line drawings of male and female bodies ranged from emaciated to very obese. The physiques were drawn in nothing but swimsuits to “maximize critical appraisal,” Rand said.

“What was impressive to me was the remarkable similarity across the age span in the selection of figures that looked healthy as opposed to scrawny as the most attractive,” Rand said. The female bodies deemed most attractive did not look like Vogue’s waif models; rather they approximated models for Lane Bryant, a clothing catalog and store catering to plus-size women.

Not surprisingly, most young adults chose a slightly thinner female body when selecting the ideal, said Rand, but it was not dramatically different from the healthy, well-nourished-looking female physiques selected by participants in other age groups. “There was some bias toward selecting a heavier male but it was very small,” said Rand. “People were not selecting skinny girls and heavier guys. They were selecting male drawings with a moderate amount of body fat.”

In response to the question: “When you see people at school, at the mall, or at the beach, what body sizes do you think look OK?” People generally chose three or four physiques ranging from slender to obese, said Rand. Older people showed more tolerance for different physiques, while elementary schoolchildren restricted themselves to one or two bodies deemed “OK.”

“Children were really judgmental,” said Rand, who’d assumed adolescents and high school students would have been least tolerant of varying shapes. “My guess is that elementary school kids tend to be more tied to rules and they may reject any deviations from what is not considered acceptable.”

Roughly, 87% of participants included their own size among those they thought “look OK” for other people, said psychologist Jaquelyn Resnick, Rand’s co-author of one of the studies and director of the University of Florida’s counseling center. Even among obese participants, nearly half included their own body size in those selected as “socially acceptable.”

“To our surprise, very few rejected their own body size . . . even though a large percentage of subjects reported a big discrepancy between their own body size and their ideal,” Resnick said.

Rand, who has spent 25 years researching obesity, eating disorders and body image, added: “It is really remarkable that so many considered their actual size within the range of socially acceptable sizes despite the prejudice against obesity.”

Of course, “socially acceptable” and “ideal” are two different matters. But where the body is concerned, striving for an unrealistic ideal can send people into a downward spiral of unhappiness, body-loathing and diminished health. If people could begin looking at their bodies in a different context, without comparing themselves to, say, 17-year-old models, said the researchers, they might be as accepting of their own body shape as they are of someone of the same physique passing on the street.

Simply changing a question from “Are you satisfied with your body?” (which tends to evoke a list of imperfections) to “Is your body OK?” shifts the perspective from what is wrong about one’s physique to what is right about it, Resnick said.

“It is really important for us to change the paradigm for how we look at our bodies,” said Resnick. “There are other areas in our life where we can say ‘I am not the smartest person but I am smart enough’ or ‘I am not the fastest swimmer but I swim well enough to do water sports.’ We do not hold ourselves to the standard of perfection that we do with our bodies.”