GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- A surprising number of Americans consider their physical image within the range of sizes that are acceptable, despite living in a society that glamorizes buff bodies and thin figures, a new University of Florida study finds.
Almost 90 percent of the 1,317 people surveyed included their own size among those that look OK when seen "at school, at the mall, or on the beach," said Colleen Rand, whose study with Jaquelyn Resnick, Counseling Center director, for UF's College of Medicine, is published in the July issue of the journal of Obesity Research.
Even among obese subjects, nearly half (48 percent) judged their body size to be acceptable, said Rand, who recently retired as a research scientist in UF's psychiatry department.
"It is remarkable that so many considered their actual size within the range of socially acceptable sizes despite the prejudice against obesity," she said. "Our culture has distorted what people really look like in favor of idealized images, especially for women."
Other research has focused solely on the discrepancy between the size women are and the size they would like to be, usually interpreting it as bodily dissatisfaction, Rand said. Yet in other areas of life, such as wealth, intelligence and athletic ability, people can accept what they are while realizing that it is not ideal, she said.
"I think the lessons to advertisers or marketers is to start putting a broader range of body sizes out there because people seem to be more accepting," Rand said. "Instead of seeing excrutiatingly thin Vogue models, you would have healthy-looking varieties."
Just as many catalogues show greater racial diversity in their use of models than in the past, they could do the same thing for size by featuring people of different builds and weights, she said.
A few stores are beginning to depart from the current practice of exclusively displaying ultra-thin models, she said.
Focusing on a range of body sizes rather than a single ideal would have psychological bonuses for women, Rand said. "If you see your own image -- your own size -- reflected in the media in a glamorized way, there's a much better chance of feeling good about yourself," she said.
The UF study involved four age groups from Alachua County; 303 children between 9 and 10 years old; 427 adolescents, 261 young adults and 326 middle-age adults. Participants viewed line drawings of swimsuited male and female figures.
After being shown an array of nine body sizes -- ranging from emaciated to very obese -- representing their own age and gender, they were asked to select the body size that most resembled how they currently looked and that they would most like to resemble. They were then given male and female line-ups of all four age ranges and told to circle the numbers of all body sizes that they considered "socially acceptable."
The specific instructions were, "When you see people at school, at the mall, or on the beach, what body sizes do you think look OK?"
"The finding that your own body size is among those that you find acceptable held true across all age groups -- even adolescents, who are stereotyped as being very self-conscious and judgmental," Rand said.
Although obese people were least likely to consider their body size satisfactory, those who were underweight also were less approving of themselves than were those of normal weight, she said.
"People that I have known who are extremely slim feel that they're unattractive," she said. "A close friend of mine really doesn't want to be seen in a swimsuit because she says she looks too skinny, and people ask if she's been sick."
Rand, who formerly worked with very obese adults undergoing surgery to reduce their size, said that most remained big people despite losing substantial amounts of weight.
"In talking with them, it seemed totally inappropriate to focus on the media ideal size as something to strive for when it probably is not within the medically healthy range to begin with," she said.
Writer: Cathy Keen, ckeen@ufl.edu