A recent study has found that women have a subconscious fear of getting fat. Apparently, when they see an overweight woman, their brain reacts negatively, increasing feelings of unhappiness and even self loathing, say researchers.
While this is hardly surprising when it comes to anorexics and others with eating disorders, scientists found that it also happens in healthy women with no obvious worries about their weight.
On the other hand, men showed no such response to other fat men.

Neuroscientist Mark Allen said: ‘These women have no history of eating disorders and project an attitude that they don’t care about body image.
‘Yet under the surface is an anxiety about getting fat.’

The research in the U.S. used MRI scans to study the reaction of the brain to images of strangers for the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Allen added: ‘Although these women’s brain activity doesn’t look like full-blown eating disorders, they are much closer to it than men are.’
Fellow researcher, psychologist Diane Spangler, said a constant bombardment of images of stick thin models and actresses make women think than thin is the ideal shape.

She said: ‘Many women learn that bodily appearance and thinness constitute what is important about them, and their brain responding reflects that.

Read on.