Nearly half of teenage girls in England think they are too fat, a study has revealed.
More than 46 per cent of 15-year-old girls described themselves as overweight while only 23.2 per cent of boys did the same.
Schoolgirls in Kensington and Chelsea were the most likely to think they weren’t the right size with nearly 60 per cent wanting to shed pounds, data from the Health and Social Care Information Centre showed.
Given what we’re told about obesity rates they’re right, aren’t they?
Schoolgirls in Kensington and Chelsea were the most likely to think they weren’t the right size with nearly 60 per cent wanting to shed pounds
I think the average might be about right but I would guess it is poorly distributed. I doubt the sprogs of social x-rays of Kensington and Chelsea are all that fat. Rather the values of the middle class involve a great deal of introspection and self loathing. The obese girls will be those much further to the north and on the other side of the river.
That depends. Unless you do a study equating body mass with the individual’s perception, you don’t know whether the girls are right or not.
I was out in Aberdeen last night and I did notice the girls were considerably more porky than those I encounter on a night out in Paris. Even the ones who were quite young were already on the road to whaledom. The way they dress doesn’t help much, either. French slutty looks a lot better than British slutty.
Tim Newman
“French slutty looks a lot better than British slutty.”
I took a Russian girlfriend out in Newcastle and she demanded to know why I had taken her to a bar full of hookers lol.
Tim Newman – “French slutty looks a lot better than British slutty.”
In my limited experience there isn’t as much in it as you might think. French youth style is pretty much converging to the global norm. A slutapocalypse.
But it does sound better. Presumably because I don’t speak French and so don’t recognise the local equivalent of Vicky Pollard.
Blubber is an insulator as well as stored energy.
No, they aren’t. They’re 15 year old girls and a lot of them just think this way. Hell, I think nearly all pre-menopausal women think this way, with girls who do a lot of sport being the exception. Girls are bigger than they were in the 80s, but there aren’t huge numbers more fatties than there were.
Tim, in Aberdeen, the extra poundage is probably a survival factor in the climate…
“In my limited experience there isn’t as much in it as you might think. French youth style is pretty much converging to the global norm. A slutapocalypse.”
Dunno SMfS. Sitting on the Lille Metro, couple weeks pack. La fille, opposite was in full retro-punk. Blue hair, facial piercings, a kilo of slap, microskirt with holed black fishnets, DMs …. And she still managed to look very French & tres chic.
Last year I took a Japanese lady on a date and she asked in a whisper why I’d chosen a pub with so many prostitutes hanging around outside – skimpily dressed women hanging around the door smoking.
The damage anorexia does to teenage girls is, at a guess, greater than the damage a bit of puppy fat does. The time to worry about fat young women is once they are past 20 so that their avoirdupois can’t be confused with puppy fat any more. Locally, it seems that a lot of the whales get jobs in the local hospitals, a topic worthy of a bit of head-scratching.
The Aberdeen weather is no worse than that of Saint Petersburg where the womenfolk are decidedly unporky (at least, those who go to clubs anyway). But then clubs and bars in Piter all have cloakrooms in which to leave a fur coat, whereas in Aberdeen (and the rest of the U.K.) they don’t, so perhaps the blubber is indeed required as a result. Maybe we should investigate this as a cause, rather than the usual bollocks? Then again, Vilnius is fucking freezing and they don’t have cloakrooms either, but the girls are fit as hell.
But what if the 46% who think they need to lose weight are not the obese ones?
dearieme said:
“it seems that a lot of the whales get jobs in the local hospitals, a topic worthy of a bit of head-scratching.”
Huge woman got into the lift the other week, worried she was going to jam it. She got out one floor up. Read her name badge: “lecturer in health & wellbeing”.
Here’s the result of my head-scratching. If they are whales before joining the hospital, my hypothesis is probably wrong. If they become whales afterwards, it suggests a bacterial contribution to whaledom.