Fitness and Weight Loss

Low self-esteem and broad and lengthy British Obesity study seems to show that low self-esteem during childhood is a risk factor for obesity in adulthood. She further argues that causation is the opposite of what was thought, low self-esteem leads to obesity, not vice versa.

The investigation, which was conducted by a team from King’s College London and published in “BMC Medicine, has lasted for decades, since the 70s. We studied 6,500 people age 10 years. They measured their BMI (Body Mass Index) and were given a psychological assessment, which, inter alia, measured their level of self-esteem. Twenty years later, when these children were thirty, they made a new assessment.

The most important result is that children who showed the ten years a low self-esteem (although still within the normal range) were those who, as adults, were more prone to obesity. They also found that this effect was stronger in women.

The researchers, led by Andrew Ternouth and David Collier, conclude that emotional problems should be considered a risk factor to cause obesity, which was no longer just a metabolic problem. This idea goes against the commonly accepted that obesity leads to low self-esteem, the causal relationship would be just the reverse.

Furthermore, this study leads many experts to recommend an early psychological intervention for children with certain emotional problems, in order to avoid the consequences that these might have in adulthood, in this case, obesity and its undesirable consequences. However, the researchers themselves acknowledge the importance of factors such as parental BMI, diet and exercise.

Without doubt, much less, the validity of this scientific study, since we Adelgazar.net, however, a critical interpretation of it, reading that has made us put the questions in the title of this article.

First, we find grounds to assert, without more, that causation is low self-esteem – obesity. This would mean that, at 10 years, no previous problems with obesity in children exhibiting low self-esteem, low self-esteem and that this may not have been caused, at least in part, by his own childhood obesity. This goes against the evidence that you are obese and as a child, which probably obese people already were thirty in ten years.

Furthermore, although we accept that there were no previous problems with obesity in children with low self-esteem at age ten could have been that the development of obesity in them produce a lower level of self-esteem, in a process of mutual reinforcement of the two variables , which would, in fact, mutually causal.

With respect to the importance of child self-esteem in the onset of adult obesity (and, again, without questioning the validity of the study), it is difficult to accept that is a decisive factor. If we consider the disproportionate increase in obesity in recent times and we intend to blame an equal decrease in excessive self-esteem of children arrive at absurd conclusions. However, we do have changed our habits have been in nutrition and physical activity.

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