Two young girls bullying other girl
"Teenagers who are teased about their weight may turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms like binge eating and avoiding exercise." (Getty Images)
For years, the teenage girl endured soul-crushing abuse from schoolmates, strangers and even her family because of her weight. Rather than behaving civilly by holding a door open for her, some fellow students once closed it on her fingers and taunted her that she might eat less if her hand were injured. Her mother told her she faced a life of loneliness unless she dropped weight, that no one would ever love her at her size. Too often, others seemed to define the teen by the obesity she battled rather than her qualities as a person.
The harassment from fellow students became so bad the adolescent dropped out of school. In her late teens, desperate to lose weight, the girl had bariatric surgery to reduce the size of her stomach and limit the calories and nutrients her body absorbed. “She said after she had weight-loss surgery that she became a person, but the world did not see her as a person before,” says researcher Zoe Meleo-Erwin, who interviewed the young woman and 31 other bariatric patients and surgeons between 2011-2012 as part of her dissertation research. The story shows the debilitating effects mocking a teenager about his or her weight can have on the victim, says Meleo-Erwin, an assistant professor of public health at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. (Meleo-Erwin ensured the study participants' anonymity.)
Recent research backs up Meleo-Erwin’s observations. Teenagers who are teased and harassed about their weight might run a greater risk of obesity in adulthood and suffer from a negative body image, according to the study published in April in Preventive Medicine. Obesity is associated with diabetes, stroke, heart disease and high blood pressure. Teasing teenagers about the number of pounds they carry can exacerbate the adolescents' weight issues, with long-lasting effects, the study suggests. Adolescents who are teased about their weight are more likely to put on pounds and turn to food as a way to cope with emotional distress, according to the research, a longitudinal study involving more than 1,800 participants who responded to surveys over a span of 15 years.
“Weight-based bullying has negative health consequences. Teenagers who are teased about their weight may turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms like binge eating and avoiding exercise," says Rebecca Puhl, lead author of the study and deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at the University of Connecticut, where she is also a professor in the department of human development and family studies.
In the U.S., the number of teens who’ve been bullied because of their weight is in the millions. About 20 percent of children and adolescents ages 6 to 19 are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A 2012 survey found that 64 percent of teens in weight-loss programs had been bullied about their weight. Most of the taunting was by peers, but some of the harassment was from parents, teachers and coaches, the survey found. The bullying is perpetrated in a variety of ways, Puhl says. By peers, teens are mocked about their weight verbally in and out of school; are teased online on such platforms as Facebook and Twitter; and are excluded from activities such as parties and other social events, she says. Some adolescents endure teasing about their weight from parents and siblings, she says.