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A person's body size or type, and how well it conforms with society's expectations, can be a source of stress in many cultures. University of Mississippi psychologists examined how people's experiences and perceptions of weight stigma relate to their well-being.

Ole Miss doctoral psychology student Ana Clara Vieira Zaidan and Joseph Wellman, associate professor of psychology, surveyed more than 1,800 people from Mexico, Portugal and the United States about how weight norms influenced their overall well-being.

Instead of looking at individual acts of discrimination against people who are overweight, their study sought to gauge how a culture's expectations can leave some overweight individuals feeling stigmatized.

Perceived discrimination was associated with psychological distress in all three countries, but women in each country were more likely to report perceived weight discrimination than men, the researchers reported in the International Journal of Obesity.

"The more that people perceive their culture to hold negative values of fat, the more that they experience this distress, and we believe that to be specifically because they're not meeting those cultural standards," Zaidan said. "The more we saw gender differences in the negative cultural value of fat in our study, the more we saw those gender differences also in the psychological distress outcomes."

If you believe your society's ideal citizen lives in a small body, then living in a larger body can make you feel like an outsider to your own culture, she said.

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