Article: Where One lives matters in Relationship between Obesity and Life Satisfaction
Summary:
A study by Pendergast and co-author Tim Wadsworth, which appeared in the June 2014 issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, compared life satisfaction in relation to obesity. They discovered when it comes to how satisfied people are with their lives, depends on where people live in comparison to their weight. Obese people seem more satisfied if others around them are also obese; however if obesity is less common in their community then the individuals seem greatly less satisfied. The communities where the individuals live seem to determine what the norm is.
The researchers suggest that is not obesity itself that determines if a person is happy with their image, but where they live. They looked at 1.3 million people across the United States comparing individual’s happiness in the counties they lived in, compared to the other people in the same counties. They found out that the weight of people around these individuals determines the norm. Obese men seem more satisfied with their image than women are at a rate of 43 percent of severely obese men being satisfied compared to 29 percent of women. If the same individual moves to a county where the rate of obese people is lower than his, the gap in his unhappiness increases.
The difference between life satisfaction among non- obese and obese people is smaller for women also than it is for men, the researcher concluded that “the emotional cost and advantage of obesity and non-obesity, respectively, may be decreasing as the prevalence of obesity increases.” Overtime the motivation to stay thin in a community of obese people lessens and that may explain why obesity has increased in more recent years.
My thoughts on the research:
My view on the subject is that not only where the person lives determines the life satisfaction, but also the circle of peoples in the person's life influences how much the individual feels happy about their lives. If one is surrounded by obese people and obesity is the social norm, individuals are not going to feel out of place.
Take for instance other countries or counties within the US,
