Lee Randall: Optical illusions in our war on obesity

Published on Tuesday 15 June 2010 19:43

WALKING down Princes Street over the weekend – I know! What was I thinking? – I counted rolls of flesh. People parading the street were so rotund that I wondered who on earth all the teeny tiny clothes in the shops are meant to fit, precisely.

No longer can you make fun of my countrymen's obesity epidemic. After my errand-inspired constitutional, I wasn't remotely surprised to open the papers and read that Scots are some of the least healthy people in the world.

It follows, then, that I'm intrigued by a new study at University College London that discovered the self-image a person carries inside their own head is highly distorted: we tend to perceive our bodies as being larger – up to two-thirds – than they really are.

As is so often the case – call it the curse of middle age – this is another of those "revelations" that I thought we already knew. Back in the 1980s, when I first wrote about health and fitness for women's magazines, every "expert" I interviewed brought up experiments in which women were handed life-size sheets of brown paper and a crayon and asked to draw an outline of their body, freehand. Then they were asked to lie down on that image. And lo! And behold! Most were smaller than their drawn selves.

All these years later, the scientists have a new ruse: participants held their fists under a board and were asked to "map" the location of things like their knuckles and fingertips. I guess this is a scientific advancement. You can probably reuse the board, so it saves on trees. The results, however, are identical. People have no idea where they begin and end. That explains why they're careening off me when I take to the streets. And here I thought they were just rude.

You'd be forgiven for thinking everyone's deluded in the other direction, envisaging themselves as sylphlike wraiths, judging by the quantity of ill-fitting brassieres and VPL I spied in the streets. Then again, maybe people are simply making the best of things by squeezing into those impossibly small garments retailed in all the shops.

Who am I to judge? I have enough trouble getting it right myself. Too often I hold up a pair of trews and think, "They're vast! These will surely fit." And they never do, which explains why I regularly emerge from fitting rooms with tears pricking my eyes.

The goal, I gather, is to learn how to work the internal mechanisms and override the brain's model, replacing it with an accurate representation of one's size. Surely it would be a helluva lot easier, not to mention infinitely more life-affirming, to abolish three-way mirrors?