Telling people they are overweight: helpful, harmful or beside the point?

Abstract

Weight status misperception refers to when a person’s subjective perception of their own or another person’s objective weight status is incorrect. Parents of children with overweight and obesity often fail to identify their child as being ‘overweight’, and in a similar vein, a large number of adults, adolescents and children with overweight or obesity fail to recognise that they are overweight. These observations are not new and have long been presumed to be a concern; if people do not realise they are overweight, how will they change their behaviour to lose weight? For example, the failure of parents to identify their children as overweight has recently been described as ‘promoting the silent rise’ of obesity,1 and new research reported in the International Journal of Obesity suggests that healthcare professionals not notifying children and their families of their ‘unhealthy weight status’ is a missed opportunity to combat obesity.2 These sentiments are echoed in public health intervention approaches. One example is national weight measurement programmes that monitor child weight and notify parents if their child has an ‘unhealthy’ weight status.