Exploring a core psychopathology in disordered eating: the feelings of fat scale

Plain English summary Many people with eating disorders report feelings regarding fat. In this paper we developed a way to measure how intensely someone has such feelings and tested how strongly this was related to potentially having an eating disorder (as measured by the EDE-Q scale). Our questionn...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yichelle Y. Zhang, Bruce D. Burns, Stephen Touyz
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: BMC 2021-06-01
Series:Journal of Eating Disorders
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-021-00401-z
Description
Summary:Plain English summary Many people with eating disorders report feelings regarding fat. In this paper we developed a way to measure how intensely someone has such feelings and tested how strongly this was related to potentially having an eating disorder (as measured by the EDE-Q scale). Our questionnaire had seven items which asked how intensely a person felt statements such as “I feel fat”. In three studies with a combined sample of 472 university women we found our scale to be reliable and that the association between our feelings of fat scale and EDE-Q scores was a .818 correlation. Thus, asking about the intensity of feelings of fat appears to be strongly associated with how likely someone is to have a potential eating disorder. This suggests that feelings of fat are an important element of eating disorders.
ISSN:2050-2974