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

• 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: Eating disorders; Feelings of fat; EDE-Q; Scale development
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-021-00401-z

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.