University of Minnesota Project Eating Among Teens (EAT) researchers have identified factors that may increase overweight adolescents' risk of engaging in extreme weight control behaviors such as self-induced vomiting, the use of diet pills, laxatives, and diuretics, as well as binge eating.
Overweight youth with certain socio-environmental, psychological, and behavioral tendencies, such as reading magazine articles about dieting, reporting a lack of family connectedness, placing a high importance on weight, and reporting having participated in unhealthy weight control behaviors, are more likely to suffer from eating disorders.
Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D., School of Public Health, and colleagues used data from Project EAT, an ongoing study that assessed eating and weight-related behaviors in 4,746 adolescents from 31 urban Minneapolis-St. Paul schools during the 1998-99 academic year. Youth were surveyed at two time points; the first occurring when participants were in middle school and high school, and the second occurring five years later.
Researchers found that disordered eating habits among overweight youth are linked to specific tendencies for both males and females, but a number of specific differences between genders were noticed. For example, increased hours of moderate to extreme physical activity and lower self-esteem predicted higher risk for disordered eating among females. For males, depressive symptoms, poor eating patterns, including high fast food and sweetened beverage intake, increased their risk of disordered eating. These findings link different patterns of behaviors and different potential motivators for overweight male and female adolescents to developing eating disorders.