Choose Your Words Carefully: How Women and Men Talk about Weight

The process of change that women and men go through to lose weight is very similar. To lose weight successfully, everyone must travel at his or her own pace through the various stages of change. Regardless of one’s gender, the first step is to move from an area where weight is not evenon one’s radar screen to an area where one recognizes the excess weight.

From there, the person prepares a plan for losing the weight, then acts on that plan, then begins to shed the excess pounds. Finally, once the behaviors that produced the weight loss are engrained in the person’s daily life, the job of maintaining the new lifestyle takes hold.

While the process of changing one’s behavior is the same, the words that women and men use to describe the experience are very different. A variety of market research techniques used on behalf of Weight Watchers demonstrate that women and men have their own preferred words and phrases that they use to talk about weight. In gen- eral, women talk about their weight in terms of how they look. The majority of men, on the other hand, talk about their weight using words connected to health and fitness.

The way that women and men typically describe their current weight status follows that pattern. One area in which there is agree- ment between the genders is in the description of obesity. Under- standably, neither men nor women like to be called obese. In a quest to find more acceptable language, Weight Watchers researchers asked obese women and men to describe their weight. The women tended to describe themselves in terms that related to their appearance, covered a variety of body parts, and had negative connotations. Examples include “I look fat,” “I have flabby arms,” and “My rear end is huge.” On the other hand, men typically answered the question using more neutral or positive phrases, such as “I’ve always been big”and “I’m on the heavy side.”And when men did talk about their appearance, they focused almost exclusively on one body part—the stomach. They said things like “I’ve got a beer belly”or “I’ve got a big gut.”