Associate Professor of Psychology Suman Ambwani addressed “fat talk” in today’s society in context of social interaction at a Rush Hour presentation on Thursday, Sept. 28.

“If your friend says, ‘I’m so fat,’ what do you say… You knew that the response is ‘No you’re not, I’m fat,’ because it’s meant to be reciprocal. If you say, ‘I’m so fat,’ and your friend responds with, ‘I feel great about myself!’ That would be a little weird, right? You’d be at the risk of social rejection at that point,” Ambwani said.

At the presentation titled “Eat, science, love: What can psychology teach us about eating disorders?” Ambwani discussed the biological and psychological conditions of disordered eating, body talk in social-interpersonal functioning, and online interventions for anorexia nervosa.

From the lecture, Ben Sobel ’21 learned “a lot more about the stigma towards eating disorders and the different denominations that they could take.” But, learning about the positive treatments available for several eating disorders also made him hopeful about treatments advancing in the future.

Ambwani described her experiment on fat talk in social interaction, one of the two main studies in her presentation: a sample of 283 undergraduate women at a small liberal arts college in the northeastern United States came in to do a baseline assessment, taking two questionnaires that measured their personal body impressions and how much they engaged in fat talk in their daily lives. A week later, the subjects were randomized to one of two conditions: one group read an interactive short story between college women engaging in fat talk with one another, the other group read an interactive short story in which one woman engaged in fat talk, but her friend challenged her.

The results showed that the degree of fat talk measured in the baseline assessment, body dissatisfaction and negative mood were the strongest predictors of whether or not the subject would engage in fat talk within the short story. Additionally, people enjoyed the condition in which fat talk was challenged more.

Ambwani believed that people’s apparent approval towards challenging fat talk is vital in terms of preventing its continuation as a group. It encourages others to refuse to engage in fat talk or to not make comparisons. It refutes the communal belief that everyone must engage in fat talk in order to act socially acceptable. And, it shows that there may be greater recognition among college women that fat talk is harmful, allowing feminist-inspired conversations to contribute to critical thinking and to reject body ideals and objectification in order to rethink the way that people measure their worth.

In her second study, Ambwani introduced a self-help aid and recovery guide for eating disorders that was developed and tested among outpatients with anorexia nervosa. Patients were recruited from twenty-one outpatient services from across the United Kingdom and randomly allocated to two conditions: one group had their usual prescribed treatment as well as the recovery guide, and another group had their usual prescribed treatment with additional assessments.

As someone “in recovery from an eating disorder,” Lyndie Duich ’20 attended Ambwani’s talk in order to learn more about the psychological perspectives of anorexia nervosa and how it compared to the perspective of someone who had undergone treatment. Duich questioned the validity of the study’s applications in the United States, considering that the majority of the research happened in the United Kingdom. She wondered if “there are certain cultural differences, not huge ones, but just enough to sort of justify that there might be differences in how effective treatment is,” wanting to have learned more about that from the lecture.

Some of Ambwani’s future projects include a similar clinical trial with an intervention for anorexia nervosa, but incorporating caregivers, a project on what defines clean eating and a study on weight-based discrimination and the opportunities for policy change.