Psychology of Addictive Behaviors 1993, Vol. 7, No. 4, 225-231 Copyright 1993 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 0893-164X/93/S3.00 Body Dissatisfaction, Self-Focus, and Dieting Status Among Women Todd F. Heatherton This study examined body shape preferences, body dissatisfaction, and self-focus between dieters and nondieters. Dieters were found to be more dissatisfied with their bodies than were nondieters. Although dieters did not have more stringent standards for body shape than nondieters, there was a larger discrepancy between ideal and current shape for dieters owing to their greater body weights. Dieters were also found to be highly and negatively self-focused on the Exner Sentence Completion Task (J. E. Exner, 1973). Moreover, dieting status was correlated with public rather than private self- consciousness, suggesting that dieters are concerned with their public image. Taken together, these data suggest that some women may be motivated to diet in part because of intense self-focus about their current self-perception of being overweight. Many researchers consider body dissatisfaction to be centrally important in the initiation and maintenance of dieting behavior (Fairburn & Garner, 1988; Rosen, 1992). There are a number of possible explanations for what determines satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with body weight and shape, and therefore which factors might promote dieting among women. For example, it is possible that some individuals (i.e., dieters) have more extreme standards for physical appearance so that even normal body weights are viewed as unattractive. Alternatively, it is possible that dieters and nondieters have similar views of what constitutes an attractive or desirable body shape but that dieters are farther from their ideals because of actual excess weight. Finally, it is possible that dieters are more attentive or aware of their body shape than nondieters so that they are more likely to notice even small discrepancies between their current body weight and their ideal body weight. The purpose of this article is to examine aspects of body dissatisfaction that are related to chronic dieting. 1 Some evidence supports the view that women are dissatisfied with their bodies—and are there- I thank Judy Ingraham for her assistance in data collection and Janet Polivy for her comments on this research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Todd F. Heatherton, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. Electronic mail may be sent toth@isr.harvard.edu. fore dieting—because of society's extreme stan- dards for thinness (for reviews, see Heatherton & Baumeister, 1991; Striegel-Moore, Silberstein, & Rodin, 1986). For example, Fallon and Rozin (1985) found that women prefer body shapes that are well below their current body shape and even smaller than what they acknowledge is admired by the average man. However, Zellner, Harner, and Adler (1989) have demonstrated that only those women who scored high on a measure of eating psychopathology (The Eating Attitudes Test, EAT; Garner & Garfinkel, 1979) expressed such extreme standards; low scorers on EAT chose ideal body shapes that were within the range of attractiveness that they thought was preferred by men. Thus, it is possible that only women who endorse symptoms of more serious eating prob- lems have exaggerated standards for thinness, and therefore, such extreme standards might not be related to dieting behavior in normal, nonclinical individuals. There are many differences between dieters and those with clinical eating disorders 1 One possibility that is not considered in the current study is that dieters might overestimate their body size. Such overestimation might predict dissatisfaction. How- ever, recent reviews of the body estimation literature conclude that many women (and not just those with eating disorders) overestimate body size, limiting the usefulness of this construct as a predictor of dissatisfac- tion (see Cash & Brown, 1987; Garner, Garfinkel, & Bonato, 1987; Polivy, Herman, & Pliner, 1990). More- over, the current methodology did not allow for an assessment of genuine body image distortion. 225