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Australian researchers have found there's no real link between mental illness -anxiety and depression - and being overweight. There are links between obesity, the epidemic on everyone's lips at the moment, and mental health. But which way does it go? Do fat people become depressed and anxious because they're fat, or does mental illness lead to obesity? And what role, if any, does weight loss play in restoring mental wellbeing? An Australian study of 7000 people has not found a relationship between anxiety and depression and obesity at all apart from a small effect in women. And in women, it wasn't obesity, it was physical illness. For a given level of physical illness, it didn't matter to your mental health how fat you were, it was just that being obese increased the risk of other diseases. Then they subtracted the statistic effect of physical illness on anxiety and depression and what bubbled to the surface was that the men and women whose weight did tend to be linked to mental health were actually underweight. And they had the worst mental health in the sample. So it means that just losing weight in it's own right won't fix up your mental wellbeing although it might, if it alleviates your physical ailments along the way. Can't win can you?
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