We are the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, or ACAMH for short. And this is ACAMH Learn. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, my name is Melissa Little, and I am a researcher at the University of Oxford, and a registered dietician. And I'm going to talk to you about my study, looking at weight concern in young people. So this was a study that we did. And the reason we did this study was really to look at this concept of weight concern. We've done some qualitative interviews with young people. And what we found was that they kept talking about how they were concerned about their weight, not necessarily the physical ramifications of being above a healthy weight, but really the mental ramifications, how it caused them anxiety, how they were often thinking about it. And this is something that we want to explore a little bit more, was it just the people in our small qualitative study that we're feeling this way, or was it a wider issue? So we partnered with something called the OxWell Student Survey. Now, this is a huge health and well-being survey for young people. It's out of the Department of Psychiatry in Oxford. And they asked tonnes of questions. They interview over 30,000 young people around the country. And they ask questions about bullying, self-harm, friendship groups, domestic violence. And we asked them if they'd ask the question, are you concerned about your body shape or weight, and do you want support to help manage your weight. And those were the two questions that we really wanted the answer to. So that survey went out. And we analysed the results. And what we found was, yes, overwhelmingly young people were concerned about their body shape or weight. In fact, 41% of young people said that they had some level of weight concern. And this was almost half of female young people. And actually it was three-quarters of gender-diverse young people. So the number was higher in girls. The number was higher in young people who were gender-diverse. And that was huge, if you think of 75% of gender-diverse young people being concerned about their weight or shape. And we also found that the weight concerned increased with white ethnicity, deprivation, and age. So those were the three things that really affected that level of weight concern. And we also found that actually weight concern was not necessarily tied to physical weight. And even though we didn't measure their weight status, we know that, for instance, in white females, the incidence of overweight and obesity is low, yet the incidence of weight concern is extremely high. So that was a really interesting point as well. And then the question of, do you want help to support manage your weight? Actually one in three students said, yeah, they really did want help in managing their weight. And that was much higher than we thought it was going to be as well. This increased with age, but had no differences across ethnicity or deprivation. And as you can probably imagine, girls and gender diverse young people were much more likely to want support to manage their weight. And yes, a weight concern was highly correlated with support in managing weight. So why does this matter? What does this all mean? Well, currently acceptance criteria for weight management programmes is on weight status alone. So you cannot attend weight management programme unless you have a BMI above a certain number. But actually weight status is not a good predictor of weight concern. And weight concern is a much bigger predictor of desiring weight support. So actually we need to open up our weight support programmes to people that have high levels of weight concern. And that actually might better align with the motivations of young people. And maybe it's not necessarily that we're providing weight loss support, because if they have no reason to lose weight. But it might be support with their weight concern. And this sort leads me to the next point that we thought that came out of this study, was that actually mental health, this concept of weight concern is so tied with this concept of desiring support to manage your weight. And this is the mental and the physical that are aligning. And what we really felt is that these services right now are completely siloed. There are two separate locations, and we really need that physical support and that mental support to be aligned. So current weight management services need to have some level of mental health support. And perhaps the mental health services, when they're treating things like weight concern, need to have some level of weight support as well. And this is really because we know the evidence is really strongly suggesting that weight concern is a root cause for both obesity and eating disorders. And those are the two of the biggest things affecting young people. So this concept of weight concern is extremely important. And based on this study, we now know that it's affecting a lot more young people than we thought. [MUSIC PLAYING]