Bridget Jones Syndrome: Could Your Chick Lit Addiction Be Ruining Your Confidence?

We all know that what we read can have an influence on us but is your love of chick lit damaging how you feel about your own appearance? It could be according to a controversial new study.

The Huffington Post reports that some new research from Virginia Tech suggests that chick lit novels that contain main characters who express negative feelings about their bodies can actually influence readers’ self-esteem and how they perceive their own attractivenes.

So what is chick lit? Well, in a nutshell, the popular genre contains storylines that involve the main character undergoing a physical transformation in her quest for love, success and happiness.

Researchers Robert G. Magee and Melissa J. Kaminski asked 159 female college students to read a passage from two popular chick lit novels.

The researchers themselves created nine different versions of the two passages. In each version, the main character was either overweight, underweight, had low body esteem, high body esteem or didn’t mention their body weight at all. After they read the passages, the participants were asked to complete a questionnaire bassed on their body self-esteem.

Is your reading material having a negative impact on your self-confidence?

“Protagonist weight influenced participant’s perceptions of their sexual attractiveness, but not their weight concern, while protagonist body esteem influenced participants’ weight concern, but not their perceived sexual attractiveness,” concluded the researchers.

Basically, reading about slim women made readers feel less sexually attractive, while reading about insecure women increased readers’ anxieties abou their own body weights.

So the next time you’re in search of some light reading it’s probably better to choose a book that doesn’t revolve around weight loss and/or an insecure main character.