Aussie women confront weighty issue

As if losing the Ashes wasn't bad enough, Aussie blokes now have to contend with the fact that their sheilas are packing on the kilos.

A nationwide study has revealed worrying trends about women's health including the startling claim that females in their 20s have put on an average five kilograms in just seven years.

More than half of middle-aged women are also revealed as being overweight in the study, which highlights greater female participation in the workforce, longer hours spent behind desks, and increasing difficulty balancing work and family commitments as key reasons for the unhealthy trends.

"It's astounding," said Christina Lee, the co-ordinator of the Commonwealth-funded study, which will follow the fortunes of the same 40,000 women for at least another decade.

"The younger women have already caught up with the older generation. We are going to have higher rates of heart disease and diabetes."

Sydney nutritionist Tim Gill, the executive officer of the Australasian Society for the Study of Obesity, told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper: "It's a pretty frightening scenario. It suggests rates of obesity are going to escalate quicker than we believed."

The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health found that women in their mid to late 20s weighed an average 67.4kg in 2003, compared with 62.6kg when the same women were weighed in 1996.

The weight of women in their early 50s had risen an average 2.4kgs to 71kg over a five-year interval.

The young women's weight would inevitably climb even further, as only one in three had already had children -- and pregnancy and new motherhood were typically times of major weight gain, said Lee, a professor of health psychology at the University of Queensland.

Women gained weight "after getting married, moving from study into work, making those transitions into adulthood -- perhaps they give up playing netball with their friends on a Friday night".

She said society needed to address the particular pressures on young women, who no longer had time to eat healthily or exercise adequately.

"It's the whole struggle of juggling increasingly demanding sedentary work with finding time to cook and exercise," Professor Lee told the newspaper.

"Women want education, they want a professional, meaningful job, and they want a husband and children. It's up to policymakers to find a way for women to do those things without their health collapsing."

Her research also examined rates of drinking and mental health problems among Australian women.

Dr Gill said concern about overweight children had overshadowed the problem among young women, in whom excessive dieting and eating disorders had been incorrectly perceived as the greater issue.

"Really what we should be doing is targeting adolescent girls in terms of behaviour they will then carry into adulthood," Dr Gill said.

"We've got to find physical activity options that are attractive and acceptable."

Christine Duboc encapsulated the issue.

She weighed 65kg before taking a full-time office job -- and has subsequently gained 10 kilograms in 10 months.

"You feel a bit wrong, the way you feel in clothes," the 19-year-old receptionist conceded.

Her standard week involves two hours travelling by train between her home in Penrith and her city office every day.

Work is hectic so Ms Duboc tended to eat fast food -- and by the time she gets home it is dark and she is "just too tired to exercise".

"I don't have time to prepare a decent meal to take with me the next day. I'm trying to lose weight now but it's hard to find time or energy. Gyms can be really expensive, too."

The study found women suffer their highest rates of stress in their 20s. Then it gradually declines over the course of their lives, shrinking to negligible levels for most women by the time they are in their 70s.

Studying was overwhelmingly the largest factor in young women's levels of stress, which they experienced at four times the rate of the oldest in the study of 40,000 women.

The researchers found stress was highest among students and lowest among new mothers.

Marriage and motherhood during the 20s were "expected, positive and normal changes" that despite their momentousness were easily introduced into women's lives -- possibly because of community support for them.

- NZPA