Half as attractive

Being fat cuts down male interest by at least 50 percent:

I’ve never bought into the lie, popular with some elements of the media, that everything will be better when you’re thin. But, as a single woman trying everything I can to increase my chances of finding The One, I was interested to see how much of an issue size is for single men.

So, to find out if men like fat women, I created two identical online dating profiles of me size 18 and size ten to find out.The rest of the profile details were the same for both. In the ‘photos’ sections, I put up a range of head shots and body shots of classic ‘thin’ me and classic ‘fat’ me.

THE RESULTS

Over the course of five days, 'fat' Yvette received 18 messages, 74 likes and 81 visits. Thin me received more than double the attention – 36 messages, 211 likes and 210 visits.

There was nothing dramatically different in the content of the messages – some men just sent a ‘hi’, some wrote essays, some tried one-liners and others just opted for old-fashioned compliments. And there was little difference in the physical attractiveness of the men messaging – they were a range of ages, shapes and sizes.

But it can’t be denied that, if the guys of OKCupid are anything to go by, single men prefer thinner women twice as much.

I say "at least" 50 percent because Yvette wasn't actually thin, she was merely less fat. Based on the fairly low number of messages "Thin Yvette" received, I would estimate that if she had actually been a thin and attractive woman, going up to a size 18 would have cut male interest in her by 95 percent.