Young women do not know the proper way to assess their weight, according to a U.S. survey conducted of 2200 women aged between 18 and 25 years in several clinics for reproductive health in Texas.

The results were the same for patients who are struggling with excess pounds, as well as for those which  have normal weight.

From over a thousand young women of normal weight or even those that are underweight, 16 percent is considered as overweight. On the other hand, the fourth overweight subjects (of which 37 percent was too difficult, and 10.5 percent obese) believed that their weight is normal or even too low.

Experts say that such a miscalculation of weight can lead to unhealthy habits . They showed that normal weight women who consider themselves overweight resort to poor methods of weight control, such as skipping meals, abuse of diuretics and the use of pills .

Such unhealthy measures were used by 36 percent of women of normal weight who were wrongly thought to have a problem, along with 19 percent of women of normal weight who had a true picture of their body.

Similarly, overweight women who have kept for themselves that they have no problem with overweight were less prone to experimenting weight loss methods, such as reducing caloric intake or exercise routine. Results were published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology