Study says you’re at your lowest weight right now
Research shows numbers on the scale will soon climb and peak around New Year’s Day
Congratulations. If you are anything like the Americans in a study by a Cornell University professor, your weight will reach an annual low this week or the next. But don’t get too excited — you’ll most likely get fatter soon.
Later this month, the numbers on your scale will begin a long climb past holidays like Thanksgiving, Rosh Hashanah and Christmas, peaking around New Year’s Day, according to research published last month as a letter to the editor in The New England Journal of Medicine.
What is worse, those extra holiday pounds tend to stick around for quite some time.
“Anything that happens in these next 10 weeks, on average, takes about five months to come off,” said professor Brian Wansink of Cornell’s business school. He conducted the study with Elina Helander of Tampere University of Technology in Finland and Angela Chieh of With- ings, a company that sells connected health-monitoring devices.
Using data from thousands of users of Withings’ wireless scales, the three tracked weight gain and loss among adults in the United States, Japan and Germany over one year, starting in August 2012. Americans accounted for nearly 1,800 participants, with around 800 from Germany and almost 400 from Japan.
While different patterns were found in each country, all three had one thing in common: Waistlines tended to grow in the 10 or so days leading up to holidays.
“Whether it be office parties, whether it be receptions, whether it be your friends’ parties, or it could be you just buying a lot of stuff and eating while you’re preparing things, there’s this real ramp up to almost every holiday,” Wansink said.
Weights peaked around the New Year in the U.S. and Germany.
In Japan, they peaked in early May, around the Golden Week holiday. Weights hit rock bottom at the beginning of December in Japan, the end of September in Germany and the beginning of October in the U.S. It wasn’t until late April when Americans were able to erase their holiday gains.
Weights rose by as much as one per cent from their annual low to their annual high in Germany. In the U.S. and Japan, they fluctuated by as much as 0.7 per cent over the course of the year, the study found.
The results represent a narrow slice of the public: The data were gleaned from adult owners of an approximately $150 wireless scale, suggesting that participants had both the motivation and means to get their weight under control.
But, that, Wansink argues, offers only stronger confirmation of the pattern he and his colleagues found.
“Even among this diligent, almost-ideal population, there’s no escaping this almost inevitable holiday weight gain,” he said.
Indeed, about one in four of the U.S. participants was obese, far fewer than the national rate of more than one in three, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Limited though it may be, the research could help guide Americans to better habits, Wansink said. “Instead of trying to come up with a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, it’s a whole lot better to maybe have an Oct. 1 resolution to gain less in the first place,” he said.
Stepping on scales more frequently during the holiday season might help, too, he said. Participants who weighed themselves four or more times a week gained less weight and dropped it all more quickly, by the end of January.