To lose weight is to become happier. At least, this is the narrative voiced by countless health gurus, ubiquitous advertisements, and, sometimes, overly blunt friends and relatives.
Last August, a team of researchers delved into the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), a U.K.-based dataset keeping track of people 50 years old and above, updated every two years.
“We thought that if we excluded healthy-weight individuals from our sample, which previous studies showing adverse consequences of weight loss had failed to do, we would see positive changes in mood with weight loss that mirrored findings from the clinical-trial literature,” the lead author, Sarah Jackson of University College London, says. “However, this was not the case; even when we restricted our sample to individuals who were overweight or obese, and [who] would therefore be recommended to lose weight, participants who lost at least 5 percent of their body weight were significantly worse off psychologically at our follow-up assessment than those who maintained their weight.”
Their results bring up the likelihood that weight loss in and of itself doesn’t come with the fanfare often expected of it.
And while Jackson doesn’t want her study to discourage people from attempting to lose weight, it appears that the greater lesson to take away from her and others’ research is that weight loss alone isn’t a prescription for happiness.
This article was originally published on www.theatlantic.com. Read the complete article here.
*Image of “scale“ via Shutterstock
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