Why now is the lightest you will probably weigh all year
Study confirms that we stack on the kilos over the festive season – and it’s easier to avoid holiday weight gain than to lose the kilos after they happen
For the past few warm months, Swati Kapoor has been going easy on food and hard at the gym to look her best in summer dresses and bikinis. But with cooler weather coming, she knows it is probably downhill from here.
“In December I’m probably at my heaviest due to all the Christmas parties and markets, and the fact you can get away with a little flab under your winter coats,” she says.
Empathise with Kapoor? No surprise – and a recent study confirms it is not just coincidence.
For the average person, the time just before the start of the holiday season is the low point in an annual weight pattern that peaks during the holidays and takes nearly half a year to fully shed, according to the study published in September in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Using data from users of wireless scales (the Withings Smart Body Analyser, HK$1,298), the research team tracked weight gain and loss daily among nearly 3,000 adults in the US, Japan and Germany over one year, starting in August 2012. There were nearly 1,800 adults from the US (average age 42.2 years, 24 per cent obese), 400 adults from Japan (average age 41.6 years, 11 per cent obese) and 800 from Germany (average age 42.9 years, 19 per cent obese).