We hope your holiday season was full of good food, connecting with loved ones, and relaxation. As we embark on another year, you may have already made a New Year's resolution list as many of us do. Are there factors that can affect a positive outcome of these resolutions? Anne Klesse, a researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands has been studying the effects of in-shape models on dieter's motivation.
According to NPR's reporting "Can Skinny Models Undermine Your Dieting Goals?" by Shankar Vedantam on 1
Klesse and her colleagues recently conducted an experiment to see what effect the skinny models had on dieters.
They recruited female volunteers who signed up for a weight-loss program and gave them diaries in which the volunteers could note precisely what they ate and when — a standard technique in weight-loss programs nowadays.
But half of the volunteers got a diary that featured a skinny model on the cover and on every page. The other half got diaries with the neutral image of a logo.
The results were sobering.
"Those people that saw the diary without the model on top — they were actually able to lose weight," Klesse said. "Surprisingly, the people that [had the diary with the model on it] were not able to lose weight, and, even worse, they even slightly gained weight."
Read the entire NPR article or listen to the story on NPR's website.
image obtained from Natures Complete Blog.