Obesity and Immediacy

A new study may explain one of the fundamental reasons why so many obese people have a hard time losing weight, but the findings are limited, because they only apply to one gender of generous girth.

According to researchers from the University of Alabama (Go Crimson Tide!), obese women tend to be more driven by immediate rewards rather than postponing those rewards for a later time.  
Now, to some people, this might not be telling us much. As any married man might tell you, women often want to ask someone for directions the moment the idea of being lost is made manifest. But the study’s analysis held true exclusively for obese women, not for women in general (so much for that theory).

The study analyzed 92 different men and women and posed a hypothetical scenario to the participants to gauge how quickly they sought gratification. The scenario involved their coming into a pretty good chunk of change and options on how quickly their profitable find would be paid out to them and in what amounts. The hypothetical amounts ranged from $1,000 to $50,000, with delays in payments anywhere between two weeks to 10 years. By a 4:1 margin, obese women were more likely to want their payments sooner rather than later – even when waiting would yield a greater reward. This held true no matter if the comparison was a woman of normal weight, a man of normal weight or an obese man. The findings were the same when controlled for contributing factors like IQ and income levels.

The study is published in the journal Appetite.

More studies on this are in the offing, but in the meantime, this finding at the very least helps provide a more well-rounded answer for why it can be so difficult for obese women to lose weight. Not only do women have to contend with the fact that they have less muscle mass than men – muscle is more efficient at burning calories – but they also must contend with their brains being wired in such a way that makes it doubly hard to lose weight because of their inclination for immediate gratification.

At the same time, as any fan of the mysterious television series “Lost” can attest, the answer opens a treasure trove of new questions: like why obese women have this increased desire for immediate gratification, while women of normal weight don’t? Why do obese men not share this characteristic? Is immediate gratification learned or innate? And does this “delay discounting,” as the researchers call it, vary as one loses weight, or does it remain constant? They are questions that beg for answers. Here’s hoping the answers help uncover even more well-defined natural ways of overcoming this generation’s plague.