Does Your Personality Dictate Whether You'll Be Overweight?

"To maintain a healthy weight, it's usually necessary to own a healthy diet and a sustained program of physical activity, each of that need commitment and restraint. Such management is also troublesome for extremely impulsive people."

For the study, printed on-line July eleven within the yankee Psychological Association's Journal of temperament and psychological science, the researchers examined information compiled over fifty years on nearly two,000 usually healthy and extremely educated individuals to work out however their personalities would possibly have an effect on their weight and body mass index.

The participants were assessed on the questionable "big five" temperament traits — openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and psychoneurosis — furthermore as thirty subcategories of those traits. They were conjointly weighed and measured over the course of the study.

Although individuals tend to achieve weight as they age, the study found those that square measure impulsive were the foremost probably to be overweight. folks that scored within the prime ten % on impulsivity weighed a median of twenty-two pounds over those within the bottom ten %, the researchers aforementioned.

"Previous analysis has found that impulsive people square measure at risk of binge ingestion and alcohol consumption," the study's author, Angelina R. "These activity patterns could contribute to weight gain over time."

Those who square measure risk takers, antagonistic, cynical, competitive and aggressive conjointly had larger weight gain, the study showed.

On the flip aspect, the study found that conscientious individuals square measure usually agent and their weight failed to trigger changes in temperament throughout adulthood.

"The pathway from temperament traits to weight gain is complicated and possibly includes physiological mechanisms, additionally to activity ones," Sutin complete. "We hope that by a lot of clearly distinctive the association between temperament and avoirdupois, a lot of tailored treatments are developed. as an example, fashion and exercise interventions that square measure drained a gaggle setting is also more practical for extroverts than for introverts."