Psychologists have found out that people who are ‘happy and fat’ do not respond as well to slimming programs as the slightly melancholic ones do.
 
The findings suggest that people who are obese and worry about it might benefit themselves because they would constantly be concerned about their appearance and size.
 
Japanese researchers conducted psychological tests on 101 obese men and women taking counseling programs for nutrition and exercise therapy.
 
Patients were required to fill-in the forms about their personality before and after the six-month course.
 
It was seen that optimism and self-orientation characteristics improved for most of the patients taking the program.
 
People who were more conscious about their size were more likely to loose weight than those who did not. Nevertheless, the research also discovered that happier people were less likely to succeed at loosing weight.
 
These happy-go-lucky patients were described as having a ‘free child’ ego, states marked by the optimism.
 
Successful weight loss was related to a more cautious and responsible ‘adult’ or ‘A’ ego state.
 
“This result supports previous findings that some negative emotion has a positive effect on behavior modification because patients care more about their disease,” said the researchers.