Football Fan? if Your Team Loses You May Gain Weight

With the NFL football season starting you may be at risk for gaining weight. While the effects of sitting, watching and snacking are obvious, there’s another subtle reason for gaining if your team is having a losing season. Recent research suggests that the disappointment following a team’s loss can affect eating. While it’s widely recognized that emotions can trigger unnecessary eating contributing to bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder, it’s less obvious that ordinary emotions can trigger eating in folks without an eating disorder. Several studies have demonstrated that even mild negative emotional arousal can affect eating.

Researchers found that people eat better when their football team wins but if their team loses, especially if it’s a narrow loss, unhealthy eating increases. The researchers compared eating on Mondays after NFL games. Saturated fat intake and caloric intake increased significantly in cities with losing teams, decreased in cities with winning teams and remained the same in cities with an NFL team that didn’t play. Similar results were found with French soccer fans who watched highlights of victories or defeats of their favorite teams. The researchers speculated that fans feel that their identity is threatened by their teams loss and use eating to cope. When their team wins fans feel good and don’t need to use food.

Football losses aren’t the only example of common emotional upsets that can trigger unnecessary eating. An English study showed that interpersonal and work-related hassles were associated with increased snacking. The participants in the study kept food diaries that revealed increased consumption of high fat, high sugar snacks and a reduction in vegetable consumption associated with daily hassles. In a German study, 23 female participants rated their emotional state and desire to eat at five predetermined times during the day. Most of the self-rated motivations to eat were associated with negative emotions which the researchers categorized as either anger-dominance or tension-fear.Taken together, these studies and others demonstrate the effects of everyday emotions on eating. Even disappointment with the outcome of a football game, (which has no direct bearing on your life unless you’ve made a bet) can cause unnecessary eating.

The authors of the football study proposed a remedy for the urge to eat. They suggest “self-affirmation” by writing down what’s really important in your life. In their studies this simple technique eliminated the effects of the disappointment. More broadly, the findings suggest that the urge to eat triggered by many of the daily hassles and disappointments in life could be avoided if the emotion is recognized, the cause acknowledged followed by realistic, rational thinking about the hassle or disappointment. There are several helpful resources including my book, Emotional Eating that provide more detailed methods for reducing eating triggered by emotions.