Holiday Weight Gain, Facts and Fictions

New York Times health answer man Anahad O’Connor takes hard look at the widely-held convicition that  holiday eating adds up to five to ten new pounds a year.  Not quite, says O’Connor. In fact, not even close. The Times reports that most studies on the subject show that the average person gains one to two pounds from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. According to O’Connor, one study published in six years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine followed a group of 200 men and women from early October to late February. Researchers found that the subjects
gained an average of 1.05 pounds, 75 percent of that from Thanksgiving
to Jan. 1. To the surprise of no one, those who were the most active had the least gain, and those who were already overweight gained the most.