Fat Women Don’t Lie

Fat women don’t lie. Well, not about exercise. They do, studies show, often "underestimate" the amount of food they eat, but when it comes to how long they exercise, it turns out that overweight people are more honest than the rest of us. The ever interesting Tara Parker-Pope reports on the research that revealed the truth about truthiness, which was conducted at Temple University’s Center for Obesity Research and Education in Philadelphia. Researchers there, Parker-Pope writes, studied 280 normal weight, overweight and obese women whose average age
was 47. The women were equipped with accelerometers, devices that
measure physical activity, and asked how much they exercised at the
beginning of the study, after three months and at 12 months. Notably,
women who were normal weight or overweight, but not obese, had a more
difficult time estimating their physical activity levels. But women who
were obese — meaning they had a body mass index above 30 —came much closer to accurately estimating how much they were exercising.
Read more from Tara Parker-Pope.