It’s October. Get Ready To Gain Weight

First the bad news. As the New York Times puts it, this is probably the least you will weigh all year. Then some more bad news. The pounds that you put on, which should peak around New Year’s Day, won’t come off for another five months. This cheery prediction comes from Cornell professor Brian Wansink, who worked with Elina Helander of Tampere University of Technology in Finland and Angela Chieh of Withings, a company that sells connected health-monitoring devices. The researchers used data from thousands of users of Withings’s wireless scales to track weight gain and loss among adults in the United States, Japan andGermany over one year. They found that weights peaked around the New Year in the United States and Germany and in May, around Golden Week holiday, in Japan. People weighed the least at the beginning of December in Japan, the end of September in Germany and the beginning of October in the United States. And yes, Americans didn’t lose the weight until late April.